Philosophy of Science: Teach Yourself

Mel Thompson

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781444157673
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

A modern understanding of the world is unthinkable without science, but what exactly is it? What does it mean to say that something is 'scientific'? How are its results justified? From the genetic basis of life, to the structures of the universe and the atom, TEACH YOURSELF PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE explores how the key ideas that shape our world have been developed.- Investigate the history of science.- Examine scientific method.- Discover key philosophers and scientists.- Explore the impact of science on Western thought.

1

Introduction to the philosophy of science

Philosophy is all about asking questions, examining arguments and generally getting to grips with reality. Nobody is likely to get involved with philosophy unless he or she has some sense that the world is an exciting and sometimes confusing place, and that human life is there to be examined as well as enjoyed.

Nowhere is this fascination with the world more evident than in science and the technology that it makes possible. From speculations about the origins of matter, to the understanding and manipulation of genetic information or the workings of the human body, it thrives on the human desire to unlock the mysteries of the world around us – both for the sake of knowledge itself and for the benefits it can offer.

We all know what science is and appreciate what it can contribute to human wellbeing, but why should there be a philosophy of science? Surely, science explains itself and validates what it does through the results it achieves. Well, not exactly. For one thing, ‘science’ is simply a label that is given to certain methods of investigation, and it is quite reasonable to ask whether a field of study is, from the perspective of the rest of science, genuine or bogus. Astronomy is scientific, but what about astrology? Mainstream medicine is scientific, but what of faith healing? Or herbalism? Or homeopathy? And what of the claim that a product is ‘scientifically proven’ to give health benefits? What does such a claim imply and how can it be verified? These are all questions that require careful attention.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which saw the rise of modern science, were – generally speaking – a time of optimism, and science was seen in the context of human progress. Reason was hailed as the tool by which humankind would be emancipated from the narrowness of superstition and tradition. The experimental method of the newly developing sciences was a sign of a new commitment to harness reason for the good of humanity. There was a fundamental trust in the human ability to understand and to benefit from that understanding, but, above all, science seemed to offer a degree of certainty about the world.

Knowledge, for science, aims to be proven knowledge, justified by evidence and reason. Nothing is accepted as true unless it has been proved to be so, or there are good reasons to believe that it will be at some point in the future. This reflects the philosophical quest for certainty that goes back to René Descartes (1596–1650), who refused to accept anything that he could not know for certain to be true. He hoped to base all knowledge on self-evident propositions, and thought that reason should take priority over observation. Descartes was aware that his senses frequently misled him. The implication of this – a view which had a long history, prior to the rise of science – was that, if the evidence of our senses did not conform to reason, it was likely that they were in error.

Other philosophers, such as John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–76), took sense experience as the basis for knowledge, and it is their approach (known as empiricism) which has provided much of the philosophical underpinning of science.

Although the raw data for science is mediated to us by the senses, we shall be looking at the way in which science has always been at pains to find ways to ensure that our senses are not deceived – in particular, by devising experiments which control nature in such a way that a single feature of it can be checked out, without being too influenced by everything else.

Insight

Life is always too complicated. The only way we can get to grips with it is by simplifying it sufficiently to be able to measure the influence of one thing on another. Science has provided the means by which such measurements and calculations can be made, and, in doing so, has systematized and supported the empiricists’ quest for knowledge based on evidence.

Philosophers and scientists

Until the eighteenth century, science and philosophy were not regarded as separate disciplines. Natural philosophy was the term used for the branch of philosophy which sought to understand the fundamental structure and nature of the universe, whether by theoretical or experimental methods, and some of the greatest names in philosophy – both before and after science appeared as a separate discipline – were also involved with mathematics and science:

• It was Aristotle (384 BCE – 322 BCE) who set out the different sciences and gave both science and philosophy much of its later terminology.
• Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), Blaise Pascal (1623–62) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) were all mathematicians. It need hardly be said that science could have made little progress without mathematics, and mathematics is bound up with logic and therefore to philosophy. In their famous book Principia Mathematica (1910–13) Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead argued that mathematics was a development of deductive logic. Thus, much of what is done in science, however specialist in its application, is based on fundamental logical principles.
• For some, science was an influence on their overall philosophy and view of the world. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Locke and others sought to give the scientific method a sound philosophical basis.
• Hume, in assessing the evidence of the senses as the basis of knowledge, was influenced by and challenged scientific method.
• Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) saw the whole world as matter in motion – a view to be developed with mathematical precision in Newtonian physics.
• Even the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who is generally seen as a writer of abstract and highly conceptual philosophy, wrote A General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) in which he explored the possible origin of the solar system. His distinction between the things we observe (phenomena) and things as they are in themselves (noumena) is of fundamental importance for understanding the philosophy of science, and especially for defining the relationship between the experiences one has, and the reality which gives rise to such experiences.

