I’m not going to answer the question posed above, for I haven’t resolved it in my own mind, but I did want to throw out a few thoughts and invite the input of readers.  This post was inspired by two New York Times pieces at The Stone, a forum for philosophers.

The first, “Philosophy by another name“, was published on March 4 by Colin McGinn, a famous philosopher of mind who’s now at The University of Miami.  it’s a rather petulant piece; for McGinn is rankled by the lower rank occupied by philosophy than by the sciences in the public mind.  Here’s a snippet:

Our current name is harmful because it posits a big gap between the sciences and philosophy; we do something that is not a science. Thus we do not share in the intellectual prestige associated with that thoroughly modern word. We are accordingly not covered by the media that cover the sciences, and what we do remains a mystery to most people. But it is really quite clear that academic philosophy is a science. The dictionary defines a science as “a systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject.” This is a very broad definition, which includes not just subjects like physics and chemistry but also psychology, economics, mathematics and even “library science.”

Academic philosophy obviously falls under this capacious meaning.

McGinn then suggests that the practice of philosophy be given a new name: “ontics.”

It is sufficiently novel as not to be confused with other fields; it is pithy and can easily be converted to “onticist” and “ontical”; it echoes “physics,” and it emphasizes that our primary concern is the general nature of being. The dictionary defines “philosophy” as “the study of the fundamental nature of reality, knowledge and existence.” We can simplify this definition by observing that all three cited areas are types of being: objective reality obviously is, but so is knowledge, and so also are meaning, consciousness, value and proof, for example. These are simply things that are.

. . . I like “ontics” best: it sounds serious and weighty, it is easy to say, and it sounds like a solid science. Note that the names of other sciences are similarly peculiar: “physics” just comes from the Greek word for nature, and “chemistry” derives from “alchemy” (an Arabic word). And “ontics” will certainly not be confused with “philosophy” in the vernacular sense — so no more of that tedious linguistic wrangling about what a “philosopher” is or should be.

When McGinn says stuff like this, though, I thought the whole piece must have been a parody:

Perhaps in 100 years’ time the process will be complete and our universities will all have a “department of ontics.” Don’t you want to be part of this historical movement? I believe that once the matter is seen clearly the eventual renaming will be well nigh inevitable.

But it’s not a parody. It wasn’t published on April 1; it’s in the New York Times; and McGinn is a heavyweight philosopher.  The name “ontics” surely won’t catch on, but his question is a good one: where does philosophy rank among the sciences? Is it a science?

In the second piece, “Philosophy is not a science,” Julian Friedland, an assistant professor at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, demurs. Although he considers philosophy separate from science—a different “way of knowing”—he sees it as adding to the sum of human knowledge. Indeed, he sees it as more efficacious at understanding stuff than science itself, and he manages to get in a curmudgeonly lick at “scientism”:

The intellectual culture of scientism clouds our understanding of science itself. What’s more, it eclipses alternative ways of knowing — chiefly the philosophical — that can actually yield greater certainty than the scientific. While science and philosophy do at times overlap, they are fundamentally different approaches to understanding. So philosophers should not add to the conceptual confusion that subsumes all knowledge into science. Rather, we should underscore the fact that various disciplines we ordinarily treat as science are at least as — if not more —philosophical than scientific. Take for example mathematics, theoretical physics, psychology and economics. These are predominately rational conceptual disciplines. That is, they are not chiefly reliant on empirical observation. For unlike science, they may be conducted while sitting in an armchair with eyes closed.

There are so many things wrong with this that I can’t begin to discuss them.  First of all, psychology and economics often do depend on empirical observations, as does a lot of theoretical physics, which often takes as its starting point empirical observations.  Theoretical physics can also make testable predictions.  These aspects are hallmarks of “true” science, at least in the way that Susan Haack defines it on p 24 of Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Science and Cynicism (p. 24).

“There is no mode of inference, no ‘scientific method’, exclusive to the sciences and guaranteed to produce true, probably true, more nearly true, or more empirically adequate, results.. . . .  And, as far as a method, it is what historians or detectives or investigative journalists or the rest of us do when we really want to find something out: make an informed conjecture about the possible explanation of a puzzling phenomenon, check out how it stands up to the best evidence we can get, and then use our judgment whether to accept it, more or less tentatively, or modify, refine, or replace it.”

Haack’s definition, if it can be called that, is what I’ve always referred to as “science construed broadly.”  Under that aegis, archaeology, car mechanics, and plumbing are also species of science.

