There was a debate at the British Academy last week about whether or not philosophy is dead, apparently inspired by Stephen Hawking’s related claim that scientists rather than philosophers “have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” (That really is a different claim. Discovery isn’t all there is, and not doing it isn’t the same as being dead.) The Times Higher tells us things about the debate.
According to Tim Crane, Knightsbridge professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Professor Hawking himself proved that philosophy is unavoidable, since he put forward a lot of philosophical views. Unfortunately, these amounted to “bad philosophy, because he is unaware of it as a discipline and a practice with a history,” Professor Crane said.
Philosophers say that a lot. That’s probably because there are a lot of people doing that kind of bad philosophy.
“If you’re pro-reason,” said Rebecca Goldstein Newberger, a research associate at Harvard University who is currently a visiting professor of philosophy at the New College of the Humanities in London, “you need all the resources you can get.” Recent outbreaks of “philosophy jeering” such as Hawking’s were ill-informed, incoherent and irresponsible – faced with today’s extremes of irrationality”, she added.
I’ve seen a good many of those.
Stephen Law, senior lecturer in philosophy at Heythrop College, put the case for philosophy’s role in “raising autonomous critical thinkers”.
He asked whether, since “I have an unavoidable responsibility to make my own moral judgement, a responsibility I can’t hand over to some supposed expert… shouldn’t our education system both confront us with that responsibility, and also ensure we have the intellectual and emotional maturity we’ll need to discharge it properly?”
If recent decades had seen “great moral advances in our attitudes towards women, gay people and other races”, this was “largely as a result of our being prepared to question received moral opinion and to think things through in just the way philosophy requires of us”, he continued.
It’s also because of changes in feelings though. The two are connected, but feelings are prior, for good and ill.
And the academic discipline itself has become very conformist, Crane said.
Professor Newberger took a similar line, reflecting that she had “only managed to maintain my enthusiasm for philosophy by staying away from philosophers”.
Goldstein, he meant, but anyway it’s a good line.
One problem with philosophy is that some of it, notably post-modernism, appears to be closer to dadaism than thinking thinky thoughts. When people like Rorty and Derrida push deconstruction and semantic games instead of systematic argument, philosophers should not be surprised their discipline is coming into disrepute.
The above comment was meant to follow this quote (I hope it works this time):
Hawking did actually use the phrase, “philosophy is dead”.
Ah, the perils of English syntax.
Or, in Hawking’s words: “Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”
I wonder just to what extent it depends on the discipline. Indeed, you can hear such remarks quite often from the physicists and I suspect that there is some truth to this. This concerns not just discoveries but also the inspiration for the research: my impression is that the contemporary physicists look upon the philosophers as too ignorant to give them even the impulse for making new discoveries.
Anyway, I wouldn’t automatically extend the judgment about philosophy in physics to all disciplines. I would say that e.g. in mathematics the situation is not so gloomy. But the reason might be that there are in fact not so few philosophers with a very good mathematical training and background. Perhaps in this respect mathematics is an exception? That’s certainly a possibility. Is there anyone here ready to risk a general diagnosis?
To me, this remark rings all the alarm bells. The thing is that (imo) a lot of academic philosophy degenerated into little more than historical erudition. In some circles at least, a “good work” must – just must – contain all the obligatory references and discussions of Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and many other ancient gods. Otherwise it lacks depth and it’s blind to the perspective of philosophy as “a practice with history”. (For comparison, imagine similar constrains in chemistry: imagine that your paper must – just must – contain references and discussion of Jābir ibn Hayyān, Paracelsus and Michal Sedziwój; otherwise it will be accused of blindness to the perspective of chemistry as “a practice with history”). This is usually excused by appeals to “deeper understanding”, provided by the study of old masters, but in fact it functions as a Courtier’s Reply, always at hand to shelter the current academic practice.
How about “more science, less ancient history of ideas”? I’m more and more attracted to the view that one should be allowed to study philosophy only after learning something else – only after studying some other scientific discipline first. What do you think?
