The last few years have seen a number of prominent scientists step up to microphones and belittle the value of philosophy. Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are well-known examples. To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.
Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing.
- “Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”
This is the totally dopey criticism. Yes, most philosophers do not actually go out and collect data (although there are exceptions). But it makes no sense to jump right from there to the accusation that philosophy completely ignores the empirical information we have collected about the world. When science (or common-sense observation) reveals something interesting and important about the world, philosophers obviously take it into account. (Aside: of course there are bad philosophers, who do all sorts of stupid things, just as there are bad practitioners of every field. Let’s concentrate on the good ones, of whom there are plenty.)
Philosophers do, indeed, tend to think a lot. This is not a bad thing. All of scientific practice involves some degree of “pure thought.” Philosophers are, by their nature, more interested in foundational questions where the latest wrinkle in the data is of less importance than it would be to a model-building phenomenologist. But at its best, the practice of philosophy of physics is continuous with the practice of physics itself. Many of the best philosophers of physics were trained as physicists, and eventually realized that the problems they cared most about weren’t valued in physics departments, so they switched to philosophy. But those problems — the basic nature of the ultimate architecture of reality at its deepest levels — are just physics problems, really. And some amount of rigorous thought is necessary to make any progress on them. Shutting up and calculating isn’t good enough.
- “Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.”
Now we have the frustratingly annoying critique. Because: duh. If your criterion for “being interesting or important” comes down to “is useful to me in my work,” you’re going to be leading a fairly intellectually impoverished existence. Nobody denies that the vast majority of physics gets by perfectly well without any input from philosophy at all. (“We need to calculate this loop integral! Quick, get me a philosopher!”) But it also gets by without input from biology, and history, and literature. Philosophy is interesting because of its intrinsic interest, not because it’s a handmaiden to physics. I think that philosophers themselves sometimes get too defensive about this, trying to come up with reasons why philosophy is useful to physics. Who cares?
Nevertheless, there are some physics questions where philosophical input actually is useful. Foundational questions, such as the quantum measurement problem, the arrow of time, the nature of probability, and so on. Again, a huge majority of working physicists don’t ever worry about these problems. But some of us do! And frankly, if more physicists who wrote in these areas would make the effort to talk to philosophers, they would save themselves from making a lot of simple mistakes.
- “Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”
Finally, the deeply depressing critique. Here we see the unfortunate consequence of a lifetime spent in an academic/educational system that is focused on taking ambitious dreams and crushing them into easily-quantified units of productive work. The idea is apparently that developing a new technique for calculating a certain wave function is an honorable enterprise worthy of support, while trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time. I suspect that a substantial majority of physicists who use quantum mechanics in their everyday work are uninterested in or downright hostile to attempts to understand the quantum measurement problem.
This makes me sad. I don’t know about all those other folks, but personally I did not fall in love with science as a kid because I was swept up in the romance of finding slightly more efficient calculational techniques. Don’t get me wrong — finding more efficient calculational techniques is crucially important, and I cheerfully do it myself when I think I might have something to contribute. But it’s not the point — it’s a step along the way to the point.
The point, I take it, is to understand how nature works. Part of that is knowing how to do calculations, but another part is asking deep questions about what it all means. That’s what got me interested in science, anyway. And part of that task is understanding the foundational aspects of our physical picture of the world, digging deeply into issues that go well beyond merely being able to calculate things. It’s a shame that so many physicists don’t see how good philosophy of science can contribute to this quest. The universe is much bigger than we are and stranger than we tend to imagine, and I for one welcome all the help we can get in trying to figure it out.
This may be of interest. Peter Unger is a Professor of Philosophy at New York University. The link is to an interview he has done about his book “Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy”. Peter Unger interview .
Link:- http://tinyurl.com/nb6d3py
From the interview: “What philosophers are in search of — and they don’t realize this — is generalizations that aren’t open to any conceivable possible counterexample, however far-fetched. These counter-instances don’t have to be at all realistic. So they put forth these offerings. Almost always, these offerings fail, and colleagues come up with counter-instances. When they don’t fail, they turn out to be trivial. Virtually all of them are analytically correct, though philosophers don’t realize it.
