James Ladyman
When philosophers are credited with contributing to the development of scientific thought, they are usually referred to as scientists, logicians, or mathematicians. The history of philosophy is widely perceived to have been unproductive, while the history of science is taken to be a success story. Philosophers who are pressed to justify the existence of their subject often point out that science was once known as “natural philosophy,” and that the scientific technology upon which we depend is the fruit of a tree with philosophical roots. However, as Bertrand Russell (1912/1983, 90) pointed out, when any part of philosophy makes sufficient progress it is rebranded as part of one or other of the sciences. This is why most people are hard‐pressed to identify anything that philosophy has contributed to knowledge. Paraphrasing Monty Python, they are effectively saying, “Apart from physics, psychology, logic, and the scientific method, what has philosophy ever done for us?”
Since so far philosophy has not brought us peace, and because debate continues to rage about what makes for human flourishing, and for a human life lived well, people are apt to conclude that philosophy’s quest for wisdom has also been a failure. The competing conceptions of the good debated today have their roots in ancient philosophy, in religious traditions, and in various political movements, and we seem no closer to collectively choosing among them. However, they have been elaborated and refined, and the arguments on all sides clarified and detailed. There is much to learn from the journey that does not depend on reaching the destination, and many people continue to derive great benefit and inspiration from the writings of, for example, Aristotle, the Buddha, Confucius, and Seneca. Nobody can doubt the impact of Marx, for both good and ill, and more recently philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon have been profoundly influential. The fact of continued disagreement about ethics and political matters does not mean that philosophy has let us down. Indeed, the formulation by philosophers of such ideas as universal human rights, religious toleration, feminism, and socialism have contributed to great social progress, notwithstanding the work that remains to be done.
Let us grant that both natural philosophy and practical philosophy have been of value up to now. The future might be different. It might be argued that all that is worth doing by philosophers in value theory has been done, and they are now just recapitulating it, and fiddling at the edges with details of decreasing importance. However, this is not true, as there has been an explosion of work in new areas such as environmental, biomedical, and healthcare ethics in response to technological changes in society. Moreover, issues of disability, gender, race, and sexuality have been the focus of much original current thought in ethics and political philosophy.
In respect of natural philosophy, many scientists have claimed that current science has no further need of philosophical input. In what follows, I argue that they are wrong and that science is as much in need of certain kinds of philosophy as ever. Of course, even those traditional philosophical questions about which science has most to say, such as those concerning the nature of the self, free will, space, time and matter, and thought itself, have not been settled. However, we know much more about all of them, the form in which they are addressed has been transformed by the development of science, and we should expect further changes. Many philosophers contribute to debates about these and other conceptual and foundational issues in the different sciences. I do not detail any of the many examples or speculate about how developments in biology, neuroscience, physics, and other sciences will affect particular philosophical questions. Rather, I address general issues about the relationship between current and near future science and philosophy. I also point to trends that I think will affect all of the latter.
Just as weather forecasters remind us of the rain yesterday before attempting predictions, let us note the important features of philosophy’s recent history. There are many scientific developments that profoundly shaped philosophy in the twentieth century. Among the most important is the rise of quantum and relativity physics that contradicted so much of the philosophical foundations of classical physics. At the same time our understanding of deductive and inductive reasoning was revolutionized by the emergence of mathematical logic, and probability and statistics respectively. The rise of the behavioral, cognitive, and social sciences was no less significant in its effect on philosophy.
Several philosophical movements can be linked to these developments in science. The rise of logical positivism was directly inspired by the developments in mathematical logic and physics in the early twentieth century. It led many philosophers to give up on metaphysics. Ordinary language philosophy was arguably the abandoning of the ambitions of philosophy in the face of scientific incursion into its traditional heartlands of mind and language. Willard van Orman Quine declared that “philosophy of science is philosophy enough” (Quine 1953/1966, 151), inspiring naturalism in epistemology and metaphysics, and Donald Davidson set the agenda for philosophers of mind who became increasingly focused on the relationship between scientific psychology and folk psychology. More recently, the development of cognitive science and neuroscience has dominated philosophy of mind and language.
