To Hell with A Priori Metaphysics

On the Relationship Between Science and Philosophy

As a philosopher of science I have some minor obligation to say something when other philosophers share harmful misinformation about how science works. Sigh.

Yesterday, the panpsychist Philip Goff (who debated my wife Heather Browning a couple of days ago in Oxford ironically enough on whether consciousness is everywhere or just to be found in other animals) shared a meme (shown above) about the relationship between science and metaphysics. Since it got a lot of attention I unfortunately saw a need to respond.

The meme suggests that metaphysics is the real hero behind our increasing understanding of reality, while science merely plays second fiddle, operating within metaphysical frameworks supplied by philosophers. Frameworks without which science itself would supposedly have been impossible. The image portrays philosophers as underappreciated truth-seekers, while scientists are instead largely parasitic on their work.

This view is grotesquely and demonstrably false.

Worse, it inadvertently provides ammunition to those who argue that philosophers have nothing important left to say in our modern scientific age. In an attempt to make philosophy seem more relevant again, claims of this sort about the relationship between science and philosophy instead betray a form of intellectual inquiry that has lost touch with reality itself. The image reflects a return to an older way of doing philosophy: a pre-Enlightenment mode of thought, a revival of mysticist scholasticism that bears little resemblance to the pursuit of truth.

The idea that an a priori metaphysics must first provide a conceptual framework for science to work at all, to be able to reveal truths about reality is, as the philosopher Don Ross has aptly put it, a “counter-Enlightenment project.” (More on his views can be found in my earlier essay on his work here:)

Is Analytic Metaphysics a Counter-Enlightenment Project?

Metaphysics, as practiced by Goff and unfortunately many of my colleagues in philosophy, is more accurately captured in the following picture. Be warned, it is polemical, but it is no less polemical than the original meme. I trust philosophers can take it, given the equally smug attitudes philosophers sometimes express in regards to science and the philosophical naivety of scientists.

Philosophers are just as guilty of neglecting science than the scientists they detest for neglecting philosophy. But at least philosophers ought to know better. For philosophy’s track record in contributing to science is about as clear a game of Russian roulette. Scientists are far more often led away from the truth by engaging with metaphysics than towards it, which shouldn’t be all that surprising since intuitions and ‘common sense’ are a poor guide to the fundamental nature of reality at best.

As the great British evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith put it:

Scientists who take the philosophy of science seriously and allow their scientific research to be influenced by philosophical preconceptions, are far more likely to do themselves harm than good. I mean, the classic case, I guess, is Karl Pearson, who because of his developed positivist stance - which says you mustn’t imagine hypotheses, you mustn’t hypothesise anything that you can’t, sort of, see and touch - screwed up genetics for 20 years and completely ruined himself, because he wouldn’t postulate the existence of an entity that he couldn’t pick up and weigh.

Most scientists do not think about metaphysics at all, not because they are operating on implicit metaphysical assumptions, but because ontology falls out of our best science (with some processing by naturalized metaphysics). Darwin, for one, rendered almost all pre-Darwinian metaphysical thought about biological essences entirely useless. And it was metaphysical considerations that long held the Darwinian revolution back.

Goff’s image makes substantive claims about the relationship between science and metaphysics, so one might expect it to reflect how philosophers of science, who study these relations, think about them. Unfortunately, it is a gross misrepresentation. I suspect that the large majority of philosophers of science would strongly disagree with it. Philosophy of science today is no longer simply metaphysics and epistemology applied to science, as it largely was at the time of Maynard Smith. It is a largely independent field that has, to a significant extent, become naturalized. Philosophers of science today are increasingly skeptical of the promises of armchair analytic epistemology and metaphysics, even if not fully embracing Quine’s quip that “philosophy of science is philosophy enough.” The best philosophers of science pay close attention to the actual sciences in order to contribute to discussions of scientific concepts and methods. They do not do so by applying a priori metaphysical considerations.

The attraction of some philosophers to strange views such as panpsychism reveals a much more problematic conception of the relationship between philosophy and science. Indeed, the hostility that panpsychism typically receives would be more usefully directed at the pernicious view that led to it.

Naturalism and materialism about the mind are not naïve, unexamined, pre-scientific metaphysical commitments of scientists, as panpsychists sometimes claim in order to suggest that their own unusual metaphysical views are no more problematic. Naturalistic materialism is a successful research programme, not a metaphysical thesis. As I’ve argued elsewhere, it should be seen a a rival research programme to analytic philosophy itself:

The End of Analytic Philosophy

Goff and other analytic metaphysicians who think they are revealing deep facts about reality, whether concerning the fundamentality of consciousness or purpose in the universe, are in fact revealing nothing more than features of their own, idiosyncratic minds.

As a philosopher, I might be advised to join in and propagate a self-congratulatory image of us as sages who can derive insights into reality from deep reflective episodes from our armchairs. But I would rather see my colleagues become hard-working aids of the scientific enterprise, perhaps somewhat grumpy about the unique status they once enjoyed, than abandon the central philosophical goal of understanding reality altogether. Philosophy remains uniquely positioned to integrate the pictures provided by the sciences, processing their raw material into something intelligible for all of us who want to understand the world and our place within it. But it cannot do so truthfully by filtering science through a priori metaphysical speculations.

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