Steve Hsu pulls out a provocative quote from philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend:
The withdrawal of philosophy into a “professional” shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth — and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending.
It’s probably true that the post-WWII generations of leading physicists were less broadly educated than their pre-war counterparts (although there are certainly counterexamples such as Murray Gell-Mann and Steven Weinberg). The simplest explanation for this phenomenon would be that the center of gravity of scientific research switched from Europe to America after the war, and the value of a broad-based education (and philosophy in particular) has always been less in America. Interestingly, Feyerabend seems to be blaming philosophers themselves — “the withdrawal of philosophy into a `professional’ shell” — rather than physicists or any wider geosocial trends.
But aside from whether modern physicists (and maybe scientists in other fields, I don’t know) pay less attention to philosophy these days, and aside from why that might be the case, there is still the question: does it matter? Would knowing more philosophy have made any of the post-WWII giants better physicists? There are certainly historical counterexamples one could conjure up: the acceptance of atomic theory in the German-speaking world in the late nineteenth century was held back considerably by Ernst Mach‘s philosophical arguments. On the other hand, Einstein and Bohr and their contemporaries did manage to do some revolutionary things; relativity and quantum mechanics were more earth-shattering than anything that has come since in physics.
The usual explanation is that the revolutionary breakthroughs simply haven’t been there to be made — that Feynman and Schwinger and friends missed the glory days when quantum mechanics was being invented, so it was left to them to move the existing paradigm forward, not to come up with something revolutionary and new. Maybe, had these folks been more conversant with their Hume and Kant and Wittgenstein, we would have quantum gravity figured out by now.
Probably not. Philosophical presuppositions certainly play an important role in how scientists work, and it’s possible that a slightly more sophisticated set of presuppositions could give the working physicist a helping hand here and there. But based on thinking about the actual history, I don’t see how such sophistication could really have moved things forward. (And please don’t say, “If only scientists were more philosophically sophisticated, they would see that my point of view has been right all along!”) I tend to think that knowing something about philosophy — or for that matter literature or music or history — will make someone a more interesting person, but not necessarily a better physicist.
This might not be right, though. Maybe, had they been more broad and less technical, some of the great physicists of the last few decades would have made dramatic breakthroughs in a field like quantum information or complexity theory, rather than pushing harder at the narrow concerns of particle physics or condensed matter. Easy to speculate, hard to provide much compelling evidence either way.
“The withdrawal of philosophy into a “professional” shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth — and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending.”
Complete rubbish.
“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” – Richard Feynman
“Feyerabend is clearly an idiot”
Exactly. Thank you.
Philosophers in no way ignore or exclude science … check out any number of past discussions here…
http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/speculative-realism-roundup/
Even though (and maybe because) Weinberg indeed seems well educated in classical philosophy he makes a persuasive argument (in “Dreams of a Final Theory”) with regard to the unreasonable uselessness of philosophy in physics.
It’s funny how people point to non-string approaches in quantum gravity as a community heavily influenced by philosophy, and see this as a positive thing. Those approaches are so far universally dead ends, telling us nothing about the real world or about consistent toy theories that demonstrably reduce to general relativity in flat space. String theory, on the other hand, at least gives us the latter. And it’s been, as far as I can see, relatively free of philosophizing. Even a somewhat philosophical idea like holography was dreamed up by ‘t Hooft and Susskind for technical reasons, and only very concrete realizations of it like Strominger and Vafa’s entropy counting or, most spectacularly, AdS/CFT have really made it a concrete part of our understanding of theoretical physics. People can get inspiration for big-picture, hand-wavy ideas wherever they want, and philosophy might be useful for that, but at the end of the day it’s nearly always calculation, hard work, slow accumulation of technical knowledge, and relatively conservative approaches that lead to progress in science.
Haelfix, in response to
“I challenge any physicist to lay down an example where his knowledge of some esoteric philosophy actually improved his work as a physicist in a way that wouldn’t be immediately obvious to a specialist without that acumen”
I offer another Albert Einstein example: he explicitly said that studying David Hume helped give him a mindset that was capable of forming so radical a theory as relativity. Something about Hume’s thorough, skeptical attitude toward everything helped Einstein to so profoundly challenge the dominant theories in physics, I believe.
(Einstein also studied Kant’s *Critique of Pure Reason* at a fairly young age, although to my knowledge he doesn’t mention it as an influence. Of course, Kant thought that Newton had everything right, and that the basics of physics could be derived a priori; but Kant also offered some other surprising challenges to the conventional thought of his own time.)
