I’ve been wading through tons of backed up e-mail and listening to the fine Rage Against The Machine album which Sub-Evil Boy and I bought last week. The album ended, and the next thing in iTunes happened to be a Science on Guardian podcast that I hadn’t gotten around to. They open with a clip from an earlier podcast (which I missed at the time) with a wonderful rant from Lewis Wolpert about philosophy of science. Their interviewer starts by suggesting that scientific methodology is very unclear, arguing that there’s a “big debate in … the philosophy of science” and suggests that they should start by examining those issues. Wolpert immediately smacks that idea down:
Certainly not. No. Please keep away from the philosophy of science. No, no sensible scientist that I know pays the slightest attention to it. … [Science is] quite a complicated process about which the philosophy of science teaches us nothing.
My experience is the vast majority of scientists really don’t pay any attention to philosophy of science largely, I suspect, because they don’t perceive that such philosophy provides any practical advantage. Scientists are, among many other things, highly prone to pragmatism (for better and worse), and if a particular field or idea doesn’t appear to provide clear value, then it tends to be ignored or discarded.
After the clip they discuss Wolpert’s comments with philsopher AC Grayling, where he argues for the importance of philosophy in the sciences. Grayling argues (and I agree) that people like Bacon and Popper have had a significant effect; I found Popper very helpful in clarifying the issues of truth and falsifiability, for example. I think, however, one could argue that those are in fact the exceptions that prove the rule. Scientists buy into what people like Bacon and Popper say (to the degree that they do), because Bacon and Popper say things that makes sense to them and seem consistent with their experience as scientists. Sadly most other writing on the subject comes from people that have at best a dim understanding of what it is to do science, and thus their ideas acquire little traction. Consequently the vast majority of scientists in the field (myself included) are largely unaware of and unaffected by whatever noise and fury is currently going on among the philosophers of science.
While I may not agree with Grayling on this issue of philosphy of science, his subsequent comments on ID and the absurd resistance to the evidence regarding global climate change are excellent and highly recommended.
