As a philosopher of science, I have some minor obligation to say something when other philosophers share harmful misinformation about how science works. Sigh.

Yesterday, the panpsychist Philip Goff (who debated my wife, Heather Browning, a couple of days ago in Oxford, ironically enough, on whether consciousness is everywhere or just to be found in other animals) shared a meme (shown here) about the relationship between science and metaphysics. Since it got a lot of attention, I unfortunately saw a need to respond.

The meme suggests that metaphysics is the real hero behind our increasing understanding of reality, while science merely plays second fiddle, operating within metaphysical frameworks supplied by philosophers. Frameworks without which science itself would supposedly have been impossible. The image portrays philosophers as underappreciated truth-seekers, while scientists are instead largely parasitic on their work.

This view is grotesquely and demonstrably false.

Worse, it inadvertently provides ammunition to those who argue that philosophers have nothing important left to say in our modern scientific age. In an attempt to make philosophy seem more relevant again, claims of this sort about the relationship between science and philosophy instead betray a form of intellectual inquiry that has lost touch with reality itself. The image reflects a return to an older way of doing philosophy: a pre-Enlightenment mode of thought, a revival of mysticist scholasticism that bears little resemblance to the pursuit of truth.

The idea that an a priori metaphysics must first provide a conceptual framework for science to work at all, to be able to reveal truths about reality, is, as the philosopher Don Ross has aptly put it, a “counter-Enlightenment project.”........

© Psychology Today