It depends on how do you define "science". If you define science as experimental acitivty, philosophy is not a science. Mathematics neither. If, however you include in the definition of science all human enterprises which try to underdtand the backgoround of our existence and if you add that science must be based on explicit rules philisophy may be included - althogh much depend on the philospher. I would place philisophy somwhere beteen natural sciences, social sciences and religion. It has certain elements from alll theses although is not identical to them.

Every knowledge that handle you to find some reasons for a question(problem) is a science but science have some branches like experimental science and ... . I think every things that forced you to thinking about the world is a science

Both Philosophy and Science are forms of social consciousness, yet understanding of Philosophy as the "science of all sciences" is now a bit outdated. Philosophy is rather a worldview, feeding upon the results of sciences and returning back methodology of scientifical cognition.

The difference is that while the subject of any science is bound to establishing laws and relations of some aspect or field of existence, the subject of Philosophy is establishing universal laws and relations, applicable to Matter and Conscience on the whole.

Besides the difficulty in defining the two concepts, we must focus on the relations between them. In this respect, I think "tools and methods" is an element which distinguishes clearly between them. Sciences provide tools and methods of investigation. Mathematics has a special status, being identified in some views with its methods (not a science, but rather a method of investigation). Some of these methods of investigation are also used by philosophy (what is currently called analytical philosophy). So, philosophy uses scientific methods through which it studies the world and sciences. It does not rule over sciences. If we talk only about philosophy of science (epistemology), we can say it supervise sciences, with the reserve that it uses (paradoxically) their methods of investigation. Nowadays, philosophy of science is more and more accepted as part of the sciences, which leads to a tendency of weaken the difference...

All sciences are philosophies but not the reverse. For a philophy to be scientific , it need to be unambigous so that it can eventually be empirically tested.

There are various forms of knowledge. The philosophy is one of them, different, yes, of scientific knowledge, whether experimental, field, observational or even social.

The philosophy proposes to think the principles, methods and training of scientific knowledge, but is not presented as such.

Philosophy proposes and science then struggles to dispose the matter ever thereafter!

No American scientist should speak to this question without having first dipped into the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce was the hardest of scientists -- measurement expert, inventor of machines to measure gravity, chemist, calculator of astronomical variables, grandfather of most of the statistics we were all taught in graduate school - who fraternized with the likes of William James and Oliver Wendel Holmes and turned his pen to philosophy. For him, science was the formalization of the human way of being in the world which is to constantly test our conceptions against their consequences. To him, logic was just the relatively packed down midden of all the experiments humans have performed over the millennia. CF, Quine. .

We define philosophy through three principles. First, philosophy is the extreme exercise of the brain’s capacity to reduce the complexity of experience to simple or single principles. Whoever can capture the greatest range of experience with the least number of symbols is a thinker forever to be venerated by the human community. The greatest philosophers as scientists have captured the essence of life and the universe and how they work through the most economical concepts— gravity/Kepler, Galileo, Newton; evolution/Darwin, Wallace; relativity/ Einstein.

Second, philosophy is the brain’s capacity to recognize that its powers of processing information do not dictate the structure of the universe or any reality beyond the universe. The brain’s powers develop gradually over time. Its initial attempts to explain what it cannot yet explain map its own processes. This natural flaw is called anthropomorphism, from the original Greek, human-shaped. Its correlate is the assumption that the purpose of the universe must be its most intelligent product—humanity. This second natural flaw is called anthropocentrism, from the original Greek, human-centered.

Third, philosophy does not simply describe or explain our experience or reality in most general terms. Philosophy is prescriptive. It tells us how to live our lives. The greatest philosophers as religious figures or atheists have compressed all rules for life into single principles: meditation/Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists; community/Mo Ti (or Mo Di), Stoics, Christ, Nagarjuna; freedom/Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche.

Philosophy is the comprehensive vision that tries to fit all of our experience into a comprehensible whole. It is the process of answering all the important questions that we cannot begin to answer with any degree of final certainty: how did we get here, where are we going, and how are we supposed to live.

Philosophy commits itself to a single principle that must never be forsaken. That principle is the idea that all principles must be subject to rational scrutiny and revision. To be rational in the most practical sense is to pursue a goal with appropriate means. Human rationality is distinguished in part by the use of reason to connect experiences through concepts. Concepts or ideas are abstractions of patterns or in-formation from experience. Rationality’s principles are themselves subject to revision over time.

How Philosophy Guides Science

Science, too, grounds itself in a single principle that must be unquestioned. That principle is a commitment to finding consensual grounds of experience to support all scientific claims. The term science comes from the same root as scissors or schizophrenia. In its original home the term meant to cut. Science is quite literally the process of cutting experience into its manifold parts and then reassembling those parts through networks or patterns of information called theories. Science furnishes generalized descriptions of experience. The practical aim of science is to predict what happens when…. What will happen when I drop the ball? It will fall. Yes! But how fast will it drop and more importantly, why will it drop?

The best result we have achieved so far is to be able to predict the rate of fall (on the earth’s surface) with the equation, S=1/2gt2: It will accelerate at the rate of 32 feet per second or 9.8 meters per second for every second that it falls. However, we do not yet have satisfactory answers to the question, why will it fall? From Newton’s research we know that bodies with mass attract each other with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. In simpler terms, more massive bodies are more strongly attracted to one another, but the force of attraction falls off as distance separates the bodies.

