Chapter One
Philosophy as Proto-Science
Where philosophy was, there science shall be.
—Robert Nozick
My
aim in this paper is to examine the structural and dynamic relationships
between philosophy and science, particularly the view that philosophy
anticipates and leads to science. My investigation sheds light on the nature of
both philosophy and science.
Greek Origins of Occidental Philosophy as a Case Study
When
seeking an explanation for the nature of philosophy, a good starting point is
to inquire as to its origins. As we know, Occidental philosophy originated in
Ancient Greece as an alternative to the mythological and religious answers that
were then commonly given to relevant but inaccessible questions. Instead of
accepting the usual explanations of the foundations and origins of reality
based on the anthropomorphic projections of mythology, early Greek philosophers
decided that the world could also be explained speculatively. They thus
appealed to impersonal (or nearly impersonal) principles, for example,
water (Thales), air (Anaximenes), fire (Heraclitus), infinity (Anaximander) and
being (Parmenides), or life forces like love and hate or strife (Empedocles).[1]
Questions that could help us to understand the nature of philosophy are in this
case: What was the reason for this change in explanatory approach? What was the
nature of this change?
A good explanation for the shift from mythological to
philosophical thought has been proposed by historians of philosophy. According
to W. K. C. Guthrie,[2]
for example, Greek thinkers, having borrowed scientific knowledge
(astronomical, physical, geometrical, arithmetical, etc.) from other cultures,
were the first to consider such knowledge in abstraction from
its practical applications, namely, in the form of theoretical
generalisations. We find the best example of this outlook in Euclid’s Elements,
with its axiomatic-deductive method of proving theorems. It was this awareness
of the explanatory power of theoretical generalisations that presumably
suggested to early Greek thinkers the possibility that questions once answered
with the anthropomorphic metaphors of mythology and religion could instead be
addressed in terms of abstract speculative generalisations, that is, in
philosophical terms.
Although persuasive, this last explanation remains
incomplete. True, the Greeks were the first to consider scientific generalisations
apart from their applications. They were the first to axiomatise geometry, and
they were able to make physical generalisations and astronomical inferences
(such as, respectively, Archimedes’ measurement of specific gravity and
Aristarchus’ heliocentric hypothesis). Nevertheless, to explain the rise of
philosophical thought it is not enough to consider the emergence of explicit
generalisations independently of their practical applications, for this is not
a privilege of scientific explanation. Common-sense explanations, for example,
are also based on empirical generalisations, like those expressed by sentences
such as, ‘The sun rises everyday’, ‘Water quenches thirst’, ‘Fire burns’...,
which are not scientific conclusions, but have always been accepted as
obviously true. Moreover, people have certainly always been able to think about
such commonplace generalisations apart from practical concerns.
A more complete explanation for the emergence of
philosophy in ancient Greece seems to me to be the following. When they
succeeded in creating abstract scientific knowledge, Greek thinkers, from
Thales to Aristotle, also achieved an intuitive understanding of the nature of
the generalisations and explanations of science, both of the formal sciences
(geometrical theorems) and the empirical ones (physical and astronomical
laws). While they did not have an explicit philosophy of science from the start
(the first steps in this direction were taken later by Aristotle in his Organon,
mainly in the Posterior Analytics), they certainly did have an idea
of the kind of hypothetical, predictive and explanatory procedures that in a
broad way are shared by the sciences in general – both empirical and formal.
Thus, they already had what we could call an idea of science.
Now, it seems that Greek philosophy arose from the speculative application of
this idea of science to questions that earlier were approached exclusively by
means of religion and mythology, like the question of the ultimate nature of
the world and of our place in it. Equipped with this new notion, early Greek
philosophers attempted to proceed rationally, first by seeking to establish
true generalisations based on certain kinds of data (empirical or
formal), and then by trying to explain certain kinds of facts, whatever their
nature, by applying these generalisations.[3]
The first Greek philosophers pursued this aim by introducing vague principles (water,
air, infinity, being) or forces (heat and cold, love and strife). These might
be interpreted as the first attempts to replace explanations relying on the
actions and intentions of divinities with explanations based on the
constitutive elements of the real world and the impersonal laws regulating
their transformations, often hovering midway between the two kinds of
explanation.[4]
It was by no means accidental that Thales, the first philosopher of the
Occidental tradition, was also a natural scientist and a competent astronomer
who once predicted a solar eclipse.
