Professor Ronald De Sousa | Exploring the Contribution of Philosophy to Empirical Sciences

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Professor Ronald De Sousa | Exploring the Contribution of Philosophy to Empirical Sciences

May 8, 2024 | arts and humanities

About this episode

The term ‘scientist’ was invented just under 200 years ago. What we now call ‘science’ was then known as ‘natural philosophy’. Since then, we’ve made a clear distinction between philosophy and the empirical sciences, to the extent that they are often perceived to be unrelated. However, it may be a mistake to divide human quest for knowledge in this way. Professor Ronald De Sousa at the University of Toronto argues that philosophy and science are inextricably linked. For him, you cannot escape philosophy when you are thinking about anything systematically and scientifically.

Drawing on the history of thought and philosophy, Professor De Sousa explains that science and philosophy can both be regarded as beginning with pre-Socrates thinkers. In the 6th century BC, Anaximenes believed that everything was derived from air and how it changes at different temperatures. When air is cold, he said, it condenses and becomes solid matter. When solid matter is heated, it becomes air and, eventually, fire.

To support this claim, he provided his own kind of ‘experiment’. If you blow on your finger with pursed lips, the air seems cooler and more concentrated. If you breathe on your finger with your mouth open, it feels warmer and more diffuse.

We now understand that compressing air actually heats it. However, Anaximenes identified two concepts key to the modern scientific method. First, while the world appears incredibly complex, it consists of simple elements, the behavior of which is governed by simple laws. Secondly, theories about the world stand in need of empirical test.

With the Scientific Revolution that began in the 16^th Century, Philosophy remained the domain of inquiry that never ceases to question the assumptions underlying our methods. But the adoption of distinctive methods allowed different scientific fields to detach themselves from philosophy. Thus, ‘natural philosophy’ evolved into separate fields, such as physics, chemistry, biology and psychology. Despite their common origins, we now think of empirical science as entirely separate from philosophy.

For Professor De Sousa, this is a mistake. He argues that, when asking scientific questions and conducting experiments, we cannot avoid doing philosophy. This is because issues can always arise about how to conceptualize a domain of inquiry.

When a physicist studies atoms using an extraordinarily complex machine, they must make assumptions about the machine’s operation. Does the pattern on the screen actually represent a boson, or is it an artefact of the equipment? And what does it mean to ‘represent’ something? Modern physics is once again questioning the very concepts of matter, existence and time.

In social sciences, where empirical experiments inevitably presuppose debatable assumptions, philosophical reflection is also unavoidable. In emotion science, for example, a researcher must first define an ‘emotion’, which is a challenging philosophical task. How are emotions different from feelings, from desires, and from beliefs?

To do the best research possible, we need to be open to the possibility that understanding reality may require our very concepts to be reconstructed. And that is the business of philosophy.