But why? The force of gravity appears to reach out across empty space to compel bodies to act in gravitational ways. Newton said he had no idea how that could be possible. The French philosopher Descartes thought that “empty” space was really a plenum filled up with an invisible fluid called aether. This fluid moves in invisible vortices or tornado-like movements that force bodies into gravitational patterns. Einstein thought that massive bodies curve the shape of space around them to make bodies behave in gravitational ways. However, no one knows why this might be so (Verharen, 2012c). Philosophy’s task is to propose highly generalized explanations that can be reduced to empirically testable descriptions.

The hallmark of the mind’s sophistication is to separate explanations of our experience from our human-centered encounter with experience. Modern science began its dramatic revolution when anthropomorphic explanations of phenomena were replaced with generalized descriptions. In Aristotle’s ancient science, bodies fell from heights to the earth because they “longed for their resting place.” In our contemporary science, we accurately predict their rates of fall, but we leave untouched the human-like reasons for their falling. We impute their falling behavior to a “gravitational force,” but no one claims to know the mechanism of that force. It is as it ever was a complete mystery.

A limitation of science is that scientific theories only provide descriptions of what happens when…. Scientific explanations for those descriptions simply reduce to more general levels of description (Feynman, 2001/1964). For example, heat used to be regarded as a mysterious substance, the caloric,that was transmitted by agents such as fire. Now heat is simply described as the mean kinetic energy or average motion of the molecules of any substance whatsoever.

A deeper limitation of science is that no matter how useful a scientific theory is for predicting and controlling experience, there is no guarantee that the theory may not be supplanted by a more comprehensive or accurate theory. Physicists were convinced for 200 years that Newton had captured all there was to know about gravitational motion in the universe. Einstein destroyed that conviction when he showed that Newton was able to describe only motions of bodies that were not extremely massive or fast. Newton’s generalizations about gravitational motion are still used to calculate orbits of rockets and satellites. But they can’t be used to predict the motions of very fast bodies such as photons or very large bodies such as suns or galaxies.

Like philosophy, science exhibits massive limitations. While science boasts the capacity to achieve consensus about the usefulness of its accepted theories for predicting and controlling experience, that consensus may be proven wrong over time. And science cannot begin to capture the answers to Hawking and Pinker’s questions that are completely beyond the powers of consensus to address: where did we come from, why are we here, and how should we live?

Science’s task is to narrow the answers to such questions to the point that they become testable hypotheses. Through Darwin’s research, biologists have promising descriptions as to how our life form evolved from other kinds of life. The most speculative science about the origins and structure of the universe offers provocative theories about there being billions of universes beyond the one we appear to inhabit. However, the most that science can do at present is to offer speculation about the origins of those universes. Science (Rundle, 2004) offers no consensual answer to the question, why is there anything rather than nothing?

The global history of philosophy shows how “preposterous” new ideas gradually become the stuff of common sense (Collins 1998). In the beginning we imagine that we on earth inhabit the center of the universe. We imagine that humans and animals cannot spring from the same source. We imagine that length, mass and time are constants that cannot change as a function of observers’ relative speeds. We imagine that our primary goal is to survive rather than sacrifice our lives for the sake of a universal community (Christ) or universal freedom (Marx).

Revolutions in the history of thought destroyed all these philosophical assumptions, replacing them with new ones. With the wisdom of Socrates, we cannot imagine that these new assumptions will stand the test of time unchanged. Philosophy’s universal descriptions of experience function as rules for the direction of life at the interface of philosophy and science. The enterprise of science rests on the highly generalized and hence unprovable philosophical assumption of the universe’s regularity. In Bertrand Russell’s (1912) elegant phrasing, we can rely on future futures to resemble past futures. We can expect the same phenomena to occur under identical initial conditions. Philosophical hyper-generalizations such as this one cannot be proven. Nevertheless, without this critical assumption, the pursuit of science would be folly.

This philosophical directive bedeviled Einstein in his quest to find an underlying mechanism to explain the stochastic or statistical nature of quantum or sub-atomic phenomena. In his famous words, “God does not play dice with the world.” Other “philosophers of science” like Bohr and Heisenberg were content to accept the probabilistic nature of sub-atomic phenomena. Einstein appears to have lost this battle—for the moment!

The most powerful demonstrations of the interpenetration of philosophy and science are the hypotheses emerging from contemporary physics and neuroscience. Working within the mathematics of contemporary physics, some physicists (and philosophers) make the claim that there must be multiple universes in addition to our own (Greene, 2011). More far-fetched but proposed as a consequence of string-theory mathematics is the idea that our universe is a computational cloud generated by an intelligent species far more advanced than ours (Greene, 2011). A neuroscientist is so bold as to announce empirical evidence against human free-will, while insisting that belief in free-will must continue in order to insure social stability (Gazzaniga, 2011). These examples show that the borderline between philosophy and science is porous. They also show that philosophy cannot be restricted to individuals whose academic credentials allow them to enter the profession of philosophy.

