Philosophy of Science with Hilary Putnam

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Putnam is one of my favorite philosophers. It makes me very sad that we lost him this year.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/getgetgetgetgot 📅︎︎ Oct 15 2016 🗫︎ replies

I love that this show was on mainstream television. Their attempts in those days to dumb-down philosophy and science were nowhere near as patronising as the attempts these days in science docutainments.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Oct 19 2016 🗫︎ replies
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The connection between philosophy and the mathematical sciences has always been very close. Plato had written over the door of his academy the words: "Let no one into here who is ignorant of geometry". It was Aristotle who codified the basic sciences into the categories and gave them the names that we use to this day. Some of the greatest philosophers have been themselves great mathematicians who invented new branches of mathematics. Descartes is an obvious example, and so is Leibniz and Pascal. In fact, most of the great philosophers, not all, but most, came to philosophy from mathematics or the sciences. And this tendency has continued into our present century. Bertrand Russell was trained first as a mathematician. Wittgenstein was trained first as an engineer. The reason for this persisting connection is I think obvious, and that is that the basic urge which has driven most of the greatest philosophers has been the urge to deepen our understanding of the world and of its structure. And this is also what creative scientists are doing. For most of the past, too, people thought that mathematics was the most indubitable knowledge as well as being utterly precise and clear that human beings possessed. So there have always been plenty of philosophers examining mathematics to try & find out what was so special about it, and whether this was something that could be applied to the acquisition of other sorts of knowledge. Ditto with the sciences, which were also thought to yield a very specially safe and certain kind of knowledge. What was it about science that made its results so reliable? And could its methods, whatever these were, be used in other fields? These investigations into the concepts and methods, procedures and models that are involved in mathematics & science have come to be known as the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science. And it’s with these that we're going to be concerned in this program. Chiefly, with the philosophy of science, though in fact, we have someone taking part who is expert in both: Professor Hilary Putnam of Harvard University. Professor Putnam, I'd like to start our discussion from a standpoint which I think a very large number of our viewers occupy anyway, and it's really this. Since the 17th century I suppose, there's been a spectacular decline in religious belief, especially in the west and especially among educated people. And for millions, the role that used to be taken in life by a worldview based on religion has been increasingly supplanted by a worldview based on science or at least purporting to be derived from science, anyway. And this is still enormously powerful in the hold that it has on people's minds throughout the west, probably it effects all of us. So I think I'd like to start this discussion by getting you to pin-down that scientific world outlook which is so influential in the modern world which will be underlying a lot of what we're going to have to talk about. Let me dodge the question a little bit by talking not about scientists think now but what many scientists thought 100 years ago or 75 years ago. Think of doing a crossword puzzle. You might have to change a few things as you go along, but towards the end, everything fits and things get added on one step at a time. That's the way the progress of science looked for 300 years. In 1900, a famous mathematician, David Hilbert, gave a list of 50 mathematical problems to a world congress of mathematicians which are still very famous. And it's very interesting that he included one problem which we would not call a mathematical problem very early in the list (I think problem 3) which was to put the foundations of physics on a satisfactory basis. And that was for mathematicians, not for physicists! The idea's---tiny it up. That's right. The idea is Newton, Maxwell, Dalton, and so on, had all put in all the parts of the story, and now it was just for mathematicians to basically clean up the logic, as it were. I think in a conversation we had a couple of days ago, you described this as a "treasure chest" view, and I like that picture, because here's this big chest that we're just filling up. It's an accumulation. You don't have to subtract, you don't have to take out. Occasionally you make a little mistake, but basically the idea is -- or to shift the metaphor -- like building a pyramid: you put down the ground floor, then the next floor, and the next floor, it just goes up. That's part of this, a view of knowledge as growing by accumulation. The other part of it is the idea that the special success of the sciences -- obviously what we're impressed by is success. This culture values success and science is a successful institution. But there's the idea that science owes its success to using a special method and that comes partly from the history of science, from the fact Newton, for example, lived after Bacon and was influenced by Bacon. And the idea that