
Why Science Needs Metaphysics - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/why-science-needs-metaphysics
======
draaglom
It's a shame that philosophy has gained such a poor reputation in certain
circles.

I mean, it's understandable: the extent of most people's interaction with
philosophy is with cartesian-style "but can we even know we exist??" navel-
gazing -- or worse, with the intentionally obscure bits of continental
philosophy.

Because of this reputation, many (the majority of?) scientifically-minded
people view it as a binary choice: you're either a good empiricist or you're
one of those damn poststructuralist lit-crit people from the humanities
department.

IMHO: people who hold this mindset risk missing out on a powerful tool for
their mental toolbox.

~~~
Retric
Step 1: Name a single piece of information* gained from philosophy that is not
currently debated.

This is why people look down on philosophy. While people might pretend to
disagree with this, I would take the complete lack of counter examples as
agreement.

PS: And because debate about word choice is so popular, _information: facts
provided or learned about something or someone._

~~~
foldr
One neat result in metaphysics is the discovery that there can't be a property
for every predicate, since this gives rise to analogs of Russel's paradox.
(Does the property of being a non-self-exemplifying property exemplify
itself?)

~~~
dkural
This is a result in logic, a branch of mathematics. Logic, as practiced inside
mathematics, is far more advanced than what's practiced inside philosophy
departments. Something like more than 95% logic professors inside philosophy
departments cannot competently explain anything in logic after Godel & Tarski.

~~~
drdeca
It seems to me that there is no clear break between logic and philosophy?

Nor between logic and mathematics.

There is also the idea that part of why philosophy is dismissed is because
people tend to take results and say that the result isn't really part of
philosophy.

Could this be because their idea of philosophy is that it has no results, so
any results they are shown are concluded to be not part of philosophy?

------
jules
The argument is the same as some religious use: science can't explain
everything, therefore we need religion. The counterargument is the same too:
while science can't explain everything, religion and metaphysics explain
nothing. The other inconvenient fact is that lots of things that were
previously thought to be not explainable by science have since been explained
by science. Science will continue to nibble at religion and metaphysics and
the religious and meta-physicists will continue to move the goalposts.

~~~
camelNotation
That's one of the key points of the article. You can't reasonably extrapolate
that the goalposts will always move. Just because science is able to discern
more than we expected in the past and will continue to do so in the future,
doesn't provide us with any concrete reason to trust that its eventual scope
is equivalent to the full breadth and depth of potential understanding. In
fact, quite the contrary since the great virtue of science is that its scope
is limited to empirical, quantifiable truths.

You can avoid that uncomfortable question by proclaiming empirical reality to
be the only reality, but that's a metaphysical claim with no greater merit
than its opposite.

~~~
nerd_stuff
For anybody who studies science that isn't an uncomfortable question and it's
over century old at this point. The last time the field of science had a high
level of certainty that it would solve everything ever was probably the late
1800's.

I dealt with this question in high school physics, it's really no big deal.
When you get to a point where all you can do is make a "metaphysical claim
with no greater merit than its opposite" you go find something better to do
with your time.

------
shasta
Summary: Philosopher believes philosophy is important.