Rather than thinking of philosophy and science as separate disciplines, it is best to think of them as continua on the spectrum of thinking, distinguished only by their degrees of generality. At the height of its speculative power, science is philosophy. Newton, Darwin and Einstein were philosophers who proposed seemingly preposterous theories. Their respective beliefs in the unity of the heavens and earth, all living beings, and mass and energy were unacceptable to their contemporaries. And philosophy becomes science over time in limited cases. The Greco-African thinker Aristarchus claimed more than 2,000 years ago that the planets revolve around the sun. Common sense experience contradicted his belief. We need only to look up to the sky to see the stars, sun and planets revolving around us! Now his claim is demonstrated scientific fact.

Historically the lag between “preposterous” philosophical innovation and empirical confirmation has consumed millennia. Based on his conviction about the centrality of the sun to the cycle of life, Aristarchus’ bold hypothesis had no immediate consequences (McEvilley, 2002). The Copernican revolution in 1543 did not achieve definitive empirical confirmation until instruments powerful enough to detect stellar parallax were available in 1838 (Friedrich Bessel). Historical examples of answers to philosophical questions becoming scientific fact are quite rare, however. We may have to accept the fact that philosophy’s deepest questions can never be answered in consensual ways. The problem is that we must have answers to these questions in order to know how to live. Despite its unavoidable uncertainty, philosophy dictates the directions of our lives.

Bertrand Russell had a thoughtful opinion which can serve as an answer to your question. Paraphrasing a little bit:

People are interested in knowledge. There are different ways people gain their knowledge. At one extreme, people obtain knowledge by a purely rational process, deriving knowledge only from observation and deduction. That's science. For example Newton's and Maxwell's laws were obtained this way. At the other extreme, people obtain knowledge by a purely irrational process, where ideas are held true simply by belief. That's religion. For example, the question of God is resolved this way. And then there is a big muddy space in between, where we can't be purely rational and where belief is unsatisfactory, but we people still want to be confident in our ideas somehow. That's philosophy. For example, "is there a meaning to life".

I personally agree with Russell: there are some elements of science in philosophy, whenever they fit and until they don't fit any more. The reason why it's controversial is that philosophical thought and empirical validation don't often play well together. But we're getting increasingly better at it. Psychology, sociology and the study of memes are arguably very muddy branches of philosophy that are becoming more and more scientific as the years go by.

The site is becoming increasing ly difficult to record one's comments. My comments just disappeared disturbing my chain of thoughts! Philosophy is the mother of what we call modern science. There was an old science of the east that was mostly built through the inward way as against the outward way of the present. As a physicist getting older i started the now ' lost ' study vis- a- vis the modern. I am of the opinion that knowledge runs both in lines and circles! Sometimes the less we think the more we get the clarity. The more we think introduces not only self bias but the biases of many others as you get crowded in thinking. Isolation and element of silence plays significant roles that one misses on these days as literature mounts in quantity and there are huge numbers of seminars and lectures almost many times a day the world over.

Forget about olden days philosophers and scientists that are often quoted as it has become a fashion to quote. Where from can the fresh approach and independence of thought emerge in such an environment?

Raphael,

Although the process of scientific validation of a theory is relatively clear; the process of scientific discovery itself is far from being clear and rational. There is no scientific method on the discovery side of science. Established science is not speculative/philosophical but where at its frontier where discovery is taking place, science is pureley philosophical/speculative.

Raphael, thanks for the post. Your demarcation lines for religion, science and philosophy assume an improbable definition of "rationality."

For simplicity's sake, let's say the most practical definition of "rationality" is the pursuit of a goal with appropriate means.

Religion's primary goal is to address humanity's four greatest fears: death, ignorance, loss of power and loss of community. Virtually all religions promise immortality in one guise or another. (Even Buddhism, offering no doctrine on god, guarantees reincarnation.) Divine providence provides enough knowledge to guarantee salvation (ceteris paribus!). Prayer gives us the power to attempt to sway god's beneficence in our direction. And religions until the advent of Marxism have been an important force for community bonding.

If a religion addresses these four fears in acceptable ways over long periods of time, shall we say that religions are irrational? Hinduism with its utterly improbable claim that we are god has managed to survive and flourish for ~3,500 years!

Both religion and philosophy provide rules for the direction of life. The salient difference is that philosophy subjects all of its commands to rational criticism. Re-ligion (from the Latin for "binding again") must hold at least one principle to be so sacred that it cannot be criticized or doubted (long and dark nights of the soul notwithstanding!).

Some philosophical hypertrophic generalizations are reduced over time to descriptions of experience (scientific generalizations) that may actually be mapped against experience that everyone may share--if they're willing to go through the apprenticeship process).

It was clear to virtually every ancient thinker that the universe revolves around the earth. Anthropocentrism is our natural flaw. From Aristarchus' revolution in Africa to Bessel's confirmation of stellar parallax consumed a period of many centuries.

The difficulty with philosophy's rationality is that we need answers to the most unanswerable questions in order to know how to live: where do we come from, why are we here, how should we live, and what may we hope for.

We can wait (and have waited!) millennia for answers to questions that have been reduced to empirically testable hypotheses (e.g., where are we in the universe?). We still haven't the faintest idea as to whether there may be billions of universes in addition to our own. Let's be patient!

But we can't be patient in deciding how to live from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. That's why philosophy is so important--and so fearsome....

And Louis, thanks for your post and vote! You're exactly right: Thinking is a continuum, and philosophy and science are right next to each other on the spectrum.

