An Irrational Rule

A somewhat older piece in Aeon by J. Bradley Studemeyer makes the case that philosophy as a discipline is often subject to the whims of fashion, not fashion as in wearing apparel, but as in fashionable ideas. He writes:

The rise and fall of popular positions in the field of philosophy is not governed solely by reason. Philosophers are generally reasonable people but, as with the rest of the human species, their thoughts are heavily influenced by their social settings. Indeed, they are perhaps more influenced than thinkers in other fields, since popular or ‘big’ ideas in modern philosophy change more frequently than ideas in, say, chemistry or biology. Why?

The relative instability of philosophical positions is a result of how the discipline is practised. In philosophy, questions about methods and limitations are on the table in a way that they tend not to be in the physical sciences, for example. Scientists generally acknowledge a ‘gold standard’ for validity – the scientific method – and, for the most part, the way in which investigations are conducted is more or less settled.

Falsifiability rules the scientific disciplines: almost all scientists are in agreement that, if a hypothesis isn’t testable, then it isn’t scientific. There is no counterpoint of this in philosophy. Here, students and professors continue to ask: ‘Which questions can we ask?’ and ‘How can we ask, much less answer, those questions?’ There is no universally agreed-upon way in which to do philosophy.

Given that philosophy’s foundational questions and methods are still far from settled – they never will be – it’s natural that there is more flux, more volatility, in philosophy than in the physical sciences. [T]his volatility... is [similar to] changes of fashion.

I'm not sure Studemeyer is correct in what he says about testability being the litmus test of science. Perhaps it should be, but it often isn't. For example, it's difficult to imagine how some of the hypotheses concerning the origin of life, macroevolution, the big bang, the multiverse, string theory, and so on, could be tested. Yet they're all considered by many scientists to be legitimate science.

The notion of a "scientific method," despite the fact that it's in the early chapters of just about every secondary school science text, is not one that many working scientists actually ascribe to. Indeed, the problem of separating science from non-science, called by philosophers of science the "demarcation problem" is one that philosophers have for some time despaired of solving. There simply is no consistent definition of what science is.

Scientists like their theories to be testable, but if they aren't they want them to be elegant, and if they aren't they want them to have expansive explanatory power, and if they don't they want them to at least conform to a materialist worldview, and if they're incompatible with materialism, well, then, they're just not science.

Or so we're told, but the materialist criterion is simply an arbitrary philosophical preference. It's not derived from any scientific investigation. Moreover, there's no compelling justification for it, and, in fact, it's becoming increasingly clear in both origin of life studies and in cosmology that the "materialist explanations only" requirement is producing a lot of dead ends.

Maybe it's time to adopt William James' famous maxim and jettison the materialist requirement. James wrote that "a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

Indeed it would be.