Can science inform philosophy?

Question

Philosophy can sometimes inform science. After all, science was once called natural philosophy, and the scientific method is a creation of philosophy. However, does the arrow of influence go both ways? That is, can science inform philosophical thinking and discussion? I would also like to know what philosophers, especially philosophers of science, have written about this matter.

Answer 1

Groovy got to it first, but the notion that philosophical knowledge intersects with scientific fact is naturalized epistemology which enjoys a range of belief from mutually supportive but distinct domains to absolutely no discontinuity between them. The shorter and easier to read article is WP's Naturalized Epistemology:

Naturalized epistemology (a term coined by W. V. O. Quine) is a collection of philosophic views about the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts the focus of epistemology away from many traditional philosophical questions, and towards the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition.

Two additional articles that are progressively more difficult to read are:

1. Naturalistic Epistemology (IEP)
2. Naturalism in Epistemology (SEP)

It's been my experience that the best way to move in the direction of naturalizing your epistemology is to study the philosophy of science. Two additional articles are:

1. Metaphysics of Science (IEP)
2. Science and Pseudo-Science (SEP)

Thus, one can reason about knowledge and do it using the facts of science. In this way reason itself has a foot in both worlds.

Answer 2

I googled for some examples of what you ask.

W.V.O. Quine "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), Quine argued for a naturalized epistemology, suggesting that philosophy should be continuous with science.

Thomas Kuhn "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962) explored how scientific paradigms shift, influencing both philosophy of science and broader philosophical discussions.

Hilary Putnam argued for scientific realism and the importance of scientific knowledge in philosophical inquiry.

Daniel Dennett often bridges philosophy and cognitive science, demonstrating how scientific findings can inform philosophical debates about consciousness and free will.

Patricia Churchland argues that neuroscientific findings should inform our philosophical understanding of the mind.

Elliott Sober shows how evolutionary theory can inform philosophical discussions on topics like altruism and group selection.

Nancy Cartwright emphasizes the importance of understanding scientific practice and its implications for philosophical theories.

Philip Kitcher has written extensively on how science can inform ethics and social philosophy, particularly in his book "Science, Truth, and Democracy" (2001).

Answer 3

When philosophy deals with topics that are not easily quantifiable, it will be harder to argue that the exact sciences would provide useful input. On the other hand, when philosophy deals with topics generally recognized as being in the domain of the exact sciences, such a task becomes easier. Thus, mathematics can actually provide refutation of a philosopher's claims.

To take an example, nobody will deny that Bertrand Russell is considered to be a distinguished philosopher. Similarly, nobody will deny that infinitesimals have a role in the exact sciences. It turns out that Russell's claims concerning infinitesimals were definitively refuted by subsequent scientific developments. More specifically, Russell claimed the following:

"Infinitesimals as explaining continuity must be regarded as unnecessary, erroneous, and self-contradictory." (The Principles of Mathematics, 1903, item 324).

Similarly,

"the so-called infinitesimal calculus ... has nothing to do with the infinitesimal." (op. cit., item 308).

Following the developments in infinitesimal analysis in the 1960s and 1970s, few scholars today would adhere to such views, which can be considered as soundly refuted.

Answer 4

It is a bi-directional influence. Philosophy influences Science and Science influences Philosophy. The distinction between the two is also "blurred". Take theoretical physics for example it is the application of logic, math and philosophy within the constraints of physics. It is the application of these philosophical tools to interpret the data and empirical evidence we obtain from physicists to give meaning to the findings, that we call theoretical physics. And again with our new formalizations of theories we have founded we influence (give/provide a direction) for the improvement and perfection of tools to obtain more scientific data and evidence.

Answer 5

Classical philosophy searches for the truth. Science is founded on natural philosophy. Quantum physics is throwing up ideas which require philosophical investigation. So, yes, science and philosophy need to work together to search for the truth.

Answer 6

Science can provide interesting elements to philosophers, specially when it comes to paradoxes. It provides strong examples of ancient beliefs that science prooved to be false: the earth was long expected to be flat, then the center of the world. Said differently, it gives an interesting point of view where what was taught by ancient scholars who were highly respected can be false of rejected.

