John Wilkins has an interesting post, titled “Metaphysical determinism“, and this post will consist of some rambling comments on John’s post.
I’ll start by saying that I agree with much, but not all, that John says. I’ll be commenting mostly where I disagree, but I hope the reader will understand that there is a lot of agreement. I am making this a post here, rather than a comment on John’s blog post, because I think it will help show where I disagree with some of the conventional wisdom.
Starting at the beginning, John writes:
There is a hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf Thesis (also known as linguistic relativity) in language that one can only think what one’s language permits you to think, and indeed forces you to think.
I’d say that “indeed forces you to think” part of that is why Sapir-Whorf is considered either controversial or obviously false. It seems an obvious truism that one can only say (or express in language) what one’s language permits one to say. Some people, including some philosophers, seem to believe that thinking is linguistic. Others, self included, believe that thinking is not limited to what we are able to say. Those who see thought as limited to what can be said are probably the one most concerned about Sapir-Whorf. Some of the discussion that I have seen is on the question of whether one’s ability to discriminate colors is limited by the number of color word in the language. Those of us who believe that thought is not limited to what can be said are likely to think it a silly issue.
There’s another problem with Sapir-Whorf in its strongest form. And that’s the fact that language itself is dynamic. We can coin new words if we need them. The history of science is a history of extending language so as to make it possible to speak about issues that could not have been discussed in the language without such an extension. So concern that the capabilities of ones language could control what can be thought seems to be an over-reaction.
Conceptual schemes have been criticised. Donald Davidson once gave a talk, titled “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, which attacked the coherence and salience of this notion.
I disagree with Davidson on that. I see conceptual relativism as unavoidable, but as not being any kind of threat to our ideas of rationality. I won’t further comment on that here, though I might take it up in a future post.
From there, John goes on to define what he means by “metaphysical determinism” and to explain its significance. As part of that, he says:
Obviously nobody thinks that science is incapable of changing its metaphysics (beyond a few who want to claim that science is just another religious worldview like their own, and so a matter of faith). But there is underneath this view the idea that somehow metaphysics forces scientists and occasionally scientific views to think in particular ways. It is this that I think is false, or at least only weakly true.
That’s an example of where I agree with John.
Personally, I don’t see how metaphysics is even possible, except by means of making up stuff. So I try to avoid any metaphysical commitment. However, scientists often do see their scientific theories a metaphysical, as rules that govern the universe. During the Newtonian era, it seems clear that many scientists took Newton’s laws to be metaphysical. And, more recently, they have taken Einstein’s relativity to be metaphysical. There’s a huge change between a Newtonian metaphysics and a relativistic metaphysics, which is partly why that change is considered an example of a Kuhnian paradigm shift.
Other scientists see theories as mainly pragmatic and epistemic, rather than metaphysical. And people who look at it that way, tend to see the change from Newton to Einstein as relatively minor and progressive. I concur with that way of looking at science.
I wondered aloud how it might be this way, and decided that we had by then swallowed the idea that world views force our thinking; when instead it seems to me that scientists are more moved by facts and experiments, and good explanations, than by philosophical ideas, and that when they do philosophy (like all scientists they do it a lot less well than they often think), they invent a philosophical justification for what they would do in any case.
I’d say that John is about right there, on scientists. As he says, they are moved by facts and experiments rather than by assumed philosophies. He is also right that they tend to invent the philosophical justification that they need, though perhaps without thinking that they are engaged in philosophy.
My fundamental rule is: never believe what a scientist says, but instead believe in what they do.
That’s a good principle. I would like to add a similar principle – never believe what a philosopher says, but instead go by what the philosophers do. The difficulty is that most of what philosophers do is in the saying, so that might be an impractical principle.
… and as I often say, when scientists do philosophy they usually do it badly …
When scientists do philosophy, they probably don’t think of themselves as doing philosophy.
The greater problem, as I see it, is that when philosophers do philosophy, they usually do it badly. Doubtless, I disagree with philosophers on what is good philosophy. But let me put it another way. Philosophers wallow in tradition. This is unlike science, which respects tradition only for as long as it supports the science, then it overturns the traditions and establishes new ones.
It seems to me that there are lots of philosophical issues that arise out of science. But philosophers seem to be so busy wallowing in tradition, that the rarely notice those issues. Perhaps if philosophers were more sensitive to new issues arising from science, their field would not have a reputation as being useless to science.
One of the real contributions to science is to ask the questions that everybody thinks are obvious; and it is this that the scientist critics of philosophy fail to understand.
One of my reasons for starting this blog, was to be able to ask the questions that everybody (including philosophers) thinks are obvious. My experience is that the philosophers go back to wallowing an tradition and thinking that the questions are obvious. In my opinion, they are missing important issues that they should be investigating.
The Heretical Philosopher 