Current Issues in Philosophy

Philosophy of Science

Simply put, philosophy of science is the philosophical exploration of the roots and methods of scientific inquiry. Like most philosophy though, a serious exploration of science is not simple. Like all good philosophy, philosophy of science tries to improve our understanding and quality of life, and like all good philosophy, it does not simply accept the dominant paradigm.

Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) was an influential philosopher of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, radically changed our understanding of science. Kuhn’s ideas on epistemology were influenced by philosophers such as Wittgenstein and his own studies of the history of science. He rejected the traditional view that science advances through the gradual accumulation of new discoveries. He argued that science is “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions” in which “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.”

Kuhn said that scientific work in these longer-lasting, more tranquil periods of “normal science” is guided by a dominant paradigm. By, “paradigm,” Kuhn meant an attitude similar to what Pierce had defined as truth—a consensus within the community of scientists. Science is an approach to reality and questions about it that operates from a set of assumptions and preconceptions. Formally or habitually, scientists establish the paradigm of how the universe should be conceptualized, including what fundamental laws and theoretical assumptions we must accept, what problems need to be solved, and what phenomena are relevant to their solution. In normal science, the task is attempting to answer questions raised by the paradigm and fitting all new data into the paradigm. Eventually, however, phenomena will emerge that doesn’t conform to the paradigm. Kuhn describes the process science goes through, initially, dismissing such maverick data as “anomalies” or minor difficulties that science will eventually solve and fit into the paradigm. Science resists the idea that the prevailing theory and paradigm is false and it resists alternative theories to explain the anomalies. As anomalous data increases, the normal science enters a crisis and eventually, a new paradigm will gain a following and will overthrow the established theory, and a scientific revolution has come about. Kuhn points to the scientific revolutions of Galileo’s rules of motion replacing Aristotelian science and Einstein’s theory of relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics.

Kuhn claims, as Husserl had earlier, that all scientific observation is “theory-laden.” This means that we don’t simply see object as they are, but in terms of our theoretical, interpretive framework. Because we operate within our paradigm, our belief system, we observe objects according to what our “knowledge” tells us we see, and we consider this to be “normal” and our interpretations “true.” Despite our best intentions, we make the phenomena we observe fit the preconceptions of our paradigm. An Aristotelian scientist had the paradigm that rest was the “natural” condition for an object. Therefore, motion was abnormal and needed to be explained. Galileo, and later Newton, operated under a different paradigm, that said an object in motion “naturally” stayed in motion. Therefore, motion didn’t need to be explained but any change in its motion did. An Aristotelian, seeing a weight swinging on a string, would seek to answer what was preventing the weight from coming to rest. A post-Galilean, seeing the same swinging weight, would seek to answer what was preventing the weight from continuing to move in a straight line. This difference may on the surface seem subtle, but because the two paradigms organize and view phenomena according to different assumptions, they ask different questions and look at different data, and come to different conclusions.

If all observations are theory-laden, Kuhn argues, then there are no theory-neutral observations. That means there is no privileged viewpoint that can decide which of the competing scientific theories is the winner. Numerous philosophers had been making this point for centuries, but science still saw itself as being above this. Nevertheless, no pure observation could decide between Aristotle’s or Galileo’s physics of motion. What’s more, scientists operating under their own theory will interpret the empirical data to make it consistent with their preferred theory’s claims. What counts as scientific inquiry, acceptable standards of scientific evidence, and even rationality itself will be defined in terms of the particular preferred paradigm. Accordingly, Kuhn concludes that we have no purely objective, rational path from an old paradigm to a new one, and therefore, a scientific revolution (like a political one) is more the result of sociological factors than objective. impartial evidence.