As science developed particular forms of experimentation and observation, it naturally started to separate off from the more general and theoretical considerations of philosophy. It also became increasingly difficult for any one person to have a specialist working knowledge of all branches of science, quite apart from all branches of philosophy. Hence the activity of scientists and philosophers started to be distinguished, with the latter carrying out a secondary function of checking on the underlying principles of those engaged in science.

However, it would be wrong to think that the influence has all been one way, with philosophy gently guarding and nurturing its young, scientific offshoot. Science has been so influential in shaping the way we look at the world that it has influenced many aspects of philosophy. The Logical Positivists of the early twentieth century, for example, regarded scientific language as the ideal, and wanted all claims to be judged on the basis of evidence, with words corresponding to external facts that could be checked and shown to be the case. This led them to argue that all metaphysical or moral claims were meaningless. In effect, they were arguing that philosophy should have scientific precision.

Sometimes scientists see themselves as the bastion of reason against superstition and religion. This was a popular view in the eighteenth century, and is still found today, as for example in the work of Richard Dawkins (1941–), who parallels his promotion of science with a criticism of religious beliefs on the grounds that they cannot be justified rationally, effectively using science as a benchmark for proven knowledge.

Insight

The debate between fundamentalist religion and the ‘new atheism’ is beyond the scope of this book, but can be informed by an appreciation of scientific method and the degrees of certainty it offers.

The role of the philosophy of science

The first example of the philosophy of science, as a separate branch of philosophy, is found in the work of William Whewell (1794–1866), who wrote both on the history of science, and also (in 1840) on The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History.

Generally speaking, the philosophy of science is that branch of philosophy which examines the methods used by science (e.g. the ways in which scientists frame hypotheses and test them against evidence), and the grounds on which scientific claims about the world may be justified. Whereas scientists tend to become more and more specialized in their interests, philosophers generally stand back from the details of particular research programmes, and concentrate on making sense of the overall principles and establishing how they relate together to give an overall view of the world.

There are two problems here:

1 Science is too vast for any one person to have an up-to-date, specialist knowledge of every branch. Hence the philosopher of science, being a generalist, is always going to have a problem with doing justice to the latest scientific work upon which he or she needs to comment.

2 The role of science can sometimes be overstated, with its exponents slipping into scientism. Scientism is the view that the scientific description of reality is the only truth there is. With the advance of science, there has been a tendency to slip into scientism, and assume that any factual claim can be authenticated if and only if the term ‘scientific’ can correctly be ascribed to it. The consequence is that non-scientific approaches to reality – and that can include all the arts, religion, and personal, emotional and value-laden ways of encountering the world – may become labelled as merely subjective, and therefore of little account in terms of describing the way the world is. The philosophy of science seeks to avoid crude scientism and get a balanced view on what the scientific method can and cannot achieve.

The key feature of much philosophy of science concerns the nature of scientific theories – how it is that we can move from observation of natural phenomena to producing general statements about the world. And, of course, the crucial questions here concern the criteria by which one can say that a theory is correct, how one can judge between different theories that purport to explain the same phenomenon, and how theories develop and change as science progresses.

And once we start to look at theories, we are dealing with all the usual philosophical problems of language, of what we can know and of how we can know it. Thus, the philosophy of science relates to three other major concerns of philosophy:

• metaphysics (the attempt to describe the general structures of reality – and whether or not it is possible to do so)
• epistemology (the theory of knowledge, and how that knowledge can be shown to be true)
• language (the nature of scientific claims, the logic by which they are formulated and whether such language is to be taken literally).

This is not to suggest that the philosophy of science should act as some kind of intellectual policeman; simply that it should play an active part in assisting science to clarify what it does. But there are two key questions here:

1 Are there aspects of reality with which science cannot deal, but philosophy can?

2 If philosophy and science deal with the same subject matter, in what way does philosophy add to what science is able to tell us?

The situation is rather more problematic, for there are three different ways (at least) in which we can think of the relationship between philosophy and science:

1 Science gives information about th...