Philosophers are annoying

What was I thinking when I recommended Massimo Pigliucci’s blog a few weeks ago? He immediately posted something stupid and annoying. In an entry titled “On the scope of skeptical inquiry“, Pigliucci said that

Consider again the example of a creationist who maintains in the face of evidence that the universe really is 6,000 years old, and that it only looks older because god arranged things in a way to test our faith. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that could contradict that sort of statement, but a philosopher can easily point out why it is unreasonable, and that furthermore it creates very serious theological quandaries.

Yes, a philosopher can easily point out why last-thursdayism is unreasonable, but a scientist can’t? Scientific theories with no empirical evidence are proposed all the time and scientists seem to have no problem making decisions about which direction to pursue. Pigliucci insists that Richard Dawkins is “doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry” by making atheism a scientific position. Why? We rejected ether. We rejected phlogiston. We rejected ESP. We rejected soul. Why is it any different when it comes to god?

Furthermore, what really annoys me is the undertone of Pigliucci’s piece: scientists should restrict themselves playing with their test tubes and leave all the deep thinking to the philosophers, the professional thinkers. You see, philosophers are really good at thinking, because that’s all that they do. They think. Thinking is apparently the one thing that scientists can’t do properly.

The problem is that philosophers really don’t have a good track record. When was the last time a scientist said “look, I think we are stepping outside our epistemological boundary here. Why don’t we knock on the doors of our smarter colleagues in the philosophy department and see if they can sort this out for us?” Three hundred years ago? Scientists are faced with deep mysteries all the time. For example, cognitive scientists are faced with the “problem” with consciousness. We don’t know what it is. We don’t have a framework to work with when it comes to consciousness. Philosophers are supposed to be experts on this kind of thing. Maybe they can help? Nope. We checked and it turns out that they are clueless too. They have tons of arguments, thought experiments and endless streams of bickering and nitpicking. But nothing concrete. Nothing useful.

When theoretical physicists are faced with deep problems, they very often discover that mathematicians already developed all the tools for describing the problem, and sometimes for solving the problem. It is famously called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. Philosophy, on the other hand, is almost the opposite. They miraculously managed to contribute nothing to science for a few hundred of years. I call this “the unreasonable useless of philosophy in natural sciences”. I have no idea why this is the case but it is.