Philosophy and Science

[MikeF]

*******Porting this conversation into it's own thread as it was off the main topic of original OP.

I would consider myself an amateur philosopher at best. It has been a long time since I've read actual philosophical literature (as opposed to pop-philosophy such as books). I don't have formal education in philosophy beyond the various 101's and intros when I was an undergraduate with electives to spend.

However, I place a deep importance on philosophy in physics. Speaking of pop-philosophy books, some of the best physics books I've read were actually philosophy books (e.g. "On Physics and Philosophy," Bernard d'Espagnat; and the cringe-inducingly named "Quantum Philosophy," Roland Omnes. Note that Omnes' later books after that were a massive departure for me, so I don't recommend anything past that... just to be clear).

My first physics hero that wasn't just someone cliche like Einstein or Hawking has been Fotini Markopoulou, who broke the scene with a deeply philosophical work on category and sheaf theory (The internal description of a causal set: What the universe looks like from the inside).

I joke that physics is 1/3 math, 1/3 actual physics/science, and 1/3 philosophy. Physicists have a harder time grasping sound metaphysics than a lot of other scientists because being well-suited for physics work doesn't make one well-suited for metaphysics, this is why we have so many otherwise good physicists going along with all kinds of woo ideas, or ideas that are less conspicuously woo but bad metaphysics all the same (just read any list of interpretations of the wave function).

I feel like that was a lot of blabbering, so the short story is: philosophy is of extreme importance to physics in my book. I would not insult professional philosophers by calling myself one, but I will meekly take the amateur moniker.

For me, I have been experiencing a growing disdain for traditional or classic Philosophy. Since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution around the 16th-17th centuries I see a fundamental schism growing between Philosophy and Science. In terms of gaining understanding of reality, I see Science, with its scientific principles and standards, as an improved and superior method of knowledge acquisition, essentially superseding what came before. Sort of like Philosophy 1.0 replaced by Philosophy 2.0 (Science). I also find that much of the language of classic or traditional philosophy has become outdated, antiquated.

I also see Philosophy used as a crutch for those who need or want there to be something beyond our physical reality, and Philosophy in the classic sense seems to provide that crutch. For this and other reasons I lean towards chucking Philosophy in the bin, or at least relegating it to the history section of the library.

I get that physics being 1/3 math, 1/3 physics/science, and 1/3 philosophy is tongue-in-cheek, but how would you describe that philosophy 1/3? Is it simply the hypothesizing, speculating, guessing, imagining side that is present in all scientific inquiry, the part that speculates what lies beyond our ability to gather data?

I guess I'm curious as to whether you see Science and Philosophy as distinctly separate, and if so, what value does Philosophy bring, or a philosophical approach as separate from a scientific approach, to the table, for you.

Somebody said (and it’s falsely attributed to Bohr a lot), “anything beyond the prediction of the outcome of experiment is metaphysics.”

We do philosophy every time we interpret. For instance, take the old canard that everyone (even some physicists) gets wrong about superposition and the wave function, a popular example is Schrödinger’s cat.

People will tell you that the cat is somehow both alive and dead at the same time until you open the box and look: that’s (wrong) metaphysics. Understanding why that’s wrong is also metaphysics.

Or consider Feynman’s many-paths integrals, which (put in oversimplified terms), gives correct answers by calculating every path a particle might take, including from point A to point B in a loopy path, or from point A to Mars and back to point B, etc. But it is never really thought that the particle is actually doing this, the math just gives correct statistical answers. (When we do a thing mathematically but don’t say the thing is real, this is called instrumentalism).

Or consider the interpretation of mass informing the geometry of space: metaphysics. There’s any number of things to bring up.

Without philosophy, scientists couldn’t know what to do with the data. Interpreting is important because it informs a general worldview from which more scientific ideas spring up: if you have bad metaphysics, you’re more and more likely to hypothesize wrong.

There are questions in physics, let me just go back to interpretations of the wave function, such as: we can’t accept realism (that we’re describing a real thing in reality as written) and locality (that causality is always local) at the same time and in the same respect, which are dearly held intuitions.

Or consider that we don’t really know right now whether spacetime is a thing unto itself (background dependence) or just a consequence of relations between other things (background independence). Are strings fundamental or are fields fundamental? Is there a duality, such that it only matters that we pick one at the foundation and stick with it; though either would work?

Realism, locality, multitudinism, duality, all these interpretational things require good metaphysics to be worth a d***.

I am reminded by a meme:
Person 1: why is philosophy important?
Person 2: well, why is science important?
Person 1: because we can…
Person 2: aaaaaand you are doing philosophy.

This probably wasn’t as elegant as I’d want it to be since I’m typing on a phone, but I’ll close out with another quote attributed to Bohr: “shut up and calculate.” Some scientists try to skip the metaphysics altogether; but this is abandoning realism and could probably be construed as a form of instrumentalism. Can’t get away from the philosophy.

I'd like to respond by starting with two definitions.

From Wikipedia I obtained the following definition of Philosophy:

“Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language.”

And the definition of Metaphysics:

“Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.”

