Scientist vs. philosopher on conceptual analysis

Francis Crick once responded, “My dear chap, there was never a time in the early years of molecular biology when we sat around the table with a bunch of philosophers saying ‘let us define life first.’ We just went out there and found out what it was: a double helix.” In the sciences, definitions often follow, rather than precede, conceptual advances.

This is a great example of a situation where this behavior led to trouble! For "gene" had previously referred to heritable traits, and was after identified with bits of DNA - this led to many people thinking DNA was the only source of heritability.

I think this is quite crude. Obviously scientists don't have to wait for philosophers to get the right definition before they can proceed but scientists often end up barking up the wrong trees because of bad philosophy. It's like Keynes said about economists, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." The same is true of scientists who claim to have no interest in philosophy. (This is especially true in neuroscience where early practitioners had a very keen interest in philosophy and it shaped the whole field.)

There has always been interaction between scientists and philosophers. The current hostility to philosophy has more to do with trends in philosophy (naturalism) than trends in science.

The situation reminds me of the relationship between math and physics. When the necessary mathematical tools are missing, physicists invent the crude new ones to "just get it done", rather than wait for the math to catch up. Then the mathematicians swoop in and refine, polish, beautify and admire them, and scoff at the ugly earlier implements.

Some notable examples that come to mind are calculus, conservation laws, Dirac's delta and bra-ket notation in quantum mechanics, path integrals, renormalization.

Lest some overzealous reader misunderstands my point, I do not intend to badmouth math and mathematicians. The elegant new tools often lead to better understanding of the underlying physical phenomena and consequently new discoveries in physics. The same can rarely be said of philosophy.

This whole discussion seems needlessly beholden to an unjustified distinction between philosophy and science: that the difference between the two is a matter of kind not of degree. If we call the entire enterprise of mapping the territory 'cartography' then there is a spectrum from applied cartography- which involves mapping particular regions with known and justified methods (stamp collecting at the limit)- to theoretical cartography in which controversial methods are debated, the aim and nature of the enterprise clarified, meta-issues discussed and theories of utmost generality advanced. There are sociological facts about the scientific enterprise that result in the spectrum being divided in arbitrary ways-- certain mapping techniques are only done in certain university buildings, for example. One of these divisions involves putting a large fraction of our most theoretical cartographers in the same building.

The result is your typical Less Wrong poster laughing "Oh you silly philosophers, proven wrong time and time again by experiment. What a worthless enterprise. Why don't you just go out and see what is there?" But condemning philosophers in this way is, I think, a bit like condemning theoretical physicists for not being experimental physicists.

The difference that is usually given is that unlike theoretical physicists, philosophers often don't make falsifiable predictions. But a) at the limit the falsifiability of a theoretical scientist's prediction is a nebulous affair (see, string theory for example) and b) philosophers rarely make claims regarding the outcome of single experiments-- the analog to falsification for a philosophy is something like 'conceptual irrelevance'. A philosophy is 'falsified' when the going scientific paradigm ceases to cohere with the philosophy.

This is not to say the condition of contemporary analytic philosophy departments is a good one. But I think it is historically analogous to something like Tychonian astronomy-- on the precipice of a paradigm shift. In particular the issue is that departments are still in large part filled with pre-Turing thinkers; people that have not internalized the deep changes the cybernetic revolution has made to scientific enterprise. When you see philosophers that do understand computers you routinely see very good work. And it certainly seems to me that that fraction of philosophers is growing. It is no surprise the some of the great, recent philosophical insights have come not from philosophy departments but from CS departments. But this community seems to (or at least be prepared to) arbitrarily accord respect to some thinkers over others merely because of what building they work in. See, for example how everyone here knows who Judea Pearl is but no one knows who James Woodward is. This overly negative, almost reactionary attitude toward 'things labeled philosophy instead of cognitive science' does not seem likely to speed up the paradigm shift. A more proactive attitude that encouraged promising currents within philosophy departments would be more productive.

I think there is a problem in the culture of philosophy.

It's seen as generally better to define things up front, as this is seen as being more precise.

That sounds reasonable. Who doesn't want greater precision?

Precision is good when it is possible. But often we don't have a good enough understanding of the phenomena to be precise, and the "precision" that is given is a faux-precision.

Often logic is used to define precise categories, by philosophers examining their concept for X. Then they look at and discuss and argue over the consequences of these definitions.

I think it'd be more appropriate for them to spend more time trying to examine the nature of the instances of X out there (as opposed to the properties of their concept of X), based on a loose notion of 'X' (because at this point they don't really know what X is).

(caveat: I didn't read the pages linked to in this post's description)

Or, Keith Stanovich, in How to Think Straight About Psychology (9e):

A common indication of the essentialist attitude is an obsessive concern about defining the meaning of terms and concepts before the search for knowledge about them begins... In fact, this is exactly the opposite of the way scientists work. Before they begin to investigate the physical world, physicists do not engage in debates about how to use the word energy or whether the word particle really captures the essence of what we mean when we talk about the fundamental constituents of matter.

The meaning of a concept in science is determined after extensive investigation of the phenomena the term relates to, not before such an investigation. The refinement of conceptual terms comes from the interplay of data and theory that is inherent in the scientific progress, not from debates on language usage.

This “forging ahead” behaviour leads to a bunch of concepts that have a nice accepted definition among experts which differs from the common usage among laymen. Consider "energy", "chaos", "evolution", "complexity", .... Ignoring/forgetting/not being aware of the distinction between the common usage and the proper definition is common trap for laymen and a common tactic for pseudo-scientists with an agenda. In my opinion, scientists should invent new words instead of re-defining existing words (quantum physicists are particularly good at this: "quark" was basically a made-up word and no one will confuse "flavour" and "strangeness" with their common macroscopic usages ).

True, scientists may one day find a proper definition for "consciousness", after having studied it, but I do not expect that it will match that which is today called "consciousness" by laymen.

Anecdotally, 90% of the time spent on software development is making up good names for things. It seems that even if all philosophers do is make up names for concepts that will be later needed in science, then they're doing important work.