Generally, though, they’re mostly incorrect offerings, with counterexamples, and it keeps changing and keeps changing, until everyone becomes bored with the topic, and then they go on to something else.”.
A number of comments above: “Old-fashioned “philosophy of science” is just that: an old fashioned field that uses inappropriate grammar to describe natural phenomena. They can’t go much further than their ancestors did centuries ago.”
– You sound very secure in your beliefs there. But even 30 seconds on its wikipedia entry will start to educate you as to what philosophy of science actually is. Hint: it bears little relation to what you think it is. Good luck.
It bears repeating: Anyone who says they have no philosophy is in the grip of an unacknowledged philosophy.
The majority of philosophers should stop pretending they have any relevance at all outside of their departments.
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“…trying to understand what wave functions actually are and how they capture reality is a boring waste of time…”
It’s not a boring waste of time. Physicists and mathematicians simply don’t need philosophers to achieve that goal.
Here is what a wave function is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function
Sorry, no amount of existentialism or analytic philosophy or other bullshit will get you any further to an answer to “what a wave function is” than simply reading a textbook or wikipedia entry written by a physicist or mathematician.
Ben Goren,
Your comment above couldn’t be a better example of people who don’t actually understand philosophy or know anything about it trying to criticize it. I could go through the entire comment pointing these out, but for the most part this part should provide more than enough evidence of that:
“But when philosophers “study” morality, they do so with nonsense such as the Trolley Car Death Fantasies, which anybody who made it through a psychology class for non-majors should instantly realize as nothing more than a watered-down variation on Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment. The philosopher, wearing the lab coat of authority, tells the subject to either kill the ugly fat man or the beautiful woman, and the subjects invariably comply, exactly as Milgram demonstrated they would. ”
I wrote on my blog once saying that the litmus test for being able to talk about modern morality was to know what Trolley Cases were. I was willing to give you the benefit of at least meeting this criteria on my first skimming, but after reading this in detail it’s clear that you know nothing about them. Here’s what you’re missing:
1) Trolley Cases, to be interesting, are two parts, not just one.
2) They never involve a choice of one person versus another, or only causing harm to a specific person (a la Milgram). Both parts involve a case where the person has to choose between allowing 1 person to die or allowing 5 people to die.
3) There is no beautiful woman involved, unless the person running the experiment happens to be one.
4) The presenter offers the choice in both cases, and never implies what the right answer would be, as the whole point of the experiment is to see what people think is the right choice. If they at all imply what the right choice would be, then the presentation is wrong and the results invalid.
5) Even in Milgram’s experiment, less scientific backgrounds and presentations weakened the results, and these are often given in philosophy classes, which is pretty unscientific.
6) Why these cases are interesting is that the two give opposite results: in one, most people choose to sacrifice 1 to save 5, while in the other they refuse to sacrifice 1 to save 5.
7) And, most damningly, most people WON’T kill the fat person to save the other 5 people, which is what makes the cases so incredibly interesting as no one expected that. (The fat person does not appear in the scenario where they DO sacrifice one to save five).
Why this is interesting is that the first case — simply flip the switch and divert the train onto the other track where only one person is standing — reflects clear Utilitarian thinking — maximize the most good for the most people — and so supported that notion that our moral intuitions were broadly Utilitarian. The second case — push one person in front of the train to stop it and save five people — seems to provide pretty much the same choice, but the intuitions tend to reflect the opposite thinking. Why this is, and which is right, is of great interest to morality and a question that any reasonable moral system ought to be able to answer.
Which leads to this (apologies for the length):
“and, either way, the fault for the deaths lies with whoever permitted such a dangerous situation to arise in the first place, not the unlucky person who stumbled upon the scene.”
