What Is Science, What Is Philosophy?

To all of you who are so obsessed with precisely determining what is and what isn't science, be aware that science is defined quite differently in different languages, and that the Latin word for "science," "scientia," was in use over 2000 years ago, long before Francis Bacon and Galileo were born, long before there was an English language. In German, the word for "Science," "Wissenscaft," is applied much more broadly than in English. Not only is history a Wissenschaft to ze Chermans -- they even have things like "Literaturwissenschaft," "the scientific study of literature," which sounds very silly even to me, and will presumably make your head explode if you're one of those English-speakers currently very much at pains to label as incorrect all definitions of "science" but the most narrow.



Is philosophy scientific, is science philosophical? Again, it's partly a matter of semantics. The term "φιλοσοφία (philosophia)" is even older than "scientia," and the ancient Greeks who were called philosophers in their day, from Thales to Pythagoras to Plato to Plotinus, we still call philosophers today -- which leads me to suspect that the present-day English-speakers squabbling about the definition of "science," and defining it very narrowly, don't know very much about those ancient Greeks, or they'd be disturbed that one of them who's always been referred to as a philosopher, Thales, acted very much like someone they'd call a scientist, using mathematical principles to determine things such as the height of Egyptian pyramids, the distance of ships seen from the shore, and the size and shape of the Earth. Then there's Pythagoras, whom these strict categorizers today call a mathematician, but in his time was known as a philosopher along with Thales and Plato. The present-day categorizers call Plato a philosopher, but how many have heard that Plato is believed to have put a sign at the entrance to his Academy which asked all those unfamiliar with geometry to go away? But wait, there's still more bad news for those would have clear and clean distinctions between one academic discipline (Did you notice where the term "academic" comes from?) and the next: Although Plato called geometry "γεωμετρία, geometria," it's not at all clear that he or his contemporaries restricted the use of the term anywhere nearly as English-speakers do today. If you break the word into its parts you see "geo" and "meter," "Earth" and "measurer." To the ancient Greeks this could have meant all sorts of things including the study of history and literature and art botany and all other things in categories as diverse as the Earth. Could have, and in the practical everyday use of the word, probably did.



And, finally, to really make the New Atheists swallow their gum: in Medieval universities, theology was often referred to as the "Queen of the sciences."

Except of course that New Atheists are not swallowing their gum: since I'm rambling on about stuff that happened a long time ago when everybody was ignorant, they're impatiently asking, as they impatiently ask whenever I point out that one of their own has said something wildly inaccurate on an historical subject, "So what?"

So Thales and Pythagoras and Euclid and Bacon and Galileo and Einstein and Heisenberg and many others (Many, many others. It's a long time from Euclid to Francis Bacon, and 1 person who knew that science didn't stop in the meantime, and wasn't waiting to be invented, by Francis or by Galileo, depending on which New Atheist yahoo you talk to, was Francis Bacon. I know this because I've read some Bacon and noticed all of the earlier scientists he mentions and praises. He knew he was building on their work, as opposed to having sprung fully-formed from the brow of Zeus.) did what they did while entirely un-plagued by this English-language mania, particularly virulent right now, to section science off from mathematics and and philosophy and history and linguistics and music and art all the other things which have gotten us out of the trees eating grubs and berries and trying in vain to fight off panthers with sticks and made life somewhat more bearable. Yes, science when extraordinarily narrowly defined has helped with that, too. Yes indeed it has, it's helped greatly. But Einstein didn't cordon himself off from the rest of the world. He played the violin, he loved the visual arts and philosophy. Galileo wrote a treatise on Dante. You think that's odd? His contemporaries would have found it odd if an Italian as learned as he had not done so. (Milton published some scientific works.) You want to talk about this supposed division between science and art -- can you say "Leonardo da Vinci"?

Don't Show Me Your Credentials, Please!

Your academic credentials, that is. Just speak your piece. What you say won't become more impressive than it was by your informing me that you are a Full and Distinguished Professor with several long titles, appointments, fellowships, etc, etc. In fact it might actually become less impressive to me. It seems to me that people tend to trot out their creds at points in debates where they are losing. When they have run out of actual substantive things to say. "I'm a bigshot, dammit! Listen to me!" Your creds might work at that point with someone who has had no idea what you've been talking about. Or who has had very little contact with higher education and therefore has an inflated estimation of everyone connected with it. (Or who him- or herself has a long list of imposing-sounding academic credentials and very little of interest to say.)

It's a tricky thing with such credentials. Lord (Settle down. It's just an expression.) knows I'm no anti-intellectual. It appalls me to learn how many Amurrkins would not vote for someone for President of the United States because he or she had a PhD. In fact, I'm very similar to an academic. Most of the people I feel most comfortable talking with have PhD's. My reading habits are very similar to those of an academic, an historian or a philosopher. It's mostly due to my autism, I think, that I don't have a PhD myself. I once had thought that there was a substantial group of autodidacts who resembled academics as much as I do, except for the lack of advanced degrees and jobs in academia. Apparently not. There are some disputes currently raging with mostly academics on one side and mostly autodidacts on the other (*cough* New Atheism *cough* *cough*) and although the academics haven't convinced me that Jesus existed, they have convinced me that the autodidacts are mostly more uneducated than self-educated.

Still, let me be convinced, or not, by what you have to say, and not by your credentials. Of course, this is all the more the case if we know each other only as pseudonyms on the Internet, and I don't even know for sure if you really are the PhD, or employed chemist, or professor who you claim to be. Hopefully I won't shock anyone when I say that I'm pretty sure some people make up some things about themselves when they're anonymous Internet pseudonyms.

There's been one striking case recently in which one anonymous Internet handle has been claiming over and over again that he is a scientist, while not sounding very familiar at all with even very basic tenets of science, logic or math, while debating with several other people who sound very much like professional scientists and/or mathematicians. It also strikes me as suspicious that he keeps saying, "I'm a scientist." That's just odd. Actual academics I've know, when asked about their occupations or backgrounds, usually say something like "I'm a biologist" or "I'm a physicist" or "I'm a mathematician." If, that is, they're not even more specific than that and say, "I'm a molecular biologist," or "I'm a theoretical physicist," or something like that. And they generally don't repeatedly state their real or imagined qualifications, they just talk to you, like regular folks, but more science-y. "I'm a scientist," just flatly stated without anyone having asked what he is, sounds very unusual indeed. Special, as it were. And as he sounds so very far from scientifically literate, I've been asking myself just what sort of scientist he could be, what his field is.

And then I remembered that some theologians actually still refer to theology as science. 800 years ago, not only was theology still referred to as a science: in Western universities, which were all run by theologians, theology was referred to as the primary science, and all the other fields of study -- grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, philosophy -- were called the "handmaids" of theology, the "queen of the sciences." I would have to guess that this guy is either a pathological liar, making up a biography for himself out of whole cloth, or one of those theologians who regards theology as a science, and whose worldview generally is about 800 years old. (Like science, theology has something which they call peer review, but, of course, it bears scant resemblance to scientific peer review. Google "peer review in theology," in quotes.)

Nota bene: I said that 800 years ago, in Western Europe, people "referred to" theology as the primary science, to which all other fields of study were subordinate. I did not say that people "believed that" theology was the highest science, or even a real science at all. No doubt some people believed this, including some professors and rectors of universities with doctorates and long and imposing-sounding lists of other titles. But in times when conformity of expression and speculation was so rigidly enforced with the aid of torture -- the "good old days," to apologists -- who knows what the mass of people actually believed, or said in private, away from the damning evidence of the writing which has come down to us?