(A) "You're not even a physicist." or "You don't even do psychology."
(B) "These areas seem terribly irrelevant. Why are you studying these areas as part of a philosophy degree?" or "What do any of these things have to do with each other?"
This entry will be primarily address the type (B) responses. This may come across awkwardly like an attempt to justify how I spend my time, but I think this should also make several convincing points about (i) the value of interdisciplinary research and (ii) the role of philosophy in scientific research.
Let me first quote a few lines from Gabbay, Thagard and Woods (2006):
"Whenever science operates at the cutting edge of what is known, it invariably runs into philosophical issues about the nature of knowledge and reality. Scientific controversies raise such questions as the relation of theory and experiment, the nature of explanation, and the extent to which science can approximate to the truth. Within particular sciences, special concerns arise about the nature of space and time, and in psychology about the nature of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of science is an essential part of the scientific investigation of the world."
From the General Preface of Handbook of The Philosophy of Science.
I think this quote does a neat job of summarising the several key philosophical questions which arise in different sciences like physics and psychology. It may seem sometimes that philosophy is only concerned about abstract, impractical (or not immediately useful) questions and far-fetched notions like, "do souls exist?" or "Are there possible worlds?" or "Is abortion morally wrong?"; I think this is a very, very narrow view of the role of philosophy. Anyone who has done a bit of history of philosophy would be aware that philosophy started out (see Ancient Greek philosophy for examples) inquiring questions which our science is now accounting for: "what is matter made of?" (Chemistry and Physics), "how does the mind work?" (Cognitive Sciences) and "where do we come from?" (Evolutionary Biology), etc. To a certain extent, one can say this for any question that was once asked in philosophy: if there has been any success in answering the question at all, that "success" is now represented by a particular thriving field in science.
Philosophy is the mother of science.
What philosophy is left with are unanswered questions, or at least questions which we haven't managed to offer a satisfactory answer to yet. Sometimes these questions are ancient ("What created the world?"), and sometimes these are relatively new ("Do quantum mechanics suggest that not every event has a cause?"). What's common about these questions is that they are often at the cutting edge or the fore field of scientific disciplines. They are questions which, if you like, mark out the (current) boundaries of human knowledge.
So now you see, at least, why it would be exciting to be able to study the most up-to-date problems which science is working on (so that you see one is not necessarily confused about what one is studying). It remains a question why philosophers, instead of scientists from their own fields, should be paying attention to such research questions. Shouldn't philosophers leave it to the experts?
My answer may be slightly controversial. I suggest that not all of these questions cannot be answered from their respective empirical fields alone, and the reason for that is because these areas of study do not contain the necessary resources to answer those questions. These questions are often ones which require interpretation, occasionally inter-disciplinary work, and reflection about the most fundamental principles. For example, it is not difficult to see how questions like "are our capacities to speak language innate?" depends very much on how our concept of "innate" is defined. Philosophy does a lot of that conceptual analysis work. Sometimes, philosophy shows certain concepts to be ill-defined, and that can inspire more cautious or refined modelling work from the scientists. On its own, philosophy may not be very successful in answering questions; but in the wider research system (where nowadays disciplines are highly specialised) philosophy plays an important role in scrutinising concepts, interpreting theories and developing ideas for inter-disciplinary research projects. To make this a little more convincing, here are a few examples:
- Clarifying the role of an "observer" in quantum mechanics. Arising paradoxes suggest that this does not have to do uniquely with human consciousness.
- Analysing whether certain evolutionary explanations (for instance, of modern human behaviour) are over-speculative. For instance, Evolutionary Psychology is very intuitive, but if one looks further into the cognitive framework in which it is grounded on (i.e. Mass Modularity), it is much less convincing.
- Answering ethical questions (legal, eventually) with moral psychology and with evolutionary theory: it is very plausible that our moral instinct (conscience) has an evolutionary origin, and there is strong evidence that morality is grounded more on emotions rather than reason. This actually reflects the usefulness of empirical work, but what I mean to show is that inter-disciplinary research can be valuable.
All in all, what I'm trying to say is that not all kinds of philosophy are useless and hopelessly detached from the world. There is much more to philosophy than just solipsistic armchair philosophy.