Let’s take this as a given, and not consider cases of unforeseen failures or the like that could lead to this situation. Imagine that someone has done something wrong and it leads to this situation. Do you think that a person stumbling across this situation has no moral responsibility in such a case? If someone pushes someone into a river, and you could save them, do you think that you and could have no moral obligation to do so because the real fault is with the person who pushed them in?
Sweet Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle, the people are right when they tell you “don’t read the comments.” Depressing isn’t half of it.
Thank you Sean, for a thoughtful and important response to what has been growing into an increasingly stressful problem in both academia and at home. However, I might add to your response that the problem is not just a matter of physicists in their own fields judging from ‘above’ as it were, but a pervasive self-image issue most philosophers and students (like myself) have been having in the current era of STEM studies as the all-important measure of personal worth.
Rant Commences
I take issue with anyone, and everyone here questioning the value of philosophy on its usefulness. There’s a good reason that philosophy is historically wedded to the Humanities, and that is because Philosophy (with a big ‘p’) is an art. We have our own schools, our own traditions, our own techniques, and our own luminaries who have nothing to do with any ‘natural science’ for a very good reason. Many people (even plenty of philosophers) may not see this, but we don’t practice philosophy for the utility it offers in understanding, or to increase the sum of human knowledge, any more than the purpose of Impressionism via Monet or Cubism via Picasso were experiments designed to generate evidence about visual perception. Like painting, or literature, or film, or sculpture, or any other artistic method, the goal has never been to provide utility in the form of either power, facts, or cash. Whether it’s “useful” or not is a statement masquerading as a question, about what one believes is valuable or not, and is neither a fair nor correct challenge to bring. Claiming that philosophy fails to provide answers demonstrates a categorical mistake in understanding why it has any value at all.
Philosophy is an art, and its form is the art of constructing questions. It’s only difference from other forms of art is in what it pursues: rather than try to draw out or play with our visual experiences as painting does, or our personal experiences as good literature does, philosophy’s paintbrush is the argument, and works best when it draws out and clarifies our concepts. That’s all. It offers no new knowledge in itself, and doesn’t need to; it can offer insights into why and how people come to think the things they do, but only when you’re willing to study their concepts, from their perspective. If you wonder what use there is in trying to understand foreign concepts, or those of someone who disagrees with you, even when, especially when that person is disastrously wrong, then you’ve completely lost the point. We are not physicists, we are not politicians, we are not here to join a debate for the thrill of ‘winning’. We are only here to understand— what it is we think, why it is we think, and (when it’s thrilling) what there still is to think about.
It is not an ‘anti-philosophical salvo’ to point out that a philosopher doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
What I find immensely frustrating is the incredible claim that, because of experimental results in quantum physics (Bell Test) somehow that means there is no underlying reality on a macro level. If physicists were better trained in philosophy they’d realize why this is nonsensical position to take (because they confuse the description of fundamental particle physics with the fundamental nature of reality).
Studying philosophy academically teaches and then requires you to hone a set of skills that are extremely useful both in everyday life and in most other academic subjects. You learn critical thinking skills like how to break down, analyse and evaluate arguments, you learn about logic and you learn how to do rigorous conceptual analysis among other things.
Perhaps one of the reasons some people think that philosophers just exchange opinions or speculate is because they have not learned the skill sets philosophers use, or are supposed to use. If you’ve never learned the skill set of how to break down and evaluate arguments, you’re not really going to understand how its done, are you? If all you know how to do is speculate and exchange opinions when it comes to engaging with particular kinds of material, you might just assume that’s all anyone can do with regard to that material. What if there is a method of approaching this material that is highly useful that you are unaware of because you have never learned it?
This phenomenon is similar to when people who have never studied the scientific method assume that scientists must be doing something similar to what they do when they try to determine how the physical world operates and criticize science on that basis. How common is it for creationists to exclaim that evolution is not scientific because we couldn’t personally observe it happening? That is an example of someone criticizing something because they don’t understand how the discipline actually works.
