The Line between Philosophy and Science

[Evo]

I agree with these sentiments from Cyrus and Evo:

^This is what I mean philosophy

Anyway, I think it's interesting how I asked a question pertaining to the history of philosophy and got a lot of anti-philosophical replies that were kind of irrelevant.

I think becuse the way you think of philosophy, as it pertains to science as the way it should be thought of, as a means of asking questions as PART of the scientific process. Then there are those that think of philosophy as nothing more than asking questions. That's fine, but don't expect that to be taken as part of a scientific process.

 

[russ_watters]

The question in the OP asks when and I don't see any dates here. How about 1610? That's somewhat arbitrary, but that's the year Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter. It's a good a time as any to say that science was invented and that's when the line was drawn.

Where the line was drawn is as Evo said: Galileo realized that in order to discover things about the natural world, you have to observe the natural world and devise theories based on those observations. Seems despicably obvious now, but it was well beyond Aristotle's capacity.

 

[Cyrus]

The question in the OP asks when and I don't see any dates here. How about 1610? That's somewhat arbitrary, but that's the year Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter. It's a good a time as any to say that science was invented and that's when the line was drawn.

I would argue the date when the scientific process was adopted.

 

[russ_watters]

I would argue the date when the scientific process was adopted.

Ok...

 

[epenguin]

I always think the key distinction between philosophy and science is that science tests and demonstrates ideas.

Then if you ask what an idea is and what a test is and what justifies it you will be into philosophy.

 

[Pythagorean]

I think becuse the way you think of philosophy, as it pertains to science as the way it should be thought of, as a means of asking questions as PART of the scientific process. Then there are those that think of philosophy as nothing more than asking questions. That's fine, but don't expect that to be taken as part of a scientific process.

We can easily criticize 'thinking without doing', but we can sometimes more harshly criticize 'doing without thinking'. Especially when people make harmful mistakes. Science involves philosophy in it. Every subject that is studied is necessarily involved with one philosophy or another.

As for pure philosophy itself, I'm not exactly sure what they do for society, but I assume they actually do stimulate the other subjects with talks and seminars (Daniel Dennet comes to mind, on the subjects of consciousness, which would stimulate neurology and psychology, and at least serves to inform the public about neurology and psychology).

Philosophy on the internet... is called armchair philosophy. I might as well be an armchair philosopher because my degree is in physics and my new program is in engineering, but I still like to think I can identify a logical argument.

That's another especially important aspect of philosophy; forming valid arguments. It's something I never learned in any of my science, engineering, or math classes. I learned about valid arguments in a philosophy class (ethics, specifically).

 

[Brilliant!]

I think it was when Galileo decided to give the finger to Aristotle and actually test the philosopher's "logical" conclusion that heavier bodies falls faster than lighter ones.

From this point forward, a shadow was cast on the reasoning ability of the mind. Logic is a superior pursuit, but "to err is human".

 

[apeiron]

And what philosophy were Galileo, Descartes, Newton et al so inspired by? Come on boys, do your history here.

A bastardisation of Aristotle was preserved by monks through the middle ages. Aristotelean physics did seem to make actual scientific predictions about things like flights of cannonballs which many believed and used. So already, Aristotle was science in this regard, just not very accurate as a model.

And many ancient greeks got key principles later rediscovered - Strato understood that falling bodies pick up speed (which was contrary to Aristotle's assertions). Aristarchus anticipated Copernicus by 2,000 years.

But then the question of what inspired the renaissance physicists - it was the discovery of ancient atomists texts.

The invasion of Constantinople by the Turks in the mid-fourteenth century led to a flood of immigrants from the Byzantine Empire to Italy, bringing ancient manuscripts with them.
Philosophical ideas that awakened the European mind.

Atomism directly inspired the likes of Galileo, Boyle and Newton. De Rerum Natura was a key translated text, Pierre Gassendi an early populariser (he Christianised the ideas enough to allow them to be discussed), Descartes the heavyweight philosopher who really convinced.
Galileo wrote discourses (Assayer, 1623) on it that got him into trouble with the church.