Let's consider Raphael's assertion about the meaning of life. The resolution of the question from the side of science is easy! "Meaning" means connectivity. Symbols are meaningful to the degree that they are connected to the experiences or patterns they represent. Experiences are "meaningful" to the degree that we are deeply connected to them.

"Life" is a series or pattern of connections that sustain themselves over time through the intake of energy and the expulsion of waster and have the capacity to reproduce themselves.

What, then, is the meaning of life? Connectivity. That part, the highly generalized description, was easy. The hard part is the prescriptive element of the meaning of life. How do we get from the description of connectivity to the command, "Only Connect"?

Feeling or desire is the source of the command, as Hume and Nietzsche pointed out. But if the desire is not universal or subject to universal interpretation, then we've jumped from science to philosophy.

And philosophy is purest speculation, ultimate guesswork about the ultimates. As such, we'll never reach consensus. Thank heavens! Philosophy is the ultimate "difference engine" that makes human variation and survival possible.

Charljes,

Philosophy is on a continuum with religion . Not in the narrow sense of these words. Long long time ago, philosophy was primarily seen as a way of life. Although '' the know the world'' and '' the know thyself'' were central to this highest form of religion (Pierre Hadot), ancient philosophers ultimate goal was to be happy through wisdom and not by filling library with books.

Raphael

The basis of physics is belief as well: belief in the postulates for instance those of Newton. His laws are not rational at all: what is rational about his "force"? An idea of an instantaneous interaction working at large distances?

Louis, philosophy and science are discontinuous with religion because of the absolute binding factor of religion. Philosophy and science--in principle--subject all beliefs to rational criticism.

Raphael, you're right that physics is grounded in belief. Two beliefs, in fact. The first: it's a good idea to practice science. Second: empirical confirmation is a good idea.

I love Paul Feyerabend's idea that "anything goes." But his idea works for science only in the sense of an initial choice to do science. If we create the sixth mass extinction of life through the power of science, we'll probably think science was the wrong way to go. At least in the way we went about science.

On the rationality of Newton's laws. Science's laws are generalized descriptions of experience. They acquire their stature through their usefulness for predicting and controlling experience.

As Richard Feynman put it in "The Character of Physical Law," all the mental gear we fabricate to sustain the research leading to the law is beside the point. Force is mass times acceleration. The nature of force itself apart from that definition, the mechanism for its transmission? We haven't the faintest idea. We've tried out "gravitons, vortices in the aether (Descartes), mass warping space (Einstein). But we're utterly clueless.

What's rational is what gets us to where we want to go without long or short range adverse consequences.

Newton's superior rationality? His brilliant "hypotheses non fingo." Loosely translated: I don't make any unsupported hypotheses about stuff I don't know anything about. For Newton as well as for us, the mechanism for "action at a distance" is a complete unknown. Same goes for the empirical subversion of Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky's thought experiment.

Charles,

My philosophy of science is very much along the post-critical philosophy of Michael Polanyi. And for me philosophy is not limited to a knowledge quest but is centered on the know thyself and this is primarily experiential and not simply about communications among ourselve about what we beleive about the universe.

Larry,

It all depend on what one consider scientific and what one consider religious. I early on in my life decided that I will only accept compatible interpretation of both.

Nobody can say religion as a large unspecified category is incompatible with science as a large unspecified category. One has to specified his/her definition of both and then say wether or not he/she think there are compatible.

Oleg is right. Science is born out of Philosophy and then onwards they go on exchanging their roles!

To my knowledge there is no science of morality , no scientific moral value, no scientific notion of human dignity. Science is a subset of philosophy which is a subset of religion.

Louis's comment is a bit confusing. N human activity worth a mention can be devoid of some Value System. Practiced religion need not be brought in for this discussion. But humanity matters through a value system that got evolved for our social interaction. My comment above was to describe that an intrinsic connect exists between science and philosophy. In fact in olden days, most of the science was conducted in the Depts. of Philosophy of Universities and Institutes of Learning.. Morality is intrinsic to science through truthful observation, data collection and analysis of results leading to tentative conclusion of a particular study in science.

Narendra,

Scientific practice is a social practice which require high ethic standard. Nonetheless none of that is included into the scientific knowledge itself.

Hi Everyone,

Anything can be called a science if it has an experimental basis. Philosophy is the super-set that includes the experiential basis as well, and therefore is the broadest possible human endeavor. It also happens to be the deepest possible human endeavor. It is not a subset of anything, much less, of religion. Of course there can be a philosophy of religion also, like a philosophy of everything under the Sun and beyond. Therefore there need not be any quarrel and classification of philosophy as a science would not fundamentally elevate its status nor is it possible or even desirable? It is unfortunate that we want everything to be classified as science and have scientific validity for it to be of any worth and credibility. Feynman said, "If something is not a science, it is not necessarily bad or wrong. It simply means that it is not a science.

We have to sooner or latter get away from this peculiar mindset and habit of running after the "science" or "scientific" tag for all that we value. Life and Nature and God have many more things of import than poor science, straight-jacketed by experiments and limited by human reason. Philosophy points out the road beyond.

Regards one and all,

Rajat

I wish I could say I thought of this but Aristotle and Quine beat me to it.

Knowledge is a spectrum ranging from hypertrophic generalizations (philosophy) through more modest generalizations (science) through particularizations (history) to unique expressions/creations (art).

