Stephen Stich: Quote of the Day

Posted on by

“stephenstichsmall.jpgThe idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But many contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and social sciences. If facts are needed, they rely on their “intuition”, or they simply invent them. The results of philosophy done in this way are typically sterile and often silly. There are no proprietary philosophical questions that are worth answering, nor is there any productive philosophical method that does not engage the sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals, language, culture and more. To make progress on them we need to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that works.”

– Stephen Stich, from Steve Pyke’s lovely collection of philosopher portraits.

My kind of philosopher!

[Photo: Copyright Steve Pyke. I hope he won't mind my borrowing the Stich picture if I promise to buy one or two of his prints, and tell my readers to consider it. I really think I could use a Quine!]

10 thoughts on “Stephen Stich: Quote of the Day”

  5. “The more exact is a science, such as physics, the more its conclusions become independent of the philosophical matrix out of which they have grown. For insofar as those conclusions are quantitative, they have a validity independent of the philosophy which
    the individual scientist tags on them. Thus, science can be compared to the building of an edifice: The completed theory is like an edifice from which all the scaffolding (including philosophy) has been removed. The edifice, however, contains nothing philosophical. It is a mere structure in numbers. It is in this sense that one should take Hertz’s famous dictum: ‘Maxwell’s theory [of electromagnetism] is Maxwell’s system of equations,” a dictum that I cannot repeat often
    enough. Nothing remotely as fundamental has ever been said by a great physicist about the physical theory of an even greater physicist.

    When cut to the bare bones, exact science is nothing more, nothing less than a system of equations. There would be no conflict whatever between science and theology were scientists truly mindful of this truth. But scientists are, like all of us, philosophers as well. The only way to avoid philosophy is to say nothing. The trouble is that nothing can sell a bad philosophy more effectively than attaching it to a splendid science. (Thus science is turned into one of the three S’s of modern life: Sports, Sex, Science, all writ large). The converse is not true; no amount of science, insofar as it is science and not something more, can justify a single philosophical proposition
    and much less a single theological statement, which has to be a proposition not about how the heavens go, but how to go to Heaven. Unfortunately, theologians, believing themselves to be in possession of eternal truths, are prone to discourse about mere temporalities, such as the physical universe, about whose measurments, large and small, science is the sole arbiter.”
    –Stanley Jaki, “Cosmic Rays and Water Spiders” The Limits of a Limitless Science, pp. 239-241.

  6. “The more exact is a science, such as physics, the more its conclusions become independent of the philosophical matrix out of which they have grown. For insofar as those conclusions are quantitative, they have a validity independent of the philosophy which
    the individual scientist tags on them. Thus, science can be compared to the building of an edifice: The completed theory is like an edifice from which all the scaffolding (including philosophy) has been removed. The edifice, however, contains nothing philosophical. It is a mere structure in numbers. It is in this sense that one should take Hertz’s famous dictum: ‘Maxwell’s theory [of electromagnetism] is Maxwell’s system of equations,” a dictum that I cannot repeat often
    enough. Nothing remotely as fundamental has ever been said by a great physicist about the physical theory of an even greater physicist.

    When cut to the bare bones, exact science is nothing more, nothing less than a system of equations. There would be no conflict whatever between science and theology were scientists truly mindful of this truth. But scientists are, like all of us, philosophers as well. The only way to avoid philosophy is to say nothing. The trouble is that nothing can sell a bad philosophy more effectively than attaching it to a splendid science. (Thus science is turned into one of the three S’s of modern life: Sports, Sex, Science, all writ large). The converse is not true; no amount of science, insofar as it is science and not something more, can justify a single philosophical proposition
    and much less a single theological statement, which has to be a proposition not about how the heavens go, but how to go to Heaven. Unfortunately, theologians, believing themselves to be in possession of eternal truths, are prone to discourse about mere temporalities, such as the physical universe, about whose measurments, large and small, science is the sole arbiter.”
    –Stanley Jaki, “Cosmic Rays and Water Spiders” The Limits of a Limitless Science, pp. 239-241.

  9. Check out what Amartya Sen says under his picture. Now that’s my kind of philosopher. The anti-Stich!

  10. Check out what Amartya Sen says under his picture. Now that’s my kind of philosopher. The anti-Stich!