Mechanics is just applied atomism - atomism with the kind of instruments like clocks, telescopes and thermometers that people started to invent so they could measure quantities rather than qualities - what the atomists had defined as primary rather than secondary characteristics of the world.

And who started the new "method" we call science? The empiricist philosophers like Ockham, Bacon, Locke, Hume.

So we could say it all came together in the Enlightenment - there was a time when philosophy became natural philosophy (the first science).

Then this philosopy-science became so successful that it mutated into techno-industrial applied science. A discourse that felt its philosophical underpinnings were established and it just needed to get on with the job of taking control of the world.

Academic philosophy then wandered off in its own directions. You had idealism and other romantic reactions that were very unproductive from a science point of view.

Within all the nonsense, there were still a few philosophers who saw that the atomism of science was an incomplete metaphysics. It lacked the systems perspective. So from time to time we heard of people like Peirce, Whitehead, Bertalanffy, Bateson, Weiner, etc.

So believe it or not, the line between philosophy and science has a well-documented social history.

You can either talk in caricatures that serve to confirm your own prejudices, or you can actually learn the true history of the world.

It was just never the case that these practical guys suddenly got off their butts in the renaissance and did real experiments, real observations, leaving the philosophers to their noodlings.

Science has always been embedded in a philosophical context and will always remain so. It is only possible to argue different if you have a complete ignorance of your own social history.

 

[russ_watters]

And what philosophy were Galileo, Descartes, Newton et al so inspired by? Come on boys, do your history here.

A bastardisation of Aristotle was preserved by monks through the middle ages. Aristotelean physics did seem to make actual scientific predictions about things like flights of cannonballs which many believed and used. So already, Aristotle was science in this regard, just not very accurate as a model.

The method you describe (and Aristotle used) is not "science", it is a method of investigating the natural world via philosophy. Differentiating between the two is kinda the entire point of the thread!

 

[apeiron]

Differentiating is not synonomous with dualising.

Philosophy and science could be two unrelated ways of knowing the world. Which would be a pluralistic story.

They could be two exactly and completely disconnected realms of discourse, which would be dualistic.

Or they could be differentiated as different levels of the same thing - so levels and meta-levels of a hierarchically organised system.

History shows the later to be the case. Like so many, you just say nah, nah, you're not right. Without a single fact to back up your opinion. You win zero respect for that approach to scholarship.

Aristotlean physics did make concrete predictions about ballistic trajectories. Ever heard of Philoponus, Buridan, Leonardo and Tartaglia? In the middle ages, people had the practical problem of aiming these contraptions called cannons. So they did the maths and observed the results.

Along came the maths of parabolas and better physical models. Aiming improved.

Do your homework before telling me what aristotelean physics is and what it is not.

Of course, if you have studied the social history and can offer a different account, please furnish the actual details.

 

[confinement]

I agree that Galileo took a major step, putting observation and mathematics at the center of his 'dialogue on two new sciences.' Einstein said that Galileo was the 'father of modern science', and I agree, which would make the early 17th century the birthdate of science.

Philosophy and science have always been separate subjects; much of the debate in this thread concerns this and I don't want to get involved. The interesting thing about this topic is that philosophy and science were for many years done by the same people (e.g. Liebniz, Descartes), but today this is no longer the case.

In fact, these days philosophy hardly resembles science at all, and this has caused a lot of tension, not least of which in this thread.

I claim that these two subjects diverged when europe made the shift from the enlightenment to the romance era. During the enlightenment, Newton's work was viewed by intellectuals as the pinnacle of human accomplishment, and rationalism and science were in vogue like never before or since. In philosophy the rationalist movement culminated with Immanuel Kant, who went so far as to claim that Newton's law of gravitation was a synthetic a priori proposition i.e. that it could be known by pure thought alone (based on the mathematical argument that we are all essentially familiar with through Gauss' law of electromagnetism). Although this appears deathly naive in retrospect, it was significant at the time.

