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Here. This quote (from the article) may explain a lot about why scientists make such confused remarks about what they’re doing:
“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology
is to birds,” goes the saying attributed to Richard Feynman, the late
Caltech Nobelist, and repeated by Dr. [Steven] Weinberg.
Actually I love these sorts of sayings. Reminds me of the one: Writing about music is like dancing about fish.
Still, one would think the philosophy of science would have tremendous relevance to scientists.
I think that's 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture'. It's a remark of Steve Martin's (and false, I'd say).
It's also been attributed to Frank Zappa and to Elvis Costello. Google gives hits as follows:
Costello: 40,200
Zappa: 6,720
Martin: 2,650
So, you're probably right that it's by Steve Martin. 🙂
That's seems to me like a dangerous quote for a scientist to propagate. After all, even if ornithology is useless to birds – the pea-brained, unreflective objects of its study – it is not therefore useless.
Besides, I don't think ornithology is useless to birds. Might it not help us in preventing the extinction of some of their species?
Hmm, I'm starting to like the analogy…
Feynman's smart-ass comment actually insults the scientists more than the philosophers. Ornithology is useless to birds because they can't understand it; it's not useless to those who can understand it. But I'm quite sure Feynman didn't intend to say that about the scientists and philosophy of science!
I see I was pre-empted. Oh well–I like Chris's statement of the problem better!
This is actually an honest question: are there any clear-cut cases where scientists have improved their practices due to arguments from professional philosophers of science?
Bryan's question is interesting. I'd like to suggest, though, that what is "useful to scientists" may include more than things that "improved their practices." Bryan's question isn't wrong, but I think the question might be usefully put more broadly than he puts it. That said, I don't know the answer(s) either, but I too am curious to find out.
I am not sure if there are any cases in which philosophy of science has improved practices. But it seems to me that people like Michael Behe (proponent of "intelligent design") would benefit from some phil sci. Not because it would improve his scientific practice. But he does communicate with the public about the implications of science, and, when he does so, he seems fundamentally confused.
I think Paul may be assuming that Behe's confusions are due to ignorance (culpable or otherwise), rather than being intentional efforts to obfuscate and confuse in the service of a religious dogma.
Bryan's question is, perhaps, better split into two. Have scientists been influenced by the philosophy of science and has this improved their practices. On the former here is a link to Feynman himself writing what is, near as dammit, Popper's philosophy of science on a blackboard:
Whether this is an improvement depends on your view of Popper!
I suspect that a lot of the acrimony surrounding string theory these days would be eased if more physicists had spent time thinking about philosophy of science rather than just parroting Popper. Of course, now that personal feelings (and funding!) are involved, and not just scientific ideas, things aren't really going to calm down easily.
Of course I don't think phil sci would ACTUALLY cure Behe. My real point is just that the value of philosophy might manifest itself not in the sharpening of scientific practices, but in sharpening the way scientists communicate with the public. The better critiques of intelligent design in the popular press are the ones written by scientists who have reflected on some of the issues philosophers raise. Or so it seems to me.
Barnett Newman apparently once said, "Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds"
Is it really such a terrible thing that a lot of scientists appear to not have very sophisticated philosophies of science? The popularity of Popper amongst working scientists does not strike me as overly unfortunate, for example, despite the obvious inadequacies of falsificationism. Here's some bad philosophy of science for you: perhaps a commitment to some kind of falsificationism actually tends to make such a committed scientist more critical of established orthodoxy, which in turn speeds up scientific progress. I have no idea whether this is the case or not, but it seems possible that philosophical naivety on the part of scientists might actually be desirable for some such reasons. That is part of why I am not so quick to laugh off the attempts of scientists to reflect on their own practices, even if their ideas about this seem to me to be in some ways primitive. Kuhn, for all of his flaws, is important I think for just this reason. He showed how the patterns underlying the practices of working scientists might not always be apparent to the scientists themselves, and how the worldviews embraced by scientists (including conceptions of their own disciplines) can have dramatic effects on the theories these scientists assemble.
One area where philosophers have made a bit of difference to the practice of science is in parts of biology. Elliott Sober's book, Reconstructing the Past, actually had a (positive) effect on many systematists and how they thought about and did phylogenetic inference (how you make inferences about what is more closely related to what). This is just an example. Discussion of some philosophers' work has also made its way into "textbook" biology (e.g, Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology).
Popper is far and away the most cited philosopher of science by biologists, but it isn't clear that they understand him in many cases.
Lots of evolutionary biologists (Gould, Lewontin, etc.) cite and say they're influenced by philosophers. Whether this actually influences practice is another matter.
Its a tricky question in part because some philosophers do work that is published in biology journals (and in physics journals, etc.), and of course this work can (and does) affect the practice of scientists, but it is often less clear whether the work is philosophical, rather than just philosophers doing theoretical science. But it probably isn't possible or useful to draw a sharp line between certain parts of philosophy of biology and parts of theoretical biology (or the analogue in physics and philosophy of physics).