Among the examples, the Newtonian physics was expected to explain the whole mechanics of the world... until we realized that we need the relativity to explain the movement of Mercury around the sun. Or on a more fundamental mathematics point of view, Euclidian geometry ensures that through a point exterior to a straight line passes one and only one straight line parallel to a given direction. Which is understandable by primary school students, and evident to many adults. Refuting that axiom leaded to the Rieman geometry that happens to be highly important in the equations of relativity theory.

What I mean is that because science constantly evolves, if gives philosophers good reasons to question everything people (including themselves) believe, with examples proving that this questioning is essential.

Answer 7

Yes of course science should inform philosophy.

People have been philosophizing for thousands of years, if not significantly longer. Let me just remind you some of the things which the ancients did not have the benefit of knowing when thinking about humans and what sort of lives we should lead and how we should relate to each other. All of which we have learned through science over the past centuries.

We have learned that humans are made out of cells, and that cells are made out of molecules whose enormously complicated interactions with each other produce this fantastic emergent phenomenon of life. We have learned that quantum field theory, and in particular the Standard Model of particle physics, accurately explain all of these interactions and the emergent phenomena arising from them, from nuclear physics to chemistry to DNA replication to respiration and digestion.

We have learned that the Earth is some 4.5 billion years old, in sharp contrast to many early worldviews which maintained existence began more-or-less yesterday. We have learned that all life we see originates from biochemical reactions on the early Earth leading to the formation of self-replicating cells, and that every single living organism we’ve found has a common ancestor a few hundred million years after the formation of the Earth. We have learned that the Earth we see today is the product of significant processing by life, and that for some couple billion years single-celled microbes spread throughout every corner of Earth and very gradually transformed it from a ball of rock to a mound rich in organic material. We have learned that all animals share a common ancestor less than a billion years ago and that each of us had a common ancestor with all mammals a couple hundred million years ago—every cat and dog kept as a pet, every ox and donkey we put to work, every sheep and pig we raise and slaughter. We have learned that every single human is related just in the past couple hundred thousand years, which is an incredibly tiny fraction of the age of the universe. We have learned that our ancestors have been social primates for millions of years, depending on each other to lead successful lives.
We have learned that humans’ collectives actions can influence the large scale climate of the Earth and have enormous effects on its biosphere.

We have learned that the Sun is but one of some hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and that within the observable universe there are some 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different planets—and this is just the small part of the universe which we have been in causal contact with. We have learned that the protons and neutrons composing all of our atoms formed out of a hot primordial soup some five minutes after the hot big bang, 13.7 billion years ago, once the Standard Model plasma cooled below the nuclear binding energies. We have learned that the universe shortly after the hot big bang was incredibly uniform, and the small inhomogeneities had grown by gravitational instabilities over a few hundred thousand years to a part in ten thousand by the era of recombination when the temperature fell below atomic binding energies and hydrogen and helium atoms could form. That gravity took further hundreds of millions of years to form the first stars and galaxies. We have learned that every heavy element in our bodies and on Earth was formed in the nuclear furnace of a star some billions of years before the solar system existed, before being liberated from the star’s gravitational well in a stellar explosion which belched it out into the cloud of dust from which we eventually formed.

Many areas of philosophy deal with understanding who we are as humans, how we should relate to each other and other organisms and the Earth, how we should organize societies, and what sort of lives should we lead. Now obviously just learning science does not directly answer these questions, nor is science the only sort of input needed for properly understanding them. But it seems equally obvious to me that our revolutionary scientific knowledge of the universe and of ourselves should inform these questions. Over the past decades and centuries we have learned enormous amounts about the fundamental world and ‘what’s going on here’. If the understanding of the world that the ancients had led to some Bayesian distribution on philosophical propositions and arguments which we might accept, certainly understanding all of this fundamental information about the universe should effect an enormous Bayesian update factor. Certainly it has had such an effect on near every area of my own thinking.

Answer 8

When I was at the University I attended a philosophy class aimed towards computer science students. One of the key points that our philosophy professor wanted us to take home from the class was the following:

Before computers, all functions of the brain, including reasoning, were a mystery. (Often attributed to the famous god of the gaps.)

With the advent of computers, the computer folks essentially showed the philosophers how, starting with the humble logic gate, you can build layer upon layer of functionality to arrive at a machine that can perform basic functions of reasoning, so there you go, it is not a mystery anymore. (And the god of the gaps has receded from yet one more gap.)