The Philosophy of Science. Many famous philosophers have
sought to take the approach and methods of science and translate science into
philosophy to create a truly scientific philosophy. These thinkers include
Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Quine. I argue that each failed, for the reasons
below:
Hume seemed to think that because scientific theories are
always capable of being disproved by new empirical evidence, that skepticism
was the scientific attitude. He ignored the fact that science, when theories
have been proven and experimentally verified, seeks to provide us some degree of
knowledge. We can know that the sun will come up tomorrow, because of the
scientific postulates of astronomy, which science has empirically verified. Whereas
Hume claimed we cannot know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Hume’s rejection
of faith was rational, but his rejection of knowledge based on analysis of the
physical world, was irrational.
Kant argued that science can achieve certainty and
universality only because the mind imposes scientific laws upon the subjective
experience of reality. His basic argument was that subjectivism is the
justification for scientific knowledge. This is, of course, completely
backwards. The scientific attitude is that the mind revolves around the
physical world. Kant’s view, that the physical world revolves around the mind,
is a religious idea, that faith and belief can alter reality. And any
intelligent academic generally recognizes that Kant’s actual purpose was to
protect religion from the rise of science. Science achieves knowledge that
hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water, for example, from an examination
of the molecules and atoms, which are things in themselves in physical reality.
The scientific mind learns from reality, it does not impose its subjective
beliefs onto sensory experience.
Wittgenstein sought to apply the principles of mathematics
into philosophy, specifically in the form of formal symbolic logic. My favorite
argument against him applies a theory called the Chinese Room, originally
developed by Searle. If someone in a room is given Chinese words, and a computer software program to process them, then he could put together Chinese sentences, but if he doesn't speak Chinese then he will have no idea what any of it means. The argument is that symbolic logic can reach conclusions,
but if you don’t know what the symbols mean, if you don’t know what the words
in a language refer to in reality, the objective physical objects in reality to
which the symbols refer, then the language, and logic, are meaningless computer
programs, devoid of actual meanings relevant to human experience. For example,
“sun” is not actually a word, it is a star in the sky.
Quine argued that the philosophical equivalent of scientific
experiments, in which theories are experimentally verified using empirical
data, is thought experiments, in which a person “tests” a theory by analyzing
whether the theory matches the person’s “intuitions,” which are teased out by
thinking about the thought experiment. This idea has been widely accepted in
academic philosophy. The obvious flaw is that, whereas empirical data comes
from objective physical reality, intuitions come from internal subjective
feelings, and therefore a thought experiment is nothing like a real scientific
experiment. Quine shares the Kantian fault.
The truly scientific approach to philosophy, would be to
take philosophical ideas, and actually design real scientific experiments to
try to test their truth or falsehood. I call this approach “experimental
philosophy.” For example, if you think that sensory experience revolves around
the mind, and subjectivism and solipsism are true, then test your belief. Pick
up a piece of hot metal, and see whether your mind can impose a phenomena, the
experience of the feeling of ice, upon the noumena, the thing in itself which
you are holding in your hand. If the iron burns you and your mind could not
control it, this scientifically proves, or at least lends credence to the idea,
that sensory experience comes from objective physical reality, and not from
your mind. On the other hand, if your mind can make you experience a feeling of
ice, then your mind is creating your sensory experiences. The Kantian might
reply that the structure of the mind could not be controlled by a desire to
feel ice, but when we speak of “the mind,” we generally mean something that can
be influenced by our feelings, desires, thoughts and beliefs.
