Philosophy is actually really important!

 

An Assertion. I am going to make the following claim without evidence. If people have reason to believe I am wrong, I legit would love to hear it (leave a comment below, please).

Most people think the discipline of philosophy is silly or useless.

I am now going to try and convince you this is wrong.

An Aside. Before I start, I want to mention that I only have three (maybe four) memories of interacting with professional philosophers. And the only important one is the time I got to meet Eliot Sober after he gave a talk at Oregon State University. I was very familiar with his work, having studied under someone who had studied under him. And at the time I thought about asking him to sign my copy of “The Philosophy of Biology” but I didn’t because I thought it would be too nerdy. Nowadays I wish I had. His work is a great asset to science and the world.

Background. So, I took a couple of Evolutionary Biology seminars and some more formal coursework in graduate school. People who want to understand biological evolution spend a lot of time thinking about what we know, and how we know it. And one of the professors had a cool way of thinking about the field of Philosophy and that is what I’m going to be writing about now.

Let’s start with two words, epistemology and metaphysics. First off, we should recognize that different people use these words differently. If you use them some other way than what I present here, groovy. But it is left to use to come up with some new word that matches the meanings of the usage I was taught. English be like that.

Epistemology is the study of the sets of rules different people use to decide what is or is not true.  If you believe that the only way to know truth is to read it in your magic book, then “reading it in your magic book” is your epistemology.

Most scientists have an epistemology that includes two things, empirical observation, and logical inference. You can be a scientist who accepts empirical observation, logical inference, and reading it in a magic book. But in the last half century, most of those people  are starting to have profound issues with cognitive dissonance, as most of the magical books make assertions that don’t literally hold up to the first two.

Metaphysics is, under this system, the list of things that you accept to be true. These are the things that you have found, or accept, based on your epistemology.

Different groups have different epistemologies and metaphysics. Some overlap between different groups. Some are reasonably unique.

Another short aside. Recently, I was involved with a Humanist forum here in Manitoba and I presented this approach to understanding people’s beliefs. In our presentations, the group would take breaks and have discussions around questions raised by the speaker.

I asked the attendees to talk about their own epistemology and metaphysics and one of the attendees made an interesting comment. Upon reflection, they asserted that they basically just believe what the people around them believe.

The core of my point. It is my considered opinion that humans are more of a perceiving and responding organism than we are a logical reasoning organism. We do both. But there are people who never really think about thinking. They don’t question “why” they accept something as true. They certainly don’t dive into critical thinking and the various types of logical fallacies (like my opening strawman) and they tend to just accept assertions made by the people they follow.

It's bad, even just among scientists. I tell my students I’m a professional cynic. I don’t believe anything “just ‘cause”.

“By Richard, it is in a peer-reviewed paper.”

“Yeah, but 20% to 50% of all peer-reviewed papers have non-trivial errors in them. Maybe up to a third have structural problems that invalidate one or more of their findings. Before I believe it, I need to do a little digging.”

Imagine how bad it is trying to understand what is true among the people who don’t have a rigorous epistemology.

So, let’s bring back the basics of philosophy. People need to understand how to approach thinking about things they don’t understand.

I honestly think that before people can understand what science is, or the dynamic relationships between and within various religions, they first need to understand the basics of how to think about thinking. And traditionally, that’s the realm of philosophy.

Secret Motivations. I actually have a secret motivation for writing about this. I want to introduce the idea of Philosophical Engineering which is an emerging approach to solving complex problems in biology and physics. Something that I have been spending the bulk of my day-job work hours on since last February. It’s really interesting, and I think it is a very promising approach to understanding, and correcting, all sorts of problems in complex, dynamic systems, but we can’t even start talking about it without first covering epistemology and metaphysics.

As always, thank you for reading, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.