Is Philosophy a Science?, Timothy Williamson

This lecture in the series Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect, is presented by Professor Timothy Williamson. He asks what it might mean to call philosophy a science, and explores different views of the relation between philosophy and science over the past century.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:08

Good evening, everybody, and uh welcome to another lecture in this year's centenary series of lectures brought to you by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. It's a great pleasure to have with us our speaker this evening, Tim Williamson. Tim is uh will be well known to many of you as one of the most productive and the most influential philosophers working today. After posts at Trinity College Dublin, Oxford, and a chair at Edinburgh, he went back to Oxford as Wickham Professor of Logic, a post he occupied for 23 years. As well as numerous visiting professorships around the world. He's a fellow of the British Academy and a foreign honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work spans formal and philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and more recently meta-ethics. And his many books include Knowledge and Its Limits from 2000, Tetralogue, I'm Right, You're Wrong from 2015, which I understand is going to be made into a film. Not many philosophy books make it that far. And Good As Usual in 2025. And perhaps closest to his topic this evening, the philosophy of philosophy. And tonight his talk is about is philosophy a science? Tim.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Right. Well, uh, thank you very much. Um, and since we're it here to in part celebrate the centenary of uh the Royal Institute of Philosophy, I thought I would take an issue which has been in one form or another quite live all the way through the the century of uh the Institute's uh uh existence, but um but but has but not because it's just one that philosophers have always been um talking about since uh Plato or anything like that. It's it's a more specific issue than that, and one about the the relation between uh full philosophy and science in some sense of the word, which I'll uh say something more about. And just putting things in very sort of um impressionistic big picture terms, um what's uh happened is that as we're with the the rise of um modern uh sciences um since the 17th and 18th centuries, um philosophy has has come under increasing um pressure to find a role for itself where it doesn't get into some kind of uh competition with, particularly with natural science, where it's offering its own answers to questions that natural science also has answers to. And um where it seems that if if philosophy does start competing with natural science, uh it's very hard to believe that philosophy will be uh the winner once one starts thinking about the all the um the experimental evidence, the the mathematical power and the uh confirmed predictions and uh and so on of uh well initially physics was the uh the most obvious uh case. Uh it seems that that the kind of armchair um methods of uh philosophy, the or the, if you like, the a priori methods of uh philosophy somehow are not really in a position to compete, and so philosophy has to uh in some way define itself so that it doesn't get into some kind of competition that it can't hope to uh to win. Um and of course, this is not something that that happened so quickly, and and as you may know, um in the um 17th and 18th century, what we would now call physics was called natural philosophy. So it was only um beginning to, as it were, pull away um philosophy. But um, I mean maybe the most uh intense form of this kind of unease initially was in the relation uh between physics and metaphysics, where it seemed that they were they were both in competition for um telling us what the the fundamental structure of the world uh is like, or at least the spatio-temporal uh world, and um and where it was very hard to see how how philosophy could could hold its its own against um physics once um how metaphysics could hold its own, um once you had the kind of achievements of uh Newton and and that uh tradition. Um and so you you can already see in the 18th century, I mean I'm being incredibly crude about the the history here, but just just to give the big picture, that with with Hume he was he was already um very skeptical about um uh about uh metaphysics uh because um it it metaphysics didn't seem to be a matter of um matters of uh fact that were open to the empirical investigation, but also didn't seem to be a matter of uh relations of ideas or what might in the 20th century be called conceptual uh connections. And so it wasn't clear how there was a respectable job for metaphysics to be doing, and and then of course with with uh Kant you you have you know a much more sophisticated treatment of issues like uh like that. But there's still ones where um the idea of sort of speculative metaphysics uh that that might be trying to do things somewhat similar things to the natural sciences, but just doing it by thought was uh also came under a cloud. Um and and then I think you know in the 19th century you can see another version of this where um psychology started uh separating uh itself from uh philosophy because of its use of experimental uh methods, and and so that that left a question about what we might now call philosophy of mind, um, what room there was for that when it seemed to be in danger of competition uh with uh psychology that that had all sorts of experimental backups for um its its claims. So that's that's a very crude way of putting it, but but the something like that is kind of in the background of a lot of um discussion which had to do with philosophy trying to find an appropriate um job description for itself, some kind of job that we can do better than anyone else can, roughly speaking. Um and in the in the 20th century, uh an awful lot of different ways of uh relating philosophy uh to natural science have implicitly or explicitly been uh tried. So, I mean what one thing that we could do is to try to just to imitate the methods of natural science. And but and specifically when I'm talking about natural science, I'm you know I mean things like physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. Um so we could try to imitate uh their methods. This is something that Russell was talking about before the First World War. Um but of course there's a suspicion that if we just try to imitate their methods, they might not actually be very relevant to answering the kind of questions that we're interested in in philosophy. Um so you know, another popular view by on the part of some philosophers in the 20th century was the idea that we could, as philosophers, you know, our job could be to clarify the concepts of science. So that as it were we would be there in the background, sort of polishing up their um intellectual instruments. Um but it's not that easy to persuade the scientists that they really need any help from philosophers as far as uh that goes. I mean it seems that that any science worth its salt is is going to be able to clarify its own concepts or at least its own terms uh when when that's really needed. And any other kinds of clarification may just be some kind of um irritating pedantry that is is not helping the science. Um another version of this view would be that uh well another version of what the the um relation between philosophy and science could be, is that um that philosophy's job is somehow to generalize the uh the results of of natural uh science. Um I mean, so so that for example, you know, in the well actually maybe in the late 19th century there were there were people who were you know trying to think what the more general lessons of uh Darwinian evolutionary theory should be for the nature of society and things like that. Um but it that kind of activity tends to lead into a somewhat dumbed-down popularization of the science, that that it sort of loses a lot of the rigor of the original science. And yet another proposal was that that somehow philosophy could um could dig the foundations for the sciences, so that they really need us. But it's not at all clear that the that natural science really uh does need anybody to dig its foundations. It seems to be sort of manage most of the time quite well without anything like that. Um a more subversive variant on that would be that it's not so much that we're supposed to be providing the um the natural sciences with with foundations, but that we're trying to undermine them in some way, you know, maybe by, as it were, some kind of um postmodern idea that sciences just provide uh you know one more or or many more uh fictions that are on a not not in any objective way better than the kind of fictions that you can get by uh reading a novel. Um again, that seems pretty extreme. Um you can you can also see people who's who are just in effect trying to distance philosophy as far away from natural science as they can to insist that whatever we're doing as philosophers, it's radically different from what natural scientists are doing, and uh it's it's not playing anything like the same kind of game. Um and and then, well, finally, at least on this list, um, you could just look away from natural trance, you from natural science, you could do your best to uh ignore it. And and if if you've had an education mainly in the humanities and and you don't look around too much at the uh the world that you live in, you you might be able