Philosophy or Science?—Part 2

In ancient Greece—where the foundations of Western knowledge were laid—there was initially just the discipline of philosophy. Science had yet to arise. (You might say that the old Greek philosophers sat around and thought, rather than got off their duffs and went out to run experiments—and you’d not be far off the truth.) 

In the pre-Socratic period (roughly 6^th to 3^rd centuries BCE) the philosophic aim of thinkers was to understand the basic character of the world; what was referred to as “natural philosophy.” Those ancient Greeks later turned their main attention from the natural world toward humans. When Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato came along, they were definitely interested more in ethics and politics. The branch of philosophy that addressed the natural world morphed into what we know as science, splitting from human-centered philosophy. The science-versus-philosophy rift had begun. 

Aristotle and his cohorts felt that anything one needed to know about anything could be discovered through reason alone. The breach between philosophy and science widened in the growing realization by natural philosophers (scientists) that knowledge of the world needed to be verified by physical experiments. Human reasoning and logic alone can sometimes veer away from reality; they need to be kept in check by empirical observation. 

Galileo (17^th century CE) was one of the first true scientists; he advanced the science of mechanics by verifying his ideas through experiment, thereby trashing many of the ancient Greeks’ philosophic ideas about the natural world.

The disagreements between philosophy and science were kept to a minimum by the later rise of a discipline that has come to be called “philosophy of science.” Scientists, of course, cannot be absolutely objective, even if they try to be. They are human, after all, and make assumptions, have beliefs, and form opinions—some of them rather whacky at times. Thus, philosophy of science attempts to keep scientists on track by asking questions like: Can science be expected to lead to certainty and truth? What is the so-called scientific method and what are its limitations? Is a new or updated scientific theory/experiment closer to the truth than the old one? How do we know? How do we tell true science from pseudoscience?

By the middle of the 20^th century, however, science became increasingly specialized and partitioned itself into countless narrow areas of specialization. A person could spend a whole career in one of these restricted fields and become so steeped in its esoteric knowledge that she would be quite unable to converse in any depth with a scientist in what could be presumed to be a closely-related field. For example, a biologist studying the mating characteristics of a butterfly in Panama might not be able to understand a biologist researching a caterpillar-caused disease in oak trees in North America.

Specialization continued to add to fragmentation and compartmentalization of the growing number of scientific disciplines. If different scientists could not communicate very well with each other, what is to be said about those individuals pursuing the study of the philosophy of science in those arcane specialties? What appeared to be happening is that these “scientific” philosophers were neither able to keep up with the increasingly specialized scientists, nor maintain their connections to traditional philosophers. They seem to have been drawn into a kind of no-man's land, where they find themselves separated from both “pure” scientists and “pure” philosophers.

Where is this struggle going? I don't think anyone can predict. It's a 2,000-year-old conundrum that has been wrestled with by countless learned people. It appears to me that the current tussle is just the latest facet of an enduring struggle between philosophers and scientists. The fact that I can relate better to one camp (scientists) than the other, is just a measure of the bias of my education and my personal predilections. I think it's useful to try to understand the other camp, if only to widen one's otherwise narrow perspective. In a fundamental way, we're all philosophers and scientists.