To think is to connect (wish I'd said that! Voltaire). Thinking's connections range over the spectrum listed above.

Those four subjects use symbols to map "extra-symbolic" experience.

The three other disciplines of thinking connect symbols to symbols in sets of symbols in descending order of generality: math, logic and grammar.

Math studies all possible relationships of relationships (in three areas according to the Bourbaki group: number theory (arithmetic, etc.), class relationships (set theory, algebra, trig, calculus) and topology. Logic as a part of math is set theory. (Russell and Whitehead to the contrary notwithstanding!) Logic as taught in critical thinking or logic courses offered by philosophy departments studies the relations of classes as expressed in ordinary (English, Russian, etc.) or artificial (FORTRAN, Esperanto, etc.) languages. Grammar studies the relations of classes of words in ordinary or artificial languages.

That's all there is to thinking! The study of religion is a combination of metaphysics, theology (as a kind of metaphysical "science)," history, and perhaps most importantly, art in the sense of a practical art (as opposed to a fine art)--the art of binding a community together, the art of getting to heaven, etc.

Why philosophy is not a science. Philosophy generalizes over all possible experience. And importantly, philosophy doesn't simply state in universal terms "how things stand" or "what happens when.." Philosophy tells us how to live. Science is purely descriptive (although as some have said on the thread the practice of science is grounded in ethics). Philosophy is descriptive but at an extreme level of generality. And philosophy is prescriptive. The famous fact/value, is/ought chasm!

Now on Rajat's important post! Philosophy is indeed "experiential," even experimental. But philosophy's generalizations are so utterly extreme that the experimental verification is still going on after 5,000 years of experience: "love is the answer"; "pleasure is the answer"'; "freedom is the answer"; "meditation is the answer"' "school is the answer."

You'll recognize Christ, the Stoics, Nagarjuna, Mo-Ti, hedonists, Bentham, Mill, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, the Buddha, the Hindus and the Daoists, Plato and Aristotle in those tidy little quotes.

What hubris those philosophers exhibit! And what fun our collective billions have had trying out their ideas. None have worked well enough to ward off the possible threat of our self-extinction.

Hence the need to democratize philosophy. We need all the help we can get to come up with truly viable philosophies!

My article in Teaching Philosophy and my research team's articles in Science and Engineering Ethics cover this material in more detail.

Hi, everybody,

I am wondering how we feel about the success of this forum, so far. If research gate is to be more than a way for us to preen, it has to generate conversations where people don't talk by each other, right?. It has to generate "convergence", not just display, right? Are we doing that? Or is the question just not the sort of question concerning which convergence is possible?

I am happy with this conversation not because of convergence but because I am learning from some other participants which I do not necessary agree with.

Hi, Dr. Brassard,

Well, I would see that activity as a first step toward convergence ... discriminating and articulating points of view. "Here is how we differ; his is how we are the same." Now, it's possible that you may not be interested in convergence. You might, for instance, be interested in the collection of opinions as an end in itself. You might be a natural historian of opinion.

In which case we differ. Like Peirce, I am interested in "fixing belief". And like Peirce, I guess I believe that the best way to fix belief, is not through stubbornness, not through authority, and not through a group of people deciding on what is agreeable to their principles, but through experiment in the broadest sense. Peirce included in "experiment" any testing of conception against experience, including thought experiments, and testing one's ideas against the experience of others. The experimental mindset what what set scientists apart in his mind, and he regarded philosophers as experimental scientist of a sort. Mathematicians, and perhaps some logicians, he kept apart because, on his view, they cared little about what was true, but only about what followed from what. Have you, by any chance, read Peirce's Fixation of Belief?

Nicholas,

A discussion forum is good for getting expose to a large range of ideas which force us to ajust our conceptions. By expressing my thoughts, it also help me articulating my thoughts. A discussion is a success if it achieve this. Such discussion cannot converge for all participants. Sub-group of participants might converge. I see such dialogue as a thinking together process even though there is rarely a global convergence. Although such a forum is ideas are exchanged using writing, it keep a lot of the oral mind set and so it is much easier for me to express myself in this almost oral medium.

Dr Brassard,

Is convergence -- honestly achieved -- a desireable outcome of scientific discourse? Or are we just artists working in empirical medium. Peirce was very hard on literary criticism. He wasn't enthusiastic about discussions that were not animated by a desire to know the truth of some matter.

N

Nicholas,

No problem with convergence but it is not necessary. We are all artists as far as we create something. I agree with Peirce on that.

Oh, I think Peirce would draw a hard line between art and science. Some modern semiotics gurus might disagree, but it's hard to read Peirce's texts in any other way. He was, after all, trained as a chemist.

Nicholas,

This page:

http://www.signosemio.com/peirce/esthetics.asp

seems to say otherwise.

Yes. And thanks for the website. But I think eventually I will be able to show you that that view is incorrect. Now, as I understand it, we have begun to do science. I.e., we both assume that there are facts of the matter, and we are doing experiments to test our understanding of those facts. Your "experiment" was to look up the website; my "experiment" will be to go back through the Peirce texts I have and try to find those passages in which he is critical of the lit'ry/artistic mindset. Unless I get lucky, this may take me a while, particularly since I will be on the move over the weekend. In short, I owe you.