to do that. Um so so that as it were, there are lots of different ideas about how philosophy and science uh might be uh related. Um and you know, and you could probably write a uh a history of uh philosophy over the last uh hundred plus uh years, in which the um the framing theme was how different uh philosophers related their activity to that of natural science. I mean, of course, lots of other things were going on as well, but but but you could take that as some kind of organizing uh principle. Okay, so to address this issue uh a little more uh carefully, uh we we need to get somewhat more precise about the the way that the word science is used. Um and it a very unfortunate feature of the use of the word science is that there's there's quite an important ambiguity in the term, um, which isn't very salient to people at just as they're using it. And this has been more of a feature of English than than of some other languages, such as German, although my what the impression I get talking to to speakers of other languages is that English is somehow managing in its role as sort of international language for the Academy, is managing to infect uh other languages with a similar ambiguity. Um so it's it's not that switching to another language automatically avoids this problem. So let me explain what the fundamental ambiguity in the word science is that is causing a lot of uh trouble. So there's a narrow sense of the term science, where it means natural science, um natural science, and um where the natural sciences are things like, as I mentioned, physics, chemistry, uh, biology, and and where there's in a kind of loose sense of a very recognizable sort of methodology. Of course, the methodology varies uh within these sciences, but um but as I mean, we're talking about things like controlled experiments, special instruments for observation such as microscopes and telescopes and so on, and measurement, uh using special measuring instruments of quantities and statistical data that you can, you know, on a large scale that you could analyze, uh, the you know, making predictions uh about um what you will observe if you if you do a certain experiment or a certain um observation and then which can be tested and uh so on. So so that's that's the that's the sort of paradigm that that people tend to have in mind when they hear the word uh science. But there's also a a broader sense of the term science, um, where it just means any kind of systematic, critical, evidence-based uh inquiry. Um and the trouble the trouble is that people kind of oscillate uh between these two uses of the term science, of I think often without realizing what they're they're doing. And um if if you if you don't take care to keep them apart, then this can introduce all sorts of fallacies. Because you know, you can say that um that something, you know, if you want to want to criticize some other kind of um inquiry, um, you know, you could if it's if it doesn't meet the sort of experimental quantitative kind of paradigm that I was sketching before, you can say, well, it's uh it's not scientific because it's it's not like physics or whatever. Um but then but then you can in effect conclude that it isn't much good as a discipline because you know it's not really systematic and critical and evidence-based. And and so what that's um doing is surreptitiously moving from saying it's not a science, whatever this kind of inquirying question is, it's not a science in the narrow sense, to saying that it's uh it's not a science um in the in the broad sense either, and therefore, roughly speaking, it's a lot of rubbish. Um and that this kind of oscillation between narrow and broad senses of science is something that you can quite often uh observe in the sort of the rhetoric and what sort of arguments um of um of people uh who identify as naturalists, you uh sort of thinking that the only kind the only good kind of inquiry um is uh is natural science. Um so just to bring out how consequential this uh confusion is, uh it's important to look at some examples of non-natural sciences. I mean all all all natural sciences are sciences in the but in the broad sense, but but there may be things that are sciences in the broad sense that are not natural science. And the the the most striking and important, well, maybe not important, but the most striking example of these is mathematics. Because mathematics doesn't have any of that the kind of um methodology that is um prototypical for uh science. It doesn't use uh experiments normally, it it doesn't um involve measuring instruments and you know and observation and so on. It's done mainly by thinking or at least drawing diagrams on a board and talking about them and those kind of things. So it's very, very obviously not a natural science. Uh, but it in the broader sense, it is absolutely a paradigm of science. It's it's maybe the most rigorous discipline that we have. Um and and it's particularly difficult for um for naturalists who you know who uh want to give priority to natural science to um to trash talk mathematics, because of course uh virtually all of um natural uh science in one way or another relies on mathematics. And the, as it were, the if you like, in a in some ways the most prestigious um natural science, physics, uh is also the natural science that most blatantly and deeply uh relies on mathematics. So so that there is a we've got one excellent example of um a vitally important um science that is not a natural science in mathematics. Um another example, maybe less dramatic, but but to try to give you a sense of the variety of things that may, in some sense, count as science without um counting as uh natural science, um, is history. And I'm talking about serious scholarly history that is done using. you know the archives and and so on which I mean is um a pretty uh systematic critical evidence based uh inquiry uh but it it doesn't it doesn't use the methods of um natural science at least not um not normally and um and it you know it it it seems to to be you know the the best way of finding out as it were about about the uh the human past actually I had a I had a striking um experience in in a a sort of an exchange with a very hardline um naturalist who um who really thought that the only kind of knowledge comes uh from uh from natural science and I mean and then just as I thought completely uncontentiously I said well look if you want to if you want to find out what happened at the Battle of Gettysburg um you can guess he was an American um the that the the you'd ask a historian you would not ask a physicist and you know it seemed to me that that was just pretty platitudinous but but he said oh no I don't that's that's too quick um the uh history isn't really a source of knowledge at all and um I mean that that seemed to me practically uh insane as a view of uh what history can um can produce but but it was striking as it were how how far he was willing to go on his in his naturalist uh line but I mean the case that really had him in difficulty was the case of mathematics because he really didn't know what to say about that um but he was perfectly prepared to to throw history to the to the into the dustbin. So the claim that I'm sympathetic to is that um that philosophy is a science but that it's not a natural science. So that it's a science in the sense that it's a systematic critical evidence-based uh form of inquiry um in some ways quite like mathematics but other parts of it are more maybe more like uh history um but but and but it obviously doesn't mainly uh rely on experimental uh methods and measurement and and so on I mean you you may be aware of a movement um known as which calls itself experimental uh philosophy which is trying to to make uh philosophy much more of a of a natural science and they they have a um a website um with a a a little video of a a a burning armchair um an armchair in flames because that that the that that's what they think should happen to our armchair methods in in philosophy um but the kind of the kind of experiments they do I mean they're the they're effectively that they're things like you uh you know you take key uh examples that philosophers uh have have used but typically hypothetical cases and you know and for example you know Gettier cases which are supposed to be cases of um justified true beliefs that are not uh cases of knowledge and then you ask you ask people who have not been trained in philosophy what they think about these cases and um there was a time when it was the it seemed to be coming out that there was the quite um big um variations between the judgments that people uh made um uh about about these experiments uh um you know with with ethnicity and gender and so on although the the most of those differences have um sort of evaporated when the when the the testing was done in in a more uh rigorous way than in the the early attempts um but anyway these kind of experimental methods I mean they're they're they're okay for finding out what uh human beings in general or human beings in particular groups think about you know some question I mean they're they're okay for you know for let's say for finding out um what um what people tend to answer to the question let's say is capital punishment um permissible morally permissible but I mean they that but the fact that you you get uh you know some answer predominating if you if you do I mean of course it that's that just tells you what people think it doesn't tell you about what's what's true um and and so it's you know I mean and we