Hmm, and what mindset is that exactly? To be skeptical and not take an authorities word for a result and instead to check things for yourself?
Hardly what I would call a novel or penetrating philosophy, even (perhaps especially) in Einstein’s time. Its also pretty much drilled into every scientists brain since childbirth.
Mach’s idea of relational space is more what I had in mind. Thats very much a well thought out idea that could in principle have had distinct physical consequences. It turns out that nature doesnt work that way (modulo definition quibbles) but it wasn’t a bad idea to try.
Well, I’m not a big philosopher – by and large I find it to be too many words – but I think it is always useful to learn different perspectives on our work. What some people have mentioned above, ‘clear thinking,’ ‘rigor,’ ‘consistency’ etc, I frankly found more of that in the maths than in the philosophy department. In fact, I found mathematicians to be the better philosophers, but maybe that’s just me.
To be honest, a lot of the discussion about philosophy strikes me as a redirection of “questions you’re not supposed to ask” if you’re a physics student. And you’re not supposed to ask them because your prof won’t be able to answer them. Or if he does, he’ll tell you to go to the philosophy department, that being meant in a condescending way and as a discouragement. Some physics students actually go to the philosophy department. But in my experience few find what they were looking for. (Howard Burton tells a little story about that in his book). Thus, I don’t think philosophy makes you a better scientists. But openmindedness and not getting discouraged when searching for answers does.
Isn’t this thread missing an obvious point: namely, the relationship between physics and ethics? While physics may not be as plagued with ethical debates as biology or medical research has, it has not in been absent! (Atomic weapons anyone?). Nor is this a thing of the past. Physicists are working on all sorts of rocketry and satellite technology that may be put to questionable purposes. Doesn’t a familiarity with ethics (a substantial sub-discipline of philosophy) make physicists better prepared to navigate the murky ethical questions that arise when mixing technology, science, and the state?
“The simplest explanation for this phenomenon would be that the center of gravity of scientific research switched from Europe to America after the war, and the value of a broad-based education (and philosophy in particular) has always been less in America.”
I would have to question this. It seems to me that American scientists are often more aware and appreciative of broader intellectual developments outside their own field than their European counterparts. You yourself, Sean, are an example, with posts like this and numerous others. By contrast, scientists I know from other countries are often oblivious to everything outside their own narrow subdiscipline, and sometimes seem puzzled as to why anyone would ever want to study anything else. And never mind philosophy and the humanities; I know one Cambridge-educated mathematician who had never heard of either Steven Weinberg or Richard Dawkins!
When you think about it, this makes some sense in light of the way the respective educational systems work. In Europe, so I understand, the “two cultures” are separated from each other at a very young age, and one basically studies nothing but one’s specialty; whereas in the U.S., people usually have to study broadly even at the university level.
I am sure, that being narrow-minded physicist is the worst thing in the world. But the problem is, that most of the contemporary guys in physics are really ignorant to many different areas of the human knowledge-and if some lunatic says something weird-another brilliant theory(I agree, that most of the time these so called theories are not even wrong:)), most of the physicists will say, that he/she is the usual I-know-everything-better-than-you-stupid-guys kind of scientist, not appreciated by the wide public..But what if, one day, somebody says something really different-something strange, and it turns to be right?? Then what… we will ignore him/her, only because he/she has got his insipartion from an ancient greek philosopher?
Socrates: In my experience the vast majority of physicists don’t care where you get your inspiration from. They tend to find it somewhat suspicious though when people make a big deal about it. Doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s your believe in God, surfing, or philosophy. Where you got the idea might make for a nice story in your memoires but is completely irrelevant for the question whether it will work. Most of the ‘really different /something strange’ people aren’t ignored because they got their inspiration from weird sources, but because they fail to establish the necessary contact to the prevailing knowledge and thus to show their ideas are not in conflict with evidence.
Erwin Schrodinger: “We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us, that from antiquity to and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in and width and depth, of the multifarious ranches of knowledge by during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it.”
Jorge Luis Borges: “There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter—if not a paragraph or a name—in the history of philosophy.”
The last quote by Borges is completely applicable to science. We have lost the capability of linking our different ranches of knowledge, and this is fairly wrong. This semi-religious discurse of science, like “science is the only way of knowledge” i don’t know where it comes from but it is not different from any catholic dogma. This arrogance is heading us to the wrong way.
