Philosophy and Contemporary Science

Philosophy and Contemporary Science

ABSTRACT: This paper is concerned with some of the differences between philosophy and contemporary science, and with the significance of these differences for the question of the nature of philosophy. Differences of particular interest here are ones that tend to be concealed and ignored through the influence of the professionalist attitudes of contemporary science, an influence that manifests itself in the prevailing normative attitude to the vocabularies and linguistic practices of professional philosophy. It is argued that this normative attitude is questionable in the light of a feature that we take to be essential to philosophy: always being open to the question of its own nature and task.

A traditional, and still common, view of the difference between philosophy and the 'special' sciences is based upon the dichotomies universal/particular or general/special. It is said that philosophy deals with the general issues concerning some subject matter while the special sciences take care of the more specific issues. Chemistry concerns itself with properties of various chemical compounds and physics with forces and the motion of bodies, while philosophy deals with the general nature of matter, general questions of causality, determinism, etc. Linguistics deals with special, empirical questions about the nature of language, while philosophy is supposed to discover the general principles that govern all language.

The ontological question about 'what there is' in the world, is, in Quine's words, "a shared concern of philosophy and most other non-fiction genres." (1) It is the use of more general or broader categories, such as, for instance, physical objects or classes, that distinguishes the ontological philosopher's interest in what there is from the scientist's.

This 'synoptic view' of philosophy, as Moritz Schlick called it, usually also involves the view of philosophy as a science. (2) As physics studies the specific structure of matter, so philosophy studies its general nature. Quine says, for instance, that "Philosophy ... as an effort to get clearer on things, is not to be distinguished in essential points of purpose and method from good or bad science." (3) Like the special sciences, philosophy is also a science, only one of a more general character.

But Quine's philosophy represents only one, naturalistic, version of this synoptic view of the nature of philosophy. There are others, both within and outside the analytic tradition. And there is a great deal to be said about the difference between these philosophies, for instance, that the ones in the Kantian tradition are more oriented towards discovering the general conditions of human knowledge and experience, and have less to say about the general nature of reality.