don't we don't just want to do philosophy by opinion poll um so those attempts to to turn philosophy into a natural science really don't look very uh promising um that doesn't mean that we have that philosophy has nothing to learn from natural science I'll say a bit more about that later one thing you might be wondering about is well what what counts as evidence in philosophy because it it it's you might initially think you know comparing it with natural science that we don't have very much evidence but but we in fact what we have is a sort of very disparate array of evidence um and one one way in which we're similar to mathematics is of course in mathematics of course that the the role of evidence is played by mathematical proof but in philosophy we we have um logical proof which is very very similar to mathematical proof perhaps in fact the very same thing uh and and so we have that kind of evidence um we also have a whole lot of common sense knowledge of the of the world I'm not suggesting that common sense is always right but but like other like any other species of uh animal we we have plenty of knowledge of our uh environment for evolutionary uh reasons and and we also you know as well as having all kinds of actual cases that we can use um we we can use hypothetical cases uh which uh as long as they're possible will tell us something about about um these cases uh you know about where whether some principle is actually necessarily true and the way the way we use those hypothetical cases are not very different from the way that they're used in all sorts of um other sciences I mean you know famously physicists do thought experiments um and so all of I mean we've got all of this we can we can learn from other sciences just in the way the other sciences learn from uh each other we you know we don't we don't have to as it were keep ourselves pure of uh what we can what we can learn from other sciences and all this is I think is just um really an application of a view of evidence that I've defended um in my epistemology where really your evidence is simply the totality of what you know um it I mean it you know it there isn't some special connection between evidence and observation for example um so just to consider an alternative um something that you you see some philosophers saying is that um that philosophy is is radically different from the sciences because it it has a uh a practical role and maybe a practical role either at the individual level of some kind of you know some kind of practical uh wisdom um or you know maybe you know in traditionally people sometimes thought that you know philosophers were good people to ask about how to be happy or at least how to be less miserable and and things like that. And and this could also be a practical role at a social rather than just an individual level for example people talk about conceptual engineering which actually really is just linguistic engineering but where they where they want to propose different ways of um drawing the lines around the for the application of words which in ways which they think would be more socially productive or something than than the traditional ones. And so you might think well isn't that a a quite an alternative view of what philosophy's doing which is radically opposed to um to sciences and and this can be as it were exacerbated but by a lot of the the rhetoric that that you get from people who are often pro-science about how science is is just is value free and that it it's it's just concerned with facts not with values. But I mean that's that's a very hard line to to pursue um and in particular it's it's not very obvious how any science can really be value free because it seems that that the any science in it um values knowledge over ignorance and and truth over over falsity. But also if you if you think about for example medicine I mean medicine is quite obviously focused on the value of health. I mean that's that's the point of medicine and so on but that doesn't stop modern medicine from being you know a very scientific pursuit so that it's it's not as though just introducing values automatically disqualifies you from uh from being a a science. And you know and if if you if you think about what what a philosophy would be like that that was concerned with kind of giving advice uh in some way to uh in uh about how to live either at advice at the uh at the individual level or at the uh social level I mean you would think that it ought to have some kind of evidence for the the good effects of uh the advice that it's giving I mean that that if you follow this advice it really will make you happier or at least less miserable or whatever whatever it is. And if if philosophers try to proceed in in a as it were an evidence free way while dispensing all kinds of advice I mean they seem really not much better than than a quack doctor who's just handing out pills without any evidence about what the effects of these pills are. So that it's not clear that that as it were just going practical is really an alternative to the the kinds of um systematic critical evidence based uh inquiry uh that that makes you a science uh in the in the broad sense okay um just jerking with time so in the final part of the talk what what I want to do is as it were to look to the future I mean presumably the Royal Institute of Philosophy is interested in what the next hundred years will be uh like if if um human civilization lasts that long um and and so I I want to talk now about a few ways in which philosophy m might be able to become much more scientific than it has been so far. I mean I've been saying that it's a science um but all these things like being being systematic being critical being evidence based I mean these are obviously matters of degree and uh and it m may well be that we could do much better than we've done so far. And so so I'll discuss a few examples of that and one one kind of um intellectual style that I think we we can learn a lot about from the uh the natural sciences but which can be applied in genuinely philosophical ways is what's called model building where models in in this sense used in the sciences they're they're very simplified as people sometimes say idealized mathematical descriptions of some system which is too messy and complicated to study directly so that we can't we can't just give a a direct description of how this thing works. And I mean the the the the idea with these models is that although we know that they're not strictly correct, they're good enough to capture some relevant feature of the target phenomenon we're trying to understand and give us some kind of structural understanding of how this feature works. I mean a typical example of idealization is in this sense is that in models of the social of sorry of the solar system you you treat planets as just point masses as if they were just a mass concentrated at a single point. Of course we all know that that planets are not like that really but but although it's a massive idealization it actually still is good enough for many purposes that you you can use it to get quite accurate results. And and this this kind of model building is something that already happens a bit in uh in philosophy uh so that so for example um in epistemology the informal epistemology we we we have models um that uh we use to understand uh phenomena and which do involve just this kind of idealization so so for example when epistemologists are interested in discussing uncertainty the their favorite model is is one of uh a lottery um and they'll say things like you know that there are 10,000 tickets and only one of them will win and you know it's a fair lottery and then you can do all sorts of calculations really pretty much on that uh on that basis. And that might seem well that's not much of an idealization. I mean there are real lotteries as the national lottery and so on and but actually in fact when you when you look very carefully you see that there are lots of uh idealizations it which are playing an extremely important role so i epistemologically so that for example um it's when epistemologists discuss lotteries they pretty much always assume that the person who buys a ticket in the lottery knows exactly what the number of tickets uh sold in the lottery is uh and if if you tried to uh be more realistic about the assumption because of course when you buy a lottery ticket you don't know how many tickets will be sold um it would actually make the mathematics so complicated and messy that um that we just wouldn't be able to to do the calculations and and we'd and we'd have to make more arbitrary assumptions it you know in you even in order to have some kind of go of it. And you've uh in in areas in in moral and political uh philosophy you you can find people um talking about somewhat similar kinds of models um you know including things like prisoners dilemma and what which are often they're um the kind of assumptions that in the background have to do with um assuming that everybody is rational and everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody's rational and things like like that which are manifestly idealizations but you you still you can get some kind of insight from these I mean obviously you know we'd we'd want something in the end more nuanced than than that. So so I think that um that using using models is some is something that we that we do in um in philosophy a bit. As with other sciences there are two but basically two kinds of knowledge that that you can get concerning these