But this intellectuall movement towards rationalism gave rise to a counter-movement in the 19th century that is known as romanticism, where poetry, painting, and musical composition were regarded as the pinnacle of human achievement, while compared to enlightenment attitudes science became regarded as sterile and limited (indeed, a more sober viewpoint that we hold to this day, although to a lesser degree). Anyway, it's around this time that philosophers embraced the kind of writing that to this day is seen by most people as a kind of nonsense poetry / rhetoric.

Before Kant, philosophers were the ones who saught metaphysical truth, epistemological certainty, and absolute ethical principles. Kant's work spelt once and for all the death of metaphysics, and with this also died the optimistic notion that the true nature of universe can be known to us, and all of this coincided with a major ebb of religious influence in europe i.e. 'the death of God' leading to a cynical view of science and knowledge and an intoxicated view of art and subjectivity as the basis for human reality. After Kant (who was a rationalist), the desirable qualities and efforts of a philosopher became imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality, and the creation of values, which bear little resemblance to ideal qualities of a scientist.

 

[Cyrus]

Differentiating is not synonomous with dualising.

Philosophy and science could be two unrelated ways of knowing the world. Which would be a pluralistic story.

I agree one is bogus (Philosophy), while the other (Science) is not.

They could be two exactly and completely disconnected realms of discourse, which would be dualistic.

What do you mean 'they could be'. This is nothing but speculation.

Or they could be differentiated as different levels of the same thing - so levels and meta-levels of a hierarchically organised system.

"Different levels of the same thing"? What are you basing this on? The problem is nothing.

History shows the later to be the case. Like so many, you just say nah, nah, you're not right. Without a single fact to back up your opinion. You win zero respect for that approach to scholarship.

So far, you aint winning no respect here with this argument.

Aristotlean physics did make concrete predictions about ballistic trajectories. Ever heard of Philoponus, Buridan, Leonardo and Tartaglia? In the middle ages, people had the practical problem of aiming these contraptions called cannons. So they did the maths and observed the results.

What you described is science, not philosophy. I don't understand your point.

Along came the maths of parabolas and better physical models. Aiming improved.

Ok, what's the point?

Do your homework before telling me what aristotelean physics is and what it is not.

Excuse me?

Of course, if you have studied the social history and can offer a different account, please furnish the actual details.

Try this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801858690/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[Math Is Hard]

Philosophers, I suppose, are primarily in the business of asking intelligent questions. Scientists are primarily in the business of answering intelligent questions. Good scientists are also philosophers and vice versa. The line is not as clear to me.

I think the discipline of philosophy will become increasingly narrowed in the future, as we develop more explanations for our questions through science. But I can't imagine it will ever completely go away.

 

[Phrak]

Science and Philosophy blend seamlessly into one another. A marriage made in heaven.

Science offers the unthinkable--to come to a conclusion. This is a philosophically untenable outcome: to put the conversation to an end.

Philosophy offers the scientifically untenable--to never obtain a solid conclusion.

 

[epenguin]

Science offers the unthinkable--to come to a conclusion. This is a philosophically untenable outcome: to put the conversation to an end.

Philosophy offers the scientifically untenable--to never obtain a solid conclusion.

Scientism knows all the answers.
Made easier for itself by not recognising any questions.

 

[Cyrus]

Scientism knows all the answers.
Made easier for itself by not recognising any questions.

Um, what?

 

[JoeDawg]

when was it drawn? Obviously scientists utilize philosophy and philosophers utilize science. But at one time, we didn't separate the two at all. How did it happen? Was it a gradual change or did it happen over a short period of time? Was there any particular influences?

It depends what you mean by science... and although many sciency types would like to think otherwise philosophy is still very much the foundation of anything you might want to call science.

Aristotle was known for being a student of natural phenomena, especially with his dissections of animals and such. At the time though, because knowledge of the natural world was pretty rudimentary, the theoretical end of things was often wrong.

Couple that with the fact that the ancients were much more impressed with mathematics than with the physical world, and you ended up with theories like Plato's forms. Where mathematical ideas were thought to be the 'most real'.

