On philosophy of [an empirical science]

I cannot recall how many times I've encountered baffled and incredulous responses when I told someone that I am reading in areas such as philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology. In general, there are two main types of responses:

(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. 

How Real is Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)?

The question of "what exists?" (or "what is real?") is a recurring hot topic in philosophy. Admittedly, at first glance this question may sound like one of those impractical brain-teasers that philosophy is often accused for producing (consider: how is necessary knowledge knowable only a posteriori possible? I've yet to be convinced of the usefulness of this inquiry). While I do find some philosophical questions to be almost ridiculously detached from practice and common sense, I am generally persuaded that questions concerning existence or reality have important implications for how general research should proceed. 

Here are a short list of questions of this type, which reveal their links with other disciplines: 

• Do moral values exist?
• Do numbers exist?
• Does the four-dimensional space-time (sub. for any other theoretical entities in well-confirmed scientific theories) exist? 
• Does the mind (or the soul) exist? ...

And of course, there is the familiar and perennial "Does God exist?" debate.

In these questions, I'm generally treating "Does x exist?" and "Is x real?" to be asking the same questions, which I don't think is particularly problematic for now. My query this time is about the realism of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM): does chi (氣) exist? Is "internal heat" (熱氣) real? Are there really meridians and collaterals (經脈, 絡脈) running through our body? 

Are meridians real? Why can't we find corresponding physical structures then?
(Photo courtesy from www.healing-with-eft.com)

I was first introduced to this general problem when I came across Richard Dawkins' The Enemies of Reason (2007) documentary series, which challenged superstitious practices that lacked good scientific evidence (Youtube link here). Although the documentary did not look specifically into acupuncture or other practices in TCM, its attack on suspicious "alternative medicine" practices really struck me, since in Hong Kong (where I was raised) I was taught and grown accustomed to the belief that TCM had genuine therapeutic effects and is as legitimate a medical enterprise as orthodox western medicine. I was told that one should only have moderate amount of fries (or generally any deep-fried food) and lychee because it contributes to "internal heat" (熱氣), a phenomenon which manifests itself in acne, bad breath and smellier gas.

Lychee: the fruit that TCM suggests as causally responsible for the phenomenon of "internal heat".
(Photo courtesy: vpwallpapers.com) 

Interestingly, I was brought up with the belief that the globally inferior status of TCM to orthodox western medicine was due to political reasons or poor marketing, rather than skepticism over its ineffectiveness. After watching the documentary and looking at a few papers and articles raising doubts or citing the lack of statistical significance for TCM (Novella, S,,2012; Yeh, L. et al., 2007; Shang, A. I., et al., 2007, Quackwatch, 2011), I felt (at least slightly) swayed to the side of the skeptic. 

Here are some general problems that arise for the realism of TCM: 

(1) If the entities and the structures (e.g. chi, meridians, etc.) postulated by the general theory that is TCM are real, why is it still so difficult to express these structures in the terms available in biology and physiology? Defenders of TCM may argue that this is a problem that isn't specific to TCM, since many branches of science are to some extent incommensurable (Cf. neuroscience and cognitive science face their own challenges in linking neurons and concepts). But what can we say about incommensurability then? 

• (A) Both TCM and the natural sciences are right. Reality, in this case, is perspectival or relative (?)
• (B) TCM is wrong - assuming that there is a single objective reality. 
• (C) TCM is right - and assuming that there is a single objective reality, the natural sciences have gotten something awfully wrong. 
• (D) There is nothing importantly wrong with TCM or the natural sciences. More research work has to be conducted to find out about how the theories translate into each other. 

(2) Although TCM has a long history of development, researchers have found it difficult to come up with enough statistical significance to show that TCM is really effective. While this may be explained away with the holistic nature of TCM and the difficulty in excluding the placebo effect (Yeung), the lack of statistically significant results raises doubts as to whether the entities postulated are really there.   

(3) If TCM is a true theory, should it not be able to pass empirical tests just like any other successful theory? (The "test of time" is often cited as an argument for TCM, but this should not matter; if it is true, then it should pass empirical tests anyhow)

The names may look familiar, but the same names refer to very different things in TCM than in the natural sciences or western medicine. It is also difficult to parse the individual causal relations between organs and energies. (Photo courtesy: drdonfa.ca)

Admittedly, all of this is a gross simplification of the controversy, but the point is that TCM does come with features which attract genuine skepticism about its reality. I acknowledge that a short blog piece can go nowhere to covering a topic of such breadth and controversy, but I think it's still worth highlighting that there is a live debate here. It is humbling to know how things that I thought I was reasonably familiar with can be so easily doubted into non-existence (it hasn't yet, by the way - the jury is still out). 

While we can wait for more empirical studies to come out to confirm (or disconfirm) the effectiveness of TCM, here are a few questions that we can think about: 

• IF TCM is effective but only effective in virtue of the psychological (placebo) effect, is it then established that the entities and structures in TCM do not exist? (... what is the criteria for determining reality?)
• IF TCM is effective in virtue of real causal interactions with its postulated entities (e.g. chi), then is biology and medicine as we know it seriously inadequate? OR... can we just step back and say that there is no single objective description of reality as presented by the natural sciences? (this of course depends on whether principles in TCM are fundamentally contradictory with the natural sciences)
• Should we care about existence at all? Does it only matter whether theories are useful, and not whether they are true? 

Caveats

• The dichotomy between TCM and the natural sciences is grossly simplified here. It would be interesting and illuminating to look at more details between their respective claims. 
• There are different interpretations of TCM principles and structures, even within TCM itself. This may change the debate if particular interpretations are fully compatible with natural science. 
• The references are terrible here, since they aren't supposed to be proper academic references. But they do provide interesting further reading if you follow the links.