Progressing Toward Specificity

I went down to New Haven this weekend to help Wayne move into his beautiful new apartment. Along the way I was listening to a recording of Patrick Grim discuss “A Philosophy of Mind.”

In the beginning there was no distinction between philosophy and other disciplines. Philosopher just meant, ‘lover of wisdom’ — any kind of wisdom. As time went on, particular areas of thought became elaborated enough or systemitized enough or established enough to peel off as distinguishable disciplines in their own right.

One of the first to peel off was mathematics — Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans who gave us both the Pythogorean theorem and the existence of irrational numbers — they undoubtedly considered themselves philosophers, not mathematicians. The Pythagoreans drew no distinction between number theory, musical theory and the speculation on the role of number and harmony as basic philosophical principles in the universe.

Only later, in Euclid, and, interestingly enough, in the systematic axiomization of geometry does mathematics start to be treated as a distinct field in its own right. Now you’ve got philosophy ‘here’ and mathematics ‘over here.’

Astronomy is probably the next discipline to peel off — though in the archaic amalgam of astronomy and astrology that appears in Ptolemy. Most importantly, astronomy peels off only with a substantial step in systemization sometime around 100 – 150AD — Ptolemy’s Almagest — and with an applicable technology of astrological prediction.

Until after Isaac Newton, there’s no physics. Newton thought of himself as a ‘natural philosopher.’ Only with the astounding intellectual achievement of his Principia of 1687 was there a field distinct enough, with its own Newtonian systemization — with its own experimental techniques to be thought of as a separate field of ‘Physics.’ Usually people just refer to Newton’s Pricipia, the full title is Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy).

Other disciplines have peeled off in our own century. There used to be a part of philosophy called ‘The Philosophy of Man.’ With the development of ethnographic techniques in the early 20^th century, and with its own smatterings of theory, ‘The Philosophy of Man’ became the science of ‘Anthropology.’

The key here is the same throughout: once an area has some real systemization, agreed theoretical basics and/or experimental techniques, it becomes a science on its own.

But, here are also more ambiguous cases: some of what used to be called, ‘Social Philosophy,’ as in ‘Social and Political Philosophy,’ part of that is now called ‘Sociology,’ but not all of it. It was essentially the agreed part — pursuable by agreed techniques — that became the science of sociology. The controversial parts, especially about social values, those remained as a part of philosophy.

Much the same happened with philosophy of language. Some of that became ‘Linguistics,’ a science in its own right, but there are plenty of questions that remain. It was only easy and systemitizable questions that became the science of linguistics.

The story is essentially the same in that part of philosophy called “Philosophy of Mind.’ William James taught philosophy at Harvard from the 1880’s to 1907 and he is, of course, known as a proponent of ‘philosophical pragmatism,’ but it was through his influence that parts of philosophy of mind started to be seen as developed enough to start to count as a science: the science of ‘Psychology.’

James once said, ‘the first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was one I delivered.’ William James published The Principles of Psychology in two volumes in 1890. It still reads as half philosophy/half psychology. William James is a philosopher and psychologist. […] That was the birth of ‘Psychology.’

About the same time in Europe the break between the philosophy of mind and what was conceived of as the science of mind took the form of psychoanalysis. Freud’s first book on aphasia was published in 1891, the term ‘psychoanalysis’ was coined in 1896, and later, with somewhat different histories, neurophysiology and neuropsychology became established as sciences.

The story throughout is the same: the easier stuff becomes the science — the stuff that is more readily systematized and that yields to experimental technique. The harder stuff is the questions that are not only unanswered, but that we’re not even sure how to answer. Those are the fundamentally controversial bits — areas where we’re not even sure what basic theory should look like. Those are the areas in which we don’t yet even quite know what we don’t know: all of that remains part of philosophy.

I have, conveniently enough, a philosophical issue with this passage. While Grim’s passage is an excellent and succinct description of the development of intellectual achievement that led to the development of psychology as a science, it glosses over the fuzziness of the boundaries between philosophy and science.

People have theories about pretty much everything. It’s what we do as organisms — we decide upon an outcome that we want and then take actions to make it happen. The action we choose is based upon some rational model of the world and how it works. Either we get the result that we projected, reinforcing the model, or we get a contradictory result that encourages us to change our model.

