More on the future of philosophy of science

Reporting from the conference on the future of philosophy of science held in Tilburg, NL. (To be exact, writing this while on a train from Amsterdam to Rome, trying to get a flight back to New York while avoiding the Icelandic volcanic ash.)

While the topic of the conference was, in fact, specifically the future of philo-sci, in reality less than a third of the talks directly addressed the issue, the remainder simply being about someone’s current work in philosophy of science (interesting, but not the main point). My notes here focus on some of the presentations actually addressing the theme of the gathering.

Take, for instance, Francis Cartieri’s “Extending the Philosophy of Science: Forecasting and Science Policy.” The idea is that philosophy of science is one of the disciplines poised at the interface between science and the humanities, which means that it could contribute significantly to the area of science policy. After all, non-scientists who have to make decisions based on scientific input (e.g., politicians, and to some extent the general public) are not at all well versed in science, and may benefit from the mediation of people — like philosophers — who both understand the science and are concerned with its broader impact on society.

Related to the above talk was Fabien Medvecky’s “Economic Discounting at the Science-Policy Interface: A Fertile Ground for Philosophical Inquiry,” where the author pointed out that economics and its interface with science policy is also ripe for insights from philosophers of science. As Medvecky put it: “Although discounting has been a standard component of cost–benefit analysis for many years, it has increasingly become a point of debate — especially for those working on climate change — with much of the disagreement over discounting stemming from philosophical issues.”

A completely different take on the future of philosophy of science was presented by Mark Colyvan, with his “Philosophy of Mathematics as Philosophy of Science.” The idea is that philosophy of science should expand to include philosophy of mathematics, even though mathematics is not often considered a science (it is more akin to logic, after all). I must admit that this talk perturbed me, in the positive sense that it gave me much to think about. Colyvan presented us with the famous example of the collapse of the Tacoma bridge in the 1940s, arguing that a major explanation of what happens has to take into account not only the wind strength and the details of the construction of the bridge, but most importantly the fact that the bridge happened to have geometric characteristics that generated a harmonic amplification of the initial oscillation, an amplification that kicked out a positive feedback that continued until the bridge collapsed. The point is that the bridge would have collapsed (but of course not entirely) almost regardless of physical circumstances, such as the specific wind speed and the particular construction materials. That is, the major explanation for the catastrophe is mathematical in nature.

Why would such a conclusion be disturbing? Well, because I have always thought of mathematics applied to science as describing physical reality, not of explaining it. Colyvan didn’t actually call this causation, but he may as well, in some respects. I had a nice conversation about this over dinner with my colleague Paul Griffiths, and he convinced me that there are ways to avoid the spookiness of mathematics that these examples seem to strongly suggest, and I think he has almost convinced me (and therefore reassured me). But I need to cogitate more on all of this, so as soon as I get back to New York I’ll look for a book on the philosophy of mathematics.

Another talk I found very appropriate to the theme of the conference was by Kathryn Plaisance and Carla Fehr: “Philosophers Responding to Controversial Science: Lessons from Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Genetics.” This is along some of the same lines I argued in my own presentation: philosophers are in a good position to assess what Plaisance and Fehr called “controversial science,” be it evolutionary psychology (which has become a self-contained enclave within the much broader and more sound fields of ecological and behavioral genetics), or climate modeling vis-a-vis the global warming debate, or Intelligent Design nonsense concerning the never ending challenges to science education in public schools. As the authors put it, “critical engagement, as we see it, involves developing ‘interactional expertise’ and conceptualizing our labor in terms of overlapping academic communities rather than solely as a set of individual efforts.”

Perhaps the talk that set the tone for the entire discussion though was Ronald Giere’s “Reflections on the Future of the Philosophy of Science, 2.0,” in which he picked up from a similar talk he gave in 1970 on the same general topic. Of course, Giere started out by admitting that it is perilous to make predictions about a field, particularly one related to science, and in fact listed a number of scientific advancements that affected philosophy of science immediately after his 1970 talk and that would have been pretty much impossible to predict then. Of one thing Giere was sure, though (and it is something I actually question): there ain’t going to be any more scholarship on the “foundational” problems in philosophy of science, the big picture stuff that gave us household names like Popper, Kuhn and associates. But as I pointed out in the discussion, it seems to me that, on the contrary, we should encourage young philosophers of science to again think broadly about foundational problems, and not just engage in the philosophical equivalent of Kuhn’s “puzzle solving” science.

Along similar lines to Giere’s talk, Leen de Vreese, Erik Weber and Jeroen van Bouwel presented on “The Primacy of Philosophy of Scientific Practice and its Consequences for General Philosophy of Science.” Here they argued for a move away from what they call general philosophy of science (the foundational problems mentioned above) and toward “a ‘practical turn’ in philosophy of science [that] will promote the primacy of a ‘philosophy of scientific practice,’” for instance through the study of concepts like causation and explanation not in general, but as they apply to specific problems in particular special sciences. Back to the big questions, yes, but via the indirect way they are pertinent to individual fields of scientific investigation.

