Hacker News Reader

Comment by mayank | Hacker News Reader

In response to your comment and the (well articulated, btw) parent, the problem I have/had is in this part:

"when something has been solved by science, philosophers stop worrying about that realm so much"

The "so much" part was what troubled me -- most of the philosophy of mind class was historical developments, etc., but occasionally it did step into the realm of science, while ignoring everything science had to offer. Perhaps I had an ill-informed professor, but when the parent says that philosophy of mind deals with "messy questions", that suggests that sometimes it can tread on the toes of fact, even if unintentionally. The inability to recognize when that was happening was what disappointed me.

View on HN

I was a philosophy major and my take was always that "philosophy is the study of things science hasn't yet solved". Yes, it butts up to science and when you tread over the line that helps you either prove or disprove that part of the theory.

It is like a financial model for a startup. In the beginning you guess at what your revenue and expenses are. Then you learn some facts (my rent is $xxxx/mo and I currently have xxx paying customers). You adjust the model based on the new facts, but the rest is still your best guesswork.

I always imagined philosophy as the study of things beyond the realm of science. By saying that its the study of things science hasn't yet solved, you're saying that philosophy is speculation about things that science will possibly solve, but speculation without taking science to date into account, and without empiricism. That just sounds like bad science. Am I misunderstanding your point? In fact, your last three lines sound exactly like the scientific method + uninformed speculation. The difference seems to be that science insists on a way to invalidate your speculations, whereas philosophy does not.

I am not an arbiter of what philosophy is, but it is not bad science. There is no empirical step in philosophy at all. Science requires an empirical step.

You have to take science to date into account. If you do not, you will be proven wrong immediately. You will say 'I think the universe is composed entirely of jelly beans', and I will say 'y experiment disproves that'. If there is an empirical way to answer a question, you should use it. Empiricism works well because it is very convincing.

A lot of the time, you do not have an empirical way to answer your question, because the technology doesn't exist, or the terminology for the question that you want to ask doesn't exist, or you haven't yet adequately specified what the question is.

At its best, it should be the building of a rational, informed, theory about a conceivable hypothetical situation, and rational explorations of the implications of that hypothetical.

I don't think that's what is being proposed. Philosophy is not bad science. But you can't always know which questions to ask with science, especially in a new field.

One of the things which philosophy does (and has done) is to clarify which questions to ask, how to ask them, and so forth. Once the problem domain is clarified enough, science can step in and start being useful. Of course, there is no clear-cut border between the two (which can be seen historically in the development of physics, biology, etc.)

That's definitely not the only thing which philosophy does, but I think that's the idea being discussed here.

Historically, what we call "Science" was called "Natural Philosophy" and much of what we identify with the history of science was not a product of the scientific method. For example Galileo did not measure the velocity of falling bodies to prove that objects of different weights (and he did not say "mass") fall at the same speed.

Even more recently, the entire field of psychology grew directly out of philosophical speculation about mental states. Starting with Kant in the late 18th century and ending with James early in the 20th, the study of the mind became an accepted part of natural philosophy or science (having James on the faculty of Harvard certainly didn't hinder the acceptance of psychology as a science).

"Hasn't yet figured out how to tackle" is better than "hasn't yet solved." Philosophy figures out what kind of question to ask, which then spawns a field of science which starts methodically asking and answering them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com