I’m just going to leave this here if I may… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmycXN-dAOw
Ariel, you make a host of unsubstantiated claims. Would you care to elucidate? Indeed, Hawking’s ventures into philosophy were “bad philosophy”. Why should this ring alarm bells? Have you considered any of Hawking’s “bad philosophy”? For example, in his and Mlodinow’s book The Grand Design, which begins with the fatuous and unsupported claim that philosophy is dead, the authors immediately speak of “model dependent realism”, which is a philosophical and not a scientific statement. It is not scientifically verifiable. There are no experimental tests which will show whether or not there is such a thing as model-dependent realism. They do not even attempt to explain what they mean by the term. This is really bad philosophy. It is apparently metaphysical or ontological, but what does the claim mean? And the only way to answer the question is to explore what (other) philosophers have said about the issue. This might indeed take you back to historical figures like Kant, for instance, whose Critique of Pure Reason is in the same rationalist tradition to which Hawking and Mlodinow apparently belong (while clearly not understanding what they are talking about). Read Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex if you want to see how “history of philosophy” is indeed relevant to philosophy today, and to our grasp of some fundamental conceptual issues.
And, by the way, your pointless reference to much touted “Courtier’s Reply” (which is, pace PZ, simply misleading, even with respect to theology), does not answer any questions. It’s a kind of reflex in people who simply don’t want to learn anything, and think they can dispose of “deeper understanding” simply by repeating two words (viz., ‘Courtier’s’ and ‘Reply’). Science genuinely needs philosophy. Of course, philosophy without a shred of scientific understanding is hobbled too, but we should not too readily think that scientists actually know what they are talking about. In physics, especially, there is simply too much mathematical speculation without any idea how their equations can hook onto reality. That’s what Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics was all about. In any event, before making pontifical remarks about philosophy, you ought at least to be willing (given you apparent adulation of science) to provide some evidence for your claims.
In my (admittedly uninformed and outsiderish) opinion, there are two problems with philosophy today:
First, when a philosopher or student of philosophy says something that makes sense or is useful, the statement tends to be labeled “common sense” or “reason” or “truth” or “a damn good idea that I’ll use in some other field.” It’s only really bad ideas or idiotic or useless statements that remain under the label “philosophy,” because no one else wants to claim them.
And second, there are too many liars, con-artists, ideologues, and political, religious and social propagandists using the field of philosophy as cover, either for bad or useless “work,” or for spouting propaganda in a more respectable, reason-y disguise. The philosophers trying to do real good in their field are currently being drowned out by the religious propagandists, the libertarians, the right-wingers trying to pretend their backward nonsense is “pure reason,” and the post-modernists who really don’t seem to know what the fuck they’re on about.
I’m not sure what can be done about either of these problems — a philosopher’s work can’t be verified quite as reliably as a biologist’s, which is probably why we have the latter problem in the first place.
Another problem with what we today call “philosophy” is that it’s a victim of progress. Back in Aristotle’s time, “philosophy” (which means love or pursuit of knowledge) meant ALL pursuits of knowledge, from math to physics to astronomy to whatever else — it was all one field, with one overarching system of reasoning, before our knowledge expanded and forced them all to diversify and become separate enterprises. Perhaps that very diversification has inevitably resulted in the original field known as “philosophy” becoming something of an empty nest.
In physics, especially, there is simply too much mathematical speculation without any idea how their equations can hook onto reality.
Yes, but it’s also physicists doing experiments — not philosophers — who do the work of hooking those equations and speculation into reality.
Raging Bee. More empty pontificating, by yet another person without even a glancing acquaintance with philosophy?! Give some examples, don’t just spout off dismissive words that have no obvious relationship to what is happening in philosophy. When you and others speak about post-modernism what are you referring to? Post-modernism may have been one of the flavours of fin de siècle literary theory, more than philosophy, but it is scarcely of enormous significance today as an independent school of thought. In the end, of course, there is some point to what used to be called post-modernism, because it raised very important questions about meaning, the stability of meaning, and hermeneutics, that we ignore at our peril, as the kind of empty verbiage you treat us to demonstrates so clearly. Speaking of con-artists ……
“Yes, but it’s also physicists doing experiments — not philosophers — who do the work of hooking those equations and speculation into reality.”
Yes, Raging Bee, but what does it mean to hook those equations onto reality? Is it some kind “model” of “reality” (whatever reality means, if it is understood in terms of modelling), or is it related to reality in some other way? And what, pray tell, is reality? Physics is in trouble, in large part, because it cannot achieve closure, which requires some kind of empirical data, and empirical data itself is becoming more and more rarified, as numbers of particles multiply, and identification of particles begins to take on some of the post-modernist problems related to hermeneutics.
I agree with Goldstein, by the way, about a lot of academic philosophy, which is often over-mathematised or over-logicised, in order to live up to what is taken as normative knowledge now (namely science), but there is still lots of good work being done in philosophy that is not just a cover for religion, as you suggest.