The progression from philosophy to science progresses along two axes. Say I would like to go deer hunting this weekend.

• Will my gun shoot? This is largely governed by chemistry — an externally verifiable model that provides reliable prediction at the granularity of the desired event. We don’t really know how atoms are stuck together and why the energy is released, but we know that a cascading reaction will take place and the resultant energy will drive the bullet. Because of our lack of a general model for how the interaction is taking place or an inability to measure all the pertinent factors, if we were watching the event in terms of picoseconds and molecules the exact moment when a particular molecule of gunpowder will combust is fairly uncertain.
• Will it rain on me? This is also externally verifiable, but unlike with the bullet where we have an precise level of prediction at the desired granularity, we don’t really have that ability with the weather. If I was wanting to get to the level of predictive power of “will my gun shoot?” (say 99.9% correct) I will have to expand the granularity of my “will it rain?” in some combination of spatiality “will it rain in Tennessee?” or chronology “will it rain this week?”
• Will I enjoy the experience of hunting? We generally think of this as internally verifiable, something that only I can know. We do have the ability though to make predictions with some degree of granularity given certain external datum. Much like meteorology tells us high barometric pressure means it is more likely to rain, knowing external information like my social class, where I’ve lived, or my organizational affiliations could help estimate whether I will like hunting.
• Is it moral to go hunting? This is generally considered completely internal and personal. If it is though, why do we have the word, “moral.” When I make that sound with my voice, the hearer has some concept they call to mind. We can only have a word for morality and use it productively in conversation if refers to something. That people disagree on whether abortion is moral speaks to a lack of precision in the meaning, but that pretty much everyone agrees setting gerbils on fire is not moral means there is also some consensus.

The internally verifiable questions share a common trait: imprecise language. One of the things that changes in the progression from philosophy to science is increasing conceptual precision. I think this is what Grim is touching on when he says, “we don’t quite know what to ask.” I could ask the question of “will I enjoy hunting?” as “how likely am I to rate the experience of hunting as five or more on a seven point Leichhardt scale?” That puts a more concrete definition to what “like” means, but how do we know if that definition of “like” is a good one?

Similarly researchers such as Piaget, Kohlberg and Gilligan are concretizing the concept of morality. They are defining moral behavior in terms of life outcomes and defining causal relationships between certain psychological patterns and types of reasoning.

With a particular set of definitions, be it “5 of 7 on a Leichhardt scale is the same as ‘like’” or “moral decisions based on the considerations of larger populations are more mentally mature,” these definitions will be used to structure behavior. Either people will get outcomes that reinforce those definitions or they will be disproven or qualified. Even if they are disproven, the process will very likely lead to more precise language because terminology will have to be developed to express why those concepts are incomplete.

My issue with Grim’s discussion is that the progression from philosophy to science is not a discrete one. In not discussing the progression from philosophy to science, he misses an opportunity to highlight a critical point in understanding the development of both: why does it happen?

A philosophy becomes a science not when it reaches some magical level of systemization. A philosophy becomes a science when the accepted systemization becomes complex enough that the majority of people can’t handle thinking outside the conceptual framework. Human brains can only deal with a certain level of complexity. After we hit that level of complexity we gather the complexity together into a bundle and conceptually segregate it.

Imagine the firing of the gun while I’m on my hunting trip. There are waves or strings or E8 or something that make up quarks which make up atoms (particle physics). The atoms go together to make molecules (modular physics) of gunpowder which ignite (physical chemistry). The explosion provides an impulse to drive a piece of lead forward very quickly (classical physics). Flying through the air it drags against air molecules (aerodynamics) and warps spacetime (special relativity). It impacts a tree deforming the bark (stress mechanics). Light travels to my eye (optics) exciting electrical impulses (biology) and releasing chemicals in my brain (neurochemistry). I am disappointed in failing to hit my target (psychology), but relived at not having killed (ethics).

Even this smallest of events can involve innumerable conceptual structures. No one person can know all of them, so we have to specialize. When the concepts are large and imprecise we can have a broader range which is what Grim calls philosophy. The accepted groupings of specializations are his sciences. Ultimately, however the distinction between them is artificial and a byproduct of the workings of the mind. A fact I think rather important to acknowledge when forming a philosophy of the mind.