models and then combine which can which do give insight and one one kind of knowledge is just precise mathematical knowledge about how the specified model works mathematically. And another kind of knowledge is knowledge about roughly how this model in in some very vague way corresponds to the actual target phenomenon about where it's uh it's similar and what the divergencies are and if you put these two kinds of knowledge together you you can um you can get a lot of insight and this this case of the model building methodology actually um it casts some light on the kind of worries that philosophers very naturally have about whether philosophy makes any progress and typically what you find is that philosophers get gloomy about their subject and feel that it's a bit of an intellectual disaster area or somehow try to recycle these disasters as if they were quite good in some funny way. But they what they're doing is they're comparing philosophy which they're very well acquainted with some kind of imagined version of scientific progress. And so for example they you know they think that that progress in science is because scientists keep discovering new laws of nature and then they think well what laws of philosophy have we discovered recently and of course you you know you you you can't think of any and and these laws are supposed to be exceptionless but most scientific progress is actually not of the form of discovering new laws that's a very rare thing to uh to do um and in a subject like biology for example progress consists much more in terms of um building better and better models of um biological uh phenomena that that are um models that that involve all kinds of idealization and approximation but nevertheless do cast some light on these subjects and uh you know if if we thought about philosophy in a similar model building spirit that that what we're doing is not trying to to find exceptionalist laws um but uh but rather models that that give us some insight into the phenomenon we might realize in fact we're making a lot more progress than we think we are because because we we our view of what progress should look like has been distorted by a false model um of um of what progress in the sciences Look like. I was at a conference in Italy a couple of days ago where which was about the relation between philosophy and science. And there were a couple of physicists in the audience, and they were complaining about the sort of naive conception of progress in the natural sciences that philosophers tend to have, and how the natural science just they just don't live up to what philosophers sort of enviously imagine. Okay, so I think that because on the whole model building has not been a big thing in um in philosophy, even though there are these cases where it's done, philosophers have not been trained in how to build or evaluate models. And often when they first encounter models, they just think they're rubbish because oh, you know, it's equivalent to saying, oh, but look, we we live on the earth and we know it's not a point mass, so that's a counterexample to this model of the solar system. And um and they they they make kind of mistakes like that. But you know what it strongly suggests is that there is a lot of room for more model building in philosophy because it's it's a method that is very powerful and that that philosophers have really not been trying most of the time. And so there may well be quite a lot of low-hanging fruit. And if we were just more alert to this as a way of thinking about our subject, we might be able to make more progress there. Um okay, so I don't want to go on for too long, but I'll I'll talk for another five minutes. So I I mentioned also on the handout the uh evolutionary epistemology. And the the the reason I'm well this I mentioned it because it's it's this idea strikes me as a much better way of thinking about epistemology. So in in epistemology, you get maybe a majority still of epistemologists who think that the the distinction between knowledge and ignorance is not the right focus for epistemology. That the real distinction should be between um justified and unjustified belief, where a justified belief can be uh can be false. And when they're discussing epistemology, they virtually always have in mind the epistemology of human agents. They hardly ever uh talk about the epistemology of um for uh non-human uh animals, and and in fact, you know, it's not at all unusual for epistemologists to deny that non-human animals have beliefs, for example. Um but you know, when you when you think about how much human cognition has in common with the cognition of non-human animals, I mean, for a start, that our perceptual systems work fundamentally in a very similar way to those of non-human animals, and and memory also has a lot of things in common. So that as it were, at some very basic level, um human epistemology is quite similar to that of uh non-human animals. Of course, lots of layers of sophistication are built on top of that because we have a language, that's the biggest single uh difference. But um but at the same time, it seems very kind of methodologically wrong-headed, really, for epistemology to be focusing on this super sophisticated um case of uh cognition and and not thinking about what are far more fundamental kinds of cognition that that humans have in common with other animals. And and if you if you think about uh why um creatures should evolve that have minds in the first place and and so are capable of having knowledge, it's I mean the point of it is presumably to um that a creature with a mind is able to uh uh interact um flexibly with uh you know its complex and rapidly changing uh environment. And it does that by gaining knowledge of its environment and acting on that knowledge. And and what so what matters is um is not the distinction between justified and unjustified beliefs. I mean, who cares whether a cat's beliefs are justified or not? But but it what does matter is is whether or how much the creature knows about its environment. And and so I think I mean one one way um in which this kind of neglect of evolutionary considerations shows itself is in the obsession of uh epistemologists with what is happening at the level of consciousness. Um and that they think as where that's supposed to be where all the uh epistemological normativity uh comes in, where you can blame more people or not. And they and they have models of um the what goes on, for example, it in perception, which where you where we you have the the action is all crucially is at the level of consciousness, uh, because you know you you're supposed to have some kind of perceptual seeming, and then you either um take it at face value or or you refuse to do so if you have some reason for suspicion or whatever. Um and and so the the their account of uh perceptual knowledge involves these elaborate processes in consciousness. But once you think that the um I mean you realize that that conscious processing is literally millions of times slower in how much uh information it can process than unconscious uh processing, it's incredibly unlikely that uh that perceptual knowledge would would require this kind of uh grotesquely complex conscious uh structure. Um it would just create a terrible bottleneck, and and we you know we would, any any creatures that that did their that gained uh perceptual knowledge that way, um, you know, would be eaten by by their uh their predators before they had time to uh react and would be wiped out by evolution undeservedly. So that I think we could do far better if we thought in epistemology, if we just thought about it a little bit more in terms of the kind of evolutionary uh pressures on cognitive processing, and I think we'd we'd have, in a way, a much more down-to-earth uh conception of epistemology than this rather rarefied stuff about um people's how justified people are and and so on. Um so well I've I've mentioned two further things, heuristics and overfitting, uh, which are also ways in which I think um we epistemology can can learn from uh scientific ideas. But I think I think I'm running out of time. So I I mean I have actually written a book called Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy, which um talks a lot about those things. So if if you're really interested, you can look at that. And I and so um so I want just one to end saying this that um, of course, everyone likes to think that they're special. And then you kind of you you know in life you come to learn that you're not so special. Um and it's exactly the same with intellectual discipline. So every discipline likes to think that it's special. Um and in with with philosophy is no exception uh to that. Um it although you know philosophers divide on whether they like to think of philosophy as specially uh exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, but but it that they want it to be uh exceptional and just completely unlike anything else. This this kind of exceptionalism is is just a uh, in a way, a somewhat narcissistic delusion that that philosophy uh has, even if it's got sort of I mean, self-hate is uh just as much an obsession with self as self-love can can be. And really, if we if we stop thinking that that we're such a special discipline, if we if we are willing just to be, you know, there in the general intellectual landscape of worthwhile uh activities that in some broad sense count as sciences, uh, I think we'll come to know ourselves uh much better than we seem to do at the moment. Thanks very much.

