philosophy and science

philosophy and science
scientia, episteme, doxa, Principles of Philosophy, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy


In seventeenth-century Europe, what we would call science was a part of philosophy. By the end of the twentieth century in Europe and America, science had not only become distinct from philosophy (with the qualifications mentioned below) but had grown beyond anything the seventeenth century could have imagined. Most of the rest of the world had accepted Western science more enthusiastically than Western philosophy. The history of this reversal of the intellectual order has yet to be written, not surprising given that even within the different nations of the West the story varies considerably. In contemporary French and German, for example, “science” and “Wissenschaft” continue to mean well-founded knowledge in general, while in English “science” usually signifies knowledge of the natural world.


The word science comes from the Latin scientia (itself a translation of the Greek episteme), meaning certain knowledge as opposed to mere opinion or doxa. The location of the study of the natural within philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be indicated by the names Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, d'Alembert, and Kant. Natural philosophy, the study of nature, encompassed much of what we would call science. Those who studied knew the philosophical traditions and described their work as philosophy—Descartes's Principles of Philosophy (1644), for example, and Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)—and these works in turn did much to set the agenda for philosophy in general.


In the nineteenth century science and philosophy began to part ways. The word “scientist,” introduced in 1833 to describe this growing breed of professionals, may be taken as a symbol of the parting. The reasons for it included the increasing success of science not only in astronomy and mechanics but in chemistry, physiology, biology, and geology; the creation of new scientific institutions, such as research institutes, university departments, and surveys; the reform of European university systems and the introduction of systematic education in the sciences; the foundation of specialized scientific societies and publications; the increasing inaccessibility of science to those not trained in its practices; and the coupling of science with technology.


Scientists and philosophers alike thus had to rethink their classifications of knowledge. From roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, two main schools can be distinguished. The first was the militantly proscience tradition of positivism. Its founder, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), famously demoted philosophy from the umbrella discipline of science to a prior and more primitive form of knowledge, less superstitious and better founded than religion to be sure, but still not as reliable or as free of strange conceptions as science itself (see Positivism). Although by the end of the century many scientists had abandoned philosophical worries, others in this tradition, such as Pierre Duhem and Ernst Mach, continued to see a role for philosophy. In works such as the former's La théorie physique: son object, sa structure (1906) and the latter's Knowledge and Error (1905), they explored the conceptual foundations of science and the methods that they believed had made it successful. By the 1930s, philosophy of science had become an important part of philosophy at least as conceived by the logical positivists and related philosophers such as Karl Popper. Because they saw in science the promise formerly held by philosophy as the prime exemplar of reliable knowledge, and scientific decision-making as the model of rational action, they believed understanding science to be a necessary preliminary to philosophical studies and political life alike.


The other main school of thought about the relations between science and philosophy sheltered a number of different traditions including Kantianism, neo Kantianism, idealism, Hegelianism, and phenomenology. Some who fell into this eclectic group were interested in science but rejected the positivist analysis of it. William Whewell (1794–1866), for example, thought that positivists had the relation between science and religion absolutely wrong and that they underestimated the formative role of ideas in scientific change. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) moved from philosophy of mathematics to his phenomenological program. Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) offered a reading of the history of science alternative to that of the positivists. By and large, though, antipositivists were skeptical about science's claims to epistemic authority and deeply hostile to its growing power in society.


Following World War II, the institutional split between science and philosophy was almost complete. Science rode high and most scientists went through their entire careers without giving a thought to philosophy, now relegated to one discipline among many in the humanities. Philosophy was itself deeply divided between the descendants of the positivists, now called analytic philosophers, and the descendants of the antipositivists, now known as the continental philosophers (since positivism had moved from the continent of Europe to Britain and America). Academic philosophy, at least in the United States, preferred analytic philosophy, and thus philosophy of science had high status. Philosophers of science (many if not most of whom were trained in the sciences) also found positions in departments of history and philosophy of science, or of science studies.Philosophers of science continued to study their twin traditional puzzles, the conceptual foundations of the sciences and scientific methodology. Those interested in foundations maintained close ties with the relevant scientific disciplines, talking to physicists about space and time, to biologists about the nature of species or the gene, and to cognitive scientists and psychologists about mental processes, meeting informally within the university structure or more formally at meetings such as those of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Those concerned with methodology and demarcation found themselves drawn into public affairs. In the case of McLean vs. The Arkansas Board of Education in 1981, for example, both philosophers and scientists spoke against the treatment of “creation science” as science (see Creationism). Theories of scientific change proliferated, proposed by philosophers such as Dudley Shapere, Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was enormously influential not only in philosophy of science but across all academic disciplines. In the 1960s, with the advent of new medical technologies such as in vitro fertilization, biomedical ethics began to take shape as a field. The Hastings Center (founded in 1969) was the first in a series of special research centers and university positions set up to deal with the ethical issues of scientific practices and applications.


Toward the end of the century, continental philosophy gained ground. Sociologists of science in particular began using the language of practices and construction to talk about science and technology. Their generally relativist conclusions that scientific knowledge owed more to human construction than to the natural world challenged a century-old tradition in philosophy of science and horrified scientists. The resultant grandiosely named Science Wars echoed debates about the nature of science carried on by positivists and antipositivists a hundred years earlier.


Rachel Laudan
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