Critics charge that Kuhn has denied the objectivity of science and its goal of producing a true account of reality. But isn’t that Kuhn’s point? And isn’t Kuhn following a trajectory of philosophical thought that goes back to Kant if not William or even Socrates? Philosophers have long debated how much our so-called knowledge is based on a “true” encounter with objective reality and how much is our own mental construction. In 21st century philosophy of science, the debate is between the various versions of scientific realism and antirealism. Scientific realism is the standard scientific view that the objects that scientists talk about exist independent of human theories and therefore science can give us objective knowledge about the world. Scientific antirealism is the contrary claim that scientific theories are products of humans and their do not give us a purely objective account of the world. Scientific theories are tools that provide us with fruitful models, “useful fictions” as Nietzsche would say, and ways to systematize and make sense of our experiences. The realists point out that it is undeniable that scientific theories can be useful guides to explain the phenomena we observe. The antirealists reply that past theories continually made successful predictions—for example, Ptolemy’s cosmology—before they were abandoned because of a paradigm shift. Truth is not essential for a theory to be accepted and successful. Furthermore, antirealists argue, theoretical models are helpful because they are abstractions, not because they are real. The “average American family” is a useful fiction for economists and social planners but the average American family does not exist as an entity in the world. Similarly, entities like sub-atomic particles, genes, and DNA molecules are theoretical constructs that serve a scientific purpose whether or not they are real. Is light a particle or a wave? Both paradigms are useful and no amount of experimentation can prove one theory or the other the winner. The pragmatic usefulness of a scientific model does not prove that it is providing us with the one and only true depiction of the world. Although realists offer a number of responses, most centered on the argument that the realist account best fits the success of science.

Tearing Down Philosophy: Postmodernism

In philosophy, around 1600 is considered the beginning of the “modern era.” Descartes to Kant are often referred to as “early modern philosophers,” and the post-Kant era as “modern philosophy.” The concept of “modernity” is loosely defined as the paradigm that originated in the Enlightenment that assumes there is one true picture of reality that humans can know through reason and science, which is a superior form of universal, objective knowledge. Enlightenment modernity in philosophy is associated with the Cartesian concept of the autonomous, knowing subject is the source of all ideas and that collectively, rational autonomous subjects have discovered theories that increasingly better describe reality. From these assumptions, modernity has an optimistic view of human progress, similar to Hegel.

“Postmodernists” is the name given to a loose-knit group of thinkers united in their opposition to modernity and its assumptions. Their postmodern tradition—though they’d reject being called a tradition—is based on the observations and arguments of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. Those philosophers themselves were inspired by the long tradition of unmasking the pretensions of reason and the illusions of dogmatic metaphysics. Postmodernists emphatically believe that the modernist dream of discovering the central theme or set of rational categories for understanding reality is dead. Reminiscent of Nietzsche’s metaphor that “god is dead,” the death of modernity means we must now face our stark and uncharted lives with no essences to which we can appeal or certitudes on which we can base our lives. We are the products of history, but history is just a purposeless interplay of shifting material and social forces. All we can do is critically analyze or “deconstruct” the dream of reason, to reveal how its illusions arose and why it seemed so real. Continuing with the false paradigm of the enlightenment, we remain stuck. Postmodernists call for philosophy, as it has traditionally been understood, to be turn down, including the modern conceptions of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and science.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is a central figure in postmodernism. His most influential books, all published in the 1960s, are Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. He saw his postmodernist task as an archaeologist digging beneath the surface of our social-intellectual traditions to expose the strata—which he called epistemes, the Greek word for “knowledges”—of historical eras that led to our current “knowledge.” Each epistemes is the dominant conceptual framework of a given historical era—that era’s definition of “truth,” “a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.” Throughout history, each era’s “truth” is the products of that particular historical era. Foucault insists that the notion of one, universal truth belongs to the episteme of an earlier era and is no longer viable for our postmodern era.

Foucault considered an episteme to consist of structured linguistic or discursive patterns. The particular patterns that Foucault is interested in are those that society had awarded the status of truth and were used to control that society. His archaeology looks at the normative discourses of medicine, psychiatry, law, and morality to expose the dominant discursive practices of an era. These discursive patterns define what is permissible and impermissible to say, what questions are meaningful, and how human behaviors are to be described. They define social reality indicating how the world should be divided into categories such as true–false, moral–immoral, rational–irrational, madness–sanity, and normal–perverse.

Foucault applies this idea of discursive patterns to the meaning of words themselves. The meaning of a word is not the object to which it refers because words don’t really refer to objects as much as they constitute them. Similar to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, Foucault said that words receive their meaning from their role within the network of social discourse and practices. To understand the meaning of a world, you can’t point to a certain object or action. Instead, you have to understand the complex network of words and practices of the episteme in which the word occurs. True to the emerging postmodernist tradition, Foucault says there is no universal, objective meaning of words. Their meaning is part of the worlds of social institutions and ideals within a historical era. Words don’t literally create a tree, but we know a tree as the sort of thing that it is in terms of a network of social meanings.