Compounding on this problem is the fact that people seem to think that conceptual analysis and critical thinking skills are just innate abilities that don’t require training or learning anything, that is not the case. You can be knowledgeable in these areas and you can gain a significant amount of expertise. Of course, for you to really understand why, you would have to go and start learning the skill set.
To draw an analogy to science again, people have an certain capacity to learn about the physical world without any training, but compare that to formally studying the scientific method. Imagine if people simply assumed that based on the fact that they have a certain level of untrained ability to figure some things out about the natural world that therefore no one needs to study science and that the views of highly trained scientists are not valuable and that science is not something you can have expertise in.
Then there are people who want to claim everything good about philosophy as science. Of course if you simply call every part of a training in academic philosophy that you like science, then you aren’t going to like what you’ve left over to be deemed philosophy.
Then there are people who judge philosophy based on poor philosophy. Imagine if I were to look at a bunch of scientific studies that were done poorly and to exclaim that because these studies were done poorly that science is bad. That would be ridiculous. Similarly, if you read some philosophy paper and you disagree with the arguments given, it might well be because they are simply bad arguments, that doesn’t mean philosophy as a whole is bad.
Is it really the case, that none of you who question the usefulness of something like moral philosophy, have ever had your views changed due to the strength of an argument that skillfully used logic and conceptual analysis? If you have had your views on abortion, or gay marriage changed, for example, what persuaded you to change your views? Do you really think your views changed based purely on learning a new fact about the natural world or was it because someone formed a strong logical argument based on that fact that demonstrated to you that your current views were logically inconsistent, or were based on poor conceptual analysis and that your values actually logically entail that you should support a different ethical position than you did before?
Suppose you want to devise a way to scientifically measure intelligence. How are you going to do that without first usefully analytically breaking down what people generally mean by intelligence? How do you go about that ‘breaking down’ process? Do you learn how to do that well in science? Doing that involves conceptual analysis and that is the kind of thing philosophical training would make you better at.
If more scientists had more training in conceptual analysis and critical thinking, they would be better at science. For a start, they would be better at determining what conclusions they can draw based on the data available to them.
A great example is the free will issue. Lots of scientists, e.g. neuroscientists and physicists, have written books proclaiming proudly that they have proven free will exists. Unfortunately the vast majority of them have completely wasted their time because they completely failed at the level of conceptual analysis. They misunderstood the nature of the problem they were trying to address, or what the term free will actually means, or they incorrectly determined the implications of their findings and so on.
I think the OP is ignoring the evidence that what he chooses to dismiss as bad philosophy is actually philosophy in good standing with the rest of the professionals, despite being manifestly wrong, time wasting or even obscurantist in regards to physics. Certainly you can’t reasonably claim that philosophy can only clarify thinking. Antirealist perspectives on science, which seem to me to be the majority position among philosophers, commonly give us scientists who would vigorously deny that science can prove anything, dismissing propositions like “There is no magic,” as nonsense.
Superficially the OP looks lile a variation on NOMA, except that not only does the OP forget that there is no more “magisterium” in philosophy than in religion, but insists that some hypothetical “good” philosophy does overlap. I think the OP has some notion of philosophy as a kind of science of reason? If so, the burden of proof is on the philosophers.
I don’t know to what extent real physicists criticize philosophy as it is for the three reasons the OP cites. But I would criticize philosophy for other reasons entirely.
First, philosophy does not adhere to a notion of truth as propositions that correspond to reality. An unsound argument, no matter how absurd, is acceptable so long as it appears to be logically valid.
Second, philosophy conceives everthying from a strictly individual standpoint. Physics, like most everything human, is a collective enterprise. We have found a single mind does not and can not comprehend the universe on its own. Epistemology is not something demonstrated to a single mind but a communal activity. The way the scientific community discovers and confirms propositions as knowledge do not rest on the absurdities from imagining a single mind somehow recapitulating the experience of humanity. (And near as I can tell, philosophy tends to imagine the mind as some kind of disembodied spirit!)