empirical science has grown up together with something called "inductive logic". And this idea that there's a method, the inductive method, and that the sciences can be characterized by the fact that they use this method and use it explicitly and consciously, as it were, not unconsciously as maybe someone who's learning cooking might be using it, but pretty deliberately and explicitly. So I think that these two things, the idea of knowledge as growing by accumulation & growing by the use of a special method, the inductive method, are the key elements of the old view. Yes, and if I were going to put the same thing I suppose slightly differently, I think I'd say this: For two or three hundred years, educated western man thought of the universe and everything in it as consistently of matter in motion. And that was all there was, whether from the outermost galaxies of the stars into ourselves and our bodies, and the cells of which we're made up, and so on. And that science was finding out more and more about this matter and its structure and its motion by a method which you just characterized as "scientific method". And the idea was that if we went on long enough, we'd simply -- as you said with your crossword puzzle metaphor -- we'd find out everything there was to find out. We could, eventually, by scientific methods, completely explain and understand the world. Now, that has been abandoned by scientists, though, in fact, this hasn't got through yet to the non-scientist. There are still large numbers of non-scientists who go on thinking that that's how scientists think, but of course, they no longer do, do they? This has started to break down. I think it started to break down with Einstein. If I can drag in a bit of history of philosophy, screaming by the hair: Kant did something in philosophy which I think has begun to happen now in science. He challenged a certain view of truth. Before Kant no philosopher really doubted that truth was simply correspondence to reality -- there are different words, some philosophers spoke of "agreement". But the idea is a "mirror theory" of knowledge... Well Kant said it isn't so simple, there's a contribution of the thinking mind. Sure, it isn't made up by the mind, Kant was no Idealist; it isn't all a fiction, it isn't something we make up, but it isn't just a copy either. What we call "truth" depends both on what there is, on the way things are, and on the contribution of the thinker, the mind. I think that today scientists have come to a somewhat similar view. That is, since the beginning of the 20th century, the idea that there's a human contribution, a mental contribution to what we call "truth"; the theories aren't simply dictated to us by the facts, as it were. I'd like to ask you to unpack that a little because I think that some of our viewers will find this idea a little puzzling. "How can it be" some people will ask themselves, "that what is and is not true could depend not only on what the facts are, but on the human mind?" Well, let me use an analogy with vision. We tend to think that what we see just depends on what's out there. But the more one studies vision, either as a scientist or as a painter, one discovers that what's called vision involves an enormous amount of interpretation. The color we see as red is not the same color in terms of wavelengths at different times of the day. So that even in what we think of as our simplest transaction with the world, just looking at it, we are interpreting. In other words, we bring a whole number of things to the world that we're not directly conscious of usually unless we turn inwards & start examining them. That's right. I think the world must've looked different in the Middle Ages to someone who looked up and thought of the stars as "up" and us at the bottom, for example. Today when we look out into space, I think we have a different experience than somebody with the Medieval worldview. And what you're saying is that the very categories in which we see the world & interpret our experience, and the ideas within which we organize our observations and the facts around us and so on, are provided by us. So that the world as conceived by science is partly contributed by external facts, but also partly contributed by categories and ways of seeing things which come from the human observer. That's right. And an example of that in science--I'll oversimplify, but it's not basically falsified--is this wave-particle business. It's not that there's something, an electron, which is some half a wave and half a particle, that would be meaningless. But that there are many experiments which can be described two ways. You can either think of the electron as a wave or you can think of it as a particle, and both descriptions are in some crazy way true and adequate. They're alternative ways of describing the same facts and both descriptions are accurate? That's right. Philosophers have started talking of 'equivalent descriptions'. That's a term used in philosophy of science. But now, for a couple of hundred years after Newton, educated western man thought that what Newton had produced was objective fact and he had discovered laws which governed the workings of the world and the workings of the universe, and this was just objectively true independently of us; that Newton and other scientists had read these facts off of nature by observing it, and looking at it, and so on. And these statements which made up science were simply true. Now, there came, didn't there, a period in the development of science beginning