Why philosophy is important in sci-ed + Which is more primary: processes or things?

[C C]

Why philosophy is so important in science education
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-philosophy-is-...-education

EXCERPT: Each semester, I teach courses on the philosophy of science [...] most of them have never taken a philosophy class before. [...] I begin by explaining to them that philosophy addresses issues that can’t be settled by facts alone, and that the philosophy of science is the application of this approach to the domain of science. After this, I explain some concepts that will be central to the course: induction, evidence, and method in scientific enquiry. [...] Lastly, I stress that although these issues are ‘philosophical’, they nevertheless have real consequences for how science is done.

[...] I think that these responses have to do with concerns about the value of philosophy compared with that of science. It is no wonder that some of my students are doubtful that philosophers have anything useful to say about science. They are aware that prominent scientists have stated publicly that philosophy is irrelevant to science, if not utterly worthless and anachronistic. [...] Many of the young people who attend my classes think that philosophy is a fuzzy discipline that’s concerned only with matters of opinion, whereas science is in the business of discovering facts, delivering proofs, and disseminating objective truths. Furthermore, many of them believe that scientists can answer philosophical questions, but philosophers have no business weighing in on scientific ones.

Why do college students so often treat philosophy as wholly distinct from and subordinate to science? In my experience, four reasons stand out. [...] The fourth source of students’ discomfort comes from what they take science education to be. One gets the impression that they think of science as mainly itemising the things that exist – ‘the facts’ – and of science education as teaching them what these facts are. I don’t conform to these expectations. But as a philosopher, I am mainly concerned with how these facts get selected and interpreted, why some are regarded as more significant than others, the ways in which facts are infused with presuppositions, and so on.

Students often respond to these concerns by stating impatiently that facts are facts. [...] What students mean to say by ‘facts are facts’ is that once we have ‘the facts’ there is no room for interpretation or disagreement. Why do they think this way? It’s not because this is the way that science is practised but rather, because this is how science is normally taught....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/why-philosophy-is-...-education

---

Which is more fundamental: processes or things?
https://aeon.co/ideas/which-is-more-fund...-or-things

EXCERPT: Metaphysics is the attempt to understand how existence works by examining the building blocks of reality, the distinctions between mental and physical entities, and the fundamental questions of being and reality. But metaphysics is not only an arcane branch of philosophy: human beings use metaphysical assumptions to navigate the world. Assumptions about what exists and what is fundamental exert a powerful influence on our lives. Indeed, the less aware we are of our metaphysical assumptions, the more we are subject to them.

Western metaphysics tends to rely on the paradigm of substances. We often see the world as a world of things, composed of atomic molecules, natural kinds, galaxies. Objects are the paradigmatic mode of existence, the basic building blocks of the Universe. What exists exists as an object. Though substance metaphysics seems to undergird Western ‘common sense’, I think it is wrong. [...] Any analysis lacking information about change misses the point, which is just what substance metaphysics is missing. Process philosophers, meanwhile, think we should go beyond looking at the world as a set of static unrelated items, and instead examine the processes that make up the world. Processes, not objects, are fundamental....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/which-is-more-fund...-or-things

[Syne]

Students often respond to these concerns by stating impatiently that facts are facts. [...] What students mean to say by ‘facts are facts’ is that once we have ‘the facts’ there is no room for interpretation or disagreement. Why do they think this way? It’s  not because this is the way that science is practised but rather, because this is how science is normally taught....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/why-philosophy-is-...-education

Sounds like the same teaching that has them believing in safe spaces and words being aggressions.

[Yazata]

Each semester, I teach courses on the philosophy of science [...] most of them have never taken a philosophy class before. [...]

In many/most philosophy programs, an introduction to philosophy class is a prerequisite for enrolling in philosophy of science. Odd that it isn't at the U. of New Hampshire.

I begin by explaining to them that philosophy addresses issues that can’t be settled by facts alone, and that the philosophy of science is the application of this approach to the domain of science.

I don't like that approach, since it will simply give neophyte students the impression that philosophy is anything that one happens to believe and hence that philosophy is essentially bullshit. Many students, especially those coming from the sciences (those who are more likely to be interested in the philosophy of science) may already think that way. (We've all seen the snarky quotes from Feynman, Krauss and Tyson about the worthlessness of philosophy.) There's no need to play into those kind of ignorant prejudices.

It's probably better to begin by saying that philosophy investigates the various underlying assumptions upon which other fields of inquiry are inevitably based. In the case of science, that would include the reign of logic and mathematics, laws of nature, causality, hypothesis formation, experiment and confirmation, scientific theorizing and modeling, the relationship of these to physical reality, and stuff like that. Science loves to believe that's strictly based on reason, evidence and facts, so the task is to inquire into what science is and what it's doing.

After this, I explain some concepts that will be central to the course: induction, evidence, and method in scientific enquiry. [...] Lastly, I stress that although these issues are ‘philosophical’, they nevertheless have real consequences for how science is done.

[...] I think that these responses have to do with concerns about the value of philosophy compared with that of science. It is no wonder that some of my students are doubtful that philosophers have anything useful to say about science. They are aware that prominent scientists have stated publicly that philosophy is irrelevant to science, if not utterly worthless and anachronistic. [...] Many of the young people who attend my classes think that philosophy is a fuzzy discipline that’s concerned only with matters of opinion, whereas science is in the business of discovering facts, delivering proofs, and disseminating objective truths. Furthermore, many of them believe that scientists can answer philosophical questions, but philosophers have no business weighing in on scientific ones.

I don't think that philosophy of science should be answering technical scientific questions so much as describing and perhaps evaluating what it is that scientists are doing when they purport to answer those questions.

Of course in real life things do get blurry, since a lot of what we see scientists talking about is really philosophy. We see physicists weighing in on metaphysical questions like the something-from-nothing question. Theoretical physicists often seem to just assume the reality of their mathematical principles and even tend to give them ontological priority. We see evolutionary biologists trying to understand phylogenetic methodologies. We see arguments pitting pragmatic instrumentalism against scientific realism. And there's obviously the whole vexed subject of interpreting the experimental evidence and mathematical formalism in quantum mechanics. Scientists are already up to their eyeballs in philosophy, without acknowledging it or thinking very deeply about it. That's where philosophers of science can help.

This is why I think that it's necessary to have a sound background in science in order to do the philosophy of science well. Aspiring philosophers of science probably should major as undergraduates in a science rather than philosophy. Then switch to a philosophy doctoral program while still taking additional graduate classes in science relevant to one's philosophy of science dissertation subject.  

Why do college students so often treat philosophy as wholly distinct from and subordinate to science? In my experience, four reasons stand out. [...] The fourth source of students’ discomfort comes from what they take science education to be. One gets the impression that they think of science as mainly itemising the things that exist – ‘the facts’ – and of science education as teaching them what these facts are.

That's certainly how high-schools present science and how it's typically presented to students in the introductory university science sequences too. (Here's how things are, your job is to memorize it and learn to do the kind of calculations that will be on the exam.) Students aren't exposed to the more fundamental questions and the controversies until they take more advanced classes in their junior or senior years. Of course those questions and controversies are pretty much all that graduate school is about, particularly at the doctoral level. But by the time they reach that level, graduate students have just kind of uncritically and unreflectively absorbed the ideas and methodologies that were pounded into their heads in their earlier years as students. They emulate earlier paradigmatic examples of successful scientific work (calculations, explanations or whatever) without thinking all that profoundly about what they are doing and why.