Third, philosophy misconceives science as some sort of logical exercise (compounding the individualist limitation.) The logical foundations are somehow built, then the rest of the model of the universe is erected. Or the ontological postulates are chose, then the universe is deduced. Instead, the universe is discovered, piece by piece. Well, physics cannot model the universe at present, nor can it demonstrate experimental answers to foundational questions. But it has nonetheless mapped a great deal of the universe, literally as well as metaphorically, and it is still knowledge, science in the strict meaning.
As it happens I do not think that philosophy must necessarily insist on these errors. Maybe philosophy that didn’t, could and would actually be of value. But since this seems to be what philosophy does in fact teach us, I think on balance it is actively harmful to clear thinking.
Perhaps defenders of philosophy could be helpful in showing us a simple example of how formal logic (widely accepted as a branch of philosophy) is helpful to physics?
The philosophers comments on this thread are quite hilarious. Especially the ones along the lines of `If only scientists learned from philosophers, they would do science so much better’. Haha. Really? Please stop. You guys are embarrassing yourselves.
This article is so good it makes me forget the silly things Sean himself says when he puts on his atheist hat. When Sean speaks to atheists, he says things like “the universe doesn’t care about you”; in doing so, he takes a subtle philosophical issue (regarding alienation and feeling at home in the world) and turns it into a caricature, by playing against literal-minded theism. That’s analogous to what Krauss and Hawking do, turning subtle questions about meaning and mortality into pseudo-physics straw men. Let’s say it again: philosophy is about MEANING, physics is about facts and causality. They only overlap in a handful of cases, when the need arises to think about the meaning of physical theories (e.g. the measurement problem).
So, I guess, by the low rating my previous post received that enlightenment amongst scientists is still some way off, despite Sean’s best efforts.
Just for the record. Scientists don’t know what Time is (Lee Smolin says).
But semanticists do:-
1. An abstract framework for referencing, calibrating, indexing events;
2. A non-specific collective term – also referencing events.
And not a mention needed of Arrows.
And, if you were as enlightened as Sean hoped, you would understand that is all there is to know about “the ultimate paradox”….the mystery of Time solved.
But, hey, who needs enlightenment…good luck in that Black Hole
Jenny – Do you think that the Continuum Hypothesis or the existence of inaccessible ordinals is formulated in “testable scientific terms”?
“First, philosophy does not adhere to a notion of truth as propositions that correspond to reality. An unsound argument, no matter how absurd, is acceptable so long as it appears to be logically valid.”
Not even wrong.
It is trivial to give examples of apparently quite meaningful statements that don’t appear to be falsifiable. The Continuum Hypothesis or the existence of inacccessible ordinals are examples. On a more elementary level consider the statement that an infinite number of prime pairs exist. That’s not obviously falsifiable. Or consider the statement that the digit sequence “378854699231” appears somewhere in the decimal expansion of pi. That seems meaningful but it is not obviously falsifiable.
Contemporary science teaches that the universe has only existed for a finite amount of time. It seems a meaningful question as to whether it will cease to exist at some future time. But how would one falsify the statement that the future existence of the universe is finite? For that matter how would one falsify the statement that it’s future existence is infinite.
Personally I will never be able to falsify the proposition that I an immortal. But I think that that proposition is both meaningful and false.
I’m curious: who said those three quotes?
stevenjohnson.
Let me try to address your criticisms based on what philosophy in general actually says about those topics:
“Antirealist perspectives on science, which seem to me to be the majority position among philosophers, commonly give us scientists who would vigorously deny that science can prove anything, dismissing propositions like “There is no magic,” as nonsense. ”
SOME postmodern philosophy — not all — would deny that science can prove anything, but that’s mostly because they essentially deny that you can prove ANYTHING. Analytic philosophy in general will accept that science can prove an awful lot about the world, and most philosophers are empiricists at least in the sense that they think that if you’re going to try and find out things like “What’s the acceleration due to gravity?” doing science is the way to do that. There are some concerns, even among naturalistic philosophers, about how you can justify claiming that you have objective truth while relying your sense experiences — which are provably subjective — but for the most part philosophers are in fact realists: we think there’s a real world out there and that our senses give us at least some way of getting at it if anything can. Even Kant said that empirical science was the way to study the world of appearances, which is what we get from our sense experiences; he just questioned if we could know if that was how reality really was unmoderated by our basic concepts and sensory organs.