in the late 19th century, when people began to realize that these statements were not entirely true, that this wasn't just a body of objective fact which had been read-off from the world. In other words, that science was corrigible, scientific theories could be wrong. And that raises some very profound questions. I mean, if science isn't just an objectively true description of the way things are, what is it? And if we don't get it from observing the world, where do we get it from? Well, I don't wanna say that we don't get it from observing the world at all. Obviously, part of this Kantian image is that there IS a contribution which is not us, there's something "out there". But that also there's a contribution from us. And even Kant, by the way, thought that Newton science was indubitable. In fact, he thought we contributed its indubitability. The step beyond Kant is the idea that not only is reality partly mind-dependent, but that there are alternatives. And that the concepts we impose on the world may not be the right ones and we may have to change them; that there's an interaction between what we contribute and what we find out. But now, what was it that made people begin to realize that this basic conception of science as objective truth was wrong? That science was corrigible, that science was fallible? I think it's that the older science turned out to be wrong when no one expected it to be wrong, not in detail but in the big picture. It's not that we find out that, say, the Sun isn't 93 million miles from the Earth but only 20 million from the Earth. That's not going to happen. I mean, sometimes it makes blunders even about things like that, but that's like making a blunder about whether there's a chair in the room. Wholesale skepticism about whether numerical values are right in science would be as unjustified as wholesale skepticism about anything. But where the newer theories don't agree with Newton is not over the approximate truth of the mathematical expressions in Newton's theory -- those are still perfectly good for calculation -- it's over the big picture. We've replaced the picture of an absolute space and an absolute time by the picture of a four-dimensional spacetime. We've replaced the picture of a Euclidean world by a picture of a world which obeys a geometry Euclid never dreamed of. We've swung back to the picture of the world as having a beginning in time which is really a shocker. It's not even that things once refuted stay refuted forever. So it means really that a whole conception of science has been superseded. Instead of thinking of science as a body of knowledge which is being added to all the time by further scientific work. That whole conception of science has been dispensed with really, and we now think of it as a set of theories which are themselves constantly being replaced by better theories, by more accurate theories, by richer, more explanatory theories. And even the theories we now have like those of Einstein and his successors will probably be replaced in the course of time by other better theories, by scientists yet unknown, isn't that so? That's exactly right. In fact, scientists themselves make this prediction. That is, that the main theories of the 20th century, relativity and quantum mechanics, will give way to some other theory which will interpret both of them and so on forever. Now, this raises a very fundamental question: namely, the question "What is truth?". I mean, when we say that this or that scientific statement is true, or this or that scientific theory is true, what, in these newly understood circumstances of ours, can we mean by "truth"? There are still two views as there have been since Kant. One is this old correspondence view, still has its adherents. But I think the view that's coming in more and more is that one cannot make a total separation between what's true and what our standards of assertability are. That the way in which the--what I called using the Kantian picture the "mind-dependence of truth" comes in--is the fact that what's true and what's false is in part a function of what our standards of truth and falsity are. And that depends on our interests, which again change over time of course. That's right. I'd like you to say a little more about this question of truth because, this again, I think is puzzling to the layman. I think that people who are not trained in science or philosophy are apt to think there are a certain set of facts and a true statement is a statement that accurately describes those facts. I'd like you to talk a little about some of the difficulties that are actually involved in this. I think the biggest difficulty in science itself comes from the fact that, even within one scientific theory, you often find different accounts can be given of so-called facts. This came in with the special theory of relativity when it turned out that facts about simultaneity, whether two things happen at the same time, could be described differently by different observers. One could say "boy-scout A fired his starter's pistol before boy-scout B", the other could say "no, boy-scout B fired his starter's pistol before boy-scout A". And if the distance is sufficiently large so that a light signal can't travel from one to the other without exceeding the speed of light, then it may be both descriptions are correct, both are admissible. Of course, this leads to profound conceptual difficulties in understanding some modern scientific theories. This prompts the thought that a scientific theory can be useful and