By Roberta Millstein
Most philosophers of science have been on the receiving end of this question at one time or another. A friend of mine recently called it a type of hate speech. I think my friend was joking. But maybe not. Philosophers of science struggle to get into grad programs, to obtain jobs, to earn promotion and tenure, to be perceived as "central" and important figures in the field, all because their work is not seen as philosophical. So, while it may not be hate speech, it is speech that does genuine harm.
This isn't a new issue and it's one that others have touched before. But a number of recent events have brought the issue to mind for me and emphasized the importance of continuing to discuss it. One in particular was a conversation with a colleague whose opinion I value and whose good faith I have utter confidence in. And yet this colleague had doubts about an essay being philosophical even as I could see that it fell squarely within the domain of philosophy of science. The colleague was willing to take my word for it, but the fact that such a well meaning person had doubts really brought home to me the fact that this is (at least in some case) simply a lack of awareness about philosophy of science. Thus this post. I can't hope to fully convince anyone in a blog post length entry, but I can at least point to some of the other events that have got me thinking about this topic again.
The second event was the excellent essay "Philosophical Enough" by Subrena Smith, a recent Featured Philosop-her. Smith rightly points out:
I think that it's difficult to find philosophers who believe that their work does not have some empirical features. Philosophers are interested in the world, and as such I think that the sorts of questions and claims that they make are, for the most part, about the world—including unobservable, but postulated, features of the world. Claims about consciousness are empirical. Claims about the metaphysics of gender are empirical, and so are claims about the nature of moral judgment. Philosophers like myself go to biology and psychology because we believe that the methods used in those domains often enough provide us with explanatory resources which help us to adjudicate the philosophical issues. We do not worship at the altar of science; we embrace those methods that stand the best chance of being knowledge-producing.
If I do no more than point my readers to her essay and persuade them to read it, I will consider my own blog post a success.
The third event was an illustration of Smith's point – a series of "regular" philosophy talks that invoked, variously, human nature and adaptationist assumptions, game theory, and claims about the use of vague concepts in science. These references were only recent, not unusual; I have heard "regular" philosophy talks appeal to specific claims about science or general claims about the nature of science on many occasions. The thing was, however, that the talks were taking these claims for granted and not arguing for them. That's OK, of course; we all take certain assumptions for granted in order to move forward with the issues that we are really seeking to discuss. But those very assumptions are ones that philosophers of science debate. So, non-philosophers of science ought to be quite interested in these debates in philosophy of science, even when they involve getting their hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of science, and recognize that they are one of a piece with the subjects that they are interested in. (And, as a side note, they should recognize that such references call into question the notion that any area of philosophy is more central than another).
The final event was my attendance at the APA Pacific in Vancouver, where I saw two engaging "author meets critics" sessions whose books show very clearly the relevance of philosophy of science to the rest of philosophy: Justin Garson, The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction and James Tabery, Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture. The former explicitly seeks to use the philosophy of biology to shed light on topics in the philosophy of mind, while the latter delves into an issue that is commonly appealed to by philosophers, showing just how complex debates over human nature can be. I have read one and not the other, but based on what I heard, both are worth a look from interested parties.
Surely our view cannot be that philosophers can only invoke views about the world from their armchair. That doesn't seem to me to be, well, very philosophical.
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