There are lots of examples in that time and since however of 'scientific' type observations, but it was never formalized, until very recently.

The enlightenment was the chief source of modern scientific thought. But even then there were still mathematicians like Descartes, who viewed 'rationalism' as the true source of knowledge. That is, one could 'logically' figure out the world, without having to observe it.

'Empiricism' is really where science starts to make itself known: Bacon, Hume, Newton, Galileo.

The idea that all knowledge could be derived from observation is empirical philosophy. Science is really just a narrow band of philosophy. And rationalism wasn't eliminated, but with science these days we tend to think in terms of theoretical and applied science. Which are essentially the rational and empirical ends of the spectrum.

Logical positivism was an attempt to reconcile logic and observation... but it is largely regarded as a failure.

There are still some real problems with science, which is where the philosophy of science comes in. The demarcation problem, the problem of induction, the definition of method, and the difference between explanation and observation are all still very relevant issues to science.

Of course, when scientists are in the lab, they generally aren't focused on the more philosophical aspects of science, but its still important to them, because 'what is good science' is very much a philosophical question.

One might be tempted to limit good science to observation, but really, science also depends on theories, which are logical abstractions, and even inspiration...

 

[Phrak]

Scientism knows all the answers.
Made easier for itself by not recognising any questions.

I think I struck an unexpected nerve. What is scientism? Is that, like, the flip-side of philoism?

 

[madness]

I think the line between science and philosophy is not at all clear, contrary to what certain people in this thread are saying. Most agree that string theory is currently not science but may become so in the future. Einstein said (about quantum mechanics) "if it is right, then it signifies the end of physics as a science", and there is some justification in this - in QM you lose the idea of an independent observer making measurements of a system without interfering with it, which was one of the basic tenets of the scientific method during its conception. The question of what is and isn't science is a philosophical one. I also think it is quite ignorant to think that science can have any hope of answering the same questions that philosophy can - we need philosophy just to interpret the results of our experiments, otherwise all we have is a set of data.

 

[Cyrus]

I think the line between science and philosophy is not at all clear, contrary to what certain people in this thread are saying.

No, it's pretty clear to the scientists in this thread what the difference is. The non-scientists seem to want to hear otherwise.

Most agree that string theory is currently not science but may become so in the future.

Most? Unless it is validated by experiment it is not science.

Einstein said (about quantum mechanics) "if it is right, then it signifies the end of physics as a science", and there is some justification in this - in QM you lose the idea of an independent observer making measurements of a system without interfering with it, which was one of the basic tenets of the scientific method during its conception.

No, it is not. This phenomenon is on the microscale. Theory at the macro scale doesn't care about this effect. That being said, I don't see any "end of physics as a science"...

The question of what is and isn't science is a philosophical one.

Again, no it's not.

I also think it is quite ignorant to think that science can have any hope of answering the same questions that philosophy can - we need philosophy just to interpret the results of our experiments, otherwise all we have is a set of data.

Ok, I'll be sure to email you my research data so you can interpret it for me - right.

 

[JoeDawg]

Most? Unless it is validated by experiment it is not science.

And what is your standard for validation?

 

[Cyrus]

I don't understand your question. And its not "my" standard of validation, so I don't know what you mean by that.

 

[JoeDawg]

I don't understand your question. And its not "my" standard of validation, so I don't know what you mean by that.

Well, there are quite a few standards actually.

Verification (Logical positivism)
Falsification (Popper)
Mill's methods
Inference to the best explanation
Peer review evaluation
...

What is the standard you use for validation of an experiment?

 

[epenguin]

I think I struck an unexpected nerve. What is scientism? Is that, like, the flip-side of philoism?

Oh dear, well I can recognise it when I see it.
There is a page of differing definitions in wikipedia, probably mine would be closely related to some more than others.
About the best one I saw there was "the belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other inquiry,".
It goes hand in hand with a technocratic or technodeterministic model of society and recipe for progress. Although mentioned in wiki the term is sometimes used by religious thinkers, perhaps anti-scientific ones, recognition of the limits of scientism is compatible with a purely rational outlook.

