Debunking a myth: science trumps other knowledge

Modern sciences offer the best methods and practices for the empirical study of the physical world.

But it stops there. You need other epistemic tools to make sense of the world and navigate the deeper questions. The sciences alone will neither make you a fully actualized and satiated human being, nor give you access to the blueprint of reality.

The physical sciences cannot even step outside of themselves. Most of the gripping questions about “science” — “What is science?”, “What can science tell us about reality?”, “Does science make philosophy obsolete?” — are far more rigorously pursued in the departments of history and philosophy than in laboratories. Wasn’t it through philosophy that Karl Popper proposed his popular “falsification” criterion as a way of distinguishing science from other activities? Didn’t Albert Einstein admit he was only able to solve the problem of relativity because of the philosophical works of Hume and Mach? Were Hobbes and Boyle debating a physical vacuum or the idea of a vacuum? Did Newton and Leibniz differ on their mechanical conceptions of nature or also on its metaphysics?

More than that, the sciences implicitly rely on first principles: the principle of identity, of non-contradiction, of causality, and so forth. Without these principles, a scientist could not say anything meaningful about the world. Empirical inquiry would simply be impossible. Yet these first principles are examined and formulated outside science, in the domain called metaphysics.

If philosophy, logic, or metaphysics were lesser or unreliable disciplines, then good luck justifying any opinion you hold about science, the nature of reality, the meaning of life, and many other consequential topics. Arguing that science owes nothing to these other epistemic spheres is like claiming that this very sentence you’re reading is operating outside the rules of grammar; thinking that science makes philosophical study useless is as silly as believing that this sentence could somehow make the alphabet obsolete. (And this is why Stephen Hawking’s infamous proclamation that “philosophy is dead” belongs either in a comedy skit or a textbook on hidden fallacies, not a bestseller about the cosmos.)

Where exactly science fits in human epistemology; whether science produces the only reliable form of knowledge; if we should be speaking of “science” or “sciences”; what these can tell us about the world; what entities populate that world; what role the sciences ought to play in life decisions; what “the” scientific method is, and whether or not it is one method; and many other science discussions actually belong to the less prestigious (because less popular) disciplines of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, history, sociology.

Science is not the only valid form of knowledge. Nor should we confuse ‘science’ with ‘empirical observation’. Scientific propositions primarily rest on observation (broadly defined); but scientists must also resort to testimony for their everyday work, and ratiocination rooted in first principles to make sense of the papers they read and phenomena they behold. Indeed, discursive knowledge comes in these three basic flavors: observation, testimony, and ratiocination. The endeavour we loosely refer to as “science” is a complex, uneven mixture of these and other ingredients, and is often more dynamic and multifaceted than is commonly assumed.

Further reading:

Canales, Jimena. 2016. The Physicist and the Philosopher.

Daston, Lorraine, Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity.

Galison, Peter. 2003. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps.

Goldstein, Rebecca N. “Science makes philosophy obsolete” (2015) in Brockman, John (ed.), This Idea Must Die.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2019. Can Science Make Sense of Life?

Lahham, Karim. 2021. The Anatomy of Knowledge and the Ontological Necessity of First Principles.

Lipton, Peter. “The Epistemology of Testimony” (1998).

Nathan, Marco J., Diego Brancaccio, Carmine Zoccali. “Can there be science without philosophy?” (2016).

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life.