10.31.06
Science blunders vs philosophy blunders
I think that philosophy of science has actually become much better. We had our early period, which was very programmatic and was quite prepared to just figure out where science should go and where it shouldn’t. And that was brave and foolhardy and it had some great moments, but people saw better, and now people in the philosophy of science have to be well-trained. You quoted Bertrand Russell. Science is what we know; philosophy is what we don’t know. I’m actually content with that, because I view philosophy as what you’re doing when you don’t know what the right questions are. And that’s not trivial. If you can help sort out the bafflement and controversy and smoke and battle, that’s work worth doing.
Science is what we know, philosophy what we don’t know. It therefore follows what philosophy doesn’t know science doesn’t know either.
You may want to disagree with this, but it probably isn’t too important for an entomologist to know the history of the field going back to the eighteenth century. But it really is important to know the history of philosophy if you’re going to do philosophy, and the reason is actually very simple. The history of philosophy is a history of very tempting mistakes, and the people that we study in the history of philosophy—Plato and Aristotle and Kant and all the rest—they were not dummies. They were really smart people and they made stunning errors. These are very tempting mistakes. So you really have to learn the history of philosophy if you’re going to do it well. Or you have to learn some of it. Because otherwise you just reinvent the wheel. You end up falling in the same old traps
What exactly are the tempting mistakes of Plato, Kant, and Aristotle?
Given the monumental blunder of Darwinian theory and its attendant positivistic methodology, the ‘mistakes’ of these three might actually give us the clue to where science is going wrong on evolution.