 

[Cyrus]

Well, there are quite a few standards actually.

Verification (Logical positivism)
Falsification (Popper)
Mill's methods
Inference to the best explanation
Peer review evaluation
...

What is the standard you use for validation of an experiment?

Experimental data matches proposed theory.

 

[Cyrus]

Oh dear, well I can recognise it when I see it.
There is a page of differing definitions in wikipedia, probably mine would be closely related to some more than others.
About the best one I saw there was "the belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other inquiry,".
It goes hand in hand with a technocratic or technodeterministic model of society and recipe for progress. Although mentioned in wiki the term is sometimes used by religious thinkers, perhaps anti-scientific ones, recognition of the limits of scientism is compatible with a purely rational outlook.

scientism? God, I hate it when you guys bastardize words just to sound high falutin.

 

[JoeDawg]

Experimental data matches proposed theory.

So, hypothetically, let's say I believe that the movements of the stars and planets affect my daily life. That's the theory. And I conduct an experiment, where I buy a newspaper every morning for a week, but I don't read it until I get home in the evening. At which point I read my horoscope and compare it to my daily activities. The results are that 90 percent of the time, my horoscope is accurate about my day.

The data matches the theory.

This experimental validation?
This is science?

 

[epenguin]

scientism? God, I hate it when you guys bastardize words just to sound high falutin.

Who is you guys? If there is a page about it in wiki it wasn't me, it was a lot of guys and well before me. I use the term because, as I said, it describes something I recognise. Actually the guys who are right inside it tend not to be able to.

 

[Cyrus]

So, hypothetically, let's say I believe that the movements of the stars and planets affect my daily life. That's the theory. And I conduct an experiment, where I buy a newspaper every morning for a week, but I don't read it until I get home in the evening. At which point I read my horoscope and compare it to my daily activities. The results are that 90 percent of the time, my horoscope is accurate about my day.

The data matches the theory.

This experimental validation?
This is science?

No, that's not a theory. That's your hypothesis. You would have to do a statistical analysis with repeated subjects, days, times, newspapers. If you could show, statistically, that there is a real correlation then it would be experimental validation.

 

[JoeDawg]

No, that's not a theory. That's your hypothesis.

No, my hypothesis is that my daily horoscope will accurately describe my day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
A hypothesis consists either of a suggested explanation for an observable phenomenon or of a reasoned proposal predicting a possible causal correlation among multiple phenomena.

The theory behind that is that the stars and planets affect my daily life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory
A theory, in the general sense of the word, is an analytic structure designed to explain a set of observations. A theory does two things:
1. it identifies this set of distinct observations as a class of phenomena, and
2. makes assertions about the underlying reality that brings about or affects this class.

I can test the hypothesis about the horoscope and my day, the theory is the framework I build around that observed phenomena.

You would have to do a statistical analysis with repeated subjects, days, times, newspapers. If you could show, statistically, that there is a real correlation then it would be experimental validation.

I asked you very specifically what your standard for validation was, and you never mentioned statistics.

You said very specifically:

Experimental data matches proposed theory.

I addressed that.

And... actually its very easy to get a high statistical result from people reading daily horoscopes. Because horoscopes are intentionally written so they are vague and easy to apply to most people's day. I could just as easily have read a random horoscope, ie not my astrological sign, every day, and I would probably have seen no statistical difference.

Granted some horoscope writers are more talented at this than others. But the point is, that the way we assess how scientific something is, can be complicated.

This is what is known as the demarcation problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem

And it doesn't just apply to astrology.

Doing experiments in chemistry is somewhat straightforward. But you can't do direct experimentation on subjects like astronomy and evolutionary theory. Similarly, within physics you can do experiments on some topics, but not on others. Then there is psychology and sociology which rely on a general scientific type of method experimentation, but aren't considered hard sciences.

Going further, you have things like economics, meteorology, which rely on statistics, but have questionable predictive power.

Even further is something like archeology, and history. Is archeology a science?

These are important questions that help define what science is. Because if you don't know this, you can't defend science against pseudoscience.