Reversing the modernist assumption that philosophers’ ideas create society, Foucault claimed that the system of social structures (episteme) determine our ideas. The Enlightenment episteme created the Enlightenment intellectuals, the intellectuals did not create their age. Foucault says that the discursive practices of a society are governed by “rules of production.” These rules weren’t consciously invented and are never explicitly explicated but are part of an unconscious play of forces within each historical era. We can understand these rules by “decoding” their patterns. Through this decoding we can expose as an illusion the notion that human institutions and history exhibit rationality and continuity. Instead, we see that history is an aimless sequence of ruptures, displacements, transformations, and gaps as socially created institutions and epistemes arise and fall without order or reason.

After the May 1968 student uprisings in France, Foucault turned his attention to the role of power structures in society. His thinking shifted from placing discourse as being primary in the constitution of social reality, to seeing it as merely one product of ever-expanding institutionalized social power structures. His focus also shifts from “archaeology” to “genealogy.” The latter term Nietzsche used to describe how the “will to power” expressed itself in covert ways. Foucault invents the phrase “power/knowledge” to indicate that power and knowledge directly imply one another. He claimed that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor is there any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute power relations. From this, Foucault concludes, similar to Marx, that intellectual history is nothing more than a demonstration of the ways in which the conception of “truth” has been used by power structures to mask the will to power that always operates just beneath the surface. “Each society has its own régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.”

His 1975 study, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison used the evolution of the architecture, policies, and practices of prisons in the nineteenth century to illustrate how the mechanisms of power and control evolved. Foucault referenced historical documents to show how the same “technologies of control” employed in prison systems were mirrored the organization of armies, schools, hospitals, and factories. All of these institutions exercised new mechanisms of power and control under the disguise of scientific, enlightened, humanitarian social reforms. Through its “régimes of truth,” society’s power structures impose their historically relative “truths” on people, inventing labels such as criminals, students, patients, and workers to divide them into categories such as moral–immoral, mad–sane, and normal–perverse.

Rethinking Philosophy: Feminism

Feminist philosophy could be said to be part of postmodernism in that it too seeks to tear down the modernist view that there is one superior form of universal, objective knowledge. What feminism adds to—and diverges from—postmodernism, is a focus on the role of gender in shaping the historical patterns of thought and society. It is very wrong to consider feminism as a hatred of men. Feminism is an acknowledgement of the ways in which our male-dominated social traditions have excluded women and an attempt to decode and change those traditions.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an early feminist who decried the exclusion of women from full freedom and social equality. John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women made arguments similar to Wollstonecraft that women of sufficient intellect and abilities should be given equal place with males in intellectual and political leadership. Both of these philosophers are part of what’s been called “equity” or “first wave” feminists. This area of feminist philosophy seeks for women to be given full intellectual and political participation in society. Advocates seek to open up social institutions, correct traditional distortions about gender roles, and modify intellectual disciplines to bring about equality of men and women.

There is a “second wave” of feminists who claim that the fundamental structures, assumptions, and discourse of human society reflect male domination. They reject what they consider the piecemeal corrections to social traditions pushed for by equity feminism. They demand a more radical and subversive action that calls the whole of human tradition into question and to seeks to devise alternatives. Most “radical” feminists see the current state of social institutions to be so corrupted by misogyny (prejudice against girls and women)

Central to feminist philosophy is the critique of the notion of “gender.” Feminism makes a distinction is frequently made between biological category of sex and the social category of gender. Gender includes social definitions of masculine and feminine and the many accompanying assumptions about social roles, sexuality, and psychological and mental differences between men and women. Some feminists are “essentialists” who claim that there is an essential female nature distinct from a male nature. (Ironically, some male misogynists agree with this idea.) Essentialists are split between biological determinists who see female nature as rooted in women’s unique biology and social determinists who see the female nature as created through the unique and common features of female social experience. Both kinds of essentialists assume that the female gender is comprised of stable properties that cannot be changed without great effort, if at all. Other feminists are nonessentialists who deny that gender characteristics are fixed, viewing gender as socially constructed concepts that are open to change and redefinition. French feminist Simone de Beauvoir rejected both extremes saying that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” She argued that gender characteristics are not biologically or culturally determined, but they can be either socially imposed or subjectively chosen.

