At the Blog of the APA, Nina Emery discusses the relation between philosophy and science. I want to discuss what she calls
Content Naturalism. Philosophers ought not put forward theories that conflict with the content of our best scientific theories.
This is close to a kind of philosophical conservatism according to which “philosophy cannot credibly challenge… the established theses of the natural sciences…”1
In that stark form, there are at least two problems with it.
First, nobody has a solution to the demarcation problem. What constitutes a scientific theory is unclear, so wherever one wants to advance a heterodox opinion one may deny that the orthodoxy is properly scientific.
Second, we ought to be falliblists. Even our best scientific theories might need revision, will probably need clarification, and will certainly need supplementation. Accepting scientific findings as sacrosanct stands in the way of enquiry.
One might reply: Naturalism and conservativism can allow that correctives are possible. They just hold that the new discovery couldn’t come from a philosopher. Yet this reply requires a sharp demarcation between the scientist and philosopher, which is no clearer than the demarcation between science and philosophy. We can make comparative judgments in some particular cases, but that shouldn’t lead us to think that there is a sharp dichotomy.
Having said all that, I subscribe to a kind of content naturalism: Philosophical questions often depend on contingent and empirical facts. When they do, we should use the best resources available to us. These resources include scientific theories from the natural sciences, but they go further. Depending on the questions, they can include psychology, history, ethnography, journalism, and much else besides. These are all science in a loose sense— or at least they’re more scientific than sitting in my office and guessing what the world must be like.
This even allows philosophers to put forward theories that conflict with what our best resources tell us. Future revolutions in science might make today’s thought experiments into tomorrow’s laboratory experiments (but they probably won’t). Yet we have to be honest that we are imagining rather than describing. The contrast with how things are not might help us better understand how things are, and make-believe can be fun even when it doesn’t.
- Here quoting David Lewis.