Philosophy as Conjectural Inquiry Lacking Consensual Foundations
If
we accept it as given that Occidental philosophy developed through the
speculative application of the idea of science to questions inherited from
mythology and religion, how can we then distinguish the activities of
philosophers from those of scientists? Despite some suggestions to the
contrary, there seem to be considerable differences between them.[6]
The answer to this question brings us to what I regard as a central insight
into the nature of philosophy. Even if philosophical methods generally resemble
the practices of scientific inquiry, there is a fundamental difference between
them, namely, that philosophical explanations remain merely conjectural
and, to this extent, speculative.[7]
But what do the words ‘conjectural’ and ‘speculative’
mean when we say that philosophical investigation remains conjectural or
speculative? One answer is that an investigation is conjectural if it produces
only hypothetical results, and that this is the case when there
is no possibility of consensual agreement about the truth of these results.
Indeed, while it is rather easy to reach consensual agreement on results in the
sciences, this kind of consensus is impossible in the murky waters of
philosophical inquiry. Consider the difference: The Greek scientist Archimedes
explained how levers work by precisely formulating the law of the lever, and
his explanation could be empirically verified and agreed on by everyone. In
contrast, the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles proposed to explain the
creation and destruction of things in the world through the action of the
forces of love (eros) and strife (neíkos) on the four elements
(water, air, earth and fire), which was nothing more than vague, obscure
speculation. He developed this theory in a mode and domain of inquiry where
thinkers were unable to find a viable path to consensual agreement.
The conjectural character of philosophical thought –
as the result of a lack of consensual agreement on fundamental matters –
reveals itself to be an essential property able to explain its typically argumentative
and aporetic character. For when thinking cannot be other than
conjectural, there is no alternative except to embark on hypothetical
reasoning: We begin by accepting certain non-consensual assumptions and then employ
our best knowledge and skills in order to find all their implications. Then we
change the assumptions (usually other philosophers do this) and proceed in a
similar way. We subsequently try to critically compare the different results
and the procedures that lead to them, in a process that can be endlessly
repeated. In this way, philosophers are always beginning: they are always
pondering new ideas in ways that usually generate aporetic argumentative
discussion.
The conjectural character of philosophical inquiry
also suggests an explanation for the lack of progress in philosophy: since
philosophers cannot achieve agreement on the truth of their ideas,
inter-theoretical comparisons must remain inconclusive. Thus, to give an
example, scientists would generally agree that Einstein’s relativistic
mechanics is superior to Newtonian mechanics, since the explanatory power of
the former is greater – this is a matter of scientific conclusions. On the
other hand, philosophers have remained divided on alternative explanations of
many important issues. Consider, for example, the disputes over the problem of
universals, the mind-body problem, the free-will problem…).
Still, why can’t we achieve consensual agreement on
the results of the philosophical endeavour? The answer is that consensual
agreement about the results of an investigation is only possible when there is
sufficient agreement about the main presuppositions underlying the
investigation. Previous agreement on these matters is always absent from
philosophical inquiry. Philosophy lacks:
(i)
agreement about the adequacy of its data, general principles and even problems
(philosophical ‘data’ and principles are uncertain, and there are
philosophical questions, we suspect, which are pseudo-problems resulting from linguistic-conceptual
confusion);
And
it also lacks:
(ii)
agreement on the adequacy of its methodological procedures for evaluating
the truth of answers proposed for philosophical questions (an
argument or a set of arguments can appear conclusive to one philosopher, but
unpersuasive to another).
In
opposition to this, conditions (i) and (ii) are always
sufficiently satisfied in the case of scientific research. Scientific problems
and procedures are relatively uncontroversial, and the correct solutions, when
finally found, can be publicly verified, if not with certainty, with a high
degree of probability. Indeed, where fundamental preconditions like these
cannot be satisfied, there is no way to achieve consensual agreement concerning
the truth (or probable truth) of the conclusions, which means that we cannot
escape the aporetic discussions typical of philosophy.
Philosophy as Proto-Science
The foregoing discussion suggests that by
investigating the similarities and contrasts between philosophy and science, we
will be better able to explain some central features of philosophical inquiry.