meaningful, it can work, even if nobody really quite understands what it means. This is the case with quantum mechanics, isn't it? I mean, nobody is really sure what quantum mechanics actually means, and yet it works. That's right. And again, I wanna say one shouldn't push that too far because I think we don't wanna give up our standards of intelligibility altogether. We want to say quantum mechanics works and the very fact that it works means that there's something fundamentally right about it. And with respect to its intelligibility, we're willing to say, in part, that may be that we have the wrong standards of intelligibility, that we have to change our intuitions. But in part, there are real paradoxes in the theory and I think that more work has to be done to really get a satisfactory resolution of these paradoxes. I think somebody hearing our discussion and to whom perhaps some of these ideas are new, might find himself thinking, well, if all this is so, how is it that science works? If traditional scientific theories are breaking down; if science is turning out not to be a body of reliable, permanent, firm objective knowledge; if a significant proportion of every scientific theory is subjective anyway in the sense that it's contributed by the human mind, by the observer, by the scientist--how is it in these circumstances that we can actually build bridges, fly airplanes, make rockets go to the moon, and actually make all this soft, fuzzy, changing, partly subjective body of theory work for us? It must fit the world in some very basic way, in spite of everything that we've been saying. That's true, but I think the contrast between being subjective and fitting the world isn't altogether right. I'm not saying that scientific knowledge is subjective or that "anything goes". I'm saying we're in the difficult position that we often are in life of thinking there is a difference between good and bad reasoning, but we don't have a mechanical rule. In everyday life, we use interest-loaded terms. We wouldn't say that there's a policeman on the corner if we didn't have a whole network of social institutions. Somebody coming from a primitive tribe which didn't have policemen might say there's a man in blue on the corner. But the fact that the notion of a policeman is shaped by our interests doesn't mean that it can't be objectively true that there's a policeman on the corner. Also, I think science works precisely because of this corrigibility in large part, as Professor Popper's pointed out. The difference between science and previous ways of trying to find out truth is, in large part, that scientists are willing to test their ideas because they don't regard them as infallible, in a way that was known at the beginning and then in the success of Newton science somewhat forgotten. And we've had to be reminded again of what Bacon knew, that you have to put questions to nature and be willing to change your ideas if they don't work. In some respects, the traditional opposition between science and religion has--the two parties have crossed places haven't they? I mean, many religious people now believe they have certain knowledge about the world--that it was created by a God, that He made us in His own image, gave us immortal souls which will survive our death, and so on-- certain very fundamental propositions which they hold with absolute certainty. And it's the scientist who believes that everything is fallible, that the world is a mysterious place, that we'll never get to the end of the mystery of, and so on. Isn't there something in that? Maybe. I'm not sure... Well, let's not pursue that. But one point I do want to take up with you, leaving even religion aside, is that, now that science is seen in this entire different way that you've been describing, by virtually all scientists, doesn't it mean that the difference between science and non-science isn't what it was always thought of as being? In other words, since science is so subjective, indefinite, changing, & so on, it's no longer a clearly-cut and different kind of human activity or kind of human knowledge from other sorts of human knowledge and other sorts of human activity? I think that's both true & culturally very important. I think the harm that the old picture of science does is that if there is this realm of absolute fact that scientists are gradually accumulating, then everything else appears somehow as non-knowledge, something to which even words like 'true' and 'false' can't properly apply. I think that the so-called fact-value dichotomy is a very good example of this. It's hard to have a discussion on politics, for example, without someone very quickly saying, at least in my country, "Is that a fact or a value judgment?", as though it can't be a fact that Hitler was a bad man, for example, or a fact that Farrah Fawcett is a beautiful woman. And do you think that it is a fact that Hitler was a bad man? Oh yes I do. [LAUGHTER] I do too! But then, if this is so, if we are abandoning so many of these comfortable clear-cut distinctions of the past, what's the point of continuing to use the category or the notion or the term 'science' anyway? I mean, does it any longer clearly demarcate something differentiable from everything else? I don't think it does. I think that if you're going to distinguish science from non-science, that makes a lot of sense if you still have this old view that there's this inductive method and what makes something science is that it uses it and uses it pretty consciously and pretty deliberately, and that