Philosophy 152

Science and Reason

Spring 2006

Lecture Notes

Rosenberg - Ch. 1

A general point about how we will proceed: critical analysis of the readings. We will often look for problems or errors or objections to things Rosenberg and other authors say. This will typically require first getting very clear about what he meant, and then evaluating it.

1) His account of what philosophy is on p. 4. Presumably, phil. of sci. will include the questions that fit this description that have to do with science in some particular way.

Some comments:

a) He says that normative questions are not part of science. He says that only philosophy addresses these questions. Note: he doesn’t say that only philosophers address these questions.

b) Some people think that all real questions are scientific questions. This is a belief in the comprehensiveness or completeness of science. Every question that has any real content is, in the end, a scientific question. But notice the “now and perhaps never” phrase in the first clause. So some questions may be philosophical until the proper tools for examining them scientifically emerge. E.g., telescopes.

            But there is a more hostile to philosophy version of this point: it’s only worth doing if you can do it scientifically. So, don’t bother trying until the necessary scientific means are in place. Otherwise, it is just idle speculation. And if, in the end, there is no possible way to study the question scientifically, then it is a pseudo-question.

            Rosenberg responds to this point on p. 5 - “philosophy is unavoidable”. This illustrates a thing that philosophers delight in. Consider the claim we’ve been discussing: all questions that are not pseudo-questions can be answered by science. Turn it into a question. Is that a scientific question? It seems not. But then the people who make this claim are themselves engaged in the very thing they said was impossible!

c) His account relies on an unexplained science/non-science distinction. So we only understand his account of what philosophy is if we already know what counts as science. This is not a refutation, but it’s puzzling. And then the point seems to be undermined by what he says at the very top of p. 6.

d) This account makes everything that is not science count as philosophy.

A different approach to his topic: philosophy addresses those questions that we can profitably address “just by thinking about them.” But this isn’t quite right either - mathematics is like that too.

Maybe we are left with some points about how philosophy typically proceeds, and lists of the questions it typically addresses. At root, they seem to be conceptual and normative questions about fundamental issues. In this case, about science. And that will include questions about what counts as science, what an explanation is, what a theory is, etc.

2) See the discussion of alternative medicines on pp. 6-7. R. suggests that phil. of sci. will help to resolve this dispute. He says that it will do this by explaining how science can yield “real knowledge.”(7) But a stronger claim is needed, and he alludes to this when he mentions scientism. He needs the idea that only science can yield real knowledge. So defenders of alternative medicine, as he sees it, must deny scientism. It’s important to see that they need not deny the merits of science, just scientism.

Here’s a nice question for you to think about: given his account of how the alternative medicines are supposed to work, is it true that there is no possible way to scientifically test them?

3) Section 1.3 is about ways in which scientific results may affect certain long-standing philosophical questions. Section 1.4 addresses some questions about the history of science. These are interesting issues, but we’ll skip them.