Can Sciences replace Philosophy ?
Can Science replace Philosophy ?
When you look at previous philosophers, it is always quite impressive how they seem to know everything that is knowledgeable.
Take René Descartes for example : mathematician (algebra, geometry, analytical geometry), physicist, philosopher and even interested in cosmology and dioptric .
It is the same for Pascal or the German philosopher Leibniz and when you take Greek philosophers, they even were pretty decent wrestlers.
But, nowadays, if we think of a philosopher he would more likely resemble someone that is a specialist of the second page of the first edition of the preface of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
Or at least we wouldn’t say that philosophers are at the peak of human knowledge.
We would much more likely say that for a physicist or a biologist, but when thinking of someone who knows everything, we would most likely imagine him with some kind of lab coat.
Then, what has changed ? What is the role of a philosopher if not knowledge ?
Traditionally, a philosopher’s role is to answer the big questions : why was the world created? How should humans act ? What is the purpose of life ?
This is also illustrated by the different branches in Philosophy : Metaphysic, logic, epistemology, axiology, aesthetics, political philosophy and ethics.
But, with modern philosophers, it seems that the role of philosophers has become more about understanding the thoughts of great philosophers rather than understanding the fundamental truths of life.
Now let’s come back to the catchy title of the article :
Can Science replace Philosophy ?
Since both fields seem to be answering similar questions, we should try to understand if there are fundamental differences between them, and so, the nature of each field.
Scientific endeavor is oriented about finding the truths about reality, and for this, is composed of methods to be able to distinguish between claims.
Karl Popper, an Austrian born and later naturalized British philosopher from the XXth century, has proposed a way to distinguish between what he calls Science and Pseudo-Science.
The difference lies in a concept that he developed which is known as the falsification condition.
“Thus the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” (Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959)
This position is quite straightforward but has a lot of implications: for a theory to be considered scientific or true, it needs to have an experiment that could prove that it is wrong. It needs to be falsifiable.
This need for an experiment (or an outcome of the experiment) that could prove wrong the claim isn’t always an easy task and has led to a lot of issues, notably for the characterization of the theory of evolution by Popper.
With the emphasis on observation 1 and the need for possible falsification, it seems that Science has found a way to prove and to determine what is true (with the error interval of course), or at least to determine a way to prove the veracity of a claim.
Philosophy, on the other hand, has formulated complex questions, proposed strong logical arguments and has also, in the process, developed a true method for rigor and given explicit definitions of concepts that are still needed today (consciousness, free-will etc). Yet, the possibility to test hypotheses seems to be Science’s triumphing advantage.
Then, why have Science been so decorelated from philosophical reasoning ? Why aren’t philosophers participating in scientific understanding and incorporating the scientific results ?
One answer could be because of the fierce specialization of each field. 2 Since scientific discovery often relies either on strong mathematical and statistical background or on complex machines, it seems that, for one to understand a subject enough to make a discovery, one would need to spend 30 years studying the field.
Another thing is that, as the knowledge thickens, either the quantity of facts becomes too big to learn (for this if you look at biology whether it is molecular biology or genetics it is quite clear) or the theories become intertwined with more domains as they become more complete (Quantum theory for example is now the theory with the most proven results and is present not only in theoretical physics but also chemistry and many other fields).
What this means is that knowing everything that is knowledgeable and having a more holistic approach like Leibniz is more and more complicated as the time goes by.
And yet, as we will try to argue, from the fundamental questions and the strong logical arguments given by Philosophy, Science could give the strong tools necessary to answer these questions.
Philosophers need to incorporate scientific results in their research and scientists should take the philosophers’s work into account to understand the meaning of their discoveries.
Let’s take an example of how it is necessary to take both fields into account with a famous question : Are humans inherently evil ?
This debate, from Plato’s vision of the soul and the christian vision of the Original Sin, has had a big impact in the 18th century with the opposition of J-J. Rousseau to the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as “war of all against all”.3
J-J. Rousseau, in his Second Discourse (Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men) published in 1755, argues that humans in their natural states (without the corrupting power of culture) have a sense of compassion, empathy and moral and are therefore virtuous. He then argues that it is society, and first and foremost private property, that corrupts humans, bringing inequality, injustice and conflict.
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine,’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.”
This claim, as well written as it is, suffers severe flaws as brought to light by evolution and primatology.
Jane Goodall, a famous ethologist, has spent 30 years studying chimpanzees, a very close species to humans from an evolutionary standpoint sharing more than 96% of DNA. 45
In her book Through a window my thirty years with the chimpanzees of Gombe, she describes how the chimpanzees separated into two distinct tribes and performed organized war.
“For so many years, I had believed that chimpanzees, while showing uncanny similarities to humans in many ways, were by and large rather ‘nicer’ than us. Suddenly I found that under certain circumstances they could be just as brutal, that they also had a dark side to their nature.”
Now, what it seems to indicate, is that humans aren’t the only species with premeditated actions that would be considered as evil.
Why is that important ? Because in this debate, we now know at least that humans are not good by nature or only corrupted by society (it however doesn’t prove that society cannot affect humans, solely that attributing evil only to society isn’t correct).
It doesn’t mean that Rousseau’s vision was completely false either. Primatologists have also found that chimpanzees had a sense of empathy and attributes that could be considered as moral (Changeux, J-P. Neurobiology of human values).
Where philosophy could only elaborate reasoning to establish human nature, primatologists were able to give concrete demonstrations of certain claims.
And this is not just an internal debate between thinkers. Rousseau’s vision on society as a corrupter has had a big impact on the way society’s role was viewed. What a society considers as truths deeply shapes the nature of the society and so, having the best method and tools to establish what is true, is necessary.
What I hope was shown with these examples isn’t that one field is better than the other but that if Philosophy wants to stand true to its purpose of answering the big questions it needs to incorporate the tools and results that are given by fields like Physics, Biology or Neuroscience.
And, if we find ourselves unable to discover everything, let’s at least use the tools we have to go one step further to a deeper understanding.
Footnotes and References
First developped by Aristotle, it then became one of the founding conditions of Science with Galileo and Copernicus. ↩
This is what Max Weber describes with his concept of the division of labor where he highlights how modern industrial societies fragment tasks for efficiency, leading to social interdependence and individual specialization. ↩
Hobbes, an English philosopher from the 17th century, famously argued in his book The Leviathan that humans form governments to prevent the chaos given by human nature. ↩
We can make a reasoning on humans with the help of evolution, as since we share most DNA with chimpanzees, it is most likely that since they don’t have culture, it is also in our nature to do the same. ↩
The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium. Initial sequence of the chimpanzee genome and comparison with the human genome. Nature. 437:69-87. DOI:10.1038/nature04072 ↩
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