what makes something non-science is either it uses it entirely unconsciously, as in learning how to cook, you're not consciously thinking about inductive logic, or perhaps doesn't use it at all as metaphysics was alleged not to use it at all, I think unfairly. But once you say, both say that there's a sharp line between, say, practical knowledge & science, and to say that the method which is supposed to draw this line is rather fuzzy, something that we can't state exactly. And attempts to state it, by the way, have been very much a failure still. Inductive logic cannot be, say, programmed on a computer the way deductive logic can be programed on a computer. I think the development of deductive logic in the last hundred years and the development of the computer have really brought home very dramatically just what a difference state we are in with respect to "proof" in the mathematical sciences which we can state rigorous canons for, and "proof" in what used to be called the "inductive sciences", where we can state general maxims but you really have to use intuition, general know-how, and so on in applying them. One of the two categories that you described the old-fashion way of looking at science in terms of was that there was a particular scientific method; that you observe the facts and on the basis of these observed instances, you generalized to form scientific theories which you then verified by experiment. That was the old view. Now that that has been abandoned, is there any longer any single method which is thought of as being scientific method? I don't think there should be. People talk of scientific method as a sort of fiction, but I think that, even in physics, where you do get experiments and tests which pretty much fit the textbooks -- there's a great deal that does and then a great deal that shouldn't. And I think, in fact, in the culture I don't really believe there's an agreement on what's a science & what isn't. Any university will tell you in its catalogue there are things called "social sciences" and that sociology is a science and that economics is a science. I bet if you ask anyone in the physics department whether sociology is a science, he'll say "no". But why would he say "no"? That's interesting. I think the real reason is not that the sociologist don't use the inductive method--they probably use it more conscientiously, poor things, than the physicists do--I think it's because they're not as successful. So in other words, science has become almost a name for successful pursuit of knowledge. That's right. Yeah. Well now, I think you've given a very good description of the way in which this age-old view of what science was has broken down in our century and been replaced by something much more fluid and perhaps much more difficult to get hold of. But you have, I think, described it very clearly. Can we now come against this background to what philosophers of science are actually doing. You are a philosopher of science, what do you and your colleagues do? Well, part of what we do, which I won't try to describe on this broadcast, is fairly technical investigation of specific scientific theories. We look at quantum mechanics very closely, both to learn what lessons we can from it for philosophy, and to see what contributions we can make as philosophers to clarifying its foundations. We look at relativity theory very closely, we look at Darwinian evolution very closely, and so on. This is the part of philosophy of science that provides the data for the rest. But much philosophy of science shades over into general philosophy. And I think the best way to describe it is in terms of what we've been talking about. That is, each of the issues we've been talking about divides philosophers of science. There are philosophers of science who have a correspondence view of truth and try to show this came be made precise, the objections can be overcome, you can still view science somehow in the old way. And there are others who try to sketch what another view of truth would come to. There are philosophers who still think there is an inductive method that can be rigorously stated & who work on inductive logic. By the way, I think it's important there should be, because we won't make progress trying to state the inductive method if there aren't. And that there are others who view the development of science more culturally, more historically. And then, people like myself, who have a sort of in between position; that there's something to the notion of a scientific method, there are clear examples, but that it's more or less a continuum, you mustn't think of it as a kind of mechanical rule, an algorithm that you can apply to get scientific knowledge. So that I'd say each of these issues: the nature of truth, the nature of the scientific method, whether there's any necessary truths in science, any conceptual contribution which is permanent and can't be subject to revision is a big question. And who are you, plural, doing all this work for? I don't ask that in an irreverent way, but what I have in mind is this. I've myself taking part in attempts to bring scientists and philosophers together for discussions of precisely the issues that you've raised, and these attempts have usually failed and failed for the same reason: namely, that the scientists lose interest. They go back to their laboratories and get on with doing more science. And the great bulk of working scientists, it seems to me, don't in fact take very much of an interest in the issues you've been talking about. I