Christopher Hitchcock gave one of the most stimulating talks of the meeting, one about which I disagreed almost slide by slide, but that nonetheless stimulated my little gray cells to a pleasurable degree. The title was “Intuitions, Experiments, and Analysis” and it turned out to be a critical assessment of philosophical intuitions, with a positive look at so-called experimental philosophy (the kind of philosophy where, for instance, laypeople are asked about their intuitions about ethics, mind, etc., in lieu of relying on the intuitions of a small number of professional philosophers).

I think Hitchcock needs to make a distinction between useful and not so useful philosophical intuitions and thought experiments. For instance, I find that David Chalmer’s intuitions about zombies, though famous, are in fact incoherent and completely unhelpful. But the sort of issues raised, for instance, by careful analysis of trolley problems in ethics are very useful in highlighting the differences between ethical theories (e.g., consequentialism vs. deontological approaches). Moreover, I am still not convinced that experimental philosophy is actually philosophy: it is certainly interesting to poll people about their ethical intuitions, for instance, but that’s an exercise in the sociology and psychology of ethics, it’s not going to address philosophical arguments.

Samir Okasha’s evening presentation on “Why does Darwin matter for Philosophy?” was both thought-provoking (as usual) and something I tend to disagree with on several levels. Samir’s fundamental point was that philosophers can learn much from science, and that there cannot be a philosophy of any kind that is not informed by science. Indeed, no disagreement there, but his examples came in two flavors, one of which is true but rather trivial, the second one from which I derived a very different lesson from what Samir, I think, intended.

The first category includes instances — even among very well known philosophers of the 20th century — where someone invoked science to make a point in, say, ethics or metaphysics or philosophy of mind, and in the process got the science fundamentally wrong. Samir’s examples included some major gaffe by Saul Kripke, for instance, and of course I can easily add the recent book co-authored by Jerry Fodor on Darwin as a spectacular failure in that respect. But the basic point is uncontroversial: if philosophers wish to talk about science or draw on science’s findings, they better get the science right.

The second class of examples in Samir’s talk is more interesting, and consists of instances where philosophers have arrived at conclusions that exactly parallel those of science. One of his best case studies was John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance,” a thought experiment that essentially says that the rational solution to the problem of how we should come to agree on what rules to use to build a just society is to randomize the playing field: if people don’t know ahead of time whether they’ll be rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, healthy or sick, they will agree to a social contract that maintains as much a spread of resources and opportunities among every member of society.

Okasha made the interesting observation that the veil of ignorance’s randomization process is analogous in important ways to Mendelian laws in genetics, where individual genes “cooperate” for the sake of the organism precisely because they all have about the same chances of making it into the next generation (they are affected by a “veil of Mendelian ignorance,” so to speak). Of course, just like in society, there are genes that try to cheat the system (they cause cancers in the latter case, global financial collapse in the first one), and safeguards have to be put in place to decrease their chances of succeeding (now, there is an argument against libertarianism!).

But why should the message of this sort of examples be that science can teach philosophers how to do their job? I’m pretty sure Rawls didn’t know much about genetics, and that his veil of ignorance was arrived at independently of any knowledge of science, which means something somewhat stunning: that philosophical analysis can yield logical discoveries that are applicable analogically to relevantly similar physical systems. This is not a naive revival of the old rationalist program according to which just thinking about stuff can yield reliable knowledge about the physical world. It is rather more subtle, as it hints at classes of phenomena that have both physical and logical components, where science and philosophy (or mathematics — see the spooky example of the Tacoma bridge above) can independently arrive at parallel truths. To me, that’s an excellent reason to feel invigorated as a philosopher!

Still, the opinion that the future of philosophy of science rests on interdisciplinarity was shared by most at the conference (including yours truly). Take for instance Michael Stoeltzner’s talk on “Philosophy of Science Between Rigorous Method and Interdisciplinarity.” The author argued that there are four reasons/venues for the importance of philosophy of science: “(i) [Philosophers] act on a specific level of a complex inner-scientific process, and, simultaneously, reflect upon the conditions of the process as a whole. (ii) They combine historical long-shots at the emergence of the scientific world-view with ahistorical close-ups tracking down a specific development in a particular science. (iii) Not only does the history of science represent an experimental laboratory for general claims, but it also influences the normative standards, in the same vein as the progress of any natural science. (iv) They, finally, can count on a certain inescapability of philosophy of science for the scientists themselves.” In other words, it’s not just philosophy, but history of science that are crucial to the understanding of science (and, therefore, to its future, especially in terms of the science-policy interface discussed above).

One thing was obvious from the meeting itself: plenty of smart people are thinking about and are excited by the future prospects of philosophy of science, which is of course the main reason to think that the field does indeed have a bright future ahead.