Also check out naturalizing philosophy, where many philosophers have spent a lot of time trying to see if philosophy would work better if it adopted the methods of science. Philosophers don’t generally dismiss science or a scientific method because they dislike it, but because it doesn’t seem to actually help in answering the questions they want answered.
As for magic, what you’d get from philosophy from that statement is “How do you know that? And please, no inductive fallacy.”
“First, philosophy does not adhere to a notion of truth as propositions that correspond to reality. ”
Um, actually one of the main and likely most popular definitions of truth in philosophy is that it corresponds to reality, or to the way things really are. Figuring out how to link those two is the problem. Or, at least, I’d posit that that’s the analytic presumption of truth, at least, and philosophers who’ve rejected that have done so because of the problems of figuring out what reality actually is so that you can know if you have a true statement or not. And if you want to claim that this is just obvious or that science obviously links to that or that our senses obviously link to reality or that we don’t have any choice but to presume that, you’re repeating work done in philosophy as far back as Hume that say “Yeah, we do, but it would be really nice to actually have a stronger justification for that”. That philosophy is indeed trying to see if we can indeed have that stronger justification is to its credit, not detriment, and having that justification is not something that science needs to worry about until philosophy manages to find it, if it ever does.
“An unsound argument, no matter how absurd, is acceptable so long as it appears to be logically valid. ”
This is semi-true, in the sense that if you come up with a logically valid argument philosophy will consider it. That does not mean, however, that it will be considered RIGHT or even REASONABLE, or that further justification is not required. And if the argument is provably unsound — meaning that at least one of the premises is false — philosophy will indeed reject the argument. So, clearly no to the unsound part, and no to the if valid part if it means that philosophy accepts it as correct. One of the more reasonable criticisms of philosophy is that nothing is ever considered right in it, but that doesn’t mean that things aren’t considered wrong.
“The way the scientific community discovers and confirms propositions as knowledge do not rest on the absurdities from imagining a single mind somehow recapitulating the experience of humanity. ”
Huh? The closest I can come to relating this to anything in philosophy is armchair philosophy, strawmanned as one person sitting in a chair and pondering. This is a misconception, as even academic philosophy is indeed collaborative and builds very much on the work of many people who have come before. In fact, philosophy can be rightly criticized for reworking old ideas and not coming up with enough new ones. And in my experience philosophy is the field that relies on data from other fields the most; in doing philosophy, I touched on psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, and a host of other fields. No other field is wiling to take so much data from so many other sources, under the notion of “Any data we might have might be the key to solving our problems.”
“(And near as I can tell, philosophy tends to imagine the mind as some kind of disembodied spirit!)”
That would be dualism, and most philosophers are not dualists (speaking as one of the few who IS a dualist, to some extent).
“Third, philosophy misconceives science as some sort of logical exercise (compounding the individualist limitation.) ”
Vanishingly few philosophers would think that science is rationalistic, in that you build logical structures and that determines what reality is. MOST would think that science must include logical analysis in forming its theories; scientific theories must not entail logical contradictions. But that seems reasonable, so again I don’t know what you mean here.
“Perhaps defenders of philosophy could be helpful in showing us a simple example of how formal logic (widely accepted as a branch of philosophy) is helpful to physics?”
Try doing science without having logically valid theories and see how far you get. Then notice that symbolic logic and formal logical analysis will tell you if your theories are logically valid or not. Yes, you still need to determine if your premises are true, but doing that is useless if your premises could all be true and your conclusion still false.