think it's conspicuous that the greatest of all scientists are exceptions. The really blockbusting, the path-breaking scientists who've actually made the revolution in this century that you've been talking about: people like Einstein, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Max born, Schrödinger, de Broglie... These people were enormously interested in the conceptual questions that you've raised, but these were the pioneering geniuses, and the great mass of thousands of scientists who follow on behind them and put their work to its practical application, they don't seem to care. So, who is listening to you? Who is reading the stuff that you publish? Well I'd say, first of all, I think we are basically writing for the philosophically interested layman, for the reader of philosophy. I don't view philosophy of science as giving direct advice to scientists, just as I think moral philosophers are ill-advised to think that they're giving at least immediately current, contemporary advice on how to live your life or what bills to pass in Parliament. On the other hand, I do think that scientists tend to know the philosophy of science of 50 years ago. And perhaps this isn't a bad thing. That is, perhaps this time lag, this culture lag has some value in weeding out what they shouldn't pay attention to. I mean, it's annoying for a philosopher to encounter a scientist who's both sure that he needn't listen to any philosophy of science and then who produces verbatim ideas which you can recognize as coming from what was popular in 1928. Is there a direct parallel here between what you're saying about scientists and Keynes, the economist Keynes' famous remark that nearly all businessmen who thought that they were indifferent to airy-fairy economic theory, were in fact the slaves of the economic theorists of yesterday and the previous generation? That's exactly true. I suppose another parallel one could make would be to say that the account that ordinary language users give of language and their use of language would be extremely unsophisticated simply because they take it for granted and never thought about it. That too would probably apply to the account that most scientists would give of what they were doing when they were doing their science. That's right. That is, it's a mistake to think that merely because one practices an activity, one can give a theory of it. One criticism that's often been made about philosophers of science is that although they talk of "science" in this general way, what they're nearly always referring to, in fact, is one science: namely, physics. Now, it's true, isn't it, that the science in which the most exciting developments have probably taken place in the last 20 years anyway has been not physics but biology. Are philosophers of science genuinely open to the criticism of being too physics-based in their view of science & having ignored biology too much? I think I would defend us against that on the grounds that, although the theories in biology are of great scientific importance --Darwin's theory of evolution, Crick-Watson on DNA, and so on--they don't, by and large, pose big methodological problems of a kind that don't arise in physical science. I'm not sure whether you're going to agree with that. Well, I mean, you mentioned the word 'evolution' just now & it seems to me that here is a concept which originated in one of the sciences, namely, biology, and which over a comparatively short period of time has spread throughout the whole of our culture. So that the way almost everybody thinks is influenced by the notion of evolution, not only about the origins of man, but about institutions, or the arts, or all kinds of other things. I mean, evolution has become a dimension of western man's thinking about almost anything, is that not so? That's right. And perhaps there has not been enough attention to this theory. Though what strikes me as interesting is that the possibility of explanations of what we think of as the biological kind-- explanations in terms of function rather than in terms of physics and chemistry, what you're made of--have come under more attention recently as a result of computer science. Now, this does raise something I'm particularly interested in when you talk of computer science & that is the interaction between our technology in the case of computers and philosophy; not just science and philosophy, but technology and philosophy. I mean, computers were originally constructed on the basis of a self-conscious analogy with the human mind. But as they became more and more sophisticated, we began to learn things from them about the human mind. So our construction of computers & what they then tell us about ourselves seems to actually precede by interactive growth, isn't that so? That's right. And today---this is one area, by the way, in which philosophers are in close contact with scientists. That is, the fields of linguistics, cognitive psychology, computer science, and philosophy of language today interact constantly, people send papers to one another, not because someone tells them to, there are conferences in which specialists in these fields meet together, again not because someone decided there should be some cross-fertilization. The interesting thing about the computer case is one might've thought that the computer, the rise of the computer, would encourage a certain kind of vulgar Materialism. The idea: so after all, we are machines, so after all, everything about us can be explained in terms of physics & chemistry. Paradoxically, the