A couple things: First, I think philosophy has made a fair dent in psychology–especially cognitive science–and linguistics. I frequently see a number of philosophers cited in research articles in those fields. Philosophers of physics do seem to have made something of an impression in foundational research on quantum mechanics and on the arrow of time. I think, however, they tend to be a lot more interested in Bohmian mechanics and GRW than are most physicists.
Second: I think we need to make a rough-and-ready distinction between analytic and continental philosophers. Analytic philosophers tend to be extremely naturalistic and to consider themselves intellectually aligned with math and science. Many of the great analytic philosophers doubled as mathematicians or logicians –Frege, Russell, Tarski, Putnam, Kripke, Quine etc., and many philosophers, myself included, studied math as undergraduates. Continental philosophers, like Feyerabend, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sartre, etc., tend to be much more humanities oriented: literary, historical, and frequently just obscure. I think it’s unfortunately the latter that most non-philosophers associate with philosophy. This could be why so many scientists think philosophers are hostile to and ignorant of what they do.
I personally think that any help a scientist can get would be useful, especially considering how bad scientists are at making strong arguments. Take Dawkins for example when it comes to his book “The God Delusion.” The man makes wonderful points and focuses on a good deal of “evidence,” but when it comes down to constructing a solid argument about his view or even against the view of others, he is no better at it than a college student in an introductory level philosophy class. Not to mention, modern scientists in particular seem to be blinded by their own models of the universe as well as absolutely convinced that “their” way is the path we should all be on. Perhaps by studying up on what some of the so-called “philosophers” have to say would do them well in learning a bit of humility when it comes to dishing out their “answers” as well. On that same note, perhaps if the scientists who were working on developing technology for nuclear weapons had actually done a little thinking outside of their scientific padded cells, they would have realized that their invention and work would be used to commit mass murder. In that case, as well as many others (working for government agencies, military contracts, matters of “national security,” etc.), a consideration of scientific ethics via philosophy would have served them well.
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Re: Cunctator at 21 above
Thanks for the pointer to your Hypertiling blog. I read through about half a dozen posts there, and I have to say that you seem to spend a lot of your time being annoyed by critics and commentators that you think are under-informed or ignorant (e.g. Lawrence Krauss, Adam Frank, etc.) and comparatively little time explaining what it is that your own field actually achieves. This may be fine for a readership that already appreciates academic philosophy, but since you seem interested in engaging a wider audience (as evidenced by your posting here) I would urge you to seize the educational opportunity and explain to non-expert CV readers what it is that you do all day.
Here’s a simple, sharp version of this question: Why should anyone believe that physics is different from nonsense? Simple: your GPS works. Done. There is a great deal in the modern world that a non-expert can see, read and touch to confirm that science is not just made-up nonsense (or at least that it’s not _all_ made-up nonsense) but has some purchase in reality. If your taste tends toward the lower tech than GPS, you can also check this classic post from Julianne on the physics of chocolate:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/04/30/the-physics-of-chocolate/
It’s worth reading all the way to the last few sentences.
So the corresponding, simple question for you is: why should anyone (such as RPF at 16) believe that academic philosophy is other than nonsense? What can a non-expert see, read or touch in the world to confirm that philosophy is not just a made-up game? If you can answer this question in a calm, lucid, readable manner then you might go a long way to answering the question posed by Sean in the original post here, and educate a few people as well.
[One possible answer to “How do we know philosophy is not nonsense?” might be “Because I know some smart people who think it’s not,” similar to the sentiment by Julianne at 18 above. This is certainly a non-zero answer, and I would guess would be the answer given most frequently by non-experts. But I think it’s a bit weak, and hope/trust that you can do better by explaining actual content and not just citing authority.]
