Every Science Begins as Philosophy
But Science Alone Cannot Save Us
You’re a bridge designer, and you’re currently working on a narrow wooden pedestrian bridge to cross a small creek and to fit tightly within a certain landscape. Only one person at a time can use it, and you plan to put up signs with that warning. By your structural analysis (and the budget that’s been imposed), you know the bridge you have in mind cannot bear a weight greater than 999 pounds—not one pound more. To your sign you plan to add a maximum weight figure. What should it be? Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine pounds? Maybe not. Probably something far less. If you’re trying to come up with a safety margin, how would you do it? Science—and engineering, which is applied science—has nothing to say on this. So what do you do?
In your analysis, in the actual design of the bridge, you went to a materials handbook showing the strength of the wood. You know that someone, or some organization, strength-tested many same-size specimens in a lab, at least dozens of them. They surely came up with a data set.
How as that data set handled statistically, and what ended up in the handbook? The mean strength? Perhaps they published the least strength for conservatism. Or maybe three standard deviations to the left of the mean. What should it be? Doesn’t engineering, which, again, is applied science, have a method for coming up with “the scientific choice”?
It does not. Statistical analysis is not science.
Science is one of humankind’s sublime achievements, but it cannot “take us all the way.” It cannot make final decisions. It’s a means to an end, not an end itself. It can assess and solve problems, but science cannot make those final decisions and effect solutions—that is, it cannot make them happen. It cannot choose the best solution among several.
Science can take us only part of the way to where we’re trying to go—often most of the way. The final leg lies within the realm of philosophy, which really means nothing more than humans—typically those in leadership roles, parent, governor, president, boss—thinking things over, and then effecting, which encompasses decisions about where to draw lines, set thresholds, limits, margins, and the likes of who-gets-what-when.
Science is free of values. It purports to be so as a means of being unbiased, which is thought to serve, in a sort of high-flown way, the scientific cause. Without having to contend with the messiness of values, science is, for the most part, descriptive—description of the physical world as it is. In the introduction to his Story of Philosophy (1926), Will Durant noted that
Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into the parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the value of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are.
Analysis is the breaking down and synthesis is the putting together. Science is analysis. It breaks the whole into its constituent parts to get at the nature of, to understand, both parts and whole. There is no room here for the likes for values, for the normative, the prescriptive, for what ought to be. That is the stuff of philosophy,
which is not content to simply describe the fact; it wishes to ascertain a fact’s relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; it combines things in interpretive synthesis.
Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only philosophy tells us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy.
Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom. (Story of Philosophy, edited for clarity)
There are those, no doubt, who believe—maybe especially in the presence of others who feel science is not exactly “real”—that if we just let science be fully science it will carry the day for us. But again, science cannot make final decisions. It cannot figure out what the safety margin should be, or whether there should even be such a thing. Being value-free, it cannot draw a line at, say a certain percentile, and announce: “You people on this side are in, and those on the other side are out.”
Science is an assemblage of facts without perspective, without judgment, without desire. It cannot provide the final answers we need. Those are brought about by philosophy operating in thinking human beings. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.