The so‐called analytic/continental divide began with a division among European philosophers between those who were heavily engaged with mathematics and physics, and those who eschewed science to concentrate on culture and history. For subsequent generations of so‐called continental philosophers the Holocaust, the mixed fortunes of Marxism, the decline of Christianity, the rise of consumer capitalism and technology were more important external drivers than the content of any scientific theories. The explosion in the number of scientists and the extent of technical and mathematical sophistication of scientific knowledge, and the specialization of thinkers and knowledge that became necessary as a result, have also profoundly affected philosophy.
Popularist philosophers have decried their academic colleagues for locking philosophy in the ivory tower when it belongs in the marketplace (Warburton 2010). On such a view, philosophy should return to the Socratic mission of discovering how we should live, and in so doing engage with the public. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of needless jargon and technicality in philosophy journal articles, and philosophers often assume the familiarity of other philosophers with a huge amount of background material. However, it would be peculiar to expect otherwise. Just as scientists in most fields now have to learn a huge amount before they can begin to make original contributions, there has been a vast amount of work done in philosophy and it would be absurd to expect philosophers to work in ignorance of it. Moreover, naturalistically inclined philosophers expect philosophers to work in the light of scientific knowledge and, since there is so much of the latter, they need to specialize in a particular science or part of one (Ladyman 2011).
On the other hand, the very recent past of Anglophone academic philosophy has involved reactions to the growth of science and specialization that I do not think are intellectually healthy for the subject (Ladyman and Ross 2007). The internal development that most shaped current analytic anglophone philosophy was probably modal logic, which arguably led to the revival of metaphysics (Williamson 2014). The latter has become central to the subject and investigating questions about, for example, time with complete disregard for the relevant scientific knowledge is not unusual (see, for example, Cameron 2015).
Alongside metaphysics we find standard approaches to epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind that also make no contact with science (for a critique of examples, see Bishop and Bootz 2007; Collins 2009: and Strohminger 2014). Analytic philosophers have even returned to the metaphysics of the Trinity (see, for example, Marmodoro and Hill 2011). Accompanying the rise of specialization in science, philosophy has become increasingly compartmentalized. The number of philosophy journals is now vast and most philosophers specialize in very specific areas. The sociology of institutional academia can allow subcultures within philosophy to define their own problems, police their own practices, and set their own standards, and for philosophers within them to achieve all the trappings of academic success. It is much easier to engage only with the writings of other philosophers in the literature of a particular genre than to engage with the relevant science, which in the case of metaphysics means advanced and highly mathematical physics. This is what has led to many professional philosophers ignoring science in a way that would have been unthinkable to the great metaphysicians of the past.
Many prominent scientists have declared that philosophy is finished and has been replaced by science. Ironically, their views are based on their wholly unscientific approach to the matter. To be scientific is to avoid generalizing from limited experience, and instead to base one’s views on a wide range of empirical evidence. Yet when Stephen Hawking declared that “philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics” (Hawking 2010), he based his view on his complete ignorance of current philosophy of science and philosophy of physics, which is replete with work that is exceptionally well informed about science in general and physics in particular.
As Socrates observed, people eminent in one field are apt falsely to take themselves to be knowledgeable in domains about which they are in fact ignorant. It is disgraceful for such a prominent intellectual to misuse his authority to dismiss an entire subject without bothering to acquaint himself with the facts about it. There is plenty of scientifically ignorant work in philosophy, but many philosophers invest a great deal of effort in learning science throughout their lives and many have productive relationships with scientists and publish in scientific journals. Lewis Wolpert is another culprit. When shown a copy of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science he was astonished by its existence and exclaimed, “I can’t even understand the titles” (Boswell 2015). Sounding off about the worth of philosophy of science without ever having looked at a journal exemplifying the subject does not set a good epistemic example.
In fact the state of current science arguably requires philosophers of science more than ever. As science becomes ever more specialized, science students are often educated in the background knowledge needed for their particular subjects without ever contemplating the bigger picture, or learning to question and think for themselves. They may come to think of science as a vast edifice of details and scientific methodology as routine and unreflective. Teaching them the history and philosophy of science can provide a counterbalance to this trend and encourage the development of abstract and speculative thinking that they will need to employ at the cutting edge of knowledge, but which they will otherwise not get to practice. They can also learn the valuable lesson that past scientific theories were highly successful but not completely true, and so they will realize, by extrapolation from concrete examples, not from skeptical possibilities, that the scientific knowledge they are being taught is probably liable to future revision, though not wholesale replacement.