Regardless of how feminists view the genealogy of gender, they tend to agree that women and men experience the world from different standpoints. Because experience and knowledge is socially situated, individuals who are socially situated differently, will have different experiences and therefore different views of what is true. This notion, called “standpoint theory,” applies to gender, race, economic class, sexuality, and any other socially situated circumstance. There are major movements in philosophy that attempt to address the social situatedness of marginalized groups by critically analyzing gender, race, and sexuality.

Second-wave feminism rejects modernist epistemology such as we saw in Locke and Kant. These feminist philosophers critique traditional theories of knowledge as having been based on the assumption that there is one, universal, human nature and therefore the gender, race, class, and other social-historical circumstances particular to the knower is irrelevant to how that person perceives and understands anything. Feminists reject the traditional assumption that it is possible to obtain purely objective, value-free, and politically neutral knowledge.

Second-wave feminists claim that perception is always relative to the standpoint of a particular knower, and therefore claims to knowledge reflect the dominant values and political structures of a society. Feminists claim that the philosophical picture of a generic universal human nature humanity has actually enshrined men’s experiences and interests as the paradigm for all knowledge. The majority position in the Western philosophical tradition has defined rationality as “male” and emotion as “feminine” and devalued the emotions. Points of view, particularly those of women, that deviate from the standard picture of universal rationality have been marginalized and excluded as being too subjective and unconventional. Traditional epistemologists seek universal standards of rationality but feminists ask, “standard and rational for whom?” Most feminist philosophers contend that women’s experiences and ways of thinking differ from those that have been the basis of traditional (male) epistemologies. Philosophy must make room for other non-traditional ways of experiencing the world and gaining knowledge.

Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy discussing the nature and working of the human mind has been around since Augustine in the 4th century CE, but the development of computer technology, particularly artificial intelligence research, has raised new questions and suggested new methods and directions within philosophy of mind. A relatively new field has emerged called cognitive science, that reduces the human mind to a biological computer and uses artificial intelligence, analytical philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics to build a deterministic model of human mental functioning. The “computational model of the mind” is the basis for cognitive science, but though computers are new, cognitive science’s assumption of a deterministic mind equivalent to a programmed computer picks up the deterministic visions of Hobbes, Leibniz, and in particular, La Mettrie in his 1747 work, Man the Machine. Many cognitive scientists work in the field of artificial intelligence in the attempt to make computers duplicate the deterministic model of human intelligence. Analytical philosophers of mind such as Patricia and Paul Churchland adopt the computational model and believe that an adequate scientific understanding of the material brain will expose terms such as “mind,” “self,” “beliefs,” “desires,” and “intentions” as “folk psychology.” They believe that all future talk about human cognition will be in terms of brain states. Their reductionist neurological approach is a very strong movement within philosophy of mind.

One of the leading critics of the computational model of the mind and the possibility of artificial intelligence duplicating the human mind is John Searle (1932–). His now famous 1980 “Chinese room” thought experiment goes like this: Imagine that you are in a room with a large rulebook giving you directions in English on how to respond to Chinese phrases with appropriate Chinese replies. You have no knowledge of the Chinese language, but the manual contains formal rules for syntactically analyzing one set of Chinese symbols and constructing another set of Chinese symbols that a native Chinese speaker would recognize as an appropriate response. However, the manual does not explain what any of the symbols mean. While you are in the room, Chinese speakers slip messages written in Chinese under the door. These slips of paper contain various marks made up of straight and curved lines, none of which you understand. You find the symbols in the rule book and, following the instructions, you write out appropriate set of symbols on a new slip of paper and pass this message back under the door. The Chinese speakers outside read the slips you gave them and read it as an articulate Chinese response.

You have fooled the people outside into believing that you are fluent in Chinese. However, you still don’t understand any Chinese. Searle argues that clearly, something different is going on when you copy the Chinese symbols from the rule book than would be the case if you were receiving and responding to messages in a language that you do understand. Searle claims that this formal manipulation of symbols is comparable to what goes on in a computer’s AI program. His point is that no matter how effective a computer program may be in simulating human conversation, it will never produce actual understanding of language. A computer program can only simulate intelligence, it can’t duplicate it. Searle claims a computer program is nothing like a human mind and artificial intelligence does not duplicate human cognitive states.

