Why philosophy is so important in science education

Each semester, I teach courses on philosophy of science to undergraduate students at the University of New Hampshire. Most students enroll in my courses to meet general education requirements, and most of them have never before attended a philosophy class.

The first day of the semester I try to give you an idea of ​​what the philosophy of science is about. I begin by explaining that philosophy deals with issues that can not be solved only with facts, and that the philosophy of science is the application of this approach to the field of science. After this, I explain some concepts that will be central to the course: induction, testing and method in scientific research. I tell you that science proceeds by induction, the practice of resorting to past observations to make general statements about what has not yet been observed, but that philosophers consider that induction is inadequately justified and, therefore, problematic for the science. Then I refer to the difficulty of deciding which test fits each hypothesis in a unique way, and why it is vital for any scientific research to have this clear. I let them know that "the scientific method" is not singular and direct, and that there are basic disputes about what the scientific methodology should be like. Finally, I emphasize that, although these topics are "philosophical", they nevertheless have real consequences on how science is done.

At this point I am often asked questions such as: "What are your credentials?" "What university did you attend?" And "Are you a scientist?"

Maybe they ask these questions because, as a philosopher of Jamaican extraction, I embody an unusual group of identities, and they are curious about me. I'm sure that's partly like that, but I think there's more, because I've observed a similar pattern in a course in philosophy of science taught by a more stereotypical teacher. As a graduate student at Cornell University in New York, I worked as an assistant professor in a course on human nature and evolution. The professor who taught it gave a physical impression very different from mine. He was white, male, bearded and about 60 years old: the very image of academic authority. But the students were skeptical about their views on science, because, as some people said, they disapproved: "He is not a scientist."

I think these answers have to do with doubts about the value of philosophy compared to that of science. It is not surprising that some of my students doubt that philosophers have anything useful to say about science. They are aware that prominent scientists have publicly declared that philosophy is irrelevant to science, if not completely useless and anachronistic. They know that STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is much more important than anything the humanities can offer.

Many of the young people who attend my classes think that philosophy is a confused discipline that only deals with questions of opinion, while science is dedicated to the discovery of facts, to providing evidence and the dissemination of objective truths. In addition, many of them believe that scientists can answer philosophical questions, but philosophers have nothing to contribute to scientists.

Why do university students treat philosophy as completely different and subordinated to science? In my experience, four reasons stand out.

One has to do with the lack of historical awareness. University students tend to think that departmental divisions reflect precise divisions in the world, so they can not realize that philosophy and science, as well as the supposed division between them, are dynamic human creations. Some of the topics that are now labeled "science" at some point were under different headings. Physics, the safest of sciences, was once the domain of "natural philosophy". And music corresponded naturally to the faculty of mathematics. The scope of science has been reduced and expanded, depending on the time and place and the cultural contexts where it was practiced.

Another reason has to do with concrete results. Science solves real-world problems. It gives us technology: things we can touch, see and use. It gives us vaccines, transgenic crops and analgesics. Philosophy does not seem, for students, to have tangible elements to show. But, on the contrary, the philosophical tangibles are many: the philosophical mental experiments of Albert Einstein made Cassini possible. The logic of Aristotle is the basis of computing, which gave us laptops and smartphones. And the work of the philosophers on the mind-body problem prepared the ground for the emergence of neuropsychology and, therefore, of the image technology of the encephalon. Philosophy has always been quietly working as a background to science.

A third reason has to do with concerns about truth, objectivity and bias. Science, the students insist, is purely objective, and anyone who challenges that view must be wrong. A person is not considered to be objective if he approaches his research with a set of previous assumptions. On the contrary, it would be "ideological". But we are all "partial" and our prejudices fuel the creative work of science. This problem can be difficult to tackle, since the naive conception of objectivity is deeply rooted in the popular image of what science is. To approach it, I invite the students to look at something close without any prejudice. Then I ask them to tell me what they see. They stop ... and then recognize that they can not interpret their experiences without resorting to previous ideas. Once they realize this, the idea that it may be appropriate to ask questions about objectivity in science is no longer so strange.

The fourth source of discomfort for students comes from what they consider to be scientific education. One has the impression that they think that science consists mainly of enumerating the things that exist - the "facts" - and that scientific education is teaching them what these facts are. I do not respond to these expectations. But as a philosopher, I am mainly concerned with how these facts are selected and interpreted, why some are considered more important than others, the ways in which facts are steeped in prejudice, and so on.

Students often respond to these questions by stating with impatience that the facts are facts. But to say that a thing is identical with itself is not to say anything interesting about it. What students mean by "the facts are facts" is that once we have "the facts" there is no room for interpretation or disagreement.

Why do you think this way? It is not because this is the way science is practiced, but rather because that is how science is usually taught. There is an overwhelming amount of facts and procedures that students must master to become scientifically competent, and they only have a limited time to learn them. Scientists must design their courses to keep up with rapidly expanding empirical knowledge, and they do not have the pleasure of devoting class hours to questions that they are unlikely to be able to address. The unintended consequence is that students often leave their classes without realizing that philosophical questions are relevant to scientific theory and practice.

But things do not have to be this way. If the right educational platform is established, philosophers like me will not have to work upstream to convince our students that we have something important to say about science. For this we need the help of our scientific colleagues, whom students see as the only legitimate providers of scientific knowledge. I propose an explicit division of labor. Our scientific colleagues should continue to teach the fundamentals of science, but they can help by making it clear to their students that science is replete with important conceptual, interpretive, methodological and ethical issues that philosophers are uniquely positioned to address, and that far from be irrelevant to science, philosophical issues are at its core.

About the author: Subrena E. Smithes assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New Hampshire.
Text taken from the original published by Aeon on November 13, 2017 under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 4.0).