Science as Philosophy

Abstract

We saw in the preceding chapters that from the time of Newton there has been a slow but systematically growing process of the penetration of the natural sciences into philosophy. At first, the process applied only to physics. Its appearance on the scientific scene of modern times was a fact so important that other fields of thought had to react to it. Later, the significance of other sciences, particularly biology, began to grow. Before long almost everyone who considered himself to be a philosopher felt the necessity of saying something either about the natural sciences directly or at least about the problems about which the natural sciences also spoke. For many of them, the achievements of the sciences became either an inspiration for their own reflections or a point of departure from which to elaborate philosophical generalizations

Appendix: The Dream of Unity—A Sketch of the Philosophy of Science of Albert Einstein

We have already spoken about the philosophy of science of Albert Einstein (see Sect. 3.2 above). One must not forget, that Einstein, in addition to being a great physicist has left us many profound philosophical thoughts. Einstein’s views on science deserve detailed treatment, if only because many of them are reflected in contemporary philosophy of science.

Science—according to Einstein—is the intellectual activity of man whose goal is the establishment of relations among those phenomena occurring in the world around us which are accessible to the senses. This brief account takes up three important components of Einstein’s understanding of science: the subject of science, i.e., man as a rational being; the fundamental epistemological relation which assures man cognitive access to the world; and finally the objectively existing world.

In fact, Einstein himself did not use technical philosophical language. However, the epistemological and the ontological layers stand out clearly in his thought. The central thesis of Einstein’s ontology is a conviction about the existence of an objective world independent of the cognizing subject. That conviction cannot be proved in any way, and each scientist must decide for himself whether that conviction will become for him an object of faith. For Einstein, faith (as he called it) in the existence of an objective world was absolutely indispensable for speaking about any process of knowledge.

Einstein ascribed the following features to the objective world:

• Uniformity and harmony, which are expressions of the fact that the world is not chaotic, but is ordered.

• Mathematicity, which means that the world has a certain property thanks to which it can be modeled using relatively simple mathematics. Einstein said that “God is subtle [because investigating the world with the help of mathematics is not an easy task], but not malicious [because it is a task that can be accomplished].”

• A deterministic character, which Einstein identified with causality (his famous statement that “God does not play dice”).

Those features were, for Einstein, the ontological premises of his conception of the unity of science.

The point of departure for Einstein’s epistemological thought, is the claim that the only source of our knowledge of the world is impressions. In order for these impressions to become material useable for science, however, it is first necessary to choose those which can be expressed in words. That makes them intersubjectively communicable and allows for their objectivization. The set of individual impressions do not, however, give real knowledge about the world and in particular it says nothing about the regularities which govern the world. Here, the use of reason turns out to be necessary. Reason builds concepts which introduce order into the collection of impressions. It is exactly this that is the foundation of the “rationality of the world,” i.e., of the fact that the world can be investigated rationally. Einstein wrote:

The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking … it can be put in order, [is a fact] which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand.⁶

Concepts evolve in the direction of an ever better understanding of the connections occurring between particular elements of reality. In the course of the evolution of conceptual systems one can observe this regularity: The deeper we understand the structure of reality, the further we are from the sphere of immediate experience. For Einstein, intuition played an unusually important role in the construction of scientific theory. It does not only allow us to establish connections between impressions and concepts; thanks to it the scientist can also discover the fundamental laws of physics.

Einstein saw physics as an exemplar of the natural sciences and therefore he referred philosophical reflections on science to it above all. He was an adherent of the view that all the sciences should approximate physics, since it is precisely the laws of physics that apply to all spheres of reality. According to Einstein, the natural sciences have two features:

• All the significant achievements of the natural sciences arose by deduction of conclusions from hypotheses and from general principles and by subsequently comparing them to experience. The formulation of hypotheses and of general principles requires, of course, a thorough knowledge of the problems, but it is, in principle, a “free product of the human mind.”

• Even positive results of the comparison of theory to experience is not proof of the truth of a theory although one disagreement with experience is sufficient for its refutation.

A good theory is supposed to satisfy one more requirement: according to Einstein, to be characterized by “inner perfection.” An essential element of that perfection is simplicity and, since nature is mathematical, the theory which describes it must be as simple as possible with respect to its mathematical structure. In practice, however, it is difficult to recognize such a criterion as a measurable indicator of the value of a scientific theory (it takes the genius of an Einstein to ascertain the “inner perfection” of a theory). So we get only an heuristic criterion for the selection of scientific theories by means of which we can only determine relative simplicity, i.e., we can evaluate which of two available theories has the simpler structure.

The simpler a theory is, the more universal has to be its character. Einstein wanted the theory of every natural process to be deducible from the fundamental laws of nature. He believed in the existence in the world of a level of organization which is the foundation of all natural phenomena.

The great unification of the theories of physics was Einstein’s dream as well as the goal which he set for contemporary physics. The development of every sphere of knowledge should move in the direction of greater simplicity, i.e., of the acceptance of a minimum number of logically independent hypotheses, from which all the laws of nature would be deducible. The most general, of course, were supposed to be the laws of physics, and the particular branches of science, as their logical consequences, were supposed to refer to various spheres of reality. Einstein mentioned the following aspects of the unity of science.

• genetic unity, or the conviction that, at the foundations of the heterogeneity of our perceptual experience lies a homogeneous system, so-called pre-scientific thought;

• linguistic unity, or the observation that there is one universal language of science, independent of particular natural languages (e.g., the language of Euclidean geometry);

• logical unity (also called economy of thought), i.e., the creation of a logical foundation containing fundamental concepts and axioms and common to all the sciences;

• a unity manifesting itself in the unification of physical theories in the course of the historical development of physics.

All those aspects of unity are the consequent of the ontological unity of the world. Einstein argued that, since there exists only one objective world, there should also be only one theory that describes it. After the creation of the special and the general theory of relativity, Einstein devoted the rest of his life to the search for such a final theory. His attempts were, however, premature (for he tried to unify the theory of gravitation with that of electromagnetism and we know today that that cannot be done without taking into consideration also the theory of nuclear forces). And even today, despite partial successes, the complete unification of physics remains still the great, unrealized dream of physicists.