Amid all this
talk about whether economics is a
science, I began to wonder about
philosophy. Not only do we have our
own
Nobel Prize, but most of us
spend our days testing hypotheses,
and even making (all too easily)
falsifiable predictions (e.g. about
what sort of intuitions rational
beings will have under various
counterfactual circumstances). There
is furthermore a lot of
circumstantial evidence that we’re
scientists. Many of us spend our
time hanging around semi-reputable
folks like linguists and
psychologists, and even
topics that have no prima
facie connections to anything
reputable, upon closer
investigation, are in fact linked in
fairly obvious
ways to the most respected
disciplines of all. Indeed, over the
course of my career, I’ve been
surprised to see how the most
abstractly metaphysical topics
originally discussed by philosophers
have come to impact a variety of
clearly empirical disciplines
outside philosophy. Work by
philosophers on the metaphysics of
modality (or the semantics for modal
languages) resulted in a model that
has useful applicability in a wide
variety of topics (e.g. the study of
probability, the study of natural
language meaning). Philosophers
nursed the notion of causation while
it was hiding from anti-metaphysical
forces, and now it is a respectable
topic again in the human sciences
(e.g. no discussion of practical
reasoning can ignore it).
Psychologists interested in concept
formation appeal to work in
metaphysics as abstract as David
Wiggins and Michael Ayers on sortal
concepts (to the great chagrin of
some of my colleagues). Some of
us are even quite explicit about the
fact that we do
experiments. It is not just in
my Quinean moments that I wonder how
to make a distinction between
philosophy and ‘real’ science.
-Jason Stanley