Of course, it's possible that Peirce's views on this subject are not the sort of domain in which there is a truth of the matter. I have been reading Peirce for two years but I have read only a small part of the enormous corpus of his work. So it is possible that the fact of the matter that we discover is that there is no fact of the matter.

In which case, doing science about it will be fruitless..

But, as I say, I owe you.

Stay well,

N .

Charles Verharen of Howard Univ., Washington, DC

, i saw your query/response to me some where but lost track of it. I am sorry. I like to respond better on direct Internet Id's rather than on LinkedIn as my responses are put under scrutiny and gets delayed from the discussions on various sites, including Research Gate and others .

Narendra Nath

Hi, Narendra

It's 10 posts above your post above.

Dr. Brassard,

Ok, so my assignment is to support the claim that Peirce "would draw a hard line between art and science"

From his essay, the Fixation of Belief, from a passage in which he is criticizing the "a priori" method of fixing belief. ====> "This method resembles that by which conceptions of art have been brought to maturity.The most perfect example of it is to be found in the history of metaphysical philosophy. Systems of this sort have not usually rested upon any observed facts, at least not in any great degree. They have been chiefly adopted because their fundamental propositions seemed "agreeable to reason." Rorty: Literature has now displaced religion, science, and philosophy as the presiding discipline of our society

Peirce: [I] desire to rescue the good ship Philosophy for the service of science from the hands of lawless rovers of the sea of literature. ...As for that phrase, "studying in the literary spirit", it is impossible to express how nauseating it is to any scientific man.

Nicholas,

"agreeable to reason." seems to support that an artistic aesthetic pleasure is involved.

Pierce studied Kant and Kant in the Critique of Judgment gives a place to art in science.

Nicholas,

“Esthet-ics and logic seem, at first blush, to belong to different universes. It isonly very recently that I have become persuaded that that seeming isillusory, and that, on the contrary, logic needs the help of esthetics. Thematter is not yet very clear to me.”

https://www.academia.edu/189987/Peirces_Esthetics

From the standpoint of practicality, it is obvious that esthetic normativity, in relying chiefly on attraction or insight—that is to say, on the only form of assurance afforded by abduction—, offers very little security in making esthetic discriminations in the actual process of formingnew ideals. Yet, this being said, one must not believe that Peirce con-ceived of abduction as an unbridled process of invention arrived atthrough the sole agency of pure chance . Rather, he saw it as a process of forming hypotheses subject to final causation. This means that abduc-tion’s rationality—based on our ability to insightfully guess the truth, toinstinctively grasp the continuity of things—is itself increasing, if only infinitesimally, as it takes into consideration other, established, hypotheses. Guessing right, in other words, is also subject to growth. Now, themore an ideal or a habit of feeling grows and consolidates, the morequalities of feeling tend to be attracted to it.

https://www.academia.edu/189987/Peirces_Esthetics

'' This said, however, there should be no doubt —as indeed the quotation usedas epigraph to this essay illustrates—that he came to understand the continuity

that exists between art and science. Peirce, of course, never pro-duced a full-fledged

theory of art and his direct contributions to thephilosophy of art are at best minimal. Yet his writings on estheticsnonetheless indicate a will to integrate

art into his esthetic concerns. ''

https://www.academia.edu/189987/Peirces_Esthetics

Dr. Brassard,

I am a little nervous that we might be abusing this setting, which seemed to be conceived as a place to ask and answer speicif questions with a definitive answer ... :How many toes does the three-toed sloth have on his right foot?" more in the spirit of Peirce, by the way. But I am also learning a lot from this discussion. Do you have another forum where we should take it, or shall we continue here? I feel that if we are going to do it here, we are obligated to "get some where", not just to spin off opinions endlessly

But continuing for the moment: Abduction is a huge can of worms. I LIKE to think of it in its narrowest sense, as inferring the class membership of an individual from knowledge of the properties of the class and the properties of the individual -- "This bird is black; All ravens are black; this bird is a raven." With one concordant property, this inference is "intolerably weak", but valid. Its probability increases with the discovery of more concordant properties. "This bird is black and says, "Caw"; all ravens are black and say caw; this bird is a raven" . Etc. This sort of thinking can be used to impute causes, but it is not limited to doing so.

There is no question that Peirce broadened his use of the term after 1900. I am inclined to think of this broadening has sloppy thinking brought on by the stress of having become an outsider to a world in which he was once the consummate insider. He lost his Civis Havardus Sum. I lost mine at an early age, so I may be projecting. Many people, I gather, see this "sloppiness" as the beginning of his true genius.

I find the later accounts of abduction disappointing because they give up on the project of providing a logical account of these "inspired guesses". I thought I saw in the early Peirce a determination to provide a logical account of the whole of scientific thinking and for him to give an account of scientific creativity which goes something like, "And then a miracle happens" was a big come down for me. I want to know how these "bold conjectures" are arrived at, and I thought when I started reading Peirce, that ultimately he was going to tell me.

Let me know if you think we should take this to another forum.

Others might have an opinion on whether we are violating a rule. If so, I would like to hear from them.

N

PS, Oh, and Yes. He regarded logic and aesthetics as both examples of normative sciences, sciences that uncover the packed-down midden of human experience.

Nicholas,

I sudgest that you post a question about Peirce's philosophy so that we can continue this dialogue.

Better science through art.