Moreover, they invite us to ask if our present philosophical inquiries will
someday be absorbed into science when they achieve a degree of maturity that
allows practitioners to reach consensual conclusions. In other words: Could
philosophy be seen as a conjectural inquiry anticipating science – a proto-science?
Could all philosophical inquiry be understood in this way?
We are not in the position to assert this. Still, an
affirmative answer to this question is suggested by the historical fact that
most of the sciences grew out of philosophical inquiry. Consider a few examples
from several different scientific fields:
A. According to Karl Popper, the now accepted
astronomical understanding that the Earth is a large, round body moving in
empty space, impelled by inertial and gravitational forces, was already
anticipated by Anaximander (610-546/5 BC). This Greek philosopher proposed that
the Earth was a stationary cylinder, not held in place by anything else, but
floating unsupported in space because it is equally distant from everything in
the universe and it would be impossible for it to move simultaneously in
opposite directions.[8]
B. The scientific investigation of subatomic particles
by contemporary physics has its forerunner in the speculative hypothesis of the
atomistic philosophers, from Democritus to Epicurus, that visible things are
formed by the aggregation of extended invisible (because extremely small) but physically
indivisible particles.
C. Biological theories of evolution seem to be dimly
anticipated by Anaximander’s insight that since man is helpless as a child he
would have perished in primeval times if he were not descended from creatures
very much like wild animals…
D. The Platonic theory of the tripartite soul has its
modern counterpart in Freud’s structural theory of mind, which divides the mind
into the I (ich), the it (es) and the over-I
(über-ich) (commonly referred to as the ego, id and super-ego).
It is true that psychoanalysis strongly resembles philosophy, insofar as its
practitioners are still unable to reach consensual agreement on many issues,
but it received from Freud’s hands a relatively disciplined method to be used
as a form of investigation.
E. Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of language as
a nebula of language games working as unities of meaning anticipated the much
more systematic (and narrower) theories of speech acts of J. L. Austin and J.
R. Searle, which nowadays belongs more to linguistics than to philosophy.
These
are only a few examples, and the developmental process is continuing. Many
believe, for example, that once we really understand how the brain works, many
of the riddles of our present philosophy of mind will yield to consensual (and
in this sense scientific) solutions. All these facts lead us to ask whether
science might not someday replace the remaining central philosophical fields,
such as epistemology, metaphysics and ethics.
Nevertheless, there are philosophers who resist the
notion of philosophy as proto-science. Echoing Wittgenstein, Anthony Kenny
holds that philosophy, unlike science, deals with knowledge as a whole, since
it aims to organise the already known, providing an overview of our
knowledge. This kind of comprehensiveness, he argues, is absent in the particular
sciences. Consequently, at least central areas of philosophy such as
metaphysics, epistemology, the theory of meaning and ethics will forever remain
philosophical.[9]
Nonetheless, some overview and some degree of
comprehensiveness can also be achieved by scientific inquiry. Why could a wider
overview not be scientific? I suspect that the main reason for the resistance
lies less in the nature of things than in outdated positions on the nature of
science that are still uncritically accepted by many philosophers. Indeed,
these opinions, which have their roots in the philosophy of natural science
developed by the positivists – and also in the main reactions against them –,
are often too restrictive to insure that our central
philosophical interests will receive their deserved place in some future
scientific inquiry. If applied, they would be reductive, impoverishing or
eliminating philosophy in its kern.
Consider, for example, Popper’s conception of science
as an inquiry that aims to construct theories that can resist falsification by
decisive experiments.[10]
This view is too restrictive, for it seems to exclude the theory of biological
evolution from science, since the former is not decisively falsifiable: How
would we conceive of an experiment capable of falsifying a hypothesis about an
evolutionary process that occurred in the distant past? Given this problem, how
could we ever apply a standard as restrictive as falsifiability (which arguably
may be applicable to physics) to the central subject areas of philosophical
inquiry, such as epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, other than in a crassly
reductive or even eliminative way?
