The Uneasy Relationship Between Science and Philosophy.

January 22, 2018 I was informed this morning that all fuse boxes in my building will be replaced. 

I assume that this work will be performed by a licensed electrician and that all necessary legal permits for such electrical work have been obtained by the contractors performing the job.

NSA warrantless surveillance of Americans was continued last week for the foreseeable future. 

I should note that I do not write at computers in my home.

Interference with my home electrical service will have no effect on my writing.

Water was cut off this morning in my apartment.

The U.S. Justice Department has announced that Senator Menendez will be re-tried on federal charges that resulted in a hung jury in 2017. ("Menendez Jury Undecided; Retrial Expected.")  

The Menendez matter (including new Senate ethics charges) and Mr. Christie's departure from New Jersey's governorship will be the subject of my next essay to be posted at this blog.

As of this date no U.S. officials, judges, prosecutors or police officers (nor media sources) have responded to my communications, nor (I have reason to believe) has there been any reply to the communications of others concerning my matters.   

January 9, 2018 I renewed my library card at the Morningside Heights branch of the NYPL. I am told that this makes the card good until February of 2021. The person who assisted me in this delicate operation is the branch manager. 

I found it difficult to post this essay because (I assume) hackers into my blogs made it problematic for me to make corrections or to space normally between paragraphs.

I have done my best to cope with these difficulties. 

Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, "The Problems of Philosophy," Free Inquiry, December/January (2017-2018), pp. 41-47.

Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein is a wonderful philosopher and also a superb novelist. 

The philosopher in Ms. Goldstein sometimes disagrees with the novelist and the opposite is also true. 

It seems that the novelist does not entirely approve of the analytical philosopher. I often wonder whether the two sides of Ms. Goldstein's personality are on speaking terms. 

A similar division may be found in Western thought these days among science-dominated (analytical) and humanities-based (Continental) "schools" of philosophy.

The division within Ms. Goldstein's psyche is a productive one, however, that leads to the paradoxes and insights in her best scholarly writings and literary-artistic works. Perhaps the same is true of the notorious "split" in Western thought.

A similar description may also be applied to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, whose scholarly interest in Lacan and Hegel coincides with a passionate engagement in the politics of his native land as well as intense involvement in the struggles of a bitterly divided contemporary Europe, where "ideology" is far from a trivial matter, nor is "ideology" ever entirely absent from the science, philosophy, and general culture of our civilization as a whole at the moment. 

It is a bit unfair for Professor Goldstein to equate Mr. Zizek with "homeopathy" and herself (or analytical philosophers) with Western scientific medicine. To do so may be to fall under the definition Ms. Goldstein provides of "ideology" as "a rigid system of ideas that so vehemently rejects any possibility of challenge as to transform conformity to itself into a veritable moral standard." (Goldstein, p. 42.)

It may be that the pernicious effects of ideology (understood in classical Marxist terms) are most harmful where they are least detected as, for example, in the alleged "neutrality and detachment" of analytical philosophers struggling to comment on philosophical issues "scientifically." As Colin McGinn explains:

" ... any professional philosopher should have a good mastery of these logical and linguistic ideas, [analytical philosophy,] but I no longer believe that these ideas alone will lead to the resolution of serious philosophical problems. To that extent, then, I do not believe that philosophy can be a science."

"Logic and Language," in The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth Century Philosophy (New York: Harcout-Brace, 2002), p. 77 (emphasis added). ("Is clarity enough?")

Professor Goldstein makes it clear that the only philosophy she will defend from the "jeers" of some prominent scientists is analytical philosophy.

I mostly agree with Professor Goldstein's defense of philosophy as she understands the subject from within her tradition and intellectual affiliations (which many Continental thinkers in turn dismiss as "ideological" and often irrelevant to substantive philosophical controversies). 

I am an adherent of the rival Continental tradition of contemporary Western philosophy which is, by far, the most popular style of philosophy today on a global level. 

This is to say nothing of the Chinese and other Asian, specifically Indian, Islamic, and other religiously-based, African and Latin-American schools of philosophy that also address these questions concerning the relationship between (or among) science, philosophy, and religion as areas of human cognitive effort and discipline.   

Among the most celebrated and important Continental thinkers are many American philosophers. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.") 