Another critic of the attempt to explain our mental life in terms of brain states is David Chalmers. In his highly influential book The Conscious Mind, he divides the neuroscience approach to human consciousness into the easy problems and the hard problem. Easy problems are problems on which neuroscience has made some progress, including the mind’s ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli; the integration of information; the ability of a cognitive system to access its own internal states; and so on. However, Chalmers says that even if all of these sorts of problems have been solved by the neuroscientist, there still remains the hard problem of consciousness.

The hard problem for neuroscience is to explain the subjective experiences of awareness that characterize human consciousness. To be conscious means that one is a self who has an inner life. Consciousness is the subjective quality of experience. When you view a tree, your eyes and brain are physically affected by the light reflecting off the tree. Obviously, though, there is more going on in your mind than what happens when a photoelectric cell is affected by the light reflecting off the tree. You have a subjective experience of the qualities of the tree, experiences the machine does not and cannot have. From this, Chalmers argues that all of the progress claimed by the brain sciences have been on the easy problems. They have not and, Chalmers claims, will not be able to solve the hard problem of explaining consciousness.

Chalmers is open to alternative theories, but his suspicion is that consciousness is a fundamental and irreducible feature in reality that operates according to its own set of laws. He points to how scientists in the nineteenth century had to introduce the new entity of the electromagnetic charge, because the existing physics day could not explain certain observed phenomena. Similarly, Chalmers thinks that there is an explanatory gap in existing scientific models of our mental life. Eventually, we will need to introduce a new, nonreductive theory of consciousness. Or, perhaps, accept one of the nonreductive theories that have long existed.

Environmental Ethics

The field of environmental ethics concerns human beings’ ethical relationship with the natural environment. Environmental ethics developed into a specific philosophical discipline in the 1970s. Philosophy’s interest coincided with increased awareness in the 1960s and 1970s of the effects that industrialization, economic expansion, and population growth were having on the environment. Rachel Carson’s 1962 exposé Silent Spring warned that the widespread use of chemical pesticides was causing the destruction of wildlife and posed a serious threat to public health. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, raised the alarm about the effects the exploding human population would have on Earth’s resources. (In 1968, the world population was about 3.5 billion. In 2020 it is about 7.7 billion.)

Pollution, depletion of natural resources, dwindling plant and animal biodiversity, the loss of natural habitat, and global warming are all environmental concerns that have become part of the public consciousness. Human concern over the looming climate crisis is slowly seeping into debates over public policy. The task for environmental ethicists is to outline our moral obligations in the face of the climate crisis and other environmental concerns. The fundamental questions that environmental ethics must address are what moral and practical duties do humans have with respect to the environment, and why? To understand what our obligations are, it is necessary to consider first why we have them. Philosophers ask, do we have duties to protect the environment for the sake of human beings living in the world today, for humans living in the future, or for the sake of non-human life forms in the environment itself, irrespective of benefits to humans? Different philosophers answer these questions differently, leading to the emergence of different environmental ethics.

What obligations do we have to our natural environment? If our concern for the environment only extends to our own desires and self-preservation, then that ethic is by definition “anthropocentric,” literally “human-centered.” In a real sense, our ethics have to be anthropocentric. For one thing, there is nothing wrong with caring about yourself and your interests. In a broader sense, it seems that only human beings are capable of reflecting upon ethical questions and reasoning to ethical decisions, thus giving all moral debate a definite “human-centeredness.” However, in the field of environmental ethics, the charge of anthropocentrism is directed at any ethical framework that grants moral weight only to human beings, and implicitly or explicitly holds that we have no moral duty to other life forms.

Much of human history is dominated by this kind anthropocentrism, but its assumptions has been challenged by many environmental ethicists. These philosophers have insisted that ethical consideration must extend beyond human beings to the non-human natural world. Some say this consideration should extend to sentient animals, others to all living organisms, and still others to natural entities like rivers and ecosystems. They agree that we have obligations to the environment because we actually owe ethical consideration to other living things and to the environment itself. How wide and to what extent our moral obligations extend to the non-human environment is a matter of debate among environmental ethicists. All of these philosophers are united in the conviction that our moral framework needs to change if our planet is to survive.