It was reputedly said by Richard Feynman that philosophy of science is as much use to scientists as ornithology is to birds. This is another example of the domain specificity of intelligence. To begin with, birds cannot possibly benefit from ornithology since they cannot understand it, while it is absurd to suggest that no scientist could ever benefit by reflecting on the nature of the scientific method. Feynman fallaciously infers that since he personally finds no value in philosophy of science, no scientists do. Around the time he said it a great many scientists found Popper’s writings on falsification useful in thinking about their own methodology.
Great scientists like Isaac Newton, William Whewell, and Henri Poincaré were also philosophers of science. More recently, cognitive scientists have found much worth in ideas like functionalism, the hard problem, and the intentional stance, which are all due to philosophers. Philosophers of physics wrote much about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics that was for a while far superior to anything written about it by physicists, who were largely in denial that there was a problem at all. Philosophers of biology have contributed to thinking about the nature of species and levels of selection, and many of the great economists, sociologists, and political scientists were also philosophers of social science.
The mistake that people often seem to make is to set the bar much too high for philosophy to be of value. Indeed, they set the bar much higher than for scientific work. Most of the latter is not game changing and adds very little, yet philosophy is expected to be earth‐shattering to be worth anything at all. Scientists who denigrate philosophy and venerate science ignore all the work in science that is methodologically or conceptually flawed, and all the work in philosophy that is continuous with careful conceptual and foundational thinking in science.
Scientists like Feynman forget that being good at an activity does not mean one is good at explaining how one is good at the activity. An article by James Blachowicz (2009) reviewing the way the scientific method is presented in science textbooks found very different emphases and outright contradictions. Scientists are also not well‐placed to explain to the public how science works unless they are trained in the philosophy of science. Since pseudoscientists and skeptics about scientific orthodoxy often appeal to ideas such as the underdetermination of theory by evidence and the theory‐ladenness of observation, knowledge of philosophy of science is useful for explaining how they are misleadingly using it.
Statistics allows scientists to quantify the probability that patient recovery in a drug trial is due to random effects. It cannot tell them how small that probability needs to be for them to infer that the drug is efficacious. To do that they must decide how many subjects in a trial are enough, and how small the probability of a spurious result must be to be dismissed. Similarly, CERN announced that the Higgs Boson had been discovered when they had enough data to declare the detection events to be of 6 sigma significance, which means the probability of error being responsible was less than one in three hundred million. There is nothing in science that could tell them that 5 sigma significance was insufficient and 7 sigma significance too much to demand. In the end, a judgment was required. When I tell science students about this they are often quite perturbed. They are used to performing calculations of statistical significance and confidence intervals but not to making decisions. Philosophers of science have a role to play in educating both the public and scientists themselves about how science works, and in informing both about the uncomfortable fact that science, for all its marvels and precision, is also fallible.
Science and philosophy also face similar threats and should unite to defend the importance of curiosity‐driven research of no immediate or predictable instrumental value. Much of the science that has been of immense technological and economic worth was originally developed by people wanting to understand nature, without regard to what use that understanding might be put. The demand for academic work to have measurable short‐term impact on non‐academic users is liable to distort and undermine the work of philosophers more than that of most academics for several reasons.
The first is that, as with pure mathematics and highly theoretical science, philosophical work is only likely to bear fruit in the medium and long term. The ideology of Britain’s academic Research Excellence Framework or “ impact agenda” refers to economic and social benefits, but in practice only impact over a maximum of ten years is assessed at all. Ten years is a very short time in the history of ideas. Mathematical logic is at the heart of information technology but it would never have been judged to have any impact during its early development. Likewise, it could not have been known that the early development of psychology by philosophers would lead to current scientific psychology.
The second reason is that philosophy often contributes to culture and ideas in ways that are diffuse and indirect and hence impossible to measure. The philosophical impact on art and literature cannot be causally understood and quantified.
The third reason is that highly theoretical philosophical work has direct impact only on other academics and scientists. As mentioned, functionalism in the philosophy of mind is a great example of philosophers having an impact outside their own domain, but because the philosophers who developed it directly influenced cognitive scientists and not non‐academic users it would be not be counted by many impact audits.
The fourth reason is that the role of the philosopher in pointing out conceptual confusion, exaggerated claims to knowledge, and ideological contamination of scientific ideas, especially in the social sciences, is vitally important. Yet the impact agenda takes no account of the value of critique in either science or philosophy.