To my mind, both of these definitions can be applied to the discipline of Science, or are goals or areas of exploration for Science. Perhaps then, Science is Philosophy. So why the distinction? I would argue that classic or traditional Philosophy relied solely on analytical reasoning to answer the questions that Philosophy set before itself. The problem with this approach was that the answers that came from this approach often did not match with reality, what we actually observe and know about the world, or would learn through careful observation. The vulnerability of this approach is that it relied too heavily on a single flawed and fallible observer, the Philosopher. There were no mechanisms in this approach to mitigate all the many ways we as individuals can get things wrong and be blind to why we are getting things wrong.

Science on the other hand, as you are well aware, still uses the same analytical reasoning in traditional Philosophy, yet adds empirical data collection to it’s approach to answering the same questions. In addition, we have multiple observers collecting data and multiple observers performing analytical reasoning on the data. And to me, this is what makes a scientific approach superior to traditional philosophical methods. Comparing the observations and analyses of many flawed observers helps mitigate the potential failings of any singe observer.

In your response above, you seemed to characterize Science as merely data collection. I would strongly disagree with this. Science is both the data collection and the interpretation of that data. And based on the definition of Philosophy, I am arguing that Science is Philosophy, different only in its improved methodology and standards that address, and therefore mitigate, the primary weakness to getting good answers to the general and fundamental question, that weakness being we human beings ourselves.

For me, since Science covers and addresses the questions asked under the traditional category label of Metaphysics, and since I do not separate data collection and the interpretation of data in what I consider scientific inquiry, it seems counter-productive to carve these questions out from the field of Physics and think of them as separate from scientific inquiry and its improved methodology. We want scientific rigor and standards to apply to all these questions. To throw some aspects of Physics back to traditional Philosophy only lowers the standards of the inquiry, in my opinion.

As a side note, I am on vacation on a lake in New Hampshire looking for something to read. I found “Quantum Philosophy” as an ebook and have started reading it. So far, I quite enjoyed the authors dialogue with the Pre-Socratic Philosophers in Hades. Thanks for the referral.

 

[Meow Mix]

I’ll be at a keyboard in about 3 hours or so

 

[exchemist]

*******Porting this conversation into it's own thread as it was off the main topic of original OP.







I'd like to respond by starting with two definitions.

From Wikipedia I obtained the following definition of Philosophy:

“Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language.”

And the definition of Metaphysics:

“Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.”

To my mind, both of these definitions can be applied to the discipline of Science, or are goals or areas of exploration for Science. Perhaps then, Science is Philosophy. So why the distinction? I would argue that classic or traditional Philosophy relied solely on analytical reasoning to answer the questions that Philosophy set before itself. The problem with this approach was that the answers that came from this approach often did not match with reality, what we actually observe and know about the world, or would learn through careful observation. The vulnerability of this approach is that it relied too heavily on a single flawed and fallible observer, the Philosopher. There were no mechanisms in this approach to mitigate all the many ways we as individuals can get things wrong and be blind to why we are getting things wrong.

Science on the other hand, as you are well aware, still uses the same analytical reasoning in traditional Philosophy, yet adds empirical data collection to it’s approach to answering the same questions. In addition, we have multiple observers collecting data and multiple observers performing analytical reasoning on the data. And to me, this is what makes a scientific approach superior to traditional philosophical methods. Comparing the observations and analyses of many flawed observers helps mitigate the potential failings of any singe observer.

In your response above, you seemed to characterize Science as merely data collection. I would strongly disagree with this. Science is both the data collection and the interpretation of that data. And based on the definition of Philosophy, I am arguing that Science is Philosophy, different only in its improved methodology and standards that address, and therefore mitigate, the primary weakness to getting good answers to the general and fundamental question, that weakness being we human beings ourselves.

For me, since Science covers and addresses the questions asked under the traditional category label of Metaphysics, and since I do not separate data collection and the interpretation of data in what I consider scientific inquiry, it seems counter-productive to carve these questions out from the field of Physics and think of them as separate from scientific inquiry and its improved methodology. We want scientific rigor and standards to apply to all these questions. To throw some aspects of Physics back to traditional Philosophy only lowers the standards of the inquiry, in my opinion.

As a side note, I am on vacation on a lake in New Hampshire looking for something to read. I found “Quantum Philosophy” as an ebook and have started reading it. So far, I quite enjoyed the authors dialogue with the Pre-Socratic Philosophers in Hades. Thanks for the referral.

This seems to have the makings of a high quality discussion.

I may not be able to contribute much to what you two have to say, but my experience on these forums over the last few years has convinced me that it is important for people practising or trying to comprehend science to know at least a bit of the philosophy of science, e.g. the predictive nature of theories in science, the concept of theories as provisional models of physical reality, their falsifiability (Popper) and the centrality to the enterprise of reproducible, viz. quasi-"objective", observation of nature.

I have had to go over this sort of thing time and again, especially with creationists and others who misunderstand what science does and what its limits are. When talking to others with science training this almost never comes up, but with the general public, as it were, it is astonishing how fast one often gets to this sort of issue.

So put me in the camp of those who respect the value of philosophy in defining science, at least.

 

[Polymath257]

My view is that science has gone beyond what classical philosophy can deal with effectively. Especially in quantum mechanics, where thing may not have definite properties at all times, where causality (such as it is) is probabilistic in nature, and where classical notions of how things 'must be' are simply false.

