Why scientists need philosophers

I’ve recently been working at a Philosophy of Science MOOC on Coursera, the online courses website. Later on, they set you an exercise to write a short essay addressing how philosophy can contribute to science.

So this is my punt. Life is too short to revise or, hell, even research this, so don’t take any of this as my settled opinion or as my best work. Whatever. With that caveat in mind, it might still be entertaining at least, or maybe even spark some thoughts.

Walk into a particular room in the Science Museum in Kensington, and you will find yourself enveloped in a cavern of ironmongery and miscellanea. The shelves droop under the weight of bolts, files, screws, bits, grinders, saws, protractors, clamps and pins. The inventory scrolls endlessly past you, voices reciting the lists of trinkets like an incantation.

This is the workshop of James Watt, meticulously reconstructed from the original as it was left in his home in Birmingham after his death. This entrancing space invites you to imagine a tireless creative, endlessly tinkering away at his next contraption.

And yet for all that - and for all his immense valorisation as the lynchpin of Britain’s industrial revolution - Watt was reluctant to think of himself as the engineer everyone else loved. He aspired to be remembered not as an engineer but as a scientist.

To understand why James Watt, one of the most admired engineers who ever lived, wished he were famed as a scientist instead, is to understand something essential about modern Western thought.

In Watt’s lifetime, scientists increasingly became the elite of society. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, this trend only gathered pace. We constructed our modern public health infrastructure on the advice of pathologists and made medicine scientific. We funded scientific expeditions to map the world, even to its remotest corners (in part to help us conquer it). We adopted radical new economic policies in response to scientific economic theories. We built vast infrastructure networks to communicate waves of invisible energy discovered by pioneering physicists, and built nuclear plants to generate more of the stuff by means of nuclear science. We even designed social programmes on the basis of scientific anthropology. By the end of the twentieth century, scientists were our prophets, priests and kings. Or so we thought.

In the 1990s, at the so-called ‘end of history’, it was assumed that there would be no more need for social upheaval. Humanity had arrived at the ideal system of social organisation. And among other ideologies - secularism, libertarianism, democracy - an essential part of the package is that science was our ultimate and incontestible way of securing knowledge about the world.

Yet now, that certainty is broken. Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or else besides, is politically empowered in many places, together with its rejection of science.

At the same time, the myth of science is ever more punctured. The supposedly scientific West has increasingly come to appreciate that their scientific heritage also includes much we would rather ignore - phrenology, race science, systematic blindness to female bodies in medicine.

Meanwhile, scientists themselves are noticing that their holy calling has turned out to be rather less holy than they had hoped. They find science pulled between the competing demands of truth and tenure. Scientific knowledge is locked behind the paywalls of exclusive journals, which even many academics struggle to access, never mind the general public.

What then for science in the twenty-first century?

Yet there is another story available. It starts with confessing that the old stories got things wrong in important ways. When we put ideology aside, science has not been on an uncontested march to universal acceptance since Galileo. There has been continual change, continual conflict, continual readjustment of our ideas to the changing demands of the age.

In Galileo’s day, it may have been a fight to establish that there was much to be seen by simply looking. As empirical observation started to prove its worth in the early modern period, thinkers wrestled with new problems: how to reconcile the evidence of Scripture with the evidence of the senses? How to understand how sensation can give us knowledge at all, granted that any observer may be vulnerable to illusions, tricks and dreams? And if that’s how sense data work, what then for our mathematical or logical knowledge, which seems to already bind the world even before we start experiencing it?

This centuries-long struggle culminated in the work of Kant, who in his 1786 magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason, set out a masterful - if infamously obscure - system, which enabled thinkers to understand just how empirical knowledge might work.

Yet two generations later, Charles Darwin lit the flame under new controversy about the relationship between scientific and religious knowledge. His bizarre and wildly imaginative theory of evolution by natural selection challenged the Genesis Creation accounts, and this was soon to be followed up with the theory of tectonic shift.

Some said that where scientists contradicted the authority of Scripture, the word of God must always win. Others said that science alone had the keys to knowledge, and if what the Bible said couldn’t be proven scientifically, then it couldn’t be accepted. Some said that science and religion were two incommensurable attempts to study the same subject matter, while others said that they covered completely separate spheres.

Gradually, all of these views moved to the extremes. Now, most people (though not all) agree that science and religion have overlapping spheres, and can inform one another, but neither the Book of Nature nor the Book of Scripture has the decisive final say.

Now, in our post-Christendom Western context, it’s more important than ever to understand how science and religion can talk to one another. Religious minorities - as all religions now are in the West - are vulnerable to the risk of becoming epistemic islands, cut off from the knowledge of the rest of the community, unless we can find ways that science can talk across creedal differences.

We need, too, for scientifically marginalised communities, such as non-white people, whom science has ignored, or worse, to be more tightly integrated into science, both so that knowledge might increase, and so that the benefits knowledge gives might be fairly shared.

In light of these urgent needs, today’s philosophers are considering science not just as an epistemic problem, but as a social problem. As philosophers once established science as the bedrock of modern knowledge, so philosophers today have the task of figuring out how science can glue together our societies.

Science has been at its most dangerous when it hasn’t been questioned. At all times, as long as we practice science, we need to consider what it means, what it means to do science well, how it can generate knowledge, and how it ought to be used as a powerful instrument of change.

And perhaps that might justify James Watt in his obsession to be seen as a scientist: since we can’t get by just with practitioners. We need people who can see our practices from the outside and shine a mirror back on us. If we want science, then we need philosophers.