Two Views on Science and Philosophy

There are different views on the relationship between science and philosophy.

One view is the position that whatever else philosophy does, it does it on the outskirts, in a territory that is either uninteresting or will be overtaken by science in due course — that is, either by some existing science or some science yet unknown. Philosophy lingers but contributes nothing truly useful and will (probably) expire as science expands. This would be the posture taken by certain (but certainly not all) science popularizers known to make disparaging remarks about philosophy, including the late Stephen Hawking. 

This position is essentially scientism. It makes a claim – implicitly or explicitly, and either ontological or epistemological (or both) – that science is the end all, be all. Whatever exists is whatever science tells us exists, and whatever we know comes through the hypothetico-deductive method. 

Another position says this. Science and philosophy are as distinct as many of the sciences are from one another, both in the questions they ask and the methods they use to arrive at their conclusions. What the physicist does is decidedly different from what the historian does, and their methods differ respectively, as well. They are, however, both legitimate fields of inquiry and produce various degrees of knowledge. One could draw similar distinctions between the biologist and the engineer, and so on. 

The second position also maintains that the truths which philosophy can get at – truths which can be held either with certainty or strong probability – are themselves philosophical truths. Some of these truths are moral truths (whereas science can help us produce an atom bomb, only philosophy can tell us when the conditions are appropriate, if ever, to drop one), some of these truths are metaphysical truths (the very structure of being itself), some of these truths are truths about the nature and kinds of knowledge (what counts as knowledge in the first place?). None of these truths, if any such truths exist, are truths which science delivers to us. Science must presuppose these truths; just as science presupposes logic (= a branch of philosophy), for science to make sense it must presuppose intellectual virtue, an external world, cognitive reliability, and many other things aside. Science cannot prove these assumptions; rather, if they are investigated at all, they must be investigated philosophically, since philosophy is the only discipline with no unexamined foundations. 

With respect to the first position – the position of scientism, if that’s what we want to call it – it must either resign a great number of important questions to the category of meaninglessness, or it must contend they are essentially unanswerable. Worse, as many have pointed out, the position of scientism is either trivial or self-defeating. It is trivial inasmuch as it includes (more or less) everything under the category of science, then there is no real conflict between science and philosophy, because philosophy will count as a science, under this expansive view. Alternatively, it is self-defeating inasmuch as it wants to exclude philosophy (= restrict everything to the hypothetico-deductive method) as a legitimate instrument of human inquiry, because the claim that we can only know that which comes through the scientific method is, of course, not something we know through the scientific method. Such is a decidedly philosophical claim, hence anybody who asserts it has already betrayed their commitment to the second position in an attempt to affirm the first.