But it goes deeper. A good deal of metaphysics has to be redone, I think. For example, the notion that objects are defined by how they interact and that anything past that is irrelevant. Or that the terms 'necessary' and 'contingent' have real meaning. Classical notions of causality need to be reworked, I think, as do the discussions of 'substance' versus 'property'.

I think that it is good for scientists to have considered some of the difficulties in supporting the scientific method, maybe even criticisms of 'falsifiability'. I think a discussion of 'grue' would do many scientists some good.

But I also think that the philosophical desire to 'prove' everything beyond any doubt has to be abandoned (even in math and logic). Instead, philosophy does best when it is looking at the various logical possibilities and investigating them. it is at its worst when it claims things 'must be' a particular way. The real world often seems to find another way to be.

 

[AlexanderG]

If philosophy and scientific findings ever conflict, then science wins. If no science currently supports a philosophical conclusion about reality, then that conclusion is unjustified and does not warrant belief.

This probably won't be the last time, but I'm going to borrow from Tom Jump's epistemology to parse out the main difference between philosophy and science.

1. Conceptual claims are sufficiently demonstrated with conceptual evidence
Ex. Saying "My favorite color is blue" or "I'm thinking of the number 7" is sufficient to justify the claim. Saying, "I define a square as a shape with four equal sides and four right angles" is sufficient to establish what the concept of a square is.

2. Empirical claims are sufficiently demonstrated with empirical evidence
Ex. Reliably demonstrating a real black swan justifies the claim that a black swan exists in reality. Reliably observing light bend around the localized gravity of a star justifies the claim that space can be bent by gravity.

3. Metaphysical claims are sufficiently demonstrated with metaphysical evidence
Such claims relate to infinites and the ultimate, absolute nature of reality, beyond which no further truth exists. So far, we don't know what would constitute metaphysical evidence. Currently, we appear to have no access to metaphysical evidence besides "I think therefore I am," which itself can't be demonstrated to anyone besides oneself. I could sit back and empirically watch a god create a billion universes, and that would still be 0% of infinite power. No induction from our own observations can warrant belief in an omni-property or an ultimate truth claim.

Philosophy is entirely conceptual. It makes purely conceptual claims about concepts, nature, and metaphysics. Granted, it may list empirical objects in its premises or conclusion, but the relationship between these objects that is conveyed by a philosophical argument is still only conceptual. For this reason, philosophy can never take us beyond a scientific hypothesis. Speculation, guesses, and suppositions, definitions, and imaginary notions are the highest philosophy can reach. Even when philosophy argues about metaphysical ideas, it is also unjustified speculation because we have no access to metaphysical evidence. Only science can move past this first step.

To support an empirical claim about reality, you need empirical evidence, namely scientific experimentation and data. Philosophy is entirely excluded from this exercise and has nothing to contribute. Sure, it can serve as a bubbling stew of ideas from which we can pluck specific ideas to test in the real world. It can inform the conceptual framework that we call the scientific method. But philosophy cannot actually confirm a hypothesis.

 

[Meow Mix]

I'd like to respond by starting with two definitions.

From Wikipedia I obtained the following definition of Philosophy:

“Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language.”

And the definition of Metaphysics:

“Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.”

To my mind, both of these definitions can be applied to the discipline of Science, or are goals or areas of exploration for Science. Perhaps then, Science is Philosophy. So why the distinction? I would argue that classic or traditional Philosophy relied solely on analytical reasoning to answer the questions that Philosophy set before itself. The problem with this approach was that the answers that came from this approach often did not match with reality, what we actually observe and know about the world, or would learn through careful observation. The vulnerability of this approach is that it relied too heavily on a single flawed and fallible observer, the Philosopher. There were no mechanisms in this approach to mitigate all the many ways we as individuals can get things wrong and be blind to why we are getting things wrong.

I don't disagree so far. Science is a philosophy, I might even call it a particular domain of epistemology because we're concerned with things like justification and falsification.

Science on the other hand, as you are well aware, still uses the same analytical reasoning in traditional Philosophy, yet adds empirical data collection to it’s approach to answering the same questions. In addition, we have multiple observers collecting data and multiple observers performing analytical reasoning on the data. And to me, this is what makes a scientific approach superior to traditional philosophical methods. Comparing the observations and analyses of many flawed observers helps mitigate the potential failings of any singe observer.

This is where I want to include a "yes, but..."

Science is a method. We do science at the telescope and in the lab. We do science when we falsify or exonerate the null hypothesis, we do science when we make models that make predictions about the outcome of experiment or observation.

But when we interpret what it is we're doing, we're not doing "pure" science: we're philosophizing. This is where what I was saying about interpretation fits in. When we're concerned about whether our maths are describing reality or whether they're just useful (say, realism or instrumentalism), that's a philosophical question, not a purely scientific one. When we're concerned about whether spacetime is a thing that exists unto itself or just an artifact of how we treat things in relation to each other such as in a configuration or phase space (background dependence vs. background independence), we're doing philosophy, not pure science. It's philosophy that we probably never would have gotten around to asking or answering very well without the science, but it's still philosophy.