For Landru: The question of how to “confirm” that philosophy is not “nonsense” is almost a perfect example of how scientists tend to see the world as containing “truths” that can be confirmed only by experiment, evidence, etc. Unfortunately for science, though, there is no direct answer or evidence that can support a question like, “Why should I not kill another person?” A question like this must be approached in a different way and instead has to be reasoned out to a point where an individual is forced with a series of choices. You cannot just say, “Well, killing somebody is bad,” or “Killing somebody is condemned by [insert religious text here],” because while these responses might be satisfactory up front, they are very poor arguments in general. At some point the individual must make a choice, a choice that is based upon a number of reasons that they have also chosen or observed or what not. So for example, I choose not to kill somebody else because I know that by doing so I would be terminating their life and thus denying them of a chance to grow. I have no care for the “law” or for the idea that killing other people is “bad,” but instead direct my focus to my own personal philosophy of a love ethic, which I chose to pursue some time ago. If I were to kill another person, though, I would be violating that choice of a love ethic, thus negating my original choice. In any case, while the internal consistency of science and scientific principles may be wonderfully confirmed by things such as a GPS working, the very ideas of confirmation, answers, nonsensical information, etc. are not necessarily applicable (at least not in the same way) to philosophy. Any philosopher who tries to convince you that philosophy is not nonsense, though, is missing the point that philosophy does not strive for confirmation but for strong internal consistency via argument, reason, etc. And every philosophy is based on choices by an individual to continue with an idea or reason as well as how it is applied in their every day life.
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Landru,
thanks for spending time reading my ramblings, and thanks even more for the provacative but polite comment. I will try to give you a half-decent answer.
First of all, some things must be made clearer: 1) I do not in any way deny the effectiveness of science. I am a user of technology, and deeply interested in several scientific fields, I read scientific publications and I do not ever secretly think that it’s ‘actually really rubbish’. I remember ‘The Physics of Chocolate’ and I actually wanted to try it myself 🙂 Yet, if I am interested in understanding and evaluating critiques to science and technology is because I generally like not to take anything for granted, and always ask some extra question, even in the face of ‘it works!’ (yes, this is part of a philosophical training, the annoying ‘but why?’ question. 2) Philosophy is a much broader category than science, if nothing else for the reason that 2 scientists, no matter how different in interests, will always find common ground in a set of methodological assumptions. Philosophers don’t, since (one of) their job(s) is to question and rebuild the ontological and epistemological theories that underlie any kind of methodological assumption. Specifically, as someone already observed in a comment above, much care should be given in drawing a line between analytic and continental philosophy. I do not want to get into this controversy here, especially when it comes to judging their merit with the only criterion of ‘how much impact does it have on actual real life’ (both could be criticized and defended in this regard, but let me just say that the more ‘naturalistic/logical/mathematical’ approach of analytic philosophy does not in any way transparently correspond to a more direct efficaciousness and ‘real-life’ relevance…), but it is simply important to keep in mind that in their methods and–mainly–aims the two are often miles apart. 3) I am not the best exemplar of ‘philosopher’ to answer this question of yours, since my ideas are particular and many, many ‘philosophers’ would disagree with me.
I am aware of the often polemic tone of my posts, but this is caused by one main point, the same point which constitutes: I do not want to proselytize, I do not want to convince anyone that MY ideas are good. I simply want to indicate that different kinds of training allow for different kinds of expertise. (For example, yes, I am irritated when i see a physicist discussing about international politics on a major newspaper, because his being a VIP physicist [the reason why he’s got access to such a newspaper] does not in any way make him an expert). Similarly, and this is my main point, I do not see why one should *start* from the assumption that philosophy is a bunch of crap. I understand the intuitive appeal of the phenomenic evidence of something which just ‘works’ that science can give (i.e. your GPS example) but the lack of this specific kind of ‘in your face’ evidence should not be enough to trash the whole of philosophy. You cannot ask: so if philosophy works, show me some new philosophy based PC, or some new philosophy based fridge. The two disciplines are different. Feyerabend was a quite eccentric guy, and many of his ideas and statements are considered extreme even in the philosophical community, he was an exceptional thinker in his own way, but let’s not make a paradigmatic example out of him (Fritz Zwicky was kind of an ass too, but we tend to respect his scientific intuitions nonetheless).
Once again, philosophy is hard to define, but as an intellectual quest has indirectly produced major historical revolutions, the scientific one included. Philosophy does not offer a finite product, but redefines the limits of what we as human beings think and therefore produce. Another example: Ted Nelson was trained as a philosopher and as a sociologist, and yet, his theoretical work deeply influenced his technical one, both of which contributed to our own understanding of the Net. The circle that goes from theoretical thinking and material effect is continuous and constant throughout history, which is why separation is a negative stance.
