(1) Philosophy has a reputation, among some (not reputable) commentators on YouTube, of being either useless or very limited. I wish to draw attention to the mix up that so often happens when science is mistaken for other subjects, which leads to a misunderstanding as to the nature of science, and subsequently the role that philosophy plays in knowledge acquisition.
(2) Engineering has been around a lot longer than science if we take the modern view that science started during the enlightenment (some people consider this to be fawning at the "new nobility"), and engineering started with the first tools.
(3) The argument could be put forward that behind engineering there has always been an obscured scientific tendency that only became apparent during the enlightenment era. This might well be true but there has never been an explicit tendency to make far reaching predictions about the world which were put through critical discourse, and sustained attempts at testing. They were always parochial concerns where the knowledge gained very rarely had reach beyond the problems they were trying to solve at the time. Science is about "all" statements which can be criticized and eventually tested, and which hope to explain things beyond the local concerns of any particular human group.
(4) The argument "pitting" science against philosophy usually rests on the (mistaken) fact that it is doing fine without philosophy, and the example they use is the abundance of technology. This shows a lack of nuance, because technology is due mainly to engineering and is not directly a consequence of science, even though it is informed by science. If we take the above we can see that technology (a product of engineering) did well without science for millennia, maybe not as well, but pretty well. Furthermore it can be argued that science has never done anything without philosophical discourse - where it finds its foundations. Maybe it is invisible because philosophy is so diffuse through science, like gravity throughout the universe, that it takes someone to point it out before it can be seen. It takes philosophical discourse to keep science together.
(5) Science itself does not inform engineering in the sense of what it should do or what it can do, only what it cannot do, assuming that the particular theory dealing with the phenomena within the current scientific community is correct, and therefore what the limit on engineering should be granting the truth of that theory.
(6) Science and engineering use some similar tools but for completely different ends, and these tools emerge from guess work and criticism. Science seeks to understand the world; engineering seeks to put the world to use. This is not say that engineering and science do not go hand in hand they often do. It is just to say that engineering is postively informed more by the needs of humans, than it is by science.
(6) Science and engineering use some similar tools but for completely different ends, and these tools emerge from guess work and criticism. Science seeks to understand the world; engineering seeks to put the world to use. This is not say that engineering and science do not go hand in hand they often do. It is just to say that engineering is postively informed more by the needs of humans, than it is by science.
(7) The nature of science is such that it attempts to put theories to test through the possible use of technology and knowledge. i.e. telescopes, language, philosophical tools, the human brain etc. Engineering also uses these tools, but to put the world to use. Take for instance the atomic bomb. Engineering was informed by science that it was limited in how an atom could be split, and eventually it was hit upon that radium could be used, and therefore engineering made an atom bomb, it was not science that made the atom bomb, nor even made it possible - it was always possible.
(8) Science borrows its tools from philosophy, which attempts to criticize the tools that are being put to use and to conjecture new ones, just like science tests the theories of the empirical world we have against that world itself, and conjectures new ones. science itself cannot put scientific tools to the test, because they are not empirical and therefore beyond the range of scientific enquiry. Although scientists themselves do engage in this criticism, what they are doing is not science but philosophy of science (or meta-science: see 9).
(9) the reason I brought up technology and engineering is because people believe that scientists qua science are engaged directly in this kind endeavour when in fact scientists qua science are only trying to explain the world not change it or "use it", and philosophers are engaged in trying to figure out how science explains and how to best improve the tools of the scientist.
(10) Theoretical science and "meta-science" (the subset of epistemology and ontology that deal with the nature and extent of science) differ in a very crucial way, meta-science seeks to understand science and improve on its methods, theoretical science tries to understand the implications of data, by speculation and criticism, which we can't yet empirically test, both have philosophical underpinnings.
(11) In conclusion, to draw an analogy from (4), philosophy does for science what science does for T&E, and, without philosophy, science would eventually disappear until all our concerns are parochial.
Until next time...