Richard P. Gabriel, Kevin J. Sullivan

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221320970_Better_science_through_art?ev=pub_cit_inc

QUOTE:

Some of the oldest stories we know, including cre¬ation myths, were attempts to make sense of the world. Those early storytellers invented answers to the mys¬teries all around them. Why does the rain come? Why does it stop? If a child is created by two adults, from where did the first two adults originate? What is the earth like beyond what we have seen, and be¬yond what the people we know have seen? What lies beyond the stars? [11]

We call these stories literature now, or religious tracts. But at the time, they passed as science.

Looking at art objectively, given this more enlightened view, it seems that artists, engineers, and scientists are not so different after all.

They all create knowledge of one sort or another—some¬times “hard science” knowledge, sometimes “how to” knowl¬edge, and sometimes “what about it” knowledge. Artists cre¬ate language and other sorts of realities (like engineers). They work through the medium of the pieces of art they endeavor to create. Theses pieces are devices used to understand and explain the world. —And not just the natural world, but the world of human perception, conditions, values and ethics, emotions, etc. The subject matter and means of investigation are different, but the architecture of the processes are similar across the art, science, engineering spectrum. Should we coin a word for this process? Is it research?

Robert Boswell, the fiction writer, puts it like this:

I have grown to understand narrative as a form of contemplation, a complex and seemingly incongruous way of thinking. I come to know my stories by writing my way into them. I focus on the characters without trying to attach significance to their actions. I do not look for symbols. For as long as I can, I remain purposefully blind to the machinery of the story and only partially cognizant of the world my story creates. I work from a kind of half-knowledge.

In the drafts that follow, I listen to what has made it to the page. Invariably, things have arrived that I did not invite, and they are often the most interest¬ing things in the story. By refusing to fully know the world, I hope to discover unusual formations in the landscape, and strange desires in the characters. By declining to analyze the story, I hope to keep it open to surprise. Each new draft revises the world but does not explain or define it. I work through many drafts, see is always dwarfed by what I cannot know. What the characters come to understand never surpasses that which they cannot grasp. The world remains half-known.

…

There can be no discovery in a world where every¬thing is known. A crucial part of the writing endeavor is to practice remaining in the dark. [27]

In the cycle of explore-discover-understand, creative acts take place in the discover phase, where abduction—guess¬ing—happens. Exploring with an open mind—perhaps with defocused attention—an artist or scientist might guess / hyo¬thesize that something might be the case or might be worth turning into a work of art. Then in understanding the guess—either verifying / validating it as a scientist or working out its best artistic expression as an artist, one can then embark on further exploration, further discovery, and further un¬derstanding.

Conference Paper Better science through art

Charles, i located your response and find it interesting.Globalization of both philosophy and science is not as easy as one may contemplate. East and West have yet to meet and comprehend each other. Regional differences also exist. Individual thinking can never become that of community and then what to say of a nation and the world. The answer lies in the State of One;smind. I attach a mss for you to go through and kindly respond thereafter. Warm New Year Greetings

The art of science: interview with Professor

John Archibald Wheeler

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.4532v1.pdf

Interviewer:

You are not only a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

which combines both creative activities you spoke now so beautifully about, but

also a member of the American Philosophical Society. So, I would like to ask you

yet, what is your opinion on the relation between science and philosophy. Even

with such an outstanding place concerned with fundamental aspects of physics

as Caltech, for example, one feels that at present there is no immediate fruitful

interaction between science and the philosophy of science. But, perhaps, Caltech

is a more “pragmatic” school than Princeton.

Answer by John Archibal Wheeler:

Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France in World War One, said that war

is too important to be left to the generals. He took control of the situation.

And one could say that philosophy is too important to science to be left to

the philosophers. But there are two extreme views. There is the view of one

man who describes the philosophy of science as a tin can which is tied by string

behind the automobile of science. And as science goes quietly ahead, this tin

can rattles on the street and it is what makes all the noise. That is one view.

But the other view is much deeper. Thomas Mann, in his lecture celebrating the

eightieth birthday of Sigmund Freud, said: “Science never makes an advance

until philosophy authorizes and encourages it to do so”. . .

Well, you can have your choice between those two views!

It is not easy to find any final answer on questions of philosophy and Science. Caltech and Princeton can exchange status. With reference to the world as a whole, these arguments do not matter as the level of humanity goes on changing and sometimes it changes in cycles depending on the quality of few individuals who happen to represent the powers that be and thereby control the destiny of nations even other than their own. Today, USA may be the most powerful nation. Another day soon, China may claim such a status de -facto. Later on, may be India comes into such a significance. History has shown that any such thing becomes possible. Interlinking of such changes have uncertain probabilities as destiny plays strange games

Narendra,

The days of the more powerfull nation are over given that these political entities are gradually evaporating in the global politic of the world.

Louis, you have a good point to ponder over, i agree!

Can philosophy develop by itself, without the support of science? Can science "work" without philosophy? Some people think that the sciences can stand apart from philosophy, that the scientist should actually avoid philosophizing, the latter often being understood as groundless and generally vague theorizing. If the term philosophy is given such a poor interpretation, then of course anyone would agree with the warning "Physics, beware of metaphysics!" But no such warning applies to philosophy in the higher sense of the term. The specific sciences cannot and should not break their connections with true philosophy.