However at the end of the day, I think a lot of this is just going to be definitional. I can see how someone would see how closely related these questions are specifically to science and just shrug and include them in the definition of what science is. There's no objective way to say "no, that definition is wrong." This may just be a preference of how we're defining what science's scope is.

In your response above, you seemed to characterize Science as merely data collection. I would strongly disagree with this. Science is both the data collection and the interpretation of that data. And based on the definition of Philosophy, I am arguing that Science is Philosophy, different only in its improved methodology and standards that address, and therefore mitigate, the primary weakness to getting good answers to the general and fundamental question, that weakness being we human beings ourselves.

I understand where you're coming from, and I don't really have a way to say "no, that's wrong." A person could self-consistently include the interpretation aspect into the scope of "what science is."

However, I find it useful not to. I think it's possible to do science well (and by this I mean the scope that I use for science: the prediction of the outcome of experiment and comparing observation to theory) but do philosophize about the science poorly.

Consider someone that sets up an excellent experiment and performs it well and collects excellent data and/or observations, performs statistical analysis immaculately, and so on. Let's say they understood the leading metaphysics very well, so what they were testing makes sense. A person can do the science (again using the word in the scope I've outlined) well, but then absolutely bungle the metaphysics of interpreting the results.

I think it is useful to be able to point this out: "your science is good, but your metaphysics are sh**."

Then again, I can see how a person might instead say "your experimentation and modeling are good, but your interpretations are sh**."

So at the end of the day, this might be a purely semantic dispute with little to no substance actually disagreed upon. Except, in fact, for one thing: even if we say "your interpretations are crap," we are philosophizing as soon as we say why.

For me, since Science covers and addresses the questions asked under the traditional category label of Metaphysics, and since I do not separate data collection and the interpretation of data in what I consider scientific inquiry, it seems counter-productive to carve these questions out from the field of Physics and think of them as separate from scientific inquiry and its improved methodology. We want scientific rigor and standards to apply to all these questions. To throw some aspects of Physics back to traditional Philosophy only lowers the standards of the inquiry, in my opinion.

I don't think it lowers any standards. When we ask questions like "is my interpretation realist? Is it background independent? Am I going to have to abandon locality? Is there a duality between strings and fields such that I could formulate this same model treating the other thing as fundamental?" I think that it's useful to treat these questions as more metaphysics than pure science. We're no longer talking about the empirical things at that point but rather about their relation and correspondence to reality.

As a side note, I am on vacation on a lake in New Hampshire looking for something to read. I found “Quantum Philosophy” as an ebook and have started reading it. So far, I quite enjoyed the authors dialogue with the Pre-Socratic Philosophers in Hades. Thanks for the referral.

Great, I hope you enjoy it! It's been a long time for me. I read it as an undergrad and considered it impressive; I might be interested in trying it again with my growth in the field and see how it is now.

 

[Meow Mix]

My view is that science has gone beyond what classical philosophy can deal with effectively. Especially in quantum mechanics, where thing may not have definite properties at all times, where causality (such as it is) is probabilistic in nature, and where classical notions of how things 'must be' are simply false.

But every one of these examples depends on your interpretation. A quantum realist would say Aristotlian logic is wrong (awful metaphysics), whereas an instrumentalist just considers the models useful. Even attempting to say QM doesn't play nice with philosophy is philosophy.

But it goes deeper. A good deal of metaphysics has to be redone, I think. For example, the notion that objects are defined by how they interact and that anything past that is irrelevant. Or that the terms 'necessary' and 'contingent' have real meaning. Classical notions of causality need to be reworked, I think, as do the discussions of 'substance' versus 'property'.

Agreed, for the most part. My one objection is that "necessity" is still a required concept for self-consistency. Things that exist must be limited to what they are, limited from what they are not, etc. Granted this doesn't go very far and this is probably just me being pedantic.

I think that it is good for scientists to have considered some of the difficulties in supporting the scientific method, maybe even criticisms of 'falsifiability'. I think a discussion of 'grue' would do many scientists some good.

But I also think that the philosophical desire to 'prove' everything beyond any doubt has to be abandoned (even in math and logic). Instead, philosophy does best when it is looking at the various logical possibilities and investigating them. it is at its worst when it claims things 'must be' a particular way. The real world often seems to find another way to be.

No further disagreements here.

 

[Meow Mix]

To support an empirical claim about reality, you need empirical evidence, namely scientific experimentation and data. Philosophy is entirely excluded from this exercise and has nothing to contribute. Sure, it can serve as a bubbling stew of ideas from which we can pluck specific ideas to test in the real world. It can inform the conceptual framework that we call the scientific method. But philosophy cannot actually confirm a hypothesis.

First of all, your post was fantastic.

However, consider something like the idea that the tensors we use in GR to describe the stress of the geometry of space. This strikes me as philosophical rather than empirical: we use it in models to describe why empirical stuff behaves the way it does, but I have no idea how we would set up an empirical experiment to test whether space is actually a real thing unto itself with which to have a geometry. We just interpret this to make sense of our models, we don't directly test it. I'm not saying that's bad or anything (what a successful interpretation it is!), just trying to elucidate why I say there is a distinction between the metaphysics of interpretation and "pure" science as a method.