real effect of the computer on psychology and on philosophy of mind has been a decrease in that kind of Reductionism. See, the thing about the computer is that when you work with computers, you very rarely have to think about their physics and chemistry. There's a distinction that people draw between their "software", meaning their program, their instructions, their rules, the way they do things, & their "hardware". And generally you ignore their hardware, you talk about computers at the software level, and you wouldn't really be able to explain what they do in a way that would be of any use to anyone in terms of the hardware level. There is a kind of emergence here, although it's not a mystical kind of emergence, it's not that they're violating the laws of physics. It's just that higher-level facts about organization have a kind of autonomy. The fact that it's following this program explains why it does this and I don't need to know how it's built, I only need to know it can be built in such a way that it will follow this program... If you apply this to the mind, it suggests a return to a view of the mind that I associate with Aristotle. It's the view that we are not "ghosts in a machine", not spirits which are only temporarily in bodies, but that the relation between the mind & the body is a relation of function to what has that function. Aristotle said that, if you use the word "soul" in connection with an axe--of course he said you don't-- you'd say the soul of an axe is cutting. And he said the soul of the eye is seeing, and he thought of man as a thing that thinks. You're talking now of the alternative to Materialism and, say, a religious view that this gives us, puts me in mind instantly of the most significant of all the Materialist philosophies in the modern world: namely, Marxism, which after all, is the official state philosophy of about a third of mankind as we sit here discussing this. Marxism claims to be scientific and this is a very important thing about it. Is there a significant Marxist contribution to the philosophy of science? I don't think there's a significant Marxist contribution, but I don't think that the Marxists were all wrong either. I think Engels was one of the most scientifically learned men of his century. He got a number of things wrong, but he had an immense general scientific knowledge. And Anti-Dühring, his big book on philosophy of science, although it contains some rather strange ideas, some of which he gets from Hegel by the way, is, on the whole, a sensible book on philosophy of science, among other things. On the other hand, it's not specifically Marxist. I'd say that Engels views in the philosophy of science are in large part influenced by the standard philosophy of science of the time. They're a fairly sophisticated inductive account. And what about subsequent Marxists thinkers who also had some pretension to be philosophers, like Lenin, for example? Lenin, I think, is on the whole, one of the worst. He says, for example, that theories are "copies" of motion. I mean, there you have the copy theory; science is just copying off the reality in its crudest view. Mao is more sophisticated. Mao was very influenced by John Dewey who was widely read in China in the 1920s. Do you think it's actually made a contribution to the subject as it is today or not really? I think that it anticipated --it perhaps might've made a contribution if people had been less ideologically divided because I think non-Marxists could've learned--the Marxists were among the first people to try to somehow combine a Realist view with a stress on practice, with a stress on corrigibility. And they were very hostile to the notion of a priori truth & today many mainline philosophers of science are very hostile to a priori truth. As it is, they play somewhat the role in philosophy of science, I think, that Keynes said they'd play in economics. He described Marx as one of his sort of underground predecessors. Yes, yes. When I was introducing this program, I mentioned not only the philosophy of science, but also the philosophy of mathematics. And before we close, I would like us to say something about that anyway. I suppose one could really say that the central problem in the philosophy of mathematics is a direct parallel to the central problem in the philosophy of science: namely, how does it fit the world? With science, it's how does science fit the world? In mathematics, it's how does mathematics fit the world? Is that right? That's right and it's even worse, because if you're trying to defend a "copy view", a correspondence view of truth in empirical science, you can answer the question "well how do we build-up this picture in such a way that corresponds?" by saying that we have sense organs. As I mentioned before that's not a total answer because there's a tremendous amount of interpretation involved in simple seeing & simple hearing. But if you're talking about numbers and sets, and someone says okay if mathematical knowledge is simply some kind of a copy of the way numbers ARE and the way sets are, and the way other abstract objects that mathematicians study are, the question [is] then: what SENSE enables us to see how they are? What is a number? Yes, yes. A deeply problematic question but still an important one. On the other hand, I don't want to say that the anti-correspondence view has it very easy either. It seems to me that mathematical knowledge is a real puzzle. And I think that philosophers should concentrate more on philosophy of mathematics than