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    Still more on Neil deGrasse Tyson – philosophy and biology, too

    M. Anthony Mills has a very nice reply to Neil deGrasse Tyson's dismissal of philosophy.  Among the points he makes, Mills notes:

    Helmholtz, Mach, Planck, Duhem, Poincaré, Bohr, and Heisenberg are a few noteworthy modern scientists “distracted” enough to engage in philosophical question-asking. Einstein himself read philosophy voraciously beginning from an early age (he read Kant when he was 13) and engaged in lively disputes with many leading philosophers of the era. Mach’s empiricism, Poincaré’s conventionalism, and Duhem’s holism all influenced Einstein’s thinking. Such cross-pollination between philosophy and science did not stall the progress of physics, but instead led to one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history.

    Lest we think that only noteworthy modern physicists engaged in philosophical question-asking with actual philosophers, let me point out some noteworthy modern biologists who have done likewise — a list off the top of my head, so no doubt missing some (and thus, please feel free to add names in the comments).  And to be clear, I am citing here only some of the most famous ones — there are many less famous ones who have nonetheless had important and influential (in both directions) exchanges with philosophers.

    • Michael Ghieselin – nature of species, sexual selection, and more
    • Stephen Jay Gould – importance of constraints, contingency, species selection, adaptationism, and more
    • Eva Jablonka – epigenetic inheritance and more
    • Richard Lewontin – fitness, natural selection (especially levels of selection), adaptationism, and more
    • Ernst Mayr – concepts of species, nature of speciation, and more
    • Joan Roughgarden – natural selection, social selection (different from MW's), and more
    • Mary Jane West-Eberhard – development, social selection (different from JR's), and more

    In other words, biologists and philosophers have had productive exchanges about important biological concepts, theories, processes, and (although I haven't emphasized it here) methods.

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    13 responses to “Still more on Neil deGrasse Tyson – philosophy and biology, too”

    1. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      In fairness, those names mentioned in the block quote were probably the people that NDT had in mind when he claimed that philosophers haven’t helped out since the 20s.

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    2. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Yes, but if there’s an issue it’s because the locus of physics moved to the United States during and after World War II, and we don’t have anything approximating the education system that continental physicists went through in the 19th and early 20th century.
      For Tyson to hold his own philistinism as normative for physics requires some combination of bad faith and ignorance. Was it a bad thing for the heroes of relativity theory and quantum physics to have spent so much of their primary education learning humanistic fields? How could it have been good for them but bad for Tyson and friends? The hubris is appalling.
      People who are ignorant of history typically see everything in a faux-Hegelian manner, as leading up to our state of current perfection. One of our primary tasks it to disabuse undergraduates of this, in part because it’s part and parcel of the civic religion (American triumphalism) they learn in high school and from television, and in part because it’s an easy null hypothesis if you are ignorant.

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    3. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      If so, then it’s part of the same attitude that I am objecting to — that the important and real science is physics and we need not pay attention to the others.

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    4. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      Agreed, both. 🙂
      Jon: I agree that it’s hard to see his remarks as anything other than a tacit appeal to ignorance based on a failure to engage with real evidence. The difficulty is that sometimes professional philosophers do a less-than-stellar job in vocally, boldly, and kindly debunking the underlying prejudice (present company excepted).
      Roberta: for sure, his drift towards physics-centrism is an evolving thing. He started out (on Nerdist) talking about “nature” and natural science, and has shifted towards talk of physics and the “physical sciences”. I resisted that move for the reason you gave in my own meager effort to name names.

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    5. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Ah, good one — I didn’t know about your reply to Pigliucci. I had the same concern about his piece, much as I liked it in other respects, so I am glad that you made the effort to offer specifics. My evolutionary biology list would look different than yours, but the positive gloss on that is just that there is a lot of good work to go around. 🙂

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    6. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      There’s definitely two different ways of approaching the general issue, which is to identify the places where philosophy of science and science are voluntarily intertwined. In that project you can start with the science and move towards the philosophy (as your list does, I think), or approach in the other direction (as I tried to do). NDT wants to ask the “What have philosophers done for us lately?” question, which is why my first impulse was to go for the latter. Even so, the distinction between approaches amounts to pure artifice, since anyone who is doing work in either philosophical biology or philosophy of biology is not going to be surprised by the names on the other’s list. (e.g., when I talk to my colleagues in philosophy of biology, Roughgarden’s name comes up a fair bit… also Lewontin and Gould, of course, but they’re taken for granted at this point.)