SPEAKER_03 54:42

Great, thank you very much. So a maximum of three questions or comments, depending on the length of your answers. So, yes, the first question is about sort of how do we identify what is and isn't science? So you said that you asked whether science can really clarify its own concepts. That was one of the rather useless offers that philosophy makes to science. But which bits of the utterances that scientists make really belong to science as opposed to philosophy? And I'm thinking both of arguments within the philosophy of physics about the interpretation of certain equations and arguments in the philosophy of biology which look pretty philosophical. Are they just because they're scientists by training, does it follow that they're doing science when they enter into those discussions?

SPEAKER_02 55:35

Well, I I don't think that we should assume that all disciplines have to be mutually exclusive. So so that I it it's I absolutely agree that um when when you see um let's say philosophers of physics and theoretical physicists talking, they're they're often addressing the the same kind of issues, and um and this you you get this all all over the place in philosophy. So that for example, um in philosophy of language, philosophers of language and linguists who are doing some say semantics or pragmatics, that they're often addressing the very same questions, and uh and and there's quite a lot of overlap in their methods as well. And so I don't I don't think we should be worrying about you know, is this philosophy or is it is it physics or is it is this linguistics or is it philosophy of language? I I think it it's just unproblematic that it can be both. Um and uh and by the way, this makes it very weird for people to kind of insist that everybody else is making progress, but philosophy isn't, because you know, if if we've got these areas of overlap, uh, you know, which are both philosophy and uh and some other discipline, if the other discipline is progressive, then how can it be that somehow philosophy isn't progressive?

SPEAKER_03 56:59

Um good, thank you. Um one of the things that you said sort of in in the middle of the talk that um was arresting was that you didn't think, I think I've got this right, you didn't think there was any special link between evidence and observation. Somebody might say, well, uh evidence is observation is a privileged form of evidence because it's more direct, and the closer you, further away you get from observation, the more possibilities of error come into play. Is that a good plea for the privileged status of observation?

SPEAKER_02 57:35

Well, I mean if if you look at the role of observation in science, the more scientific you get, the the less direct it becomes because all sorts of filters are applied, and you know, and um and you you can you can't you know it it's it's not good enough just to say, you know, oh you know, last night I saw a witch flying past on her broom or something. I mean it's um and um and you know and the for so for example in in animal ethology where where um they they're looking at videos, let's say, of chimpanzees interacting with each other, and um, and there are all all kinds of descriptions that it's very natural to say, like, you know, like the the chimpanzee a chimpanzee was trying to do such and such and so on. And but of course you have to be very, very careful about what it is that you observed, and then and then they so it's it's not a matter just of of writing down what you what you thought you saw, it's it's you know they have things like you know, three graduate students looking independently at the videos and and and um and saying you know, giving their descriptions of them, and it's only if they all agree and so on. So that of course, I I mean we do get huge amounts of knowledge just by very ordinary perception, just all the time our eyes are open, we're getting a stream of knowledge about what's happening around us. Um and and so uh you know, and if if we if we didn't get that kind of observational knowledge, uh natural science could hardly get off the the ground. But but it it still um you know for for it to be evidence, we we need all kinds of further filters and and so on. So that um it, you know, I the a sort of crude empiricist account of what's going on, which I'm I'm sure you you you're not actually proposing, um it just doesn't get right what's happening with this um good.

