I had a weird visceral thought after reading two recent NDPR reviews:
- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics (ed. Robert Batterman, including a cool piece by friend of the blog David Wallace), and
- Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics (Hsiang-Ke Chao, Szu-Ting Chen, and Roberta L. Millstein, of newapps fame)
If Plutynski and Weatherall's reviews are right (and they read wonderfully) both books in different ways seem to me to mark decisive moves away from Generalized Philosophy of Science. The very first paragraph of Weatherall's reads:
If this collection has an overarching theme, it is that the details matter. If philosophers hope to understand contemporary physics, we need to engage in depth both with the technicalities of our best physical theories and the practicalities of how those theories are applied. The authors in this volume brush aside an older tradition in the philosophy of physics — and the philosophy of science more generally — in which actual physics entered only to illustrate high-level accounts of theories, explanation, or reduction. Of course, by itself, dismissing this tradition is hardly worth remarking on: such an approach to philosophy of physics has been going out of fashion for decades. Taken as whole, however, this volume pushes the theme still further, in ways that mark important shifts in recent philosophy of physics.
And Plytinski's second paragraph is:
The editors frame their project as part of the methodological and naturalist approach in philosophy of science, according to which one ought to examine actual scientific practice in inquiring into the objectives, methods, criteria of evaluation and role of values in science. And this is what we find. Each essay draws upon both empirical and methodological practices in biology, biomedicine, and economics. How the case studies inform each authorâs arguments and conclusions varies. Some essays are more top down in spirit — concerned with questions that might be said to fall into the category of general philosophy of science. For example, Kevin Hoover gives an illuminating explication and defense of a structural account of causation, though one that drew upon both methodological tools and examples from economics. Others are more bottom up: e.g., Lindley Darden gives a detailed description of exactly how the mechanisms leading to cystic fibrosis were identified, using this example to illustrate how causal knowledge is refined and improved upon with mechanistic understanding. This counterpoint is refreshing: one gets a sense for both the diversity of approaches to explicating how causal and mechanistic knowledge is achieved in science, and an illustration of how biology and economics can jointly (but in rather different ways) shed new light on long-standing problems in philosophy of science.
The articles that follow are really interesting, but the arguments and positions described are things I couldn't possibly assess, since I don't come close to understanding the relevant sciences. This is fine, but it did make me miss Generalized Philosophy of Science, where you could debate so and so's counterfactual analysis of a law of nature without having to mess with the nature very much.
While reading the articles, I had a lurching realization about how much classical analytic philosophy helped itself to results and approaches from Generalized Philosophy of Science, the very kind of things being critiqued today by the people who actually know the science.* How many thousands of philosophers of mind wrote articles assuming things about successful reductions (to contrast witht the irreducibility of the mind) that philosophers like Nichols and Batterman now tell us never existed anywhere? How many metaphysicians or ethicists (think reflective equilibrium) make assumptions about what a metaphysical or ethical theory should look like base on analogies to how Generalized Philosophy of Science treated the concept of a theory?
I guess there is some sense in which one can de re think of ourselves as doing something analogous (the "naturalist") or disanalogous (the "anti-naturalist") to what scientists do. But maybe that's just to say that we dont' know what we're talking about. I really do wonder how "core analytic philosophy" survives in world without Generalized Philosophy of Science.
This is not a disinterested question. I adore metaphysics of the like done by Jonathan Schaffer, Johana Seibt, and Jessica Wilson, some of which is fairly a prioristic, and all of which ties into the history of philosophy in really exciting ways. I cherish this kind of work so much so that it's almost a priori to me that there is a good answer to the conundrum that's bugging me. But I'd like to have some idea of what it looks like.**
[Notes:
*I've expressed similar worries before, but these two reviews really seemed to raise the stakes to me.
**Maybe it's just that there is no royal road to philosophy, and the problem all along was taking textbook writers too seriously about the bits of meta-philosophy trotted out ("theory of meaning," "canonical notation," "reflective equilibrium," etc.). Philosophical problems arise if you think closely enough about anything and all of the interesting solutions and dissolutions are ultimately sui generis. Thus I wave my hands.]
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