I explore some initial difficulties and ambiguities in Professor Goldstein's argument. I then examine the narrow defense of philosophy offered by Ms. Goldstein from within analytical philosophy while drawing out the implications of her statements that lead, I suggest, to a more open-ended or Continental-style rationale for philosophy against the recent critiques of some scientists. In the words of Christopher Norris:

"[Scientists] would do well to consider the historically attested and nowadays more vital than ever role of philosophy as a critical discipline. It continues to offer the sorts of argument that science requires in order to dispel the illusions of a naive sense-certainty or intuitive self-evidence but also the confusions that speculative thought runs into when decoupled from any restricting appeal to regulative principles such as that of inference to the best explanation. To adopt a quotation from Kant in a different though related context: philosophy of science without scientific input is empty, while science without philosophical guidance is blind. ..." 

"Hawking Contra Philosophy," in Philosophy Now, February/March, Issue 118 (2017) posted to the online edition: http://www.philosophynow.org/issues/82/hawking_contra_philosophy.

Critiques of Philosophy From Prominent Scientists. 

Ms. Goldstein begins by noting the recent outbreak of attacks by scientists against philosophy and philosophers:

"Whether in books, interviews or tweets, some of our most high-profile scientists have gone out of their way to opine on the mortal state of philosophy, either declaring its death a thing most devoutly to be wished for or already dancing on its grave." (Goldstein, p. 41.) 

There are no specific examples given of these critiques or so-called "jeers" by Professor Goldstein. 

I am aware of criticisms that confirm Professor Goldstein's remarks by Steven Weinberg and Richard Dawkins. Christopher Norris in his essay defending philosophy from scientists focuses on the comments of Stephen Hawking:

"[Hawking] wrote that philosophy is 'dead' since it hasn't kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. In earlier times -- Hawking conceded -- philosophers not only tried to keep up, but sometimes made significant contributions of their own. However, they were now, in so far as they had any influence at all, just an obstacle to progress through their endless goings on about the same issues of truth, knowledge, and the problem of induction, and so forth." (Norris, p. 1.) 

The persistence of these philosophical worries about the epistemic claims of scientists or any others (including lawyers and social scientists) I consider a sign of the healthy state of a discipline performing its historic function of counseling humility in knowledge claims or in any efforts to fully account for the furniture of the universe in an ontological sense.

It is ironic that scientists -- including Professor Hawking -- cannot avoid philosophizing themselves about the meaning of scientific developments and often do so very badly indeed. This is a point on which Professors Goldstein and Norris agree. (Please see my essays "Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "Stephen Hawking is Right On Time.")

Ms. Goldstein characterizes the attacks on philosophy as "ill-informed," "incoherent," and "irresponsible." 

Scientists' accusations are ill-informed because they misunderstand what philosophy is about. The subject matter of the discipline is non-competitive with science focusing, for example, on conceptual meaning, logic of argumentation, ethics and metaphysical implications of scientific claims. ("Robert Brandom's 'Reason in Philosophy.'") 

Philosophy should not try to substitute for science in describing the workings of empirical reality.  

The scientists' accusations are also incoherent, however, because any claim about philosophy or its relevance today is necessarily also a philosophical assertion that must be supported by philosophical argument. 

Scientists indict philosophy by doing philosophy. At the very least this is inconsistent and a self-undermining effort. 

Scientists' attacks on philosophy are irresponsible because philosophy and science have a powerful common enemy in irrationalism of various kinds, notably religious fundamentalism as distinct from religion, as well as many forms of intolerance that are tearing communities apart. 

Science and philosophy must share a commitment to reason and objective analyses as well as factual and theoretical interpretations as a bulwark against irrationality. 

Scientists and philosophers are, accordingly, natural allies or "friends" in a world in which they are greatly outnumbered by adherents of various mysticisms and belief systems that are not grounded in objective thought or empirical evidence with little respect for argument as opposed to authority.  

Professor Goldstein suggests that science is able to enlist "reality" as a collaborator in a way that philosophy cannot. 

This is a controversial claim for many Continental philosophers of science, including some who are also distinguished scientists, but who emphasize the extent of theoretical preconceptions or "paradigms" that define the boundaries of the alleged "reality" to be measured by experimentation. 

I am referring not only to Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Khun, and Michael Polanyi as well as others, but even to pragmatists -- like Richard Rorty -- who wonder about the inability of scientists to escape their forms of representation or "texts." ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.") 

Setting aside distractions (or stunts) such as the so-called "Sokal Hoax" Professor Stanley Aronowitz states: 

"It would be excessive to claim that the development of quantum mechanics, especially the discovery that knowledge of the physical object entails bringing the observer into the observational field, represented a direct acknowledgement of the power of Hegel's attack [on all forms of realism.] Yet, although physics has largely recuperated this admission within [mediated or critical] realist epistemology, some of the more philosophically minded theoretical physicists still have nagging doubts that the 'corruption' of the principle of indeterminacy is insufficient, that physics and truth are non-identical." 

Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minn.: U. Minnesota Press, 1988), p. ix. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.") 