SPEAKER_03 59:46

So I think we've got time for a third one. This might be gris to your mill in the end, but and I don't want to um restage the Battle of Gettysburg, but this is about your extremist uh uh interlocutor who was saying that history wasn't a reliable source of knowledge. I mean, um, if you wanted to argue that it was a respectable source of knowledge and that it was continuous with the methods of natural science, not just because it was rigorous, but because it's scientific in the narrow sense, you might say, well, don't focus too much on the recent past. The more remote the periods you're writing the history of, the more history resembles science. Because, you know, if we're looking at what happened 5,000 years ago, we don't know what individuals did, we just have to rely on scientific principles about what people generally do, what rain does, what sheep do, and this sort of thing. What do you think of that?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:47

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's it's clear that that uh archaeology is much closer to to uh um one of the natural sciences that um and uh and and a uh you know a lot of things like carbon dating and so on are you know obviously highly scientific. But I my my sense is that as were people who would describe themselves as historians think that history is hard it's hardly count, I mean it hardly counts as history if you if you're not dealing with um doc well, typically written documents, I mean, of that that you can then use to understand um you know what individuals were thinking and and so on. Of course, I mean a lot of social history is not meant to be at the level of it uh uh uh of individuals exactly, but it still it um it gets its distinctive flavor from the use of written materials. Of course, there are there are things like oral history, so that we um where you know in cases of um non-literate societies, you you may have to rely on um on narratives that that you get from informants that have never been written down. But there are I mean there are ways of testing you know how reliable people are and so on, and and so that that's I mean that's one of these kind of slightly trickier cases, but it I mean it surely is the case that um that we you know we get we get some um we can do history of of non-literate societies to some extent, and after all, you know, it it's not as though the the things that somebody might might tell you uh just uh in speech that they suddenly become much more serious evidence once they've written written them down.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:43

Um great, thank you. Over to you for questions. Uh yes, about halfway up on this side.

SPEAKER_08 1:02:51

Yes. So science it is not a question of uh whether uh is philosophy science. Rather, I'm thinking uh we all uh know that the science needs philosophy. And the reason for it is if we think about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in the quantum mechanics, where Heisenberg just wrote an equation delta P multiplied by delta Q is divided by Q. But philosophers come back saying that that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a statement about the nature of things, which is ontological, and not just about what we can know, that is the epistemological. So that interpretation came from the philosophers, you know. But so science needs philosophy. Now I'm a question for you that the Quine, philosopher Quine, he rejects the idea that the philosophy provides a foundation and that science proceeds on that foundation. He rejected it. So I come up with the alternative for you that the science provides the foundation or say groundwork, and the philosophy provides a structure on that foundation, and that structure is language, method, interpretation.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:25

Or do you think I think there are many, many scientists who would not agree that that science uh needs philosophy. Um and of course in taking the the case of Heisenberg, I mean you were not taking you know a typical piece of of science, you were taking, you know, what one of the most famously uh problematic um developments in in science. Um and so I think that even with these very abstract theoretical issues, um scientists can can good do quite a lot them themselves. Um I I think that philosophers sometimes can uh add something extra. I mean the you know, it if if you take the the case you know of quantum mechanics, I mean the um you know the Copenhagen interpretation, you know, the advanced by Niels Bohr and so on, that that was I think much more his, if you like, amateur philosophizing, but but amateur as a philosopher, but still of course you know informed by you know immense knowledge of the of the science. And um, you know, I think that f philosophers do sometimes have something extra that they can contribute. Um and so I think you know, I think that. Actually, in the case of quantum mechanics, it's the physicists have been tending to stick to um the Copenhagen interpretation when philosophers have been more open, but perhaps because they've got slightly less invested, um more open to alternative interpretations. And I and I think it it looks as far as I can tell, but I'm a real outsider to this, as as though the the Copenhagen interpretation is gradually falling uh into decline and and the moves to towards you know other views, many worlds or the Bohmian uh interpretation. Um but I mean I think you know I think it's it's not it's not as though the the scientists are themselves incapable of putting structures uh on on the kind of work that they've done. And and often and often, I mean, it's not, and of course, some of them themselves are to some extent informed by philosophy in the way that Einstein was influenced by March, although he wasn't really a Marchian, I think. But um so so I think it's it's much it's much harder to do this sort of division of labor than that, and I don't I don't think any simple formula is actually going to capture it. But it's just that sometimes philosophers coming at things from a different angle can contribute something. And and not only in the there's very, very obviously metaphysical issues about quantum mechanics. So I know people I know one philosopher of biology um who um who was kind of in inter who'd started as a biologist and was interested in you know the what by what principles do we do we uh divide populations into species and uh we'll group them into species. And and he just he found that the most illuminating things that had been written about that were by a philosopher, Elliot Sober, rather than biologists. And so it, you know, I think I think it's um it's it's just a much messier uh picture, but but we do have something to contribute, but it's it's not as though um it's not as though if philosophy departments were all closed down that all the science departments would collapse.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:22

Okay, so now there was I can see lots of people towards the back. Who had their hand up first? I can't remember now. Go on, you you go first then. Uh okay, you go on.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:33

Thank you for the talk. Um I guess the way I understood kind of from the beginning of the talk, the setup, there was sort of a competition between science and philosophy. There was some threat that philosophy might become irrelevant. Uh and sort of you mentioned that initially there were sort of bad fellows back in you know natural philosophy day. But uh it seems to me that there was another sort of bad fellow was religion, right? And sort of over time, where when sort of science was ascending, religion, we see at least in the Western society, kind of losing ground, right? And that made me think that kind of based on the examples you gave of the good life or whatnot, kind of the typical sort of philosophical questions back in the day, that there was kind of an overlap between philosophy and religion in terms of the kinds of questions that they were trying to pursue. And so that made me think that do you think that maybe sort of, you know, while we're kind of chasing after science and trying to get there, maybe sort of a more prudent approach is to say, well, are there some questions that sort of wouldn't fall in the purview of science, but typically would be maybe catered to by religion that philosophy can also try to address? Or do you think rather that pretty much there are no questions worth exploring that are not solidly in sort of the realm of scientific inquiry? Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:16

Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, of course, you're right that that religion did play a significant role. And um and so for but it was certainly there in the mix, and you can you can see that with um for example uh George Barclay, uh, you know, who who was very concerned about the the way in which the uh autonomy of um well it was still natural philosophy, that then seemed to to be giving you a universe that that didn't need God and and then tried to it it undermine um the calculus, which was supposed you know the basis of a lot of the science with a critique of infinitesimals, and so and and of course, you know, we all you know we know about all Galileo's troubles with the the church and so on. Um but you know I uh I think when when you look at sort of medieval philosophy, which of course was uh you know all the people doing it were um well in the in the West they were they were all Christians and and uh well the Northwest, um, but you know, it w there was something similar going on with Islamic uh philosophy. And um I was talking actually talking about this issue with in with someone who's studying early Islamic philosophy, and he he what he was saying was that you know people have this model where there are just certain things that you mustn't you mustn't say because the the you know the the religion is operating as this kind of sensor of what what you're allowed, and that it's in fact much messier than that, uh because um the you know for for any pass for any passage in the Quran, for example, there would be you know a dozen different interpretations of it, and you know, and so so that it wasn't as though religion was just saying, look, here's the bottom line, uh you you which you can't you can't cross this. It was more a matter of people picking interpretations of the sacred texts that that would that would suit their philosophy. And so that in fact there was there was more m room for maneuver than than one might think. But of I mean, of course you're right that you know if if one was doing some serious history of this, what one would have to talk about the role of of religion as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:55

Okay, so there was somebody else in uh let's go by the wall then.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:04

Uh I was wondering about some of the uh contributions philosophy has made to the sciences in terms of methodology. Uh because it seems largely arguable that in computer science there is a link between logic. Uh perhaps considering computer science and computer simulations applied logic. Uh similarly, now the social sciences are celebrating Bayesian statistics and Bayesian inference, but it has its roots in mathematical philosophy. And it seems like many times over there has been this pattern of philosophy conceding its methods to the sciences. Uh now computer science is now statistics. Uh and it just strikes me as oddly tragic, and I'm wondering what role institutions might play in allowing that bit of concession. Uh, because it seems to me like model building is fundamentally something that computer scientists and statisticians are interested in, and yet their methods stem from the philosophy department. I'm wondering why that almost displacement of the endeavor occurred. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:20

I mean, so in the case of computer science, of course, the basic origin of that well, at least if we're talking about modern computer science, is is with uh Turing's work, which came it came well he Turing was a was a mathematician rather than a philosopher, although obviously a mathematician with with highly philosophical uh interests. And and so the the whole idea of a universal computing machine came out of a solution to the Holting problem, which was a uh uh a mathematical uh uh problem, but but one sort of embed embedded within um formal uh logic. Um so so that um I mean there are yeah, there are those very deep connections. And um and I don't I m my experience of computer scientists is that they're not really in denial about that. I mean they um I mean they they simply publish I mean they pub a lot of the a lot of the work being done on logic these days is coming from computer science departments rather than either philosophy departments or mathematics departments. And um and but you know, but they're uh in some ways work you know working to the same standards of rigor and and and for example, they computer science has been very open to uh new developments in uh in logic so that um you know when epistemic logic, which is is very much a model-building uh enterprise, uh the sort of logic of knowledge and belief, where that they that was used by computer scientists uh as a way of understanding um things like how knowledge is uh passed around in distributed systems and so on. And you know, and another example which I think um just strengthens the point that you're making, is um if if you look in linguistics, particularly informal uh semantics and pragmatics, the the fundamental um explanatory frameworks uh are taken by by lingu linguists from philosophers. I mean, there are things like um the possible world semantics, um, you know, taken, which was developed by you know Kripke, David Lewis, uh Robert Stolmaker, and so on. And and then that the uh the linguists have found that that's exactly what they need and they've and they've applied it. And and so I I think uh one could make a yeah a good a good case that that philosophy um uh has contributed to a lot of scientists, uh sciences, but you know, in in these kinds of innovation which which um philosophers can do in a somewhat more freewheeling way, but that but often turn out to have very serious applications.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:21

Okay, now there was okay, let's let's you've had you've been waiting for a long time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:27

Uh thank you very much. Um I had one question about whether or not uh you perhaps minimize the difference between uh what you call sort of like the practical or ameliorative role of philosophy against uh disciplines that are called you know said to be scientific. Uh, because you said that, well, the claims being made by the people who say that this is uh different uh from science is that you know values are involved here. But you said, well, values are involved as well in disciplines that we call scientific. Um but usually I think what's said is that uh there are non-epistemic values involved in the internal stages of science, um, which you might think is not involved here. But then you said that you know, well, you know, if if this sort of practical and military role philosophy is gonna be any good, we're gonna have to, you know, come up with some evidence for it. If you could say a bit more about that, because that sounded just a little bit quick to me. Um uh just because evidence is needed isn't clear to me that it's uh it's science yet, uh, in the sense in the broad sense. Um so I just wanted to hear a bit more about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:38

Yeah, so I I was uh just considering not something like moral uh philosophy or whatever, but but something that is really you know um much more practical the way in which people have thought of philosophers as you know uh as wise and and you know able to give you good advice uh about how to live your life and and so on. And um and I think very often what people have had in mind is is just the the as it were the the philosopher as guru, um which is the kind of as it were the the you know the sort of the pre-Socratic role of uh the philosopher who's just somebody who will come out with these aphorisms and and you know you your job is is not to uh to question them but but somehow to uh interpret them and uh and so on. But of course, uh philosophers were trying to do metaphysics, but uh in in a kind of guru mode as well, and um and we we really did have to get a lot bit beyond that um you know uh to to get very uh far. Um and the the thing is of course, you know, I mean, you know, if we're comparing all this, let's say, to psychiatry or or whatever, I mean the the the there are all sorts of questions about you know exactly how good the evidence is, although I mean there are some questions uh about that in the you know in the case of just regular medicine as well, because I mean there is this movement of you know which calls itself evidence-based uh medicine, but but where the the the it there's a very narrow conception of what can count as evidence in such a way that most evidence most medicine is not evidence-based because they're thinking of the you know the required evidence-based as sort of massive um big data, you know, with all sorts of uh you know controls and uh and so on. And I mean, so you know, it's it's a it's a matter of uh degree, but I you know I take it that people who you know who had who had a reputation for for wise advice, they they probab there was there was probably something you know in their track record that um that uh that made people think that. I mean I'm assuming that it wasn't simply that these were sort of charismatic characters who could could get people to um to do all sorts of things just by their say-so, maybe including killing themselves or whatever, because I mean, you know, as in with some sects. But um and so that I mean, you know, it's it's not as though either we have statistics or we don't have any evidence at all. You know, there's quite a lot of room in in between. And um, I mean it does strike me that that philosophers who you know who are pretending to give or you know, claiming to give uh advice that will that will you know transform people's lives, um if they're serious about that, they they they ought to have some evidence for that. I mean, if I you know if if I'm if if I'm give giving um somebody some ad advice um you know and I know that they're going to act on it and and that it will transform their life for for better or or worse, if if I'm just saying the first thing that comes into my head, I mean that's that's no good. I mean I you know it's it's utterly irresponsible. And and so so I you know the the these questions of um of uh evidence uh just naturally come up. And of course, it's you know it's not it's I mean, you know, medicine is the most obvious example, but um, you know, even subjects like engineering are you know in fact um that they involve values uh you know all over the place because uh you know the engineers need to be able to to build um bridges that that don't fall down and you know that that that robustness is of is of value as and uh and um and so so the you know the similar questions about what what the evidence is for for the their normative uh claims arises there as well. And I think one could show that in all range of okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:38