Excellent post. The basic reason philosophy can’t be ignored in science, is because there is no philosophy free science. Embedded in science are philosophical presuppositions underlied by the particular approach a scientist takes as described by various philosophical approaches going by the name of realism, pragmatism, positivism, etc. Of course each has pros and cons, and rabid supporters and little resolution on which is best. Conscious or unconscious, you find working scientists committed to these or other overarching philosophical stances when doing science. In some ways dissing philosophy is making a categorical mistake, philosophy is not trying to replace science, it has a different role.
Another thing that hasn’t been brought up, and may be controversial, is that in a way some philosophy works as a vehicle to translate science to ordinary everyday human reality. A lot of the new Cosmos series was devoted to taking arcane or mathematical scientific concepts and putting stories together to aid in understanding them. Of course this has limits. For example, I think Dan Dennett as one example, uses philosophy very deftly to translate more modern scientific approaches to consciousness and free will in terms of ordinary ideas, to flesh out the implications of counterintuitive discoveries in ordinary language to make them more understandable. I’m not at all saying that is all philosophy does, but it is an important and vital contribution, as long as we remain humans. I can imagine some future cyber creature who could grasp mathematical concepts in physics, who could dispense with storytelling, and perhaps would find humans grappling with physical laws quite amusing. But as long as we are human, we seem to need the best theories and evidence supporting these theories, but additionally the back story that goes along with it, even if on some level it may be irrelevant.
Verbose Stoic,
I indicated the deep and profound problems with the Trolly Problems, none of which you addressed. All you did was indicate what you think the Trolly Problems are supposed to tell you, but ignored that the intentions of the philosophers are irrelevant.
To recap:
The scenarios never actually arise in the real world, only in the perverted fantasies of philosophers.
In similar real-world situations, the actions proposed by the philosophers are horrifically immoral and highly illegal.
The philosophers insist that their subjects must perform one of those immoral and illegal acts, and refuse to let their subjects do the right thing.
And the right thing to do? DO NOT TOUCH CRITICAL INDUSTRIAL SAFETY INFRASTRUCTURE UNLESS AUTHORIZED OR INSTRUCTED, MOST ESPECIALLY IN A PERCEIVED CRISIS SITUATION. First, get qualified help, such as by calling 9-1-1. Follow all instructions of first responders. Render first aid if possible. Assist the post-incident investigators as completely and honestly as you can. And, if you feel any guilt over what you witnessed, get counseling from a qualified mental health professional for post-traumatic stress.
As such, the real end result of the Trolley Problem is to encourage the public to engage in illegal, immoral, and violent actions without regard to what any even vaguely competent ethicist, lawyer, or industrial safety officer would counsel.
Indeed, I’d even go so far as to suggest that, even if philosophy did have some other utility, the Trolley Problem alone is enough to utterly condemn it as a respectable academic exercise. I’d be astonished if you could get the Trolley Problem past the ethics review board of any psychology department I’m aware of, yet it’s hailed as the pinnacle of philosophical research into morality.
Cheers,
b&
One other thing, there are a few areas where science and philosophy play complementary roles in reasoning. Morality is a prime example. Science can study morality, its adaptive and maladaptive features, etc., but unless you take the position of say Sam Harris, I don’t think science can go all the way in determining which moral systems are superior to others by gathering more data. As data and though experiments have shown, there are different consequences to alternative metaethics and no standard but another metaethics to judge these consequences. Ultimately a value is posited or a metaethical approach is used and then science can use data to evaluate the utility of a particular moral approach, or how it affects human nervous systems to promote happiness or decrease pain. I don’t however see science being able to determine what these values should be or what metaethics is ‘objective.’ We can all agree that the Taliban is barbaric, but that is far from an ‘objective’ morality.
Excellent piece, Prof. Carroll. I’ve tangled a bit with Krauss on this issue and am happy to see a physicist of your stature push back a bit. Here’s an interview I did with Krauss:
http://www.independent.com/news/2013/aug/01/something-nothing/
And my essay defending the value of philosophy in science:
http://www.independent.com/news/2012/may/07/defense-philosophy/
You can easily identify the philosophers on this thread by just looking for the long ranty gibberish comments, trying to justify their existence 🙂