PWAug11critical 18/7/11 15:47 Page 17 physicsworld.com ...Steven Weinberg’s chapter “Against...

“Philosophy is dead.” So say the venerablephysicists Stephen Hawking and LeonardMlodinow on the first page of their recentbestselling book, The Grand Design.

Physicists declaring philosophy to be life-less is nothing new. In his 2010 book In Praiseof Science: Curiosity, Understanding, andProgress, Sander Bias likened philosophers’discussions of science to doctors who diag-nose patients before considering symptoms.In a 2004 New Scientist article, Simon Singhsaid that scientists do not need philosophersany more than birds need ornithologists.Steven Weinberg’s chapter “Against philo-sophy”, in his classic 1992 book Dreams of aFinal Theory, needs no explanation.

Why do physicists so often, and confid-ently, condemn a field that is not their own?Where are their instincts to be inquisitive,resist overstepping what they know, withholdjudgment until certain and accompanyclaims with error bars?

The evidence that Hawking (using hisname as shorthand) cites is essentially thefollowing. Questions such as, “How can weunderstand the world in which we find our-selves?” and “How does the universebehave?” are traditionally considered to bephilosophical. But because philosophershave not kept up with scientists in theiranswers, therefore “Scientists have becomethe bearers of the torch of discovery in ourquest for knowledge.”

No. Philosophers (including myself)approach such questions differently.

What philosophy doesFor philosophers, the world includes morethan physical matter. As the HarvardUniversity philosopher Steven Shapin writesin his book, Never Pure, “Plants photosyn-thesize, plant biochemists are experts inknowing how plants photosynthesize, [while]reflective and informed students of scienceare experts in knowing how plant bio-chemists know how plants photosynthesize.”In other words, the world studied by scienceresearchers includes not just objects, but alsoconnections between scientists and objects.

Human beings, after all, engage with theworld in different ways. They seek wealth,fame, pleasure, companionship, happinessand other “good” things. They do this as chil-

dren, adolescents, parents, merchants, ath-letes, teachers and administrators. All thesemethods arise through modifications of amatrix of ways by which human beings prac-tically connect to the world that precedes anycognitive understanding. The technical termphilosophers use for this matrix is the “life-world”. But scientists are not like plantswhose product is knowledge. Plants do notplan to follow laws of nature and do not inter-pret themselves. Human beings, however, dointerpret both the world and themselves. Thetechnical term philosophers use for humanself-interpretation is “hermeneutics”.

Understanding photosynthesis, forinstance, is only one – rare – way for humanbeings to interact with plants. Hawking’s the-oretical stance as an observer of fundamen-tal structures, too, is only one way forhumans to engage with the world, and notthe default setting either. Humans are notautomatic information absorbers; they mustbe trained to approach the world as he does.They have to pay a special kind of attention,pursue a special kind of inquiry and find thatinquiry valuable.

The lifeworld is the domain to which philo-sophers bring their torch of discovery. Theystudy similarities and differences betweenvarious modes of being in the world – theirgroup structures, if you will – and how eacharises out of the lifeworld. To study this is notto undermine or critique these activities, butto understand and help cultivate them.

But the lifeworld – a kind of horizon struc-tured by powerful metaphors, images anddeeply embedded habits of thought – has itsown character that changes over time.Philosophers – and here they differ from

other students of science – do not and can-not adopt a “view from nowhere”, in aphrase popularized by New York Universityphilosopher Thomas Nagel, but seek to bereflective. When philosophers think aboutscience, they struggle to be self-aware of thathorizon and how it affects human self-inter-pretation. This is why the humanities matter,for they study and help reshape the lifeworld.Without ornithologists, wrote one astuterespondent to Singh’s New Scientist article,many bird species, in these ecologically trou-bled times, are heading for extinction.

Why it’s misunderstoodIt is easy to misunderstand what philosophydoes, for several reasons.

First, like much of physics, philosophyoften has a narrow focus and is concernedwith special topics or technical issues, whoseplace in the big picture may not be easy foran outsider to see. Much philosophy of sci-ence is thin or even anorexic and does notflesh out all of the ways in which science isembodied in the world.

Second, the lifeworld – like any horizon –tends to drop out of view. It is overlooked infavour of the objects, plans and goals thatappear in and thanks to that horizon. That isperfectly understandable; detecting the hori-zon and its impact on our lives is the philo-sopher’s special task.

Finally, the particular character of themodern world is that the very successes ofscience lead us to think that only the meas-urable is worthwhile. The messy, ofteninchoate lifeworld is bound to seem not onlyless distinct and valuable, but also less tangi-ble and real, than the grandeur of the designsuncovered by Hawking and others.

The critical pointOn the first page of his book Subtle is theLord…, the physicist Abraham Pais reportsa discussion with Einstein in which the latterasked Pais if he “really believed that theMoon exists only if I look at it”. One couldhardly think of a deeper, more challengingquestion about the concept “to exist”. YetPais smoothly characterizes the conversationas “not particularly metaphysical”. Discuss-ing the meaning of reality is okay, evidently,so long as it is done in an amateur way.

So is philosophy dead? No; it will live aslong as science does. When will physicistsstop misunderstanding it? Probably never.But those who are ignorant of philosophy aredestined to commit a bad version of it.

Robert P Crease is chairman of the Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, and historian at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, US, e-mail rcrease@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

Critical Point Philosophy rulesYou might not understand whatphilosophers do for a living, butthat does not mean their work ismeaningless. Robert P Crease

tires of hearing physicists tryingto kill his profession

Alive and kicking Philosophy has moved on andremained current since the time of Plato’s Academy inAthens, despite physicists’ assertions to the contrary.

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