Indeed, if we accept such a view of science, our
attempt to conceive of philosophy as proto-science would have to end here. The
reason for this pessimistic conclusion is that when our view of the nature of
science is strongly influenced by the study of a well-established particular
science like physics, we are led almost perforce to reductive generalisations
about the character of still unknown areas of science. What we are looking for
is a concept of science so general and inclusive that any new investigation
deserving the name of science that might chance to emerge could satisfy it, for
it is credible to imagine that this would be precisely the concept of science which
could properly be contrasted with that of philosophy.
The Right Contrasting View of Science
To
arrive at this more balanced view of science, I propose that we should not adopt
a model settled on by some already established science, but rather should rely
on scientifically informed common sense. We must begin with questions such as:
What does the scientific community as a whole understand as ‘science’? How
would scientists recognise any new theory or field of investigation as
belonging to science? When considering these questions, the obvious answer that
occurred to me was that science should be systematically contrasted with
philosophy in the sense that science is not conjectural: It achieves
consensual agreement on its results because it has already achieved consensual
agreement concerning basic issues such as data, general principles and
methodological procedures.
Searching in the literature, I found that such a
balanced view of science was already suggested by John Ziman, who understood
science in general as ‘consensualizable public knowledge’, that is, as any kind
of knowledge susceptible to consensual agreement about its truths.[11]
According to this perspective, science is essentially constituted by generalisations
that are – or at least are able to be – consensually accepted as true by the
members of a scientific community.[12]
Ziman’s notion of science is in complete accord with
the picture most informed laymen and scientists have of science. When we talk
about the progress of science, we are thinking of the acquisition of new
knowledge that the community of specialists can or could evaluate with
certainty and precision. This view of science is also sufficiently general and
flexible to include everything we usually accept as belonging to the
sciences, both the empirical and the formal. Moreover, placing the concept of
consensual agreement at the centre of attention, this view of science seems to
provide the ideal contrast between philosophy and science, since, as we have
seen, the first is an inquiry identifiable by a lack of possible
consensual agreement concerning its results. Accordingly, even if philosophy,
as Kenny thought, should be a comprehensive inquiry aiming to achieve an
overview, it could also be proto-scientific, insofar as we cannot rule out in
advance the possibility that over time philosophical theories could become a
sort of consensualisable and comprehensive public knowledge.
However, isn’t the definition of science as ‘consensualisable
public knowledge’ too inclusive? It might seem to be, because
there are ideological circumstances in which ‘consensus’ is imposed from above,
excluding the possibility of critical evaluation. Notorious examples of this
are the roles played by political ideologies in defining legitimate science in
Nazi Germany (outlawing non-Aryan science) and the Soviet Union (rejecting
non-Marxist biology) and the Catholic Church when it declared to be Geocentrism
a doctrinal truth (and condemned Galileu as heretical). Yet, in accord with the
above characterisation, such ideological impositions do seem to pertain
to science, since a scientific community of ideas consensually accepted them.
Thus, as presented, the proposed characterisation of science seems incapable of
distinguishing science from an ideological by-product.
Nonetheless, we can regard this difficulty as only
apparent, if we distinguish between authentic and inauthentic
consensus, specifying what we understand as a community of ideas that is able
to produce science in a way that excludes inauthentic consensus. Keeping the
contrast with philosophy in mind, I suggest we call a community able to warrant
authentic consensus a critical community of ideas, understanding it as a
community that satisfies some constitutive conditions
approximating those specified by Jürgen Habermas for what he calls an ideal
speech situation (ideale Sprachsituation).[13]
This means that we must define a critical community of ideas as something that
satisfies constitutive conditions warranting the claim to authentic consensus.
Without trying to be either systematic or exhaustive, I propose that we can
generally characterise the main constitutive conditions for a
critical community of ideas as requiring:
(a) Commitment to seeking truth:
The members of the community should seek to find truth throughout the
entire process of inquiry and evaluation of ideas.
(b) Freedom of discussion: There
must be an equal opportunity for free critical discussion among the members of
the community of ideas; they should not be subject to any intellectual
constraints, except those of the best arguments.
(c) Full access to information:
All members of the community must have full access to information and equal
chances for the evaluation and exchange of ideas.
(d) Shared competence: All
members must have suitable training in order to be able to make adequate
evaluations regarding their fields of research.
Indeed,
Nazi Germany’s Aryan science and the Soviet Union’s Marxist biology only
prevailed because their scientific communities did not satisfy such conditions.