I agreeb that philsophy and science depend on one another. Philsophy is an art of learning and thought generation and science provides logical and rational approach. An appropriate mix provides the means to live in a practical manner in a community, nation and globally. Mind accordingly should get expanded to accomodate many relative variety of truths as absoluteness/ final authority does not exist. The ideal is termed God by we humans!

Narendra,

Do you agree that the outer products of Philosophy and science be philosophical and scientific narratives but the inner aspects can be and should primarily be dharma.

Oh, gosh. I just have to say, when we start talking about "God" and "Dharma", I start to lose it. Charles Peirce (whose [early] views on this subject I highly recommend) noted how metaphysical arguments tend to fly off in all directions, with each participant trying to develop his own school. By contrast, scientific arguments tend, in the vary long run, to converge on a common view. It was this characteristic of scientists -- that they are ultimately bound together by a faith that there is a truth of the matter to be discovered -- that separates them from poets, artists, and literary critics.

N

Nicholas,

A metaphysical discourse is one that attempt to answer ultimate questions. There is nothing wrong with trying to answer ultimate questions. It seems a natural course of action of most important thinker to try to do so and Peirce and Whitehead are among the best american in the ultimate discourse arena. A closer analysis of such discourse show that the ideas that are developed are not so varied as their outer expression let suppose and the number of ultimate idea that are judged as fundamental are so numerous either and such discourse in fact show a remarkable stability accross millenia and accross cultures. The separation from poets, artists is only on the surface because every truly creative humans is a kind of poet or artist in the medium he/she choose to express.

Regards,

I don't think I said there was anything wrong. I said, only, that [on Peirce's view, and perhaps mine as well] scientists are people bound together by a commitment to the discovery of The Truth of Some Matter. This is NOT to say that there are not other ways of fixing belief. This is only to say that what defines science -- as opposed, say, to literary criticism -- is that, however much we might disagree about what the truth of the matter is, we are agreed that there is one and that we will ultimately find it. N

Nicholas,

Scientistsare people bound together by a commitment to the discovery of the truth on some aspects of the world. There are technical/specialized philosophers working in an area of philosophy sufficiently developed to be unambiguously expressed so as to allow empirical verification. It is the definition of this special type of art form.

Dr. Brassard, I was pleased to see you referencing storytelling. I understand the constraints of a forum such as this; however there is a great deal more yet to be used information contained in stories which can be unlocked through earning an understanding of stories. By stories I refer to Sufi Teaching Stories, which if a dichotomy is needed, then would still be classified as scientific. I will let Dr. Robert Ornstein, longtime colleague and friend of Idries Shah before Shah passed, finish for me:

Copy of Press Release on 10/16/02

Robert Ornstein To Speak at Library of Congress on Afghan “Teaching-Stories and the Brain.” Leading psychologist says little-known literary form develops thinking skills. A form of literature little-known in the West but common in Afghanistan can help develop thinking skills and perceptions, says neuropsychiatric expert Robert Ornstein. The internationally renowned psychologist, pioneering researcher and author of more than 20 books—including The Psychology of Consciousness, The Roots of the Self and The Amazing Brain—will discuss this form of literature, called the “teaching-story,” at the Library of Congress Friday, Nov. 1, 6:30-7:30 p.m., Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E. in Washington, D.C.

While Western educators and psychologists are just now beginning to acknowledge the effectiveness of this type of story in developing thinking skills and perceptions, it is still largely unknown here, though it has been used for such purposes elsewhere in the world for centuries, says Ornstein. Although found in many cultures, it is especially prevalent in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Middle East, he notes. On the surface, says Ornstein, teaching-stories often appear to be little more than fairy or folk tales. But they are designed to embody—in their characters, plots and imagery—patterns and relationships that nurture a part of the mind that is unreachable in more direct ways, thus increasing our understanding and breadth of vision, in addition to fostering our ability to think critically.

"These stories, with improbable events that lead the reader's mind into new and unexplored venues, allow her or him to develop more flexibility and to understand this complex world better,” he says. Ornstein, who has taught at Stanford, Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco, says psychologists have found that reading teaching-stories activates the right side of the brain much more than does reading normal prose. Ornstein sees stories as being part of our basic cognitive development, leading the child and then the adult to learn more about what happens in the world, when and how events come together. He points out that the stories of all cultures share more in this regard than they differ, and that an analysis of stories throughout the world shows that the same story occurs time and again in different cultures.

"Stories have been part of all cultures from time immemorial,” says Ornstein, “but only recently has their psychological significance been discovered, especially in teaching-stories.”

PR 02-147

10/16/02

ISSN 0731-3527

As a professor, I have used teaching stories in the only psychology course from 1,000 to 7,000 level courses I have taught that they can be incorporated into appropriately: Psychology of Adjustment or Psychology of Personal Effectiveness. These are 1,000 level, applied, general psych courses and the Shah book I use is "Learning How to Learn," the one he recommends reading first and the only one cross referenced under Religion and Psychology. It would be worth your time, and probably could be found in your native language, if you were interested. Best,

Kelly

Can philosophy be called as a science in itself? If not, what is the difference between the two? Science and philosophy addresses the different questions. The subject matter of science and philosophy is different. For example, Can we tell a lie? philosophy or religion will answer this question, whereas, scinece has no interest with this question. On the other hand, what physiological changes arises when a person tells a lie. Science will answer this question, whereas, philosophy has no interest with this question.