 

[Meow Mix]

One of the first questions I had as an undergraduate that bothered me a lot was about dimensionality, SR, and QM: when I began to understand how Planck units were defined (I did this early because I was reading so many papers with a lot of stuff set to unity, and I wanted to keep track of it all), I had this question:

If, for instance, the Planck length is defined with a bunch of constants, would an accelerated observer measure the same Planck length as an observer in that length's reference frame?

It seemed paradoxical, and it still somewhat is thanks to how relativity and QM don't really get along at such scales. I dived deep into this, reading papers proposing a "doubly special relativity" (holding Planck units Lorentz invariant), all of it somewhat whacky from my understanding now (and my understanding of the problem I had stumbled into at the time was naive).

Still, my point is that it felt more like doing philosophy than science. IIRC, the doubly special relativity ideas did ultimately make some predictions that could be tested (and failed), so we could eventually get to the science. But the very question sought to be answered felt more philosophical.

Am I being vague about this? I wonder if I have a point other than that my brain wanted to use the p-word more than it wanted to use the s-word for a lot of this kind of literature perusing.

 

[AlexanderG]

First of all, your post was fantastic.

However, consider something like the idea that the tensors we use in GR to describe the stress of the geometry of space. This strikes me as philosophical rather than empirical: we use it in models to describe why empirical stuff behaves the way it does, but I have no idea how we would set up an empirical experiment to test whether space is actually a real thing unto itself with which to have a geometry. We just interpret this to make sense of our models, we don't directly test it. I'm not saying that's bad or anything (what a successful interpretation it is!), just trying to elucidate why I say there is a distinction between the metaphysics of interpretation and "pure" science as a method.

Thanks for the feedback. I didn't include this in my post (because it was getting long), but I consider novel future testable predictions to be the key tool of the scientific method. Namely, conceive of an experiment that no one has ever run before, and predict what the results of that experiment will be based on your conceptual model. If the test is then run and the empirical results match your prediction, then this is empirical evidence that supports your model. Sure, the model is conceptual and arguably philosophical. But the evidence supporting its actual correspondence to reality is that empirical data. If your tensor models make many predictions that are later confirmed to be accurate, that's good empirical evidence.

We can create a thousand conceptual models to explain any past or present phenomenon, or to speculate about future tests that still haven't been run. I think the way we distinguish the merely imaginary models from the probably real ones is via these novel future predictions.

Theists often construct arguments like, "We can't explain phenomenon X, but if a thing G existed as I've defined it then it'd be sufficient to explain X, therefore this is evidence that G exists." It is a fallacious deviation from novel future predictions. It is post-hoc rationalizing, and entirely conceptual. I see a lot of philosophical arguments like this, which are trotted out as if they can to stand on par with science and offer real alternatives. They can't. They're always fallacies like arguments from ignorance, arguments from incredulity, special pleading, or circular reasoning. My prior post was to make this kind of comparison between philosophical arguments and scientific evidence.

 

[Meow Mix]

Thanks for the feedback. I didn't include this in my post (because it was getting long), but I consider novel future testable predictions to be the key tool of the scientific method. Namely, conceive of an experiment that no one has ever run before, and predict what the results of that experiment will be based on your conceptual model. If the test is then run and the empirical results match your prediction, then this is empirical evidence that supports your model. Sure, the model is conceptual and arguably philosophical. But the evidence supporting its actual correspondence to reality is that empirical data. If your tensor models make many predictions that are later confirmed to be accurate, that's good empirical evidence.

We can create a thousand conceptual models to explain any past or present phenomenon, or to speculate about future tests that still haven't been run. I think the way we distinguish the merely imaginary models from the probably real ones is via these novel future predictions.

Theists often construct arguments like, "We can't explain phenomenon X, but if a thing G existed as I've defined it then it'd be sufficient to explain X, therefore this is evidence that G exists." It is a fallacious deviation from novel future predictions. It is post-hoc rationalizing, and entirely conceptual. I see a lot of philosophical arguments like this, which are trotted out as if they can to stand on par with science and offer real alternatives. They can't. They're always fallacies like arguments from ignorance, arguments from incredulity, special pleading, or circular reasoning. My prior post was to make this kind of comparison between philosophical arguments and scientific evidence.

I don't disagree. I think all that I'm saying is that the fact that philosophy is intertwined with science doesn't mean that we're only doing science when we do science. I've only been pointing out that we're philosophizing as well, so we should be cautious about blanket condemnations of philosophy as useless.

I won't disagree that large swathes of philosophy are questionable; but certain foundational things are necessary for us to be good at doing science.

 

[AlexanderG]

I don't disagree. I think all that I'm saying is that the fact that philosophy is intertwined with science doesn't mean that we're only doing science when we do science. I've only been pointing out that we're philosophizing as well, so we should be cautious about blanket condemnations of philosophy as useless.

I won't disagree that large swathes of philosophy are questionable; but certain foundational things are necessary for us to be good at doing science.

Totally. Not much disagreement here, heh. I think there's a subset of philosophy that describes reason and conceptual strategies for reaching reasonable conclusions. That is part of science for sure.