How is physics “in trouble?” And how, exactly, is empirical data becoming “more and more rarified, as numbers of particles multiply, and identification of particles begins to take on some of the post-modernist problems related to hermeneutics?” Seriously, what the fuck are you talking about? You’re starting to sound like a stoner trying to help his roommate study for a philosophy exam.
Raging Bee. Be civil, or you’re not worth the bother of responding. Physics is in trouble because it’s got a host of theories (the multiverse, for example) that cannot be empirically tested. That’s what it looks like when a science is in trouble. Data is more and more rarified in the sense that no one has any idea how to confirm string theory, which is the basis for the multiverse theory, which posits new dimensions to reality. As Smolin points out, if string theorists are wrong,
And that’s really rarified, don’t you see? So that’s what I’m talking about. This should have been clear enough from the sentence you quote. However, this is the last remark I make unless you are willing to be reasonably civil. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but I won’t respond to crude insults.
Raging Bee. Be civil, or you’re not worth the bother of responding.
You call me ignorant, and then tell me to be civil? Stop being a hypocrite. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.
Physics is in trouble because it’s got a host of theories (the multiverse, for example) that cannot be empirically tested.
Where’s the “trouble” in that? There’s nothing wrong, or damaging, about such speculation, as long as everyone is being honest about what they’re doing.
Data is more and more rarified in the sense that no one has any idea how to confirm string theory…
Just because you can’t confirm a theory, does not mean that the data itself is in any way “rarefied.” The data is the data — either it’s sufficient to prove or disprove a theory, or it isn’t, in which case we just need to get more data.
Theirs will be a cautionary tale of how not to do science, how not to let theoretical conjecture get so far beyond the limits of what can rationally be argued that one starts engaging in fantasy.”
Big fucking deal. It won’t be the first time a bunch of scientists engaged in speculation that turned out to be unfounded. If string theory turns out to be wrong, or we just never find enough data to verify it, then it will be abandoned and physicists will move on to something else. None of that will mean the whole profession of physics is “in trouble.” Dumping theories and speculations that don’t pan out is a major part of how science is done.
@15 Eric MacDonald,
String theory as the basis for the multiverse hypothesis? I thought that it was ‘fine tuning’.
Any cosmologists out there?
@16 Raging Bee,
Agreed, science has been ‘in trouble’ many times before, the impasse has usually been resolved with a new and verifiable theory.
Well, it is a big deal, when, as Smolin says, the standard model was formulated by the early 1970s, and that model, as Smolin says, has big problems. Here’s how he describes them:
And then he goes on to speak about the inconsistencies at the heart of physics, hoping, as he says, “that a true unified theory of the particles and forces will give a unique answer to this problem.”
Long time since I read the book. But we can go on. One of the problems, as I understand it, that we are almost at the limit of particle acceleration at CERN (anything larger would be simply unimaginably expensive — remembering that the US already closed down its plans for a particle accelerator in Texas, which would have been much smaller) and this still hasn’t delivered a unified theory, so undecidability seems to be an insurmountable obstacle to further progress in physics. I’m no physicist, obviously, but this is a serious conceptual problem for those who think that underlying physics is the metaphor of a “model” of reality. You simply can’t make a model out of something that is undecidable. And that’s a problem, if what you want to do is to end up with is a model of the real world, the Grand Design as Hawking and Mlodinow call it. My point, remember, is to point out some of the philosophical problems at the heart of science, and this is one of them, just as Gödel threw a wrench into the completeness of mathematics. One of the suggestions seems to be that we can still progress in physics, but without the empirical verification, since we can know what is true by considering the beauty of the equations (or some such thing), apparently because no one can think of a way to progress further. But the further and further away we get from empirical testability (and we seem to be quite a fair distance away from that now), the further and further we get away from model-dependent reality. Then what are the equations about? This is what I mean by rarified.
RJW. One implication of string theory, as I understand it, is multidimensionality, and from this the multiverse follows.
