Commenting on an earlier post, Dan Kervick made the interesting comment that early GPOSers took physics to be a proxy for science. There never was GPOS, he says, only philosophy of physics masquerading as GPOS. (http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/05/on-the-nature-and-decline-of-general-philosophy-of-science.html#comment-6a00d8341ef41d53ef01538e718636970b)
I don't think he's right about GPOS, but he is definitely on to something with regard to the attitude toward physics. There were two different ways in which physics was taken to be primary, one more harmful than the other.
1. (a) A lot of philosophers of science maintain that only physics could ensure the unity of science, since ultimately everything real is physical. (b) They assumed that this dependence was to be demonstrated by reducing all "special sciences" to physics.
1a has a core of truth, and we have been able to progress forward from this core in a healthy way. Physicalism is still a powerful idea, and many different proposals have been made about how best to capture it. So far, however, the question has not been settled, though a lot of progress has been made. (Of course, I would insist that the best ideas have come from outside GPOS, primarily from philosophy of mind, and to a lesser extent, philosophy of biology and philosophy of chemistry. But put this aside.)
1b. The reduction idea was attacked--by Putnam, Kim, and others--who pointed out that classic reduction was threatened by open-ended multi-realizability. The way forward for physicalists is to give up on classical reductionism.
2. It was also held that the method of physics is canonical for all science. This was not only wrong, but obstructive. For example, it was responsible for the silly idea that biology is not a science because it is not universal. It obstructed the long overdue investigation of historical sciences. More contentiously, I would contend that it was responsible for a mistaken attitude toward teleology. Instead of trying to figure out what is going on with functions and goals (as Ernest Nagel did), many GPOSers simply dismissed it. (I remember losing a number of jobs by giving a talk about teleology and error attribution in immunology--a paper that ultimately got published in that Ernest Nagel influenced organ, the Journal of Philosophy.)
Personally, I hope that physicalism is vindicated, though we still don't quite know how to do it. Obviously, though, the solution will not be found in the philosophy of physics. How can it be? Physicalism is trivially true in the ontology of physics. It is not trivially true in the ontology of the mental.
Recent Comments