Next we ask this expert on extraterrestrial life whether extraterrestrial life
exists.

~~~
jevgeni
Summary: Non-fibbler disparages fibbling.

------
snake_plissken
This article reminds me of my first two years in college when I was studying
physics and taking some philosophy courses. The professors and the department
chair eventually found out who the science kids were and then vehemently tried
to recruit us into double majoring, or at least minoring in philosophy. And
then a few of the kids from philosophy came over to the physics side to take
some classes and some of them got minors/double majors. I never did get that
minor, but those philosophy classes were some of the best I took over the 4
years.

The sciences and the philosophies are incredibly intertwined and to argue
otherwise or dismiss philosophy as useless is just being lazy. While in many
ways they are different, fundamentally they are identical. We are seeking a
better understanding and explanation of the world we live in.

------
brianclements
Like many subjects in recent times (last 50 years or so), they've gotten
really entrenched and dusty because they're afraid to go beyond their well
defined borders (and then get more difficult to teach and make industry out
of).

IHO, from a bigger anthropological viewpoint, philosophy and religion are
extremely rich areas of idea prototyping. They came first. They are based on
intuition and are good-faith efforts to understand our world. Science came
later and was much better at it. What needs to happen culturally is that
people need to all be philosophers, they need to have a reverence toward the
sacred and toward the cultures that hold it dear. However, they can't let
religion, or philosophy, prematurely cut off in their minds what the realm of
science can embody. There are long lists of famous scientists that did this,
and even they were proven too quick to place arbitrary limits on science and
prescribe "everything else" as religion, or metaphysics.

To me, philosophy/religion/metaphysics are all "pre-physics" in a way.
Intuitions without proofs...yet. The intuitions of many individuals, over many
centuries, however seemingly incorrect scientifically, aren't completely
worthless. It's like saying art is worthless. They may not explain
mechanically how something behaves, but they offer insight and new ways of
thinking, which are really at the core of how to truly understand something
difficult.

------
matthferguson
are the four fundamental forces not already "metaphysics" ? such is the
position of both philosophy and common language , great tools for cooperation
and ethics , but subjective semantic arguments are most certainly dead ends
when observing and determining the most probable reality.

------
petewailes
TL;DR: Man who's devoted his life to woolly thinking, thinks about things in a
woolly fashion.

Note 1

"If we are embedded in a reality that can be beyond our reach, how can we hope
to achieve any knowledge at all? Perhaps Kant was right, and what we think we
know may simply reflect the categories of the human mind. We can perhaps only
deal with things as they appear to us. How things are in themselves may
forever be beyond our grasp. Alternatively, the reality that we seek to
understand may not even be subject to rational understanding. It may be
sufficiently chaotic and disordered to be unintelligible."

Note 2

"There is such a thing as scientific progress, and it happens through
systematic trial and error or, in Karl Popper’s terminology, conjecture and
refutation. A "scientific realist" has to be wary, though, about how such
realism is defined. A realism that makes reality what contemporary science
says it is links reality logically to the human minds of the present day.
Science is then just a human product, rooted in time and place. Bringing in
future science - or ideal science \- may sound more plausible, but even then
there is a distinction between science reflecting (or corresponding to) the
nature of reality and it being simply a human construction."

That's the problem with the article, and a lot of Trigg's ideas. He assumes
that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the output of
science is flawed". Which is obviously false, like saying science done by
people who speak different languages would express itself differently. However
you analyse the structure of an atom is irrelevant to its structure: it is
what it is. Sine qua non. There's something which is an atom, whatever you
call it and however you discover it.

The postulate that "the universe my not be ultimately understandable" should
only be taken as a priori at the point where it appears that that is in fact
the case. Which it doesn't. (Don't confuse this as a dismissal of uncertainty
- that certainly exists, but even that lack of certainty can be expressed in
certain terms and understood).

Editing for clarity:

By "the output of science is flawed" \- I phrased this poorly. I don't mean
that the interpretation of results is flawed, which it obviously can be. See
phlogiston, early models of the solar system and so on. Rather, I meant that
he seems to imply that the nature of what's being studied can change given the
human looking at it and their understanding. Which isn't correct. Whether you
understand how the solar system works or not makes no impact on what it's
doing or why it's doing it.

I'd have been more accurate to say "the eventual output of the scientific
process, upon where it has arrived at the correct answer, is flawed".

~~~
vinceguidry
> He assumes that "science is done by people", "people are flawed", ergo "the
> output of science is flawed".

What's so wrong about this? It seems so obvious it should be uncontroversial.
The first several dozen scientific hypotheses to explain any given phenomenon
are all bound to be very very wrong. Even the big-t Theories have to be
adjusted many many times before and after they start to get referred to as
such.

We have no idea what's true until long after the fact. Many respected
scientists of the early 1900s believed in and contributed to the science of
eugenics. Scientists we still respect today for their contributions to other
fields.

> Which is obviously false, like saying science done by people who speak
> different languages would express itself differently.

Again, why the scornful dismissal? The scientific establishment of the West
differs in many ways from the establishment in the East. Not just language,
but culture also produces differences. We managed to collaborate with the
Soviets to do space missions, but it took an awful lot of work to do it.
Medicine can have some very striking differences.

~~~
petewailes
Because those differences are a reflection in differences of understanding,
not of how the underlying system being studied actually works. Whether or not
you say that the sky being blue is because of light and the composition of the
atmosphere and the current weather, or because the Sky God made it that way
has nothing to do with the actual reason why. It's solely a reflection of your
explanation. It is how it is for a reason, and that reason doesn't change
because your explanation does.

------
jackmaney
> Can Science Explains Everything

[ _cringe_ _cringe_ _twitch_ ]

------
debacle
> Can Science Explains Everything

Yes.

Edit: I think a scary number of you guys are conflating the process of science
with our current observational model. Quantum theory is the product of
science, it's not science itself.

~~~
bottled_poe
This is a strange belief to hold, considering we can prove this not to be the
case with pure logic.

Suppose we observe that when A happens, B occurs. This does not imply that A
causes B. In fact, we can _never_ confirm that A causes B, regardless of how
closely we measure the reaction. 'Preposterous!' I hear you say on the other
end of the intertubes.. but alas, it is true. Beyond the realm of reality and
hubris we might observe that in fact X causes Y, and that A is simply an
observable effect of X. Similarly, B is just an effect of Y. If you really
want to explode that mind, think about how broadly this concept can be
applied.

~~~
snarfy
This is a flawed argument. Nothing can be proven in that sense. We cannot even
prove that 1 = 1. I cannot prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but there is a
high probability it will.

~~~
knodi123
I had a professor in college who, when challenged with that kind of "but we
can't _knoooowwwww_ " argument, would reply "Alright, you are correct. But for
the sake of not being an insufferable twit, let us assume that 1 = 1 and move
on..."