Let's give the people close to the front a turn. Were there any hands on this side of the room at the um front? Go ahead.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:49

Thank you for for the talk.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:51

Um I just wonder from an educational point of view, because um I did physics and we had a short, we had a course on history and philosophy of science. And up to that point in my life I'm going to admit that was very naive. Science is fact, fact, fact, fact. And we had, I think, three lectures on philosophy, and they were transformative. We did Thomas Cohn's the revolution of scientific discovery, and we also covered Upper and I never looked at the way science was done then. We ethologies being made a lot of people. I never looked at science again in the same way. And I worried I worried after that. Uh I mean, with the passing years, um instead of uh I think the conviction has grown stronger and stronger that um I I almost feel it should be a necessary part of every every uh science discipline. But I wonder whether amongst practicing scientists there's a kind of a blind spot when it comes to their epistemological uh foundations. And I wondered what your comments would be on that. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:04

Well, just I mean, one comment by the way about Kuhn is that he was not trained as a philosopher. He was he was trained as a well, he was a f I think he studied in physics and then moved to the history of physics and then and then as it were became more philosophical. But um but he was he was always liable to make terrible philosophical mistakes from time to, you know, some of which he got called out on in the structure of scientific revolutions. But he but even you know he he insisted that he was a real uh a realist, but he also said that of course there were no galaxies before somebody had had the word galaxy, and um things that are just obviously uh wrong like um like that. But the thing I mean it's it's you know this partly has to do with the the way that that um degrees are structured, so that for example, you know, in um in North America, the um people who do science degrees say they they just have to do some some humanities, and it's very it's quite often philosophy, you know, out of just uh um as a distribution requirement. So that so that they you know many, many scientists in North America have had you know as much exposure as as you had uh to to philosophy in that way. Of course, uh alas, you know, a lot of them are just sitting there bored and so on. And you know, and it may be you know that that um you know I I mean I'm you you're you're not necessarily a random, you know, a completely random sample, particularly given the fact that you're here in this um I mean the the one the ones who sat through some the some lectures on philosophy and were totally bored would probably not be coming to the Royal Institute of Philosophy later. But um I I mean yeah, I I look I uh I agree that philosophy has a lot to offer and that it in fact and it has it has that that to offer to to people who you know who may spend their careers doing science, but I mean you do sometimes see scientists saying that that the philosophy course that they took somehow gave them a lot more intellectual flexibility. Uh and uh and I think the as it were the the greater freedom to ask subversive questions that that is part of the philosophy, uh the culture of philosophy, um d is very good for for some people, and and and maybe it would be good if only others could take it seriously. But on the other hand, that you get people who really do who are extremely good at at thinking within a box and and don't really want to. To look outside and and for them that may that may be what works best.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:06

Okay, now over on this yes, I point it to you and make it make it as we're nearly at time, make it quick enough, Tim, if you could make your.

SPEAKER_07 1:28:14

Hi. Um thank you for the talk. Um I'm just wondering uh whether the um desire and the duty to uh follow, to ask a question and uh think through it and uh construct an argument, follow it where it leads, uh often it seems to me to quite bizarre places that then become kind of standardized like um radical sceptical scenarios, uh brain in a vat scenarios and so on. Um I I wonder I can't quite see those going away um in in the near future or or or uh uh or even think that it's good that they should go away completely. But what I'm sorry, I'll try and hurry up here. What I wonder is um the fact that they will probably persist, those questions and those the uh the duty to try to uh to answer them and engage with them uh is difficult to combine with the generation of uh some of the new models that you were talking about, because um those models uh rely on certain assumptions which um you can't make if you've uh uh followed an argument where it leads, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:50

Well the the more the models build in all kinds of assumptions, but the the point of the model-building methodology is that you're not required to believe these assumptions. So, you know, if the the people the scientists who are working with a model um of the solar system on which planets are point masses, they don't believe that planets are point masses. They're perfectly aware that they're not. Uh, you know, it's not it's not very difficult to be aware that we're not living on a point mass. But um and uh and so so that um you know the model-building methodology is actually quite hostile to dogmatism. And of course, people people that they may have a model that that that um works well and then they're reluctant to uh to change it. But um, you know, I I I just sorry, I'm I'm going on too long, but just on the the case of skepticism, I think one of the one feature of why skepticism is something I completely agree that that we will we will never get rid of some skeptical in instincts. And this the thing is that something that's very intellectually healthy is that people question their assumptions. But if you do too much of that, you end up just suspending all belief, and then you and then you you you you're lost. I mean you you've got no way of kind of recovering the um uh what you suspended um belief on. And and so it's like the self-criticism is is like uh and which you know in its extreme cases become skepticism. Um it's like a you know a doctor who you know who hands you a bottle of medicine and and just says, look, a little a little bit of this medicine will be good for you. Um if you have too much, it'll kill you. But but doesn't tell you what the dose what the right dose is. He just leaves it to you to try to work out what dose you should have. And and with the the as it were, you know, our instinct for for self-criticism is like is like that, that we have no we have no idea where we should draw the line about what what is re a reasonable level of self-criticism and and what what is just madness.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:27

Well, I wish we could go on. I'm afraid we're at time, so apologies to those of you who had questions and did not have the opportunity to ask them. Um but before we close, let's thank Tim once again for a very stimulating talk.