But I should add, the multiverse is simply, by definition, untestable, and this would bring us back to the perspectival nature of human knowledge. What Hawking and Mlodinow were talking about was a model-dependent reality that was not dependent on a point of view. It would be a self-standing model of what the universe is like. But, if we cannot test the theory, then we are inevitably driven back to the perspectival view, and science, instead of being able to abstract from the human (from all the secondary qualities), and like Pythagoras, constructing the world from numbers, will be forced back to consider the limits of testability from a human perspective, so not a free-standing model at all. I am not sure of all the implications of this, but it would, at least, suggest that we have taken the fundamental abstraction, assumed by science, to its furthest limit, and we will be forced back to take some account of what it is to be a scientific animal. Whether this would resurrect some forms of Aristotelianism, as some religious metaphyisicians suggest, is anyone’s guess, but it does seem as though experimental physics may be reaching its limit, and may, in the end, be undecidable; and perhaps this is because it is limited by a point of view, our point of view, in fact.
One of the many things that physicists are currently looking for is a mathematically consistent way of both extending the standard model for elementary particles to arbitrarily high energies and including gravity in that model in away that matches the predictions of general relativity at large scales. Smolin’s complaint is basically that, with regard to that objective, the community currently has too many of its eggs in one basket. This may be true and may be a bit of a problem or “trouble”, but it hardly amounts to the discipline being “in trouble” in any larger sense. A related bit of minor trouble is the effect of people trying to express in lay terms the excitement they feel about their ideas and what they may “mean” in a “philosophical” sense if they pan out. Misconceptions about where things like “many worlds” and “the multiverse” come from abound, but are not really worth correcting since they are either only loosely based on the physics or the putative physics behind them is highly speculative and as yet only half-baked.
With regard to philosophy, I think the complaints of some physicists are shared by many philosophers. Indeed it has been characteristic of the discipline that many of its most prominent exemplars have been at least as dismissive of it as any modern physicist. And with good reason. The problem with philosophy, as I see it, is in its misrepresentation by some as an advancing body of knowledge (about something other than just what other philosophers have written) rather than an ongoing effort to help us understand where one another are “coming from” when we appear to be in disagreement (and may or may not actually be so), rather than to actually answer the questions.
While I share Feynman’s view that the philosopher of science does nothing to help me do science, I also think that a good one can help the public to understand and value what we do – just as an ornithologist may do for birds.
Eric MacDonald:
It’s not calling Hawking’s ventures “bad philosophy” that rang the alarm bells – you misunderstood me. See the final fragment of this comment.
Here are the claims which I made:
(1) “Indeed, you can hear such remarks quite often from the physicists”
A statement of fact. It’s not just Hawking, but also Krauss, Feynman, Weinberg, and others. Unsubstantiated, really?
(2) “I suspect that there is some truth to this”
Indeed, I suspect this. I’m not buying into the view that this is all the physicists’ fault. More about it below.
(3) “my impression is that the contemporary physicists look upon the philosophers as too ignorant to give them even the impulse for making new discoveries.”
The ignorance part was clearly implied by Hawking. In addition, you have quotes like “We should not expect it [philosophy] to provide today’s scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their work or about what they are likely to find” (Weinberg), or the famous “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”. Yes, I think that they indeed look upon philosophers in this way. You think they don’t?
The question is what makes these physicists so hostile to philosophers. Here is what I see as the two main reasons:
1. Philosophers present themselves as “better knowers” – cf. your “we should not too readily think that scientists actually know what they are talking about.” This is irritating and it’s received as pure arrogance – what these physicists see is a bunch of presumptuous laymen who come to pontificate and teach them, typically without bothering to actually do any of the stuff.
2. Philosophers keep repeating that “Science genuinely needs philosophy”. However, the question “how exactly and why?” receives disappointing answers. It looks like at the moment academic philosophy doesn’t have any bearing on the practice of doing physics (see the quotes above). As for your remarks about “trouble in physics”: do you really expect the philosophers, of all the people, to provide a solution to the problems of the unified theory? Forced to gamble, I would put all my money on the physicists, not on philosophers. How about you?
(As to 2, we have also Alan Cooper’s remark that “a good one [philosopher of science] can help the public to understand and value what we do”. This answer is at least clear, although I’m sure it will be very disappointing to the philosophers: on this view, the value of their work lies in popularization, of all things! Unfortunately, here is the obvious problem: who reads the papers authored by the professional philosophers of science? Hint 1: no, it’s not the general public. Hint 2: search for the readers among … other professional philosophers!)
Lastly, about the “alarm bells”. It was not about Hawking’s philosophy; it was about “a kind of reflex” in some philosophical circles, where people are taught to introduce tons of historical material to whatever discussion they have. Don’t discuss a contemporary problem – Plato forbid! – without a thorough overview of its genesis, from the Neanderthals to the present! This is my traumatic experience of discussing with some philosophers.