Whether reality says "yes" or "no" to scientists' questions may depend on what scientists choose to regard as "real," or what questions (often the wrong ones) are put to "reality" by scientists, or how questions are formulated "for" reality and/or science, to say nothing of how scientists interpret the "language of nature" (mathematics) in which so much of the scientific conversation about the building blocks of "reality" must be conducted today.

This does not deprive us of objectivity or truth within our various modes of discourse but offers us an invitation to select the "conversations" in which we, as inquirers, will participate. 

Among these "conversations" detailed work in science and philosophy may certainly be included, but also the dialogue between science and philosophy matters, including (perhaps especially) philosophers' skeptical reservations about the confident knowledge claims of their colleagues in laboratories along with their questionable and frequently unconscious metaphysical assumptions. ("The Return of Metaphysics.") 

Objections From an "Evolved Ape."   

Professor Goldstein sees a continuity between the scientific and philosophical "projects" along with important differences that make it impossible for philosophy to be a science. 

The crucial issue in Ms. Goldstein's discussion has to do with the engagements of these disciplines with "reality." Scientific methodology, Ms. Goldstein contends, has been "designed" to provoke "reality to answer us back." (Goldstein, p. 43.)

The trouble is that philosophy is concerned with questions that are meaningful even where objective empirical reality simply can not answer us back. 

For philosophers there is always a process of "beginning again" that Continentalists describe as the "hermeneutic circle" of refocusing upon one's original inquiry. 

There are two responses to this way of defining the issue between philosophy and science in an effort to defend the vital importance of philosophy for science: First, one needs to focus on this ambiguous word "reality" in order to appreciate that it may refer to the workings of the empirical world as well as how we know such workings or laws of the universe; but also the word "reality" may refer to the objective features of the social world that are as much created as discovered by scientists and humanistic scholars or even by all of us living in society. 

For Continental philosophers of science (and many scientists also) philosophy and science share a commitment to reason or (more modestly) rationality of interpretation that simultaneously discovers while constructing what we take to be "real." 

It may be best at this point to allow Professor Goldstein to state the issue and offer her argument before raising some skeptical reservations about her way of understanding the current division between philosophy and science:

"This grab-bag [scientific method] has proved powerful, allowing us progressively more insight into the laws of nature, though, of course, every progressive step is provisional; no result stands immune from a revision forced on us by further rebukes from reality that are elicited by those prods we deliberately inflict by way of controlled experiments." (Goldstein, p. 43.)

This suggests that the scientific castle is always built on quicksand, but it is also a reminder that in philosophy there are no "defeated" fundamental positions. 

Idealism and/or various forms of anti-realism have been made more plausible by developments in the sciences as well as in the history of thought. Plato is still an important philosopher for students of politics and morals. 

This eternal recurrence of fundamental positions (updated to account for scientific changes) in epistemology and metaphysics is a strength of philosophy and not a weakness because it suggests the linkage between philosophy and human nature which is essentially the same in every historical epoch. Professor Goldstein is led to a remarkable conclusion:

"Science expresses a humility that is highly appropriate for a pack of evolved apes to cultivate in the face of a reality that wasn't designed with our cognitive faculty and capacities in mind." (Goldstein, p. 43, emphasis added.)

The word "designed" in this statement will certainly please theologians since it implies a designer and suggests a teleological scheme in which the design is realized. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")

More importantly it is doubtful whether any "laws" of nature could be formulated by intelligent and conscious "evolved apes" if such "creatures" ("sacks of protein and water" perhaps?) were not admirably suited to the task of understanding a universe that can only come to know itself through persons as conscious agents. ("Ape and Essence" and "Primates and Personhood" then "The Naked Ape.")

The second response to Ms. Goldstein's statement of the division between philosophy and science has to do with the role of "reality" in scientific epistemology. 

In recent years eminent scientists have taken a far more modest view of what science is or concerning what can be achieved through scientific efforts:

"We normally think of science as the discovery of the facts about the natural world and the laws that govern its behavior, that is, we view science as the uncovering of an already made world. In this book, we will follow another course. We will trace the history of physics as the evolution of a language -- as the invention of new vocabularies [scientific hermeneutics] and new ways of talking about the world. Concentrating on the language physicists use to talk about the world will establish a perspective vitally important to understanding the development of physics in the twentieth century. But even more important, tracing the development of physics will provide a powerful way of looking at the much broader question of how language hooks up with the world."   

Bruce Gregory, Inventing Reality: Physics as Language (New York: John Weitz & Sons Inc., 1988, 1990), p. viii (emphasis added). (Professor Gregory served as Associate Director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics.) 