Universities in the UK are desperate to claim that they host world‐class excellent research. The idea that it might be okay to be merely nationally excellent is dismissed out of hand. Scarcely anyone stops to think about what they are saying. To be one of the fastest runners in the land is no mean achievement, yet to be a nationally excellent researcher is regarded as worthless. Universities are now run by people who do not understand what is comically absurd about the insistence that all scholarship (like the children of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon [Keillor 1985]) be above average. The highest intellectual standards are set for us by the great philosophers of the past and the present, and most of us need to work hard for a lifetime just to understand and interpret them. Intellectual culture, like any other, must be continually renewed and relived or it dies. The quest to understand the best existing work and to transmit it to the next generation is as valuable as the drive to innovate.
My predictions for the future are as follows.
Two current trends in philosophy are likely to continue. The first is that data will continue to be gathered about what people in general think about philosophical issues. Experimental philosophy has taught us, for example, that not everyone has the same intuitions about whether S knows that p in some scenario, and that various factors affect how people decide what should be done in the trolley problem (where you must decide whether to intervene to save several lives even though that choice kills another innocent person). This does not resolve normative issues about knowledge and action, but it has made philosophers more reflective about their methodology and more aware of the importance of the ways in which abstract problems are framed in concrete scenarios.
The second is the rise of formal epistemology and mathematical philosophy. The former is leading to the integration of epistemology with decision theory and philosophy of science, which is a good thing since they all study the same problems of confirmation and justification, and involve the same cognitive states. Formal epistemology involves the use by philosophers of mathematical technology other than logic and set theory, and not just probability theory. Mathematical philosophy in general has great potential, and whether or not it is ultimately successful there is still much to explore.
While philosophers have speculated about artificial intelligence for decades, little work has been done on the machine learning algorithms and Big Data infrastructure that already exist and which are set to transform society (Cristianini 2015). I expect that Big Data and expert systems will be the subject of increasing attention by philosophers as they start to transform decision‐making and knowledge production in finance, medicine, and science (Ladyman 2016). The effects of social media on the self and society will become increasingly important for philosophy of mind, ethics, and politics.
P4C (philosophy for children and communities) is a wonderful counterbalance to the inaccessibility and esoteric nature of much academic philosophy. The methodology my own department has followed in bringing philosophy to children and communities is due originally to Matthew Lipman (1988), as channeled through the charity SAPERE. Participants are not taught what philosophers think about classic philosophical issues, but rather provoked to engage in their own philosophical discussion by a short story or film or a picture.
I hope that philosophy will become integrated into education and more generally into welfare programs such as the rehabilitation of drug addicts and prisoners. Helping people to reason and, importantly, to disagree collectively and cooperatively is empowering, allows them to articulate and understand problems and solutions, and provides them with an alternative to conflict. It is, of course, a false dichotomy to think that philosophy must be either highly specialized, esoteric and technical, or accessible and socially engaged.
As far as academic philosophy goes I anticipate more teamwork and division of labor. It is now almost impossible to contribute to scientific knowledge as a lone individual. The great scientists of the past could invent and build their own instruments, make and record their own observations, and devise their own mathematics and theories. Not only are current scientists obliged to learn a huge amount of what has already been discovered before they have the chance to add to it, they also have to rely on background theories and tools from very different domains. There are whole teams of people operating individual detectors in particle physics experiments, and experts in programming and statistics are also required. Many philosophers continue to work individually, but most are completely reliant on the literature to define their problems and methods. If philosophy is to engage productively with science, it is likely that philosophers will become more collaborative, and co‐authored work will become more common. Indeed, there are already research projects with specialists in different areas on the scientific model working throughout the philosophy of science.
One of the most important developments in recent academic anglophone philosophy is the rise of feminist philosophy and engagement with non‐Western philosophical traditions. I expect the continuation of this trend to be central to the future of philosophy. We can look forward to a global philosophical culture that considers all the important ideas that human beings have had and that recognizes the diversity of their sources. The history of philosophy will be transformed by a better understanding of the evolution of ideas in non‐Western traditions. I expect that the analytic/continental divide will cease to exist as European philosophers continue to engage with logic, mathematics and science, and the analytic tradition, and more analytic philosophers engage with culture, ethnicity, gender, race and history, and as non‐Western philosophical traditions are increasingly studied everywhere.
In these ways I expect the future of philosophy to be both more academic and more engaged, and both more diverse and more unified.