But in what respect can, say, economics and psychology (or theoretical physics for that matter) “yield greater certainty” than science?  Mathematics can, of course, because some of its propositions are true by definition, not verified by empirical observation.  But I’d assert that we’re far more certain about the double-helical nature of DNA than about any psychological or economic “theory.”

I must say that I was put off by Frieland’s certainty about questionable propositions:

Does this mean these fields do not yield objective knowledge? The question is frankly absurd. Indeed if any of their findings count as genuine knowledge, they may actually be more enduring. For unlike empirical observations, which may be mistaken or incomplete, philosophical findings depend primarily on rational and logical principles. As such, whereas science tends to alter and update its findings day to day through trial and error, logical deductions are timeless.

Well, I’m not going to argue about whether 1 + 3 = 4 is “knowledge”, or whether logical syllogisms that end in conclusions like “Socrates is a man” are also knowledge.  That’s largely a semantic issue.  What I have no doubt about is whether philosophy is a tool for obtaining knowledge. It is.  By enforcing strict rationality and logic, it helps clarify our thoughts and, more important, sweep away errors—and the sweeping away of errors is indeed a “way of knowing.”  Two examples where philosophy has helped me understand things better are Peter Singer’s analysis of animal suffering (if our ethics are based on suffering, and they often are, then we must take into account the suffering of animals in thinking about morality); his analysis of our “expanding circle” of empathy; and the efforts of philosophers like J. L. Mackie to expose the holes in theologians’ arguments for God. (Read his The Miracle of Theism if you haven’t; it’s very good).

Now none of this work has revealed anything new and true about the universe. Given the nature of philosophy, that’s impossible. But the work of philosphers like Mackie, or that of other ethical philosophers who use rationality to pick holes in arguments (e.g., the Euthyphro argument) help show us what is likely to be false, or at least which propositions lack strong support.  In that way philosophy resembles statistics, which tells us what we are and aren’t entitled to conclude from our data.  Like statistics, philosophy is a way of drawing limits around what we know and don’t know, though neither area by itself produces new knowledge.

So I was prepared to say that philosophy, if not strictly a science, is surely a way of knowing.  But then I began thinking about real theoretical “science”, especially theoretical population genetics, which I know a bit about. No biologist would doubt that theoretical population genetics is a science. But why? It usually produces no knowledge itself, but merely sets limits on what we can conclude and not conclude.  For example, the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium equation tells us that earlier geneticists’ ideas that dominant alleles—like the one causing Huntington’s chorea in humans—would become predominant in a population by virtue of their physiological dominance alone was wrong.  That, at least was an increase in understanding.

So is theoretical population genetics a science?  Was it a science when it proposed the “neutral theory” of molecular evolution, which explored the theoretical consequences of assuming that genetic variants at a locus were equivalent in their effects on an organism’s fitness?  That was a purely theoretical enterprise, without initially drawing on empirical data.  Yet the discipline made predictions which can and have been tested (e.g., nonfunctional parts of the genome, or the third positions in the triplet DNA code, should be highly variable), so it certainly has helped produce knowledge and understanding.  Further the tools of theoretical population genetics have helped analyze data, like the data on hybridization between modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, that did give us scientific “truth”: the fact that we carry a small fraction of Neanderthal genes in our genome, almost certainly reflecting ancient hybridization. That is a scientific “fact,” and it came from a combination of data and theory.  Without the theory, we wouldn’t have the “fact.” The theory was integral to the production of fact, just as theoretical physics is in areas like quantum mechanics.  (Theory predicts, for instance, the existence of certain particles.) To nearly all scientists, theoretical population genetics and theoretical physics are truly “science”.

So if the theoretical branches of natural and physical sciences are truly science, then why isn’t philosophy, which often does similar things?  Certainly philosophy by itself can’t produce knowledge, but neither can many areas of theoretical population genetics.  Both require empirical input, but can work out the consequences of that input using the tools of rationality. Philosophy might not be able to tell us what is true about the universe, but it can tell us what is false.  But that’s also true of much theory in biology.  So I agree with Friedland when he says:

Logically fallacious arguments can be rather sophisticated and persuasive. But they are nevertheless invalid and always will be. Exposing such errors is part of philosophy’s stock and trade. Thus as Socrates pointed out long ago, much of the knowledge gained by doing philosophy consists in realizing what is not the case.

I’m prepared, then, to say that philosophy is a “way of knowing,” but not quite comfortable in saying that it’s a science.  I’d love to hear readers’ input on this.