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    7. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Agreed – there are two ways of responding (that probably amount to the same thing in the end, given the interactions between scientists and philosophers), and both ways are good. I responded the way that I did because Mills’ essay listed scientists, and so I was paralleling that. I think such a list also shows that, contra to what dGT said, that scientists find philosophy useful. But then again, so does your list, because you specifically picked out essays that have been cited in science journals (although I would not say that Biological Theory is a science journal, despite its name).

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    8. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      About Biological Theory — I didn’t know that, thanks! I’ll try to find a more relevant citation to showcase.

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    9. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Acta Bioetheoretica is a better choice (both of these journals are in a bit of a grey area, but AB is more scientific than BT, imo). But the piece you link to is written by a philosopher. Does that still get to count? Not sure.

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    10. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      That’s a fair point, though I have to stay agnostic about it. It’s not for me to decide.
      I think of the proferred list as providing probative evidence, not pro tanto evidence. It ought to function a little bit like the Bechtel test. The BT doesn’t lay out the necessary or sufficient criteria for misogyny in any particular film or book, but it does tell us something about how far the aggregate is from a reasonable ideal. Analogously, my hope is to show that the aggregate of citations on the list are not terrifically far from the ideal.
      So it’s not a knock-down argument. But I’m no philosopher of physics or biology, and it’s the best I can do with my modest powers without starting to make stipulations I couldn’t be comfortable with.
      Really, in the dialectic, I would like NDT and his like to go through the list on the whole and say, name by name, “None of these people have failed to make any kind of material contribution to the science”. Likely he wouldn’t. I’m betting that he would qualify his claims further, or say something to the effect that most of the names have had training in the relevant sciences, so they’re not mere philosophers. (In the other thread, Wayne Myrvold seems to think that’s what he means.) But that further claim would amount to skepticism about the autonomy of philosophy of science, not skepticism about its utility. And that would be uninteresting, since absolutely nobody thinks that philosophy of science is autonomous from science. If it were, it wouldn’t be any good as philosophy of science.

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    11. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Well… I think it’s complicated. You’re surely right that the qualification that “those who have been cited by scientists had training in the relevant sciences” is uninteresting. I am not even sure what it would mean. Does “training” mean a degree in the relevant science? In which case, it is false — I have no biology degree, but I have been cited by biologists. Does it just mean “those who have been cited by scientists are knowledgeable about the given science”? If so, it’s almost true by definition, since it’s unlikely that a scientist would cite someone who said false things about the relevant science. And, as you say, it’s what you’d expect from good philosophy of science anyway.
      I think the idea of your list is a very good one. But I think for it to be truly convincing, the citations have to be good ones. I look at some of the citations of my work and I am… puzzled. Some scientists have citation patterns that seem a little less than careful (e.g., where I am cited here and here). Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to be cited, but I am more happy with citations such as this one or this one which are clearly articles written by biologists and which show that they understand what my article is about, not just that they needed a citation and mine seemed to be somewhere in the ballpark.
      Another avenue to pursue, it occurs to me, is to list the publications of philosophers who have published in science journals. There are lots of those.
      Of course, you are right in that no one article is convincing on its own — it’s the list taken as a whole, and here I am being unfair because I am criticizing your list without offering one of my own. Sorry about that. It’s a little daunting. I’d be more likely to crowd source it. If you’re interested, I can try to do that with some of my philosopher of biology friends.

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    12. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      I think that sounds like a marvellous idea!

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    13. Roberta L. Millstein Avatar
      Roberta L. Millstein

      Ok, I’ll give it a shot!

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