they do now because it seems to be an area where no theory works very well. Isn't there another very important parallel between mathematics and science? I mean, throughout the history of science, one of the conflicts has been between one camp who thought that it was all about objects in the world which existed independently of human experience, and another camp which thought no it's human beings and observers who actually contribute most of this. And as you pointed out much earlier in our discussion, the truth is almost certainly a combination of both. There is a long standing dispute in mathematics between one body of people who think that mathematical knowledge is something that's, sort of speak, inherent in the structure of the world, and we derive it from the world by experience & observation, and another body of mathematical thought that says no, mathematics is a creation of the human mind which we then try to impose on reality like a grid, as it were, on a landscape. Isn't that so? That's right. The latter story is attractive because of the sense organ problem, but it doesn't seem to work either because it seems that we're not free to impose any mathematics or any logic we want. Almost anyone would admit that at least you have to be consistent and what's consistent and what isn't, isn't somehow something we can just make-up or decide. When we try to stress conventionalist accounts, subjective accounts, we come up against the objectivity of mathematics. When we try to stress the objectivity of mathematics we come up against another set of problems. I think we can learn a lot more than we now know about human knowledge & about scientific knowledge by going further into this area. Talking of where we're going from where we are, sort of speak, I think the most interesting way in which you could end this discussion Professor Putnam would by talking about what you regard as the most interesting problems areas at the moment, and therefore, I take it, the most likely growth areas for the immediate future in both of the subjects we've been discussing: philosophy of science & philosophy of mathematics. Okay, I think that--if I'm allowed to confine my prediction to the immediate future, because we know that long-run predictions are always false. But in the immediate future, I would expect philosophy of mathematics to be a growth area & philosophy of logic. I would expect philosophy of physics, I think, to decline somewhat from its central place in philosophy of science. Although I think, part of it touches philosophy of logic. The astounding suggestion has actually come forward, in connection with quantum mechanics, that we may have to change our logic, our view of what the true logical laws are, in order to really understand how the world can be quantum mechanical. I think this side of philosophy of quantum mechanics that touches philosophy of logic will be a hot discussion area. But more generally, I think, areas which we almost don't think of as philosophy of science that become philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, like these questions about computer models of the mind, computer models of language, and these more general questions about theories of truth, the nature of truth, the nature of verification, how science can be objective even though there's not a rigorous scientific method. I think these questions will continue to be the staples of the field. One thing that worries me about this whole area is its relationship to the educated layman, I mean, which in a sense is the person our discussion has been for. After all, it's now over 70 years since the 25 year old Einstein published the theory of relativity, and I'm sure you agree with me that it's true to say now that the great majority of educated people with higher educations, university degrees, and so on, still have scarcely any idea of what this is all about. And it's done very little to actually influence their view of the world. Isn't there a danger that now science and mathematics are simply racing ahead and the whole new range or world of insight that that is giving us into the universe in which we live simply isn't filtering through to the non-specialist, or not filtering through anything fast enough? That is a danger, but it's one that something can be done about. There's now, for example, a text of special relativity called "Spacetime Physics" which is designed for the first month of the first Freshman college physics course. And the authors say at the beginning that they look forward to the time when it will be taught in high schools. And do you think that time will in fact come? Oh I'm sure of it. Yes. Well, I think you're right and indeed I hope you are. Thank you very much Professor Putnam. Thank you.
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Channel: Philosophy Overdose
Views: 67,763
Rating: 4.9028215 out of 5
Keywords: Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Hilary Putnam, Truth, Knowledge, Foundationalism, History of Science, Einstein, Correspondence Theory, Quine, Scientific Method, Fact-Value, Kant, Philosophical Realism, Metaphysics, Empiricism, History of Philosophy, Theory of Knowledge, Thomas Kuhn, Subject-Object, Positivism, Skepticism, Scientific Theory, Materialism, Induction, Scientific Realism, Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Mind, Foundations of Mathematics
Id: et8kDNF_nEc
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 43min 57sec (2637 seconds)
Published: Mon Nov 09 2015
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