What Wayne Myrvold thinks Neil de Grasse Tyson got right (guest post)

Over on Facebook, I invited Wayne Myrvold, philosopher of physics at The University of Western Ontario, to post his thoughts about Tyson and the responses Tyson has gotten from philosophers.   In another post to follow, I will post my reaction to Wayne's post.

What Neil de Grasse Tyson got right Wayne Myrvold, Department of Philosophy, The University of Western Ontario, Rotman Institute of Philosophy

Neil de Grasse Tyson has made a few remarks about philosophy that have bothered some members of our profession. One reaction to this has been to resort to name-calling; he’s been called a “philistine,” and a “dumb astrophysicist,” and “clueless astrophysicist.” My attitude towards this is: if we’re engage in that sort of behaviour, we should at least do it right. A six-year-old acquaintance of mine advises me that the appropriate term when expressing sentiments of this sort is “poo-poo head.”

On the other hand, we’ve seen some serious blog posts defending the value of philosophy; Lewis Powell’s "Open Letter to Neil de Grasse Tyson," and Massimo Pigliucci’s "Neil de Grasse Tyson and the Value of Philosophy," which has been reblogged at The Huffington Post.

Tyson’s remarks occur in an interview with The Nerdist, and in a discussion with Richard Dawkins, entitled "The Poetry of Science." If you haven’t seen them yet, Pigliucci quotes these remarks in full in his blog post. Tyson also engaged in some back-and-forth in the comments on Powell’s Open Letter. I find one particularly interesting:

No doubt anybody can sit in a chair and philosophize about the cosmos, coming up with ideas that may or may not be correct. I have no problem there. What I reference is the formal training that goes into making a professional Philosopher — the undergraduate and graduate curricula that serve as the foundation of a Philosopher’s academic training. I don’t know of anyone who received that training in the 20th century that has contributed materially to the moving frontier of the physical sciences. In fact, the people who have made the most philosophical contributions over this period have been people formally trained as Physicists — in departments of Physics — served by Physics curricula. So I never meant to imply that philosophy has no role in science — they are joined at the hip. But if you want to philosophize about the physical sciences in the era of Modern Physics, where most discoveries do not derive from anybody’s common sense, then evidence suggests strongly that you will be best served earning advanced degrees in the sciences and not in philosophy itself.

First of all: I agree with Powell and Pigliucci that philosophy is important. But, once we’re done congratulating ourselves on having chosen such a deep and important field, let’s admit a few things, just between us. Some of what Neil de Grasse Tyson said was right, though he overstated things a bit.

1. Philosophy does carry with it a risk of getting bogged down in questions that are either pointless or meaningless, and it always has. There is, of course, a long tradition of philosophers saying just that. Insert your favourite examples here; my greatest hits list includes the resounding closing paragraph of Hume’s Enquiry, and Kant’s challenge to metaphysicians in the Prolegomena. The logical empiricists, of course, tried to demarcate between sense and nonsense in such a way as to keep science on one side and the sorts of pointless metaphysical disputes they wished to avoid on the other. Most philosophers these days think that there isn’t any simple way to draw a line between sense and nonsense. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as nonsense. Fill in your own favourite example of a dispute in contemporary philosophy that is either pointless or nonsensical.
2. Historically, the best philosophers (in my perhaps idiosyncratic judgment) have taken the science of the day as their starting point. But in the latter half of the 20th century, mainstream philosophy (I’m not including philosophy of science) has largely detached itself from science. I don't think that this is a Good Thing.

   [I started to write a riff here on David Lewis, which threatened to turn into a blog post of its own. If you’re interested to hear what I have to say about that, come to our Metaphysics Within and Without Physics which will be held at Western June 7-8, in which I will argue that, despite Lewis’ claim that Humean Supervenience is “inspired by classical physics,” actual attention to classical physics shows that it is not. And don't get me started on the quantum side of things. Come and heckle!]

3. Our educational system isn’t particularly well suited for training philosophers who can engage seriously with the sciences. I mean, we do it, and there are lots of philosophers who do engage with the sciences, and we do our best. But it’s a struggle, and we face institutional obstacles to genuine interdisciplinarity. We’re well beyond the point where the well-educated amateur can keep up with the cutting edge in all the sciences. So philosophers of science specialize. The specialized knowledge of some particular science or sciences required to engage in a serious philosophical manner is either acquired through formal training or through less formal reading. There are a few philosophers of science with two Ph.D.s (Pigliucci is one), and many more who have a Master’s degree in the relevant science. But, though pedagogically ideal, the dual Ph.D. is problematic for many, for personal or institutional reasons. Here in Canada, graduate students are limited in the number of years they are eligible for federal funding, and completing one Ph.D. and starting in on a second doesn’t reset the clock. I don’t think there is an easy answer to this problem, but it is a problem, and we should face it. But, as I said in an earlier blog post, this will require more engagement between philosophers and scientists, and it doesn’t help to try to fence off a domain of our own on which science can never encroach.
4. In the “Poetry of Science” discussion, Tyson seems to equate philosophy with the attempt to uncover truths about the world without the benefit of empirical input. And, in conversations with physicists, I have gotten the impression that this is what at least some physicists think that philosophers are attempting to do. We should be clear about this: this isn’t something that we, or anyone else, can do. The long history of trying to derive substantive truths about the way the world is via purely a priori reasoning is a history of failure: it can’t be done. Though there isn’t a simple relation between observational evidence and advanced physical theories, learning about the world does not, and cannot, proceed without empirical input. And, if some physicists think that that is what we’re trying to do, fruitlessly, we should make it clear that we don’t think it can be done, either.