A truly scientific consensus can only be produced by sufficiently satisfying
constitutive conditions like these, which make possible free and rational
evaluations of the results of scientific investigation. When we evaluate
reports of a new scientific discovery, we always assume at least that the
scientific community has satisfied the conditions of commitment to seeking
truth, free discussion, full access to information, and shared competence, if
not in full, at least to a sufficient degree.
Another important objection that critics could make
against such a consensus-based view of science is that it would be too dependent
on social consensus, compromising its objectivity. It seems at first glance
that science can be whatever the critical community of ideas decides to call
science, arbitrarily disregarding objective criteria. However, this is not how
science is defined in practice. For the critical community of ideas aims at
achieving a consensus about truth, and as a matter of fact
it is unable to achieve this aim in arbitrary ways like consulting crystal
balls and similar superstitious practices. It is simply a matter of fact that a
critical community of ideas must fulfil the appropriate objectivity conditions
for a chosen epistemic domain if its aim is to achieve consensus about truth.
In other words: Experience has shown that no community of ideas ever achieves
an authentic consensus about truth unless it first meets some
appropriate conditions for objective evaluative consensus. Indeed, without
attempting to be either systematic or exhaustive, we can show that this is the
case by making a list of conditions that must be sufficiently satisfied by any
critical community of ideas able to reach an objective consensus about how to
achieve truth. These conditions are what we could call conditions of scientific
objectivity. Indeed, in order to achieve objective consensus there must at
least be previous agreement about:
(i) what should be counted as the
(empirical or formal) basic data and/or general principles
of the epistemic domain to which certain scientific theories should be applied;
(ii) what can be accepted as adequately
formulated questions to be asked concerning the epistemic domain (theories
must answer meaningful questions);
(iii) what can be accepted as an adequately
constructed theory in the epistemic domain (i.e., adequate in its
internal, as well as in its external coherence within a wider conceptual
framework);
(iv) what can be accepted as the procedures
of truth-evaluation in a theory’s epistemic domain (which
should involve some kind of correspondence between a theory and the
facts the theory is meant to explain, together with the accepted forms of verification
procedures for finding this correspondence, etc.).
Such
conditions of scientific objectivity are different to each scientific field. But
they must be satisfied in order to assure the factual truth of scientific work,
and they coincide in many ways with the kinds of things that philosophers of
science often investigate in depth with regard to their preferred scientific
field. The difference is that these philosophers have too often considered only
such conditions and their particularized ramifications, abstracting the social
role of the critical community of ideas. On the contrary, we regard the
satisfaction of such conditions only as an indispensable prerequisite for the successful
scientific functioning of a critical community of ideas. As already noted, even
if these conditions are not met a priori, the need for their
satisfaction in order to achieve consensus on truth is an inescapable matter of
fact, learned through experience by any community of ideas effectively committed
to the achievement of truth.
With the aid of these notions, we can improve Ziman’s
general characterisation of science as ‘consensualisable public knowledge’.
Here is our understanding of science:
SCIENCE = a body of non-trivial generalisations
reached by the members of a critical community of ideas (the community of
scientists), these generalisations (sometimes seen as scientific laws) being
(or being able to be) consensually held as true by this community.
This
is a better understanding of science. It is better in the sense that it is
unbiased, according sufficiently with the view of science that everyone, from
scientists to the educated public, generally holds. And it is also better,
because it cannot be seen as reductionist or positivist: Any discipline that
well-informed, objective evaluators deem a science should be compatible with
this characterization, for the first requirement of the scientific enterprise
is the possibility of agreement on the truth-searching conditions of
non-trivial generalisations shared by the members of a critical community of
scientists.
The Right View of Philosophy Contrasted with Science
The
above-outlined consensualist-but-objectivist view of science enables us to
establish the appropriate relationship between science and philosophy. We can
oppose the consensualizable public inquiry of science to the
non-consensualizable conjectural inquiry of philosophy. In order to achieve
this, we can characterize philosophy as follows:
PHILOSOPHY = a conjectural body of non-trivial
generalisations arrived at by the members of a critical community of ideas (the
community of philosophers), without this community being able to reach any
consensual agreement on the truth of these generalisations.