Philosophy, as I see it, is a meta-tool, one used to help other disciplines (other tools of human understanding of the world) to either clarify (or eventually criticize) their aims or to evaluate (or eventually criticize) their results. Useful, but a tool nonetheless. Philosophers as scientists are highly trained individuals, but none should be morally, intellectually or institutionally prioritized. That is what I criticized this kind of ‘two cultures’ wars. Let’s keep hostilities aside, and let’s try to study a bit of each other’s discipline, for the results can only be better. I do not want to claim the intellectual superiority of ‘philosophers’, just as much as I fight against any other kind of undeserved prestige that is often attributed to different ‘intellectuals’, scientists included. My own view being: yes to study philosophy can (if not necessarily *will*) make you a better scientist (and be careful here, since ‘scientist’ is a name that encompasses people from the physicist to the maritime biologist), just as studying ‘science’ (again, all of them) can make you a better philosopher.
I have been too prolix as it often happens. I hope this reply is somewhat useful to you. If we keep cordial tones, I’d be very happy to keep discussing this issue further.
Best regards
The two fields are related and complement one another.
With philosophy we talk to ourselves about nature but with science we talk to nature directly, or at least we try to.
Notwithstanding #11 and #26, “Feynmans, the Schwingers” is an interesting pairing, precisely because Dirac was able to unify their major results at the foundations of Field Theory, and taught that unification in his famous course on Relativistic QM and field theory, recently available in a new edition on arXiv.
I didn’t know Schwinger, but I consider it an oversimplification to say that Feynman rejected Philosophy. He may have intentionally rejected a lot of Philosophy, just as he rejected a lot of univerwsity protocol (i.e. he wouldn’t serve on committees), because so much seemed to be, to a pragmatic theory-builder and problem solver and teacher, a waste of time.
Clearly, Feynman was acutely aware of some philosophical conerns, such as Epistemology (he was very good as a teacher in showing exactly how we know what we know).
The attacks from outside the sciences, on Darwin and Einstein, whatever the psychological causation, seem to me more about their philosophical claims than their scientific claims.
The converse question is more acute. Why have so many Philosophers failed to educate themselves on the breakthroughs in Mathematics, Physics, Biology, and observational Cosmology, which seem, even to the general public, to bear on ancient central problems of Philosophy?
First, someone asked for discrete examples of philosophy’s usefulness, a la GPS for engineering/physics. Somewhat off topic of the post, but a legitimate question that is (all too often disdainfully) brought up by scientists, and should be addressed. A direct analogy may or may not be possible (saying a GPS “works” and saying a legal system “works” are two different statements, and a comment section isn’t the forum to define and expound upon this), but examples of philosophical ideas influencing and changing the nature of human society abound. A short list of examples: empiricism and the underpinnings of the modern scientific method, political philosophy and the shift from monarchy to democratic government in many countries, abolition/civil rights/feminism and the progress towards equal rights for all people, legal philosophy and jurisprudence. Does trial by judge/jury “work” in the same way a GPS does? No; but I think we can convince ourselves they are more just, fair, and efficient than burning all of the accused and assuming Satan will protect the guilty.
As to the discussion about whether it helps physicists, this discussion might be broadened even further: Does breadth of education/personal interest help people who work on deep, highly specialized topics? I argue that it often does, but not necessarily, or always directly; and the benefits can come (not an exclusive list) from a useful skill, useful knowledge applied to a new situation, or simply a different interpretation of things. I’ve heard it often stated, and agree, that it is useful for an experimentalist to deeply understand the theory behind their investigations, and that a good handle on an experiment can help a theorist interpret a new result. So, is it useful to go further than understanding the “other side” of physics, into becoming, not an expert, but a facile amateur, in another field? I think so. For example, drawing diagrams is often incredibly useful when discussing an experiment; well-drawn, detailed diagrams are generally even more useful, and I think many physicists would indirectly benefit from a short course in drawing or drafting. Certainly some meetings I’ve been to where someone draws the same thing multiple times or constantly changes it until it is right would go a little quicker :). Math learned in pretty much any context tends to have a broad range of applications. Philosophy may not directly help a physicist deal with some specialized physical system, but the logical methods available from philosophy may often indirectly help (skepticism, an understanding of logic and fallacy, ability to argue a point rigorously).
Hope that added to the discussion somewhat.
The argument, it would seem, is that the value of philosophy to science is to help scientists learn how to think rigorously. Apparently, without a strong philosophical foundations, scientists are bereft of this ability.
Nothing that I have observed corroborates this supposition. If one lacked the ability to think before, defending ones work against the bracing critique of scientific peers hones those skills very quickly, or the scientist simply fails. There is the extra benefit in science that an argument, no matter how logically sound, fails if experiment cannot validate it. Having to meet that standard appears to hone the mind rather effectively as well.