These thoughts and new understandings of science are shared by prominent biologists. Please compare Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Inquiry (London: Coronet, 2012), pp. 291-318 ("Illusions of Objectivity") with Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Putnam, 1995), pp. 63-147 ("Idealism and the Resolution of the Quantum Paradoxes").  

Professor Goldstein's definition of philosophy's role may well coincide with science's greatest need today: 

" ... the real point of philosophy is: to maximize our coherence by discovering and resolving the inconsistencies we accrue as we go about trying to get our bearings in the world, which is our distinctively human project." (Goldstein, p. 43.) 

Philosophical intelligence is essential to unifying and establishing meanings for our total knowledge claims. Imagination is the fundamental tool in the effort to create as much as to find this unity that we seek between human knowledge and the world. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")

The Search For a Theory of Everything. 

The effort to unify and reconcile different theories and facts about the universe as well as ourselves has been called "the search for a theory of everything."

I happened to be reading Paul Davies' book on string theory when I came across Professor Goldstein's essay in Free Inquiry. In that book Professor Davies -- who is philosophically adept as a scientist -- includes in his glossary of terms the word "phenomeology" as one of the crucial concepts for the discussion of recent developments in physics and the related analysis of consciousnesss. P.C.W. Davies & J. Brown, eds., Superstrings: A Theory of Everything (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1988), p. 226. 

Roger Penrose makes use of developments in quantum mechanics and the epistemological revolution resulting from these developments in physics to examine the issue of consciousness concluding (I believe correctly) that only with the development of quantum computing will we see real progress in A.I. technology aimed at developing conscious machines. 

Current technology and efforts to create conscious computers are doomed to fail because of serious confusions concerning the nature of consciousness. The multidimensionality and social essence of consciousness call for a quantum-like approach in theory and in all derivative technologies. ("Mind and Machine" and "Consciousness and Computers" then "Ex Machina: A Movie Review.")   

Professor Penrose, as a mathematician and cosmologist, anticipates many of the observations made by Professor Goldstein concerning the role and importance of philosophy to all of our cognitive activities:

" ... aesthetic criteria are enormously valuable in forming our judgments. In the arts, one might say that it is aesthetic criteria that are paramount. Aesthetics in the arts is a sophisticated subject, and philosophers have devoted lifetimes to its study. It could be argued that in mathematics and the sciences, such criteria are merely incidental, the criteria of truth being paramount. However, it seems impossible to separate one from the other when one considers the issues of inspiration and insight."

"Where Lies the Physics of Mind?," in The Emperor's New Mind: With a New Prologue by the Author (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1989, 1999), p. 544 (emphasis added). 

For a sampling of classic scientific discussions in which philosophical intelligence and learning are central to the arguments and suggestions set forth by the authors, please see Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1944, 2000), pp. 46-56; Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: Dover, 2010) (1st ed. 1961), pp. 23-32 ("Natural Philosophy and Human Culture") and 67-83 ("Unity of Knowledge"); Werner Heisenberg, Encounters With Einstein and Other Essays On People, Places, and Particles (New Jersey: Princeton U. Press, 1983), pp. 130-136 ("Thoughts On the Artist's Journey Into the Interior"); G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1940, 1993), pp. 121-133. (F.H. Bradley's logic and metaphysics as influences on Hardy's mathematical work and his version of "numerical realism.")

John D. Barrow summarizes my point by neatly suggesting overlapping intelligence and imagination in our scientific as well as philosophical unification efforts where "reality" is both created and discovered by inquirers:

"Are the sciences and humanities alternative responses to the [one] world in which we live? Are they irreconcilable? Must we embrace either the subjective and objective: the abacus or the rose? Or have we created a false dichotomy and are the two views of the world more intimately entwined than appears at first sight?"

The Artful Universe Expanded (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1995, 2000), p. 3. (The author is Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University where his predecessors include Issac Newton and Stephen Hawking.)

Compare Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Poetry (Charlottsville & London: U. Virginia, 2016), pp. 23-43 ("Universalist Grandeur and Analytic Philosophy") with Roger Trigg, Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics (Penn.: Templeton Press, 2015), pp. 3-25 ("Is Science the Sole Authority?").

I agree with Professor Goldstein's eloquent defense of philosophy from the "jeers" of some scientists. 

I continue to have reservations, however, about the suggested bifurcation of the knowledge field into areas where "reality" says "yes" or "no" to scholars' questions and other areas where "reality" is silent. 

It may be that in philosophy and the sciences the "reality" we perceive as entirely external to humanity that provides answers to our nagging questions aimed at knowing the cosmos and ourselves is as much a mirror as a window in the universe.