In
accord with this characterisation, we can regard any conjectural inquiry in any
domain of thought where it is impossible to achieve a consensual body of truths
to be of a philosophical nature. Its philosophical nature results from its
failure to satisfy the truth-searching conditions that can make possible consensual
agreement in the critical community of ideas. In short: philosophy lacks (i)
agreement about its basic data and/or principles, (ii) agreement about the
right questions to pose, (iii) agreement about the right form of its theories,
and (iv) agreement about the right procedures for its truth-evaluation.
Indeed, in those difficult domains where science,
understood as ‘consensualisable public knowledge’, clearly remains impossible,
only the conjectural inquiry of philosophy is available. In this way, we can
explain why philosophy, in conformity with the etymology of the word, is the love
(philo) of knowledge or wisdom (sophia) and not the attainment of
knowledge (scientia). In the words of Bertrand Russell: ‘Science is what
we know; philosophy is what we don’t know’… ‘Science is what we can prove to be
true; philosophy is what we can’t prove to be false’.[14]
Indeed, when philosophy achieves consensual truth, it ceases to be philosophy
and becomes science. Even the meta-philosophical understanding I outline in
this paper could be accepted as belonging to science, if the critical community
of ideas were able to achieve authentic consensus on its truth.[15]
Another point that we should note is that the practice
of philosophy always presupposes a critical community of ideas, even if in some
cases (like those of Vico, Peirce and Nietzsche) in a counterfactual sense. A
well-known criticism of medieval philosophy is that by accepting Christian
dogmatism as above criticism, it fell short of satisfying this condition.
Finally, one could object that as a typically
‘higher-order’ form of investigation, by its very nature philosophical inquiry
is not subject to objective verification and, consequently, to the kind of
objectively grounded consensus achieved by science. Our response is that this
argument may well be overly pessimistic. The main reason to think so is that
support for much theoretical work is not just directly empirical – through
observational verification – but also inter-theoretical. We can often
find this kind of support in the sciences. Take as an example the Darwinian
theory of evolution. Darwin and his contemporaries developed their ideas
without recourse to genetics, since Mendel’s work was unknown to early
evolutionary theorists. Nevertheless, the subsequent rediscovery of genetic
theory by the scientific community provided extremely important inter-theoretical
support for evolutionary theory. Something similar can also occur within
‘higher-order’ philosophical inquiry.
It was once figuratively suggested that the problems
of philosophy are so intertwined that any one problem can only be solved when
all the other problems have already been solved (Wittgenstein). Far from being
pessimistic, this thesis points to inter-theoretical support. Insofar as
related fields of knowledge move toward science, this provides new
inter-theoretical support for philosophical insights, paving the way for
consensual scientific knowledge.
Proto-Scientific versus Analytic-Conceptual Views
Once
we accept these proposals, we see that the supposedly essential differences in
subject matter or even in methods between philosophy and science are illusory.
Take, for example, the still widely believed conception according to which
philosophy is a non-empirical, higher-order activity of conceptual
analysis (its method) intended to make explicit the structure of
our most central concepts and the relations between them (its subject
matter). This view or something similar arose due to the prominence of the
philosophy of language in the first half of the Twentieth Century.[16]
In the second half of the Twentieth Century, however, the philosophy of language
lost its status as the most productive philosophical field to the philosophy of
mind, which consists largely of empirical speculation.
Moreover, the fact that a given form of philosophical
inquiry has a linguistic-conceptual character does not mean it cannot develop
into a science. This is exemplified by J. L. Austin’s theory of illocutionary
forces. As he himself foresaw, today this theory belongs, in the form of the
theory of speech acts, more to the scientific field of linguistics than to
philosophy. The reason for this is that it has achieved enough consensual
agreement to lose its more plastic role in the uncertain domain of conjectural
thought. Hence, there seems to be no contradiction between understanding
philosophy as proto-science and understanding it as conceptual analysis, since
the latter can be regarded as belonging to the former.[17]
Finally, we can offer a meta-philosophical refutation
of the thesis that the proper object of philosophy is of a
conceptual nature. As W. V. Quine rightly noted, philosophers often need a
particular resource that he called a semantic ascent.[18]
A semantic ascent could also be called a semantic meta-language (a semantic
meta-language is different from a syntactic meta-language: whereas the
latter has as its objects signs and their relationships, the former also has as
its objects meanings, and with them, indirectly, the world as we mean it;
in Rudolf Carnap’s simplified example, instead of saying, ‘Five is not a thing
but a number’, the philosopher prefers to say, ‘“Five” is not a thing-word, but
a number-word’.) However, the call for semantic ascent need not be confusing,
for this is nothing more than a propaedeutic resource, aiming at the
achievement of the kind of conceptual rigor usually demanded by philosophical arguments.
