Three possible roles for philosophy
Peter Godfrey-Smith on integration, incubation, and education
[This post is a brief summary and discussion of “On the Relation Between Philosophy and Science” by Peter Godfrey-Smith]
In a brief essay called “On the Relation Between Philosophy and Science”, philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith (whose work on consciousness has appeared here before) discusses three roles that the discipline of philosophy might play in broader intellectual life: as a field for the integration of existing knowledge, for the incubation of proto-scientific ideas, and for providing education in critical thinking and logic.
[1] The integration role can be summed up by Wilfrid Sellars’ remark that philosophy is about "how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.” On this view, philosophy is about achieving an integrated picture of the world: drawing on all of the deliverances of science and of everyday experience and trying to fit them all together into a coherent worldview.
Godfrey-Smith argues that this role of integration is especially important now because of “specialization in intellectual life”. As more and more intellectual activity takes place in narrow silos—which is in many ways a necessary and desirable driver of more and better scientific knowledge—it is especially important to have an intellectual environment where people can step back and try to integrate all of this knowledge: "I see the integrative role for philosophy as compulsory, in a sense: there is a need to somehow achieve the Sellars project, and to some extent ‘philosophy’ is a name for whatever does this, no matter where the people are trained and work.”
I’ll note that Godfrey-Smith himself, whose work draws upon his prodigious knowledge of (among other things) evolutionary biology, scuba diving, John Dewey, and the metaphysics of consciousness, is one of the best philosophical integrators I know of.
[2] The incubation role is about birthing new ideas that may turn into (but are not yet) rigorous and empirical scientific theories—theories about how the world works that are speculative and perhaps currently untestable, but which may ultimately be tested and elaborated upon by the sciences. As with integration, this kind of theory-birthing can and does happen in all kinds of disciplines, not just philosophy. But philosophy is a natural home for it, and Godrey-Smith proposes several historical examples of this kind of incubation. The cognitive sciences in particular stand out:
Associationism about the mind was developed by Locke and Hume, who couldn’t yet develop it into a detailed empirical proposal since they lacked the tools of modern psychology and neuroscience. But associationism later “made its way from a philosophical to a recognizably scientific form through the mid 19th to early 20th century (Bain, Mill, Thorndike, Pavlov).”
As far as I can tell, the philosopher Grice more or less single-handedly invented the study of conversational implicature.
The philosopher Jerry Fodor originally elaborated the Language of Thought hypothesis (or was it William of Ockham first?), which now exerts significant influence in empirical psychology.
[3] Education is about teaching critical thinking skills, logic, argumentation and so forth. Godfrey-Smith isn’t especially keen on this role:
In the US, when asked about the point of philosophy people quite often say that what is distinctive is a set of skills – clarity, analysis, critical thinking. Philosophers, they say, do not know any special facts or theories, and have no permanent subject-matter, but they have a skillset that can be usefully brought to bear on any problem. When this is presented as a general view of the point of philosophy as an activity or profession, I am against it; philosophy is not an uninvited management consultant to more substantive intellectual life.
I agree with Peter Godfrey-Smith, and find this proposed role (as he also seems to) somewhat annoying. Another reason I share his lack of enthusiasm for this role: as far as I can tell, there is basically no evidence that philosophy classes do in fact improve people’s clarity, analysis, and critical thinking! Philosophers eager to defend their departments sometimes like to cite results that philosophy students have high GRE or LSAT scores. But of course these results are consistent with philosophy selecting for, rather than inculcating, skill in these areas.
Some related reading: a very old post by Katja Grace about Bertrand Russell’s proposal of the ‘incubation’ role; Wilfred Sellars’s “Philosophy and the scientific image of man”; Chalmers’s “Why isn’t there more progress in philosophy?”