Of course, many philosophers of science will say that it isn't surprising that much of what philosophers of science do isn't all that useful to practicing scientists – that's because philosophy is, after all, a separate discipline and often interested in different questions that don't interest the practicing scientist.
I am not sure why the question is whether philosophy of science ever improved a scientist's practices. Shouldn't it be whether, either together with or in opposition to, science, philosophy ever contributed to knowledge and understanding? I would have thought that the answer to this question is 'yes'. In biological matters, philosophy has contributed to our understanding of natural selection, classificatory practice, and ontology. In psychology, it contributed to both the rise and fall of behaviorism, the practice of psychophysics (I have Carnap and Goodman in mind particularly), questions regarding the nature of linguistic competence, animal cognition, and of course consciousness.
Concerning Feynman's crack: ornithology might well not be of interest to birds, but anthropology is to humans.
I got the impression from Feynman's Lectures on Physics that he has a real axe to grind against philosophers of science. I think maybe he only read one book that pissed him off, but that's just an unjustifiable suspicion on my part.
Based purely on the quotes from the article, it looks like there are scientists who are interested and take sides on governing vs humean-best-systems accounts of law. I suppose that that's a separate issue from whether their practice has been improved by this philosophical interest.
The example I was given of the benefits of philosophy for science was in interpretation of quantum mechanics. Apparently the last few decades of philosophy of physics has explicitly pinned-down the measurement problem. The following are inconsistent:
1. Quantum mechanics is complete (all basic physical properties are described by the formalism)
2. The wave equation is correct (in an unmodified form)
3. Measurements have definite results.
And you can categorize all the variants and interpretations of QM by which statement they reject. (I'm not sure where Putnam's quantum logic fits, though). Some variants have empirical consequences!
I can't say for sure that this has had a salutary effect on physicists, so this doesn't qualify as clear-cut, but it's a place to look.
Feynman is well known for being dismissive of philosophy. So what? Many other scientists are like him. But many others have a great deal of respect for philosophers and their work.
Come to think of it, philosophers are the same way. Some are dismissive of scientists and their work, others respect them.
For a nice introduction to the philosophy of physics, with plenty of examples in which philosophy made/makes a (positive, constructive) difference to science, read Marc Lange, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics: Locality, Fields, Energy, and Mass (2002).
I think Chris and Pete had it right early in this discussion: the practice of ornithology by humans *is* helpful to birds. And I think something even stronger is true: the practice of ornithology *by birds* is extremely useful (essential, even) to birds. I mean, birds are probably the best and most knowledgable ornithologists in the world. (If only a similar thing were true of scientists and philosophy of science.)
Perhaps something to consider. One can't help but admire the years of learning and breadth of knowledge required to obtain a sophisticated insight into, say, Nietzsche's philosophy. Personally it's interesting to observe philosophers debating on particular subjects and philosophies, what these mean or imply. But professionally, what is a scientist to do with that if learned philosophers can't agree on philosophies that have been around forever–let alone recently.
On another level, if a scientist hears of some new discovery that is relevant to their work, the usual process is to set up some equipment and reproduce/observe the thing of interest. How does that experience, approach, and standard of proof mesh with ideas from philosophy?
Finally, I'm not sure I understand the defensiveness from philosophy regarding the original quote. I simply don't read it as saying philosophy of science was useless–just not so useful to scientists doing science. Let's face it, modern scientists' would still recognize their approach in Descartes' basic points in Meditations: don't prejudge, doubt, break down problems, be logical, be explicit…
Feynman was also famous for being irreverent, provocative, and anti-traditional. Some of this statement could be motivated by the simply enjoyment of watching the frenzied fuss as philosophers justify their own existence.
I would suggest that a lot of muddled science is characterised by a deficient guiding philosophy of that particular endeavour. For instance, I would count the implicit positivism in the Copenhagen Interpretation as being indicative of some of the problems of that interpretation.
Pursuing this line of thought, I'm tempted to suggest that a basic falsificationist philosophy is probably good enough for practising scientists….
Do philosophers of science really want scientists to know the philosophy of science? I would imagine that would be like anthropologists finding out that their subjects have already studied Margaret Mead.
The original source quote–about aesthetics/artists and ornithology/birds–was indeed made by Barnett Newman (in the 1970 documentary "Painters Painting", I believe). There are two reasons this is interesting: First, Newman himself wrote some of what might be called aesthetics; at least, he tried to develop a theory of the sublime that would make his art out to be sublime. Second, Newman said this at a time when the influence of aesthetics on art had already clearly manifested itself, and was soon going to take off like crazy.
Ayer once cited with approval–though perhaps did not apply seriously enough to himself–the claim that "the man who is ready to prove that metaphysics is impossible is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of his own." Scientists who think they deserve the final word on reality have good ground to be dismissive of philosophy–one of the tasks of philosophy of science, certainly, must be to find the boundaries between "reality" and "what science tells us about reality."
