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From: sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Do philosophers need defending?
Message-ID: <71@thirdi.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Jul-87 00:26:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: thirdi.71
Posted: Thu Jul 30 00:26:05 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 04:33:27 EDT
References: <3219@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> <825@klipper.cs.vu.nl> <3227@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> <831@klipper.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Distribution: world
Organization: Third Eye Software, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 72
Keywords: science philosophy empiricism methodology
Summary: Wrong distinction between science and philosophy.

In article <831@klipper.cs.vu.nl> biep@cs.vu.nl (J. A. "Biep" Durieux) writes:

>I would put psychology and physics under philosophy as long as there is not
>a relatively large body of methodology (and perhaps theory?).

>And if I say philosophy has no methodology: a scientist cannot challenge the
>methodology of his discipline without leaving science (not just his disci-
>pline) and becoming a philosopher. A scientist can (and has to) take the
>dictate of his methodology as the last word. A philosopher may have rules
>he obeys in his work, but he cannot take them for granted, he has to
>support them (if only by saying "aren't they convincing?"). A scientist may
>take an empirical fact, apply some mathematical theorem on it, and say
>"well, that theorem is *proven*". A mathematician has to challenge the
>proof, to look for the presuppositions, and to convince himself, to
>persuade himself (no rules) it is true (or not). For a mathematician
>nothing is ever proven, the proofs can only become more convincing.

I probably missed the first part of the discussion, but it seems that you are
saying that the realm of methodology belongs to philosophy and that of
*applying* methodology to science.  Since you list physics and psychology
under philsophies, you must feel that these are primarily concerned with
methodology, whilst other disciplines (those you would allow as sciences, like
chemistry and biology) are not primarily concerned with methodology.

If I have understood your definition of philosophy correctly, you would say
that physics (for instance) does not *use* methodology, but only studies it.
This seems quite counter-intuitive.  From a naive viewpoint, it seems that the
use of a vast panorama of expensive instruments does really constitute a
methodology.  Even in theoretical physics, mathematical methodologies are used
freely.  Psychology also seems to me to have various methodologies, insofar as
it is a science at all (admittedly an arguable point).  If it's not a science,
I don't think I would dignify it with the title of being a philosophy either.

As has been pointed out, philosophy uses various methodologies (though, like
any other discipline, it also *generates* a certain amount of methodology).  It
generally uses logic (perhaps not always, unfortunately); some philosophies use
the methodologies of etymology (Heidegger was a big one for this); linguistic
analysts use the method of investigating common meanings of words.  I took a
philosophy course once in which Roget's Thesaurus was programmed onto punch
cards, and we had to discover Wittgensteinian Families of Meanings by peering
through stacks of cards to see which holes they had in common.  (If you said
that this wasn't philosophy, you'd have a point, actually!)  Hegelian
philosophy and Socratic philosophy use the dialectic; Nosick uses explanation
in preference to proof, etc., etc..

On the other hand, each science generates its own methodology.  The methodology
is not generated by philosophers but by scientists, and science *is* a creative
undertaking, in that the scientist must dream up suitable hypotheses and then
dream up suitable ways of testing these.  All these are part of the purvue of
science.  It seems silly to me to think that a scientist keeps switching hats
and becoming a philosopher whenever he is working out hypotheses or
methodologies, instead of doing experiments, just as it seems silly to think
that a philosopher is temporarily becoming a scientist when he uses the
methodology of logic in his arguments!

Therefore methodology does not appear to be either a necessary or sufficient
criterion for distinguishing between science and philosophy.

Disciplines are best defined in terms of their overriding goals or purposes, I
believe.  I like my criterion for differentiating philosophy and science:
Philosophy has the purpose of arriving at non-empirical truths; science has
the purpose of arriving at empirical truths.

I await with interest a serious challenge to this notion.
-- 
"Absolute knowledge means never having to change your mind."

Sarge Gerbode
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.
Palo Alto, CA 94301
UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!sarge