by Keith Wilson (Part 2)

The Science of Philosophy

In order to answer this question, perhaps we need to be more specific about the content rather than the methods of philosophy. Philosophers are normally concerned with seeking truth and knowledge – and not just any old knowledge. Knowledge of the external world is known as empirical, or a posteriori, and its pursuit science (although even this once went under the guise of natural philosophy). Empirical knowledge is notoriously uncertain, particularly when subjected to philosophical scrutiny, resulting in the kind of sceptical doubts that were raised by Descartes in his Meditations, and that have plagued (or helped, depending upon your point of view) philosophy ever since. Non-empirical knowledge, on the other hand, is considered prior to experience, or a priori, and its pursuit philosophy. On this account, philosophy is simply the pursuit of a priori knowledge; i.e. necessary and certain knowledge about the world, ourselves and our ways of knowing. Perhaps this is the definition we have been looking for?

Many philosophers have found this conception of philosophy to be perfectly adequate. However, increasingly, philosophers are reluctant for their efforts to be characterised in this way. This is partly due to the fact that philosophy is becoming increasingly concerned with the interpretation and foundations of the natural sciences – theoretical physics, for example – as well as the study of empirical phenomena connected with the mind, such as consciousness, imagination, and perception. Personally, I find this kind of interdisciplinary activity very refreshing, and very much in line with the traditions of philosophy as they have been practised down the ages, and so would be very reluctant to characterise the discipline as a purely a priori activity. However, perhaps this is just personal preference on my part. More objectively, as Quine argues in his Two Dogmas of Empiricism, there are serious reasons to doubt the absolute nature of this distinction, which is highly contingent on our forms of language. However, even if one doesn’t accept this argument, even in the area of formal logic – surely one of the final bastions a priorism – elements of a posteriori reasoning can also be seen to operate. Of course, one can work out the details of a particular system of logic using purely a priori means, but the question of which system of logic is correct, either for solving a particular problem, or to characterise our thinking in general, is surely an a posteriori one. In philosophy, it would seem, we must still look into the world and see how our concepts function in situ in order to know whether, for example, possibility is transitive, or whether double negation elimination (the principle that ‘not-not-p’ is equivalent to ‘p’) actually hold, and so it cannot be a wholly a priori enquiry.

Perhaps, however, there is something to be said for the comparison between philosophy and science. If the natural sciences can properly be characterised as the study of empirical phenomena, then perhaps we can characterise philosophy as the study of reason – or, more specifically, the science of truth and argument. Certainly, philosophers are interested in truth, and not just truths about things (what Heidegger calls ‘ontic’ knowledge), but truth itself: what it is, how it can be known, whether we can be justified in claiming such knowledge, and so on. A large part of philosophy involves the presentation of arguments, whether they are valid (i.e. their conclusions follows from their premises), necessary (i.e. true in all possible cases) or contingent (placing their confirmation back in the realm of the sciences).

The idea of philosophy-as-science becomes particularly attractive when considered in the context of recent philosophy of science, such as the work of Thomas Kuhn, who characterised science as constituted of a series of ‘puzzle-solving’ phases punctuated by periodic revolutions in which the old way of thinking (or ‘paradigm’, in the Kuhnian jargon) is swept away and replaced by a new conceptual framework with which we divide up and evaluate the world.

The history of philosophy certainly seems to confirm this pattern, including Platonic idealism, Aristotelian essentialism, the Kantian tradition of placing human cognition at the centre of the intelligible world (Kant himself had no hesitation in pronouncing metaphysics a science, and very much hoped that philosophy would emulate the success, as he saw it, of the physical sciences), logical positivism, and the current vogue of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, with its aim of reducing every philosophical concept to its constituent necessary and sufficient conditions. In each case, the emergence of a new paradigm ushered in a new age of philosophical research, theory building and puzzle-solving, until the paradigm itself ran into insoluble difficulties, or simply ran out of steam and ceased to produce useful insights – as in the case of scholasticism in the Middle Ages.

The scientific view of philosophy runs into problems, however, as soon as we stop to consider what in philosophy can assume the role of empirical evidence. At first sight, the closest equivalent appears to be the motley assortment of hunches, ‘pre-philosophical’ opinions, and widely held prejudices that philosophers refer to as ‘intuition’, but this is scarcely scientific. If any other science were to be pursued by such means, then we might as well just make it up as we go along, for surely nothing worthy of being called knowledge can be obtained by such means, except perhaps common sense, which hardly qualifies as philosophy.

Once again we have attempted to establish the nature of philosophy, and once again we have failed. It is becoming increasingly apparent (at the risk of stating the obvious) that it is much easier to say what philosophy is not than what it is. Perhaps, then, we are mistaken in seeking a definition of philosophy at all. Perhaps, we should not try to say what philosophy is, but to examine how the concept is used in practice.

Continue to Part 3