Re: Question: Philosophy of Science - is it Relevant?

Wirt Atmar wrote:
> John S. Wilkins wrote:
>
>
>>Michael Nuwer wrote:
>
> >
>
>>>>That's a rather broader question. Popper of course has been adduced to support
>>>>everything from Mendelian genetics to phylogenetic systematics (and has very
>>>>little impact on the actual science). Likewise Kuhn. But David Hull and Elliot
>>>>Sober have influenced the disciplines they have addressed, particularly
>>>>Sober's _Reconstructing the Past_ on cladistics. Lately Sober has been working
>>>>with a biologist, David Sloan Wilson, on selection theory and evolutionary
>>>>psychology.
>>>
>>>John, What, in your view, are the qualities that the philosopher brings
>>>to a discussion of biological theories? Are they "outsiders" looking in
>>>and offering unique views? Do they have tools (disciplinary tools) that
>>>the biologist doesn't have? Can philosophers offer something more to
>>>biology than a biologist who reads and absorbs philosophy?
>>
>>Hard to say. IMO there is nothing unique to philosophy
>>methodologically. I suspect it has more to do with the traditions
>>(Locke, Kant, etc.) and the live issues in philosophy that keep popping
>>up in science again and again.
>>
>>Biologists who do philosophy, such as Mayr or Ghiselin or the cladists,
>>often do very bad philosophy. Of course, so do a lot of philosophers.
>
>
> My comments may come across as a little harsh, especially if you are a
> philosopher of science, but my expectation is that if all of the
> philosophers of science had never existed, nothing of any consequence in
> the history of evolutionary biology, or any other science for that
> matter, would have changed a whit.
>
I should certainly hope so. If not, then science would be just another branch
of philosophy, but it ought to be (and this is, of course, a philosophical
position) empirically driven in its methods and sources. Philosophers have, of
course, tried to tell scientists how to behave, but by and large, it is a
descriptive enterprise, not a normative one.

> The scientific enterprise is inherently empirical, not rational. Its
> ideas prosper only by their ability to be shown to be true in repitious
> demonstrations to skeptical peers, not on the basis of eloquent
> pronouncements. Nor is the process complex or convoluted, nor should it
> ever become so. Robert MacArthur wrote in the preface to his 1972
> "Geographical Ecology" that the only rules to the scientific method are
> honest observation and accurate logic.

Of course. I hope you don't think that philosophy of science is justified in
terms of how it affects science. It is a discipline in its own right. Science
is an inherently interesting subject of study, and philosophy of science (and
in a slightly different way, history of science) is the discipline that
studies how science is done, and what the ideas and practices of science
imply. Science is itself a messy, slightly chaotic, occasionally political,
often rambunctious, field in which, almost despite the various philosophies
held by its practitioners, learns stuff about the world. Philosophy is a
rather different discipline altogether.

>
> Ludwig Boltzmann was apparently no more enthusiastic about philosophy
> than I am. He wrote the following a century ago:
>
> "To go straight to the deepest depth, I went for Hegel; what unclear
> thoughtless flow of words I was to find there! My unlucky star led me
> from Hegel to Schopenhauer ... Even in Kant there were many things that
> I could grasp so little that given his general acuity of mind I almost
> suspected that he was pulling the reader's leg or was even an

Boltzmann was, however, influenced by Darwin and the philosophies that
influenced him (see below). And Hegel, Schopenhauer and Kant are hardly
philosophers of science (Kant has the best claim of these). Marx was even worse.

imposter"
> [cited in D. Flamm, Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 14: 257 (1983)].
>
> Indeed, Boltzmann's ultimate conclusion about the value of philosophies
> grounded in nothing more than words (presuming that the various authors
> were not intent on pulling the readers' legs) was a paragraph in
> Populaere Schriften:
>
> "The most ordinary things are to philosophy a source of insoluble
> puzzles. With infinite ingenuity it constructs a concept of space or
> time and then finds it absolutely impossible that there be objects in
> this space or that processes occur during this time... the source of
> this kind of logic lies in excessive confidence in the so-called laws of
> thought" (L. Boltzmann. "Populaere Schriften" Essay 19, Ludwig
> Boltzmann, "Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems," B.
> McGuinness (ed) Reidel, Dordrecht, 1974, p 64).

It's worth noting that "laws of thought" is a term used by George Boole to
describe the employment of logic. At the time, this was thought to impose
(Kantian) categories on all rational thinkers. As late as 1890, logic was not
a philosophical or mathematical discipline (that came later), but a
descriptive *and* prescriptive enterprise that was supposed to clearly
describe the way science was done and should be done.

The first philosopher of science was most likely William Whewell (following
Herschel), and he *did* influence, rather specifically, Darwin's approach to
evidence and argument. So indirectly, Whewell (who also influenced Mill, who
influenced a slew of scientists), influenced a number of scientists. Moreover,
Mach's positivism (a scientist doing philosophy) influenced Einstein, and was
the Ursprung for logical positivism. If anything, scientists affected
philosophy rather than vice versa.

But I don't want to make too much of this. Scientists are influenced by all
kinds of things - Newton, for example, by Biblical interpretation, and
alchemical ideas. It doesn't really matter what the influences are, so long as
the end results survive, as you note, repeated demonstration to skeptical
peers. Philosophy is at best a parallel tradition to the scientific process.



--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project
University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
"Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other
hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122

.

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