The problem that's niggling at me is that technically any idea can be considered part of philosophy. To express any concept, including an empirical claim or a metaphysical claim, is technically philosophy because it is an idea with conceptual definitions, relationships, attributes, etc. I mean...ok. That also means a muffin recipe is technically philosophy, and so is a tourism pamphlet or a shipping manifest for tropical fruit. Am I wrong? I'm not really sure. I'm not a professional philosopher.

I guess I'd sum it up as philosophy is how we formulate and express ideas, and science is how we filter which of those idea correspond to reality. The utility of philosophy is minimal to me, because it's a disordered morass of imagination; it's just a necessary prerequisite for conveying ideas. Science, on the other hand, is knowledge. It gives us the justification to say we know something rather than we suppose something.

 

[Heyo]

*******Porting this conversation into it's own thread as it was off the main topic of original OP.







I'd like to respond by starting with two definitions.

From Wikipedia I obtained the following definition of Philosophy:

“Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language.”

And the definition of Metaphysics:

“Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.”

To my mind, both of these definitions can be applied to the discipline of Science, or are goals or areas of exploration for Science. Perhaps then, Science is Philosophy. So why the distinction? I would argue that classic or traditional Philosophy relied solely on analytical reasoning to answer the questions that Philosophy set before itself. The problem with this approach was that the answers that came from this approach often did not match with reality, what we actually observe and know about the world, or would learn through careful observation. The vulnerability of this approach is that it relied too heavily on a single flawed and fallible observer, the Philosopher. There were no mechanisms in this approach to mitigate all the many ways we as individuals can get things wrong and be blind to why we are getting things wrong.

Science on the other hand, as you are well aware, still uses the same analytical reasoning in traditional Philosophy, yet adds empirical data collection to it’s approach to answering the same questions. In addition, we have multiple observers collecting data and multiple observers performing analytical reasoning on the data. And to me, this is what makes a scientific approach superior to traditional philosophical methods. Comparing the observations and analyses of many flawed observers helps mitigate the potential failings of any singe observer.

In your response above, you seemed to characterize Science as merely data collection. I would strongly disagree with this. Science is both the data collection and the interpretation of that data. And based on the definition of Philosophy, I am arguing that Science is Philosophy, different only in its improved methodology and standards that address, and therefore mitigate, the primary weakness to getting good answers to the general and fundamental question, that weakness being we human beings ourselves.

For me, since Science covers and addresses the questions asked under the traditional category label of Metaphysics, and since I do not separate data collection and the interpretation of data in what I consider scientific inquiry, it seems counter-productive to carve these questions out from the field of Physics and think of them as separate from scientific inquiry and its improved methodology. We want scientific rigor and standards to apply to all these questions. To throw some aspects of Physics back to traditional Philosophy only lowers the standards of the inquiry, in my opinion.

As a side note, I am on vacation on a lake in New Hampshire looking for something to read. I found “Quantum Philosophy” as an ebook and have started reading it. So far, I quite enjoyed the authors dialogue with the Pre-Socratic Philosophers in Hades. Thanks for the referral.

Two or three hundred years ago this would have been no question. The word "science" wasn't established in common use and every "scientist" was doing Natural Philosophy.

 

[Polymath257]

I don't like the definition of philosophy that implies you are doing it whenever you think about anything in a careful way.

So, I would not consider model-building in physics to be philosophy (this discussion would be, however).

So, a mathematical model, as I see it, has two parts. The first is the mathematical formalism and the second is the interpretation of that formalism. Both are crucial aspects of a physical model (assuming it is a mathematical model). The interpretation tells how to convert a physics question into mathematics and how to convert back from the mathematical answer to a physical prediction. i don't see this as metaphysics or philosophy; I see it as mathematical physics.

The goal is to find a predictive mathematical model that is consistent with and predicts all observations. In general, a model A is considered to be better than a model B if it has fewer basic assumptions, makes more predictions, and is more accurate in the predictions it makes.

But it is actually fairly common for more than one mathematical model to give the same predictions. A classical example would be the Newtonian formulation of physics via forces and the Lagrangian formulation as an extremal principle. They are inter-convertible (for conservative forces) but have different fundamental concepts (force vs action). Philosophically, they are quite different, with the Lagrangian formulation even having a touch of teleology. But, as physical theories, they are the same.

We consider two predictive models to be identical if they make the same predictions.

This is important because, for example, all 'interpretations' of quantum mechanics make exactly the same predictions of observations. SO THEY ARE THE SAME THEORY. Choosing one over the other only makes sense when one makes the calculations easier. Again, this happens often in the Lagrangian formulation of Newtonian physics. The philosophical differences are irrelevant to the science.

As I see it, philosophy comes into play when discussing the relative merits of observationally equivalent theories. So, Bohmian mechanics and old quantum theory can be shown to give the same observational predictions, but are very different philosophically. But, because the Bohmian formulation is more complicated to extend to a relativistic theory and also more complicated to even do the basic calculations, it tends to be ignored by most physicists (as opposed to philosophers, who love it).