Even if philosophers like Carnap have seen here a proof that the object of
philosophy should be purely linguistic-conceptual, this cannot be true, as
Quine realized, because every sentence of the empirical sciences can also be
meta-linguistically represented in this way. As he noted:
“There are wombats in Tasmania” might be paraphrased as ‘‘Wombats’
is true to some creatures of Tasmania’, if there were any point in it; but it
does happen that semantic ascent is more useful in philosophical connections.
[19]
The
upshot of this argument is that philosophy does not have concepts (e.g.,
meaning, knowledge, consciousness, substance...) as its proper subject matter,
any more than does science (e.g., genes, molecules or superstrings), except for
reasons of semantic ascent. We can regard the task of both a theoretical
physicist and a philosopher of mind, for example, as not only to analyse and
combine concepts, but also to work toward solving empirical questions, the
latter in much more speculative ways. Hence, all that we can intend by saying
that philosophy is conceptual analysis is to refer to certain methodological
resources, not to an indispensable approach, and still less to its proper
subject matter.
To the question of whether all philosophy might
be an anticipation of science, assuming the wide concept of science that we
have proposed, the only answer is that we have no strong reason to think
otherwise. Moreover, it makes sense to accept this as at least a normative
assumption, since it gives us at least a foundation on which to progress toward
truth.[20]
More Complete Framework
While
I have limited myself here to the relationship between philosophy and science,
I think that this is only one aspect of a more complete framework that places
philosophy within a wider perspective. In my book on the nature of philosophy,
I explored to some extent this wider perspective, conceiving philosophy in
general as a derivative cultural activity.[21]
Opera, for example, is an artistic activity combining plot, poetry and music.
In this regard, philosophy has some similarity to opera. It seems to be a kind
of amalgam of motivations, materials and procedures borrowed from three
fundamental cultural activities: art, religion, and science.
These cultural activities can be represented as forming the corners of a
triangle, inside of which the various philosophical activities find their
places. The scientific corner of the triangle is responsible for the solid,
practical, reality-bounded and truth-oriented aspects of philosophy. The
mystical-religious corner is responsible for the speculative-transcendental,
verbally inexpressible element, usually grounding the comprehensiveness of
philosophy, the traditional breadth of the philosophical quest in its inquiry
about the world as a whole and man’s place in it. The aesthetic-artistic
corner, finally, is responsible for the metaphorical dimension that to
different degrees is always unavoidably present in philosophical discourse. We
can use this scheme to classify the various forms of philosophy. We can locate
them in different positions inside the triangle. At its centre, we can locate
philosophies that in a balanced manner have scientific (truth-oriented),
religious (transcendental) and aesthetic (metaphorical) dimensions. Examples are
Plato’s Republic, Descartes’ Meditations, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
However, there are forms of philosophy located near the scientific corner of
the triangle, like Carnap’s Logical Grammar of Language, Quine’s Word
and Object and Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. There are works
near the mystical-religious corner, like John Scotus’ On the Divisions of
Nature and Meister Eckhart’s treatises. Moreover, there are those near the
aesthetic corner, works by poet-philosophers, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
and (almost crossing the border) Novalis’ Hymns to the Night. And there
are also works near to one side of the triangle, like Heidegger’s writings,
which can be placed near the aesthetic-religious side...
We can also use such a triangular diagram
to classify entire cultural traditions linking philosophy with a corner of the
triangle. These are the cases of the scientifically-oriented English tradition,
the mystically-oriented German tradition and the belletristically-oriented
French tradition.
Finally, the relationships between the components are
not stable: it is possible to perceive in the sub-domains a wide, gradual
movement from the aesthetic-mystical side of the triangle to the scientific
corner, as an inevitable consequence of the continuous and now accelerating
advancement of science.
