Philosophy as Science

Science is the systematic and theoretical mode of making sense of our experiences¹. Each particular science focuses on a particular kind of experience. Philosophy is the most general science, as opposed to all of the other "special" sciences. It is the job of philosophy to take into account all of our experiences without discrimination, while maintaining this systematic and theoretical mode of inquiry. Thus "a philosophy" is a maximally synoptic vision of how our experiences hang together. Philosophy needs to take seriously the findings of the special sciences, because its results cannot be discordant with them (just as they cannot be with each other). This is because all of the sciences trivially form one large explanation, and internal coherence is a virtue of any good explanation.

An important line to clarify is the epistemological boundary of science. What can science tell us about, and what can science tell us about it?

A naively scientistic thing to say is that science gives us completely certain knowledge about the fundamental nature of reality. An obvious objection to this is that science is an activity in which we, finite inquirers, engage. This puts pressure on both the claim that science delivers certain knowledge, and that it describes the so-called fundamental nature of reality. There are two (respectively) reasons for this:

1. Fallibilism: We are generally fallible qua inquirers
2. Transcendental Limitation (TL): Our powers of inquiry are limited, and thus are potentially incapable of penetrating into that which underlies the reality of things

Surely both fallibilism and TL are broadly correct, and the full ramifications of them are murky, but let's say a bit about what they aren't telling us.

Fallibilism does not preclude our ability to acquire knowledge, so long as knowledge is not equated with certain knowledge. Thus, it is possible that scientific inquiry gives us knowledge about the world in just as robust a sense as anything else which falls short of apodicticity.

TL only precludes a certain kind of knowledge science can't give us, namely ultimate knowledge about the nature of things. But so long as that is not all there is to knowledge, it is possible that science can provide it.

So even accepting both fallibilism and TL, we are left with a science which can prima facie deliver literally true, objective knowledge about how the world works, so long as it is understood that that knowledge is not infallible, and that science can never provide a complete account of how things are in the sense of leaving out nothing even in principle.

By talking about the telos of science as explaining our experience, one might feel science to be only a kind of self-knowledge. In particular, one might conclude from the notion that science is about explaining our experience, that science does not tell us how the world is "in itself". But this conclusion does not follow. That the data of the world is always manifest to us in a guise laden with the artifacts of our experiential apparatus does not mean that it is not data of the world. The most one could conclude from this is something akin to fallibilism or TL, but those theses have nothing to do with what our theorizing is about. One could say that science describes the world as it is revealed to us in our experience, but that is a description of both us and the world distinct from us (specifically, how the world interacts with us).

Perhaps a larger question raised by the setup of this text is: why should we think of philosophy as continuous with science? I want to say that philosophy is continuous with science, but is this a descriptive or normative claim? Well, it is almost certainly false as an anthropologically descriptive claim, as there have been many pieces of serious intellectual work which have been widely considered to be philosophy, but which seem to not fit the understanding of science espoused here in this text. So in that sense then, it is a normative claim about how philosophy should be practiced, and be seen as situated relative to other intellectual modes of inquiry. But what are these non-scientific intellectual modes of inquiry?

Well, science here is supposed to be about explaining our experience of the world. But it's hard to find an instance of earnest intellectual activity which runs counter to this spirit. Rather, it is the aforementioned focus on theoretical speculation and systematization of knowledge which demarcates science. Thus, we have a normative claim that philosophy should, on the whole, be theoretical and systematic.

But this sounds terrible! So much widely praised philosophy, from the ancients east and west to the modern day, have included quietistic and/or particularistic philosophical ideas.

What kinds of philosophy are really excluded on this picture of philosophy as science? The main target of this line of thinking is overly pessimistic and/or skeptical philosophies which seek to undermine the prospect of science as a method for delivering genuine knowledge and understanding about the world. Unless invoking the very weak limitations of fallibilism and TL, philosophical works which genuinely undermine scientific ambitions are not philosophy proper because they do not contribute to our knowledge or understanding about the world. Rather, they are rhetorical put downs.

I want here only to say that philosophy as science is a worthwhile endeavor that should be pursued, and that the only kind of philosophy which I want to categorically rule out is philosophy which goes against that idea. Philosophy which puts pressure on a particular instance of theoretical knowing might fall into the wider scope of scientific process, or might be an instance of undermining skepticism, and each case must be evaluated on its merits.

There is a notion of philosophy as a kind of intellectual "therapy". On this view, the point of philosophy is to take one from philosophical anxiety or puzzlement, to philosophical contentment or ataraxia. This is beyond the scope of this article, but I wish to say that I believe that philosophy as science is amenable to this understanding, and in two ways. The first is that possessing theoretical knowledge itself often leads to a kind of relief about some puzzling aspect of nature. The other less obvious point is that the process of tracing out how far a theoretical scheme goes and running into its limitations can lead to a kind of insight which results in relief, even without providing an answer to some previously posed definite question. See Raymond Smullyan's When the Time is Ripe.