This gets to another aspect: all of our current theories are incomplete. One of the possibilities is that two observationally equivalent models may NOT be equivalent when attempting to generalize to a broader theory. So, in going from classical quantum theory to a relativistic theory, Bohmian mechanics has great difficulty dealing with spin and even more difficulty dealing with anti-particles. Since we want to have a theory dealing with those, the Bohmian formulation is disfavored.

Thoughts?

 

[Polymath257]

One of the first questions I had as an undergraduate that bothered me a lot was about dimensionality, SR, and QM: when I began to understand how Planck units were defined (I did this early because I was reading so many papers with a lot of stuff set to unity, and I wanted to keep track of it all), I had this question:

If, for instance, the Planck length is defined with a bunch of constants, would an accelerated observer measure the same Planck length as an observer in that length's reference frame?

It seemed paradoxical, and it still somewhat is thanks to how relativity and QM don't really get along at such scales. I dived deep into this, reading papers proposing a "doubly special relativity" (holding Planck units Lorentz invariant), all of it somewhat whacky from my understanding now (and my understanding of the problem I had stumbled into at the time was naive).

Still, my point is that it felt more like doing philosophy than science. IIRC, the doubly special relativity ideas did ultimately make some predictions that could be tested (and failed), so we could eventually get to the science. But the very question sought to be answered felt more philosophical.

Am I being vague about this? I wonder if I have a point other than that my brain wanted to use the p-word more than it wanted to use the s-word for a lot of this kind of literature perusing.

My interpretation is that this was a physical model that simply failed to make correct predictions. I don't see it as philosophy, but as mathematical physics.

But I do agree that the division line isn't always so clear. For example, string theory has made few actual predictions (except for gravity) and those it has made have a tension with recent observations. But it is beautiful theory with a lot of interesting mathematical payoffs. At this point, I would call it more philosophy than physics, but I might be a minority in that.

 

[Meow Mix]

I don't like the definition of philosophy that implies you are doing it whenever you think about anything in a careful way.

So, I would not consider model-building in physics to be philosophy (this discussion would be, however).

So, a mathematical model, as I see it, has two parts. The first is the mathematical formalism and the second is the interpretation of that formalism. Both are crucial aspects of a physical model (assuming it is a mathematical model). The interpretation tells how to convert a physics question into mathematics and how to convert back from the mathematical answer to a physical prediction. i don't see this as metaphysics or philosophy; I see it as mathematical physics.

The goal is to find a predictive mathematical model that is consistent with and predicts all observations. In general, a model A is considered to be better than a model B if it has fewer basic assumptions, makes more predictions, and is more accurate in the predictions it makes.

But it is actually fairly common for more than one mathematical model to give the same predictions. A classical example would be the Newtonian formulation of physics via forces and the Lagrangian formulation as an extremal principle. They are inter-convertible (for conservative forces) but have different fundamental concepts (force vs action). Philosophically, they are quite different, with the Lagrangian formulation even having a touch of teleology. But, as physical theories, they are the same.

We consider two predictive models to be identical if they make the same predictions.

This is important because, for example, all 'interpretations' of quantum mechanics make exactly the same predictions of observations. SO THEY ARE THE SAME THEORY. Choosing one over the other only makes sense when one makes the calculations easier. Again, this happens often in the Lagrangian formulation of Newtonian physics. The philosophical differences are irrelevant to the science.

As I see it, philosophy comes into play when discussing the relative merits of observationally equivalent theories. So, Bohmian mechanics and old quantum theory can be shown to give the same observational predictions, but are very different philosophically. But, because the Bohmian formulation is more complicated to extend to a relativistic theory and also more complicated to even do the basic calculations, it tends to be ignored by most physicists (as opposed to philosophers, who love it).

This gets to another aspect: all of our current theories are incomplete. One of the possibilities is that two observationally equivalent models may NOT be equivalent when attempting to generalize to a broader theory. So, in going from classical quantum theory to a relativistic theory, Bohmian mechanics has great difficulty dealing with spin and even more difficulty dealing with anti-particles. Since we want to have a theory dealing with those, the Bohmian formulation is disfavored.

Thoughts?

I have little to add to this except possibly this: you note that models are equivalent until we zoom out to broader theory (where they may continue to be equivalent or not). This is true. But there are philosophical differences in models. I'll bring up realism vs. instrumentalism again: you can have a realist model that gives correct answers and an instrumentalist model that gives correct answers about the same thing.

In science we don't care about this, as you note. Which one's easier to do? Let's do that one. Done.

But we might philosophically care, if anything to sate our philosophical curiosity. We're human, we like to ask "but what does it mean?" I wouldn't call that useless. And I would submit again that depending on your metaphysics, they will color your next proposed model. It eventually does seep back into the science in an influential way. If you have an instrumentalist model for instance, but you approach it in a realist way, you might make wrong assumptions about reality and color your next proposal that way. Now of course, reality will often sort you out. But you just wasted your time finding out the hard way rather than just bothering to do good metaphysics in the first place.

That's all I'm saying here. I'm not trying to say any careful thinking is philosophy, but some questions that we tango with in science are definitely philosophy.