Eric, it’s not that I do not want to learn anything. It’s rather that when I want history, I go to the historians. However, when I’m interested in (say) issues in contemporary set theory – even the ones with a philosophical flavor – I do not need Plato’s ‘ideas’ or Aristotelian ‘essences’, thank you very much, and I react nervously to such pointless distractions. I suspect that the physicists are no different in this respect.
…and this still hasn’t delivered a unified theory, so undecidability seems to be an insurmountable obstacle to further progress in physics. I’m no physicist, obviously, but this is a serious conceptual problem for those who think that underlying physics is the metaphor of a “model” of reality. You simply can’t make a model out of something that is undecidable.
Horsemuffins. Just because a model is not 100.00% complete, does not mean it’s totally worthless or unusable. Anyone with a grade-school education can plainly see that physics still gives us a perfectly valid and relevant model of, at the very least, the reality most people live in. Current problems in sting theory pose absolutely no problems for the rest of physics, just as unresolved past questions about the nature of light posed no problems for Newtonian physics.
My point, remember, is to point out some of the philosophical problems at the heart of science, and this is one of them…
Or so it appears so far. I’m sure there were at least a few armchair philosophers who said the same thing back when the physicists of their time were having problems figuring out what atoms were made of. Ultimately physics moved on without them, and there’s a rather long historical record that suggests the same thing will happen again to the armchair philosophers of today.
I’m not sure about your motives here, Eric, but you sound like quite a few anti-rationalist cranks I’ve heard from here and elsewhere, who seem strangely desperate to insist that science is in some kind of “trouble” because it doesn’t yet know everything, therefore something else is needed, or “materialism” is bad, or “scientism” has to be destroyed before it brings us back to Stalinism, or something.
Philosophers present themselves as “better knowers” – cf. your “we should not too readily think that scientists actually know what they are talking about.” This is irritating and it’s received as pure arrogance – what these physicists see is a bunch of presumptuous laymen who come to pontificate and teach them, typically without bothering to actually do any of the stuff.
And on the other side of the coin, there’s the philosophers — or the people pretending to do philosophy — who see scientists as a bunch of presumptuous professionals who come to pontificate and teach others, without admitting there might be some truth those “materialists” can’t grasp, which the so-called philosophers (or whatever they actually are, see my comment #9 above) want us to think somehow trumps “materialistic” science.
Posting a comment for Tim Harris pending repair of his commenting difficulty –
This is Tim Harris. Since when I try to comment under my own name, I am at once presented with a message that I am possibly an impostor, I am trying under my two middle names. So ‘John Gibson’ is also ‘Tim Harris’. I simply wonder whether those who are so eager to rancorously dismiss philosophy have bothered to read, say, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Susan Haack, Judith Jarvis Thomson or Philip Kitcher (for the last two of whom the biologist Jerry Coyne has professed his respect). I suspect that almost certainly they have not. There are certainly, also, other philosophers who are worth reading, but that will suffice. There is a splendid essay by Sir Peter Medawar (a scientist, and a not inconsiderable one, in case those commenters who profess an interest in science have not heard of him) in which he remarks on the contempt he feels both for those whom he sees as professing what he calls ‘poetism’ and for those who espouse ‘scientism’. I tend to agree with him.
Tim (if that’s your real name): thanks for naming some names, but I, for one, would appreciate something more than just names, such as some quick summation of what those authors have to say, and why it’s worth reading. I don’t doubt that you know what you’re talking about; but it’s easy to bluff one’s way out of an argument by saying “just read this book” without actually engaging with the material allegedly to be found in it. Randroids and Bible-thumpers do that sort of thing all the time, so I’ve learned to be skeptical when others do it too. (After all, Hitler’s apologists can say the same thing WRT “Mein Kampf.”) And besides, I suspect many of us here may not have time to read books by the authors you cite, unless you give us good specific reasons to think it would be worthwhile.
RB – I’ve quoted a fair bit of Haack and Nussbaum here and at ur-B&W, so you could find useful samples just by searching here and the old place. I think I’ve also quoted some Kitcher and some Williams.
Posting for Tim Harris again –
Raging Bee, there is such a thing nowadays as the internet, and if you are genuinely interested in learning something about these philosophers as opposed to trying to score a point I’ve seen made countless times, then all you have to do is to push a few buttons on your computer. A comment is hardly the place to give potted descriptions of the work of five or six philosophers.