From: ramsay@unixg.ubc.ca (Keith Ramsay)
Subject: Re: Science vs Philosophy of
Organization: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 06:21:00 GMT

In article <1992Aug28.013928.4918@math.ucla.edu> 
barry@arnold.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:
>Essentially, there was a time when math, science and philosophy
>were all all mixed together. Folks like Newton, Liebnitz, Descarte,
>etc were of that era. This made it difficult to separate out
>the effects of these three fields at the time. 

Roughly true.

>However, in retospect its clear these folks greatest contributions
>were as mathematicians and physicists. Their philosophical efforts 
>were of little import, although it does give early philosophy a
>bit of a boost to be able to claim these great scientists as philosophers.

One of the (assorted) key problems with your analysis is that we've
made this distinction between science and non-science after the fact.
We've dropped Descartes' "vortex theory", for example, from our
"physics", because it didn't work out.

Worse, however, is the mistake of failing to recognize philosophy
which has worked as really being philosophy.

Philosophy is, in fact, everywhere, an unavoidable component of life
as a thinking being. Philosophy is simply the most basic principles of
everything. What people mean when they say that they don't need
philosophy is, in essence, that they don't need *deliberate*
philosophy, that they don't see the need for *further reflection* on
their basic views. They regard their understanding of the concepts
with which they deal in life as adequate (for their needs) already,
and not in need of further polishing up.

What is almost invariably the case is that people do have definite
philosophical views, although perhaps vague ones, which they have
gathered from their parents, teachers, friends, books they have read,
and so on. It is rare indeed that a person is left with no more than
the fundamental concepts and habits of thought which came naturally to
our early hunting and gathering forbears.

A good sign of a highly developed concept, however, is that it seems
to come to one completely naturally. On being formally presented with
it, one tends to say, "Now why didn't I think of that before?" And
when a concept or way of thinking is part of the assumed background
philosophy of one's community, one tends not to be aware it is even
there, unless one particularly calls attention to it. It is like
trying to get a fish to notice water.

Science has certainly not proceeded in a philosophical vacuum. One
brief indication that this is so is to ask oneself the question: why
didn't we do more science earlier? Why did the project take off in
such a big way only a few centuries ago? Crude popular views of
science give the misleading impression that it was because of a
general stupidity or confusion on the part of the ancients. One can
certainly point to certain factors which were lacking, materials which
were not as readily available, the harmful influence of dogmatic
religion, and so on.

Getting to a suitable point of view was, however, crucial. (The bad
influence of certain dogmatic religions is an example of this need.)
Descartes et al. were only as good scientists as they were, because
they had some of the philosophical sense of what science was
fundamentally about which others perhaps lacked. Science may indeed,
as Einstein said, be a refinement of common sense, but it is a very
well crafted refinement. Common sense is also not as common as it
seems. These ideas Merriman has been tossing at us, the idea for
example of choosing the most convenient theory which fits the
evidence, all of those ideas were developments in philosophy. (There
is still discussion about them today.) In the distant past it simply
was not always clear that the search for knowledge should look at all
like it does now. It may seem obvious *now*, in retrospect, that 20th
century scientific method is a good method, but this is hardly fair to
the ancients who didn't have the benefit of hindsight (and weren't
dummies either, accomplishing a fair bit with what they had
available).

Consider the progress in mathematics. To us today, our most basic
notions in math, those of "proof", "functions", "real numbers" and the
like seem plain and clear. But if you look at each of them, you will
find that there were basic issues about what they should mean. 

It was not clear to the Greeks, *before* the flowering of Greek
mathematics, that there was a need to "prove" things. Why not just
"know" that it is true? (Students of math sometimes ask the same
question today.)  Other ancient cultures seemed to assume that it was
sufficient to learn how to carry out the needed calculations, to have
a tolerable approximation to pi for figuring the value of a round
field, and so on. At least as stunning is the lack of realization that
good notation was necessary. People continued to use words instead of
variables for centuries, holding up the development of algebra.  It
also was not clear that it was reasonable to use non-Euclidean
geometry (it didn't appear to be true, after all), or "imaginary"
numbers (quantities ought to be actual, real quantities, not these
confused non-entities posing as quantities in equations).  The idea of
"function" was in a somewhat confused state even into the 19th
century. All of these involved philosophical questions, and progress
demanded in these cases that someone stop to think (or un-think a
prejudice) about the basic issue. There are those, constructivists for
example, who think that we are still suffering from a basic confusion
about many of these ideas, and that much greater progress will become
possible once this proposed source of confusion is overcome.

At this point, much of what I am writing probably almost seems to
confirm Merriman's point of view: see how much better *science* is
than all of those previous philosophical ideas. The problem with that
view is that it is too cheaply smug. Holding that view is essentially
a matter of looking back at the long, slow, road of philosophical
progress, and assuming ourselves to have arrived at the pinnacle of
it. It is to see the current philosophical underpinnings of science as
complete. Now that we have "the right way" of learning about nature,
we can stop worrying about it and get on with the business of
improving the state of mankind.

I regard this view as naive. Past history shows that progress in
philosophy is slow. Thinkers work for decades developing ideas. It can
take centuries for a trend of philosophical thought to develop itself.
It is hardly reasonable to think that this century has seen the final
development, that our current ideas are completely adequate. It is
easy, as an armchair philosopher, to think that the truth is obvious
enough. "Why all this discussion? It should be clear." But this is
lazy. It is easy *not* to see serious philosophical problems when one
has not explicitly formulated one's views. If you try to formulate any
kind of thorough account, however, and especially if you put it out in
an open forum in front of dedicated philosophers, and you will find
that there remain problems.

In science, ignorance about history (and who here has really taken the
time to read the history of science deeply, after all?) tends to
obscure the obstacles and blind leads, and make science look like a
straightforward progression upward. In philosophy, it tends to
highlight the mistakes which have been overcome, and make what
progress has occurred seem like it should have been obvious all along.
Much of the progress in philosophy, after all, consists in recognizing
mistakes as such, and formulating a standpoint from which the nature
of the mistake can be made clear even to the man on the street.

Keith Ramsay          "While this sort of holistic pragmatism is
ramsay@unixg.ubc.ca   attractive, it too has serious difficulties. (So
                      does *every* view; that is why the philosophy of
                      mathematics is so fascinating.)"
                         - Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam
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