Edit: This is really low-hanging fruit but a good example of sh** metaphysics coloring perceptions of what exists in reality is quantum woo. Someone with sh** metaphysics might be thinking "oh okay, consciousness plays some role in collapsing the wave function" and waste a lot of time constructing whacko nonsense models (and perhaps even put together perfectly reasonable experiments under that assumption, otherwise doing science very well). But because their metaphysics suck, they're wasting so much time. Reality will of course sort them out. But sometimes you get right answers for the wrong reason, so perhaps they will go even deeper into the rabbit hole, getting more and more wrong, until they make a model that reality finally slaps them in the face over; and by that point they don't know where they've gone wrong.

If only they'd kept up on sound metaphysics!

 

[Meow Mix]

My interpretation is that this was a physical model that simply failed to make correct predictions. I don't see it as philosophy, but as mathematical physics.

But I do agree that the division line isn't always so clear. For example, string theory has made few actual predictions (except for gravity) and those it has made have a tension with recent observations. But it is beautiful theory with a lot of interesting mathematical payoffs. At this point, I would call it more philosophy than physics, but I might be a minority in that.

I'm not sure what I'd call string theory. There are probably a lot of metaphysics involved. One aspect I can think of that I would call philosophical rather than empirical is the supposition that strings, not fields, are fundamental. LQG says the opposite: fields are fundamental and strings are emergent.

Some people, at least Lee Smolin, have at least once proposed that there may be a duality between strings theory and LQG: that it might not matter whether we treat strings as fundamental or fields as fundamental as long as we're consistent all the way up to broader theory. I would call this philosophical as well, correct or not.

Yet another edit: also most string theories are background independent, but M-theory is background dependent. That's a philosophical difference I'd say.

Yet at the end of the day I still have this sneaking suspicion that we're just quibbling over what we're willing to call "philosophy," over what the limits of what we call "science" are. I bet we (and by we I mean everyone in this thread) will probably agree on concepts and might just not agree on the semantics.

 

[Meow Mix]

Sorry to flood with responses, I'm a little scatterbrained tonight (I'm reading a 48 page road plan for my thesis through the night... it's... special).

Going back to quantum woo: when we make a dumb assertion like "maybe consciousness itself is collapsing the wave function," and someone asks skeptically "okay, er, what's the mechanism for that?"

I feel like this is a philosophical question. The idea that there should probably be some mechanism is a philosophical idea.

 

[Heyo]

I'm not sure what I'd call string theory.

Anything but a theory.

 

[MikeF]

Science is a method.
.....
But when we interpret what it is we're doing, we're not doing "pure" science: we're philosophizing.
......
It's philosophy that we probably never would have gotten around to asking or answering very well without the science, but it's still philosophy.
.......
However at the end of the day, I think a lot of this is just going to be definitional.
......
This may just be a preference of how we're defining what science's scope is.
......
A person can do the science (again using the word in the scope I've outlined) well, but then absolutely bungle the metaphysics of interpreting the results.

I think it is useful to be able to point this out: "your science is good, but your metaphysics are sh**."

Then again, I can see how a person might instead say "your experimentation and modeling are good, but your interpretations are sh**."

So at the end of the day, this might be a purely semantic dispute with little to no substance actually disagreed upon. Except, in fact, for one thing: even if we say "your interpretations are crap," we are philosophizing as soon as we say why.

Perhaps it is simply definitional preference and semantics. I suppose for me, I see disadvantage to separating empirical data collection under the banner Science, and analysis and interpretation of that data under the banner Philosophy, primarily because doing so drags in all the baggage of antiquated and obsolete philosophical terms and ideas into science. Perhaps it is my bias, but it seems that Philosophy never lets go of an idea once it has been put forward, regardless of what comes after.

I don't think it lowers any standards. When we ask questions like "is my interpretation realist? Is it background independent? Am I going to have to abandon locality? Is there a duality between strings and fields such that I could formulate this same model treating the other thing as fundamental?" I think that it's useful to treat these questions as more metaphysics than pure science. We're no longer talking about the empirical things at that point but rather about their relation and correspondence to reality.

I have only a general layperson familiarity with modern Physics. As a result, I can't speak directly to your examples, but will try and express my concern toward your statement, "I think that it's useful to treat these questions as more metaphysics than pure science."

When I think of scientific disciplines outside of Physics, such as the Life Sciences, for the most part, the whole of their area of inquiry lies within their empirical grasps. That the main obstacle in these inquiries lies in interconnected complexity, and not necessarily a limit on empirical observation.

Physics, to me, is different. Physics seems to be hamstrung in its ability to empirically reach the entirety of the subject matter. The distances involved are either too great or too small, the speeds too great, and the energies too great, for us to be able to evaluate empirically in the foreseeable future.

If science is philosophy with empirical verification, then this would seem to indicate that scientific inquiry in Physics has a boundary, an empirical limitation.

I am wondering if you are arguing that Physics can soldier on, to continue beyond its empirical limitations by relying solely on Philosophy without empirical verification. That the 1/3 Philosophy portion of Physics is this extension beyond empirical limitations.

For me, based on the historical track record of classic or traditional Philosophy, I am skeptical that Physics can proceed in a meaningful way on Philosophy alone, absent empirical verification.

If you are not arguing that Physics can soldier on in a meaningful way relying solely on classic Philosophy, then any apparent difference to our attitudes on Science and Philosophy really is all down to semantics.