I think that saying is due to Bradley not Ayer. (A quote very much like it appears in the introduction to Appearance and Reality.)
My comments may come across as a little harsh, especially if you are a philosopher of science, but my expectation is that if all of the philosophers of science had never existed, nothing of any consequence in the history of evolutionary biology, or any other science for that matter, would have changed a whit.
Ludwig Boltzmann was apparently no more enthusiastic about philosophy than I am. He wrote the following a century ago:
"To go straight to the deepest depth, I went for Hegel; what unclear thoughtless flow of words I was to find there! My unlucky star led me from Hegel to Schopenhauer… Even in Kant there were many things that I could grasp so little that given his general acuity of mind I almost suspected that he was pulling the reader's leg or was even an imposter" [cited in D. Flamm, Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 14: 257 (1983)].
Indeed, Boltzmann's ultimate conclusion about the value of philosophies grounded in nothing more than words (presuming that the various authors were not intent on pulling the readers' legs) was a paragraph in Populaere Schriften:
"The most ordinary things are to philosophy a source of insoluble puzzles. With infinite ingenuity it constructs a concept of space or time and then finds it absolutely impossible that there be objects in this space or that processes occur during this time… the source of this kind of logic lies in excessive confidence in the so-called laws of thought" (L. Boltzmann. "Populaere Schriften" Essay 19, Ludwig Boltzmann, "Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems," B. McGuinness (ed) Reidel, Dordrecht, 1974, p 64).
One question that doesn't seem to have been met directly dead on, though Chris Stephen's remarks come very close is this: If the philosophy of science is ignored by scientists at their (Scientific? Philosophical? Truth Seeking?) peril, then just how could science be bettered (right now) with more philosophical sensitivity? I think that's the burden Feynman and Weinberg are placing on philosophers and either that burden ought to be met (as Elliot Sober's work often does) or it ought to be argued out of. If the claim is that meeting that burden is just doing science, well, you say tomato, I say tomato. But if one attempts to argue out of it, then why is one doing philosophy of science in the first place? Just what virtue is being promoted with it if the betterment of scientific practice is not its chief one, and why not just skip the concern with science and go straight for it? Hegel, anyone?
Coming late to this thread, what strikes me is that we philosophers of science apparently need to do a better job communicating our work to other philosophers, never mind scientists.
There are many examples of philosophy of science impacting directly on scientific practice. Perhaps part of the problem is that these cases often involve detailed technical knowledge, of both the relevant science and relevant philosophy, and thus are not as widely known as they might be. I have in mind such as:
— techniques of causal inference, e.g. from statistical data
— the appropriate use of highly stylized mathematical models, e.g. in economics
— explanations in neuroscience
— reductionism and explanations in genomics
— the use and meaning of innateness/nativism in zoology and cognitive science
— several issues in evolutionary biology and fundamental physics, as already mentioned earlier in the thread
All of these have in common that a methodological or conceptual issue in science turns on substantive views regarding something such as causation, the relation between model and reality, or explanation. And those in turn are things that philosophers have typically studied more than scientists have, so it’s not surprising that philosophers may have something to contribute. Often the cause of the alleged weakness in scientific practice is that practice’s de facto (but unknowing) obeisance to defunct philosophy, such as some crude version of positivism, Popperianism or reductionism. In such cases, it’s therefore not a matter of whether science can get by without philosophy but rather that it is unavoidably knee-deep in it already, and so it’s necessary to get that philosophy right. And the best way to do that is to think about it explicitly while keeping well informed about the relevant scientific details – i.e. exactly what good philosophy of science is all about.
Of course, often these critiques and debates are contentious. Different scientists and philosophers take opposite sides in them. But that’s nothing for us to be embarrassed about.
One further point here: the overlap between philosophy and theoretical science is evident not only with respect to the methodological questions above, but also with respect to more metaphysical issues too. E.g. take the nature of laws, of causation, or of time. One might think that such inquiries concern the nature of the physical universe and thus are also part of science broadly construed. And again, on these issues philosophers have much to contribute (as perhaps, at the risk of sounding ungallant, some of the scientists’ quotes in the NYT piece demonstrate indirectly).
I agree with Robert Northcott that philosophers do make substantive admonishments to scientific practice, but they are often ignored, with virtually no attempt by scientists to justify the ignorance. The case I'm thinking of is Clark Glymour's criticisms of regression analysis (perhaps Northcott's example of causal inference and statistical methods?) which, as I read the relevant non-philosophical literature is either explicitly dismissed (Chamont Wang) or totally ignored. It's been 18 years since his first article on this (the review of the Bell Curve) and yet, every day, thousands of social scientists use regression and continue to teach it to many more thousands of students. This, despite that, as far as I can see, Glymour's criticisms are philosophically spot on.
Philosophical criticism is usually ignored unless it is offered with a better technique that (also) can produce 'results' (journal publications, funding, progressive research programs, etc).
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