Not So Stupid As To Say That Kind of Stuff Either, Neilsie

Since Neil Degrasse Tyson is to be believed to be The Greatest Genius in the World, taking over that post from Issac Asimov and Carl Sagan, it is pretty stupid of him to have said what he did about philosophy (from a post by Massimo Pigliucci)

Neil made his latest disparaging remarks about philosophy as a guest on the Nerdist podcast, following a statement by one of the hosts, who said that he majored in philosophy. Neil’s comeback was: “That can really mess you up.” The host then added: “I always felt like maybe there was a little too much question asking in philosophy [of science]?” And here is the rest of the pertinent dialogue:

dGT: I agree.

interviewer: At a certain point it’s just futile.

dGT: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, what are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

(another) interviewer: I think a healthy balance of both is good.

dGT: Well, I’m still worried even about a healthy balance. Yeah, if you are distracted by your questions so that you can’t move forward, you are not being a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world. And so the scientist knows when the question “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a pointless delay in our progress.

[insert predictable joke by one interviewer, imitating the clapping of one hand]

dGT: How do you define clapping? All of a sudden it devolves into a discussion of the definition of words. And I’d rather keep the conversation about ideas. And when you do that don’t derail yourself on questions that you think are important because philosophy class tells you this. The scientist says look, I got all this world of unknown out there, I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind. You can’t even cross the street because you are distracted by what you are sure are deep questions you’ve asked yourself. I don’t have the time for that. [Note to the reader: I, like Neil, live and work in Manhattan, and I can assure you that I am quite adept at crossing the perilous streets of the metropolis.]

interviewer [not one to put too fine a point on things, apparently]: I also felt that it was a fat load of crap, as one could define what crap is and the essential qualities that make up crap: how you grade a philosophy paper? 

dGT [laughing]: Of course I think we all agree you turned out okay.

interviewer: Philosophy was a good Major for comedy, I think, because it does get you to ask a lot of ridiculous questions about things.

dGT: No, you need people to laugh at your ridiculous questions.

interviewer: It’s a bottomless pit. It just becomes nihilism.

dGT: nihilism is a kind of philosophy.

The latter was pretty much the only correct observation about philosophy in the whole dialogue, as far as I can tell.

I very strongly suspect that like most sci-guys these days, Neil Degrasse Tyson has read little to no philosophy and he obviously doesn't have the slightest idea of what he's talking about.   As Pigliucci notes he's said such stupid things before:

“Up until early 20th century philosophers had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum mechanics, remember the philosopher is the would be scientist but without a laboratory, right? And so what happens is, the 1920s come in, we learn about the expanding universe in the same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientists was rendered essentially obsolete, and that point, and I have yet to see a contribution — this will get me in trouble with all manner of philosophers — but call me later and correct me if you think I’ve missed somebody here. But, philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, the word physicist didn’t even exist in any important way back then. So, I’m disappointed because there is a lot of brainpower there, that might have otherwise contributed mightily, but today simply does not. It’s not that there can’t be other philosophical subjects, there is religious philosophy, and ethical philosophy, and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosophers to do, but the frontier of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them.”

Makes you wonder if the Cosmos guy has ever dipped much into cosmology, which can't escape questions of philosophy or his ideological buddies, such as Larry Krauss, whom the philosopher William Lane Craig mopped the floor with and Sean Carroll, who came closer to that fate than I think he could believe he might.

As an informal student of Arthur Stanley Eddington, a far greater astrophysicist than Tyson is likely to develop into, I especially liked this from Pigliucci's answer.

You and a number of your colleagues keep asking what philosophy (of science, in particular) has done for science, lately. There are two answers here: first, much philosophy of science is simply not concerned with advancing science, which means that it is a category mistake (a useful philosophical concept ) to ask why it didn’t. The main objective of philosophy of science is to understand how science works and, when it fails to work (which it does, occasionally), why this was the case. It is epistemology applied to the scientific enterprise. And philosophy is not the only discipline that engages in studying the workings of science: so do history and sociology of science, and yet I never heard you dismiss those fields on the grounds that they haven’t discovered the Higgs boson. Second, I suggest you actually look up some technical papers in philosophy of science to see how a number of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians actually do collaborate to elucidate the conceptual and theoretical aspects of research on everything from evolutionary theory and species concepts to interpretations of quantum mechanics and the structure of superstring theory. Those papers, I maintain, do constitute a positive contribution of philosophy to the progress of science — at least if by science you mean an enterprise deeply rooted in the articulation of theory and its relationship with empirical evidence.

Call me skeptical but I doubt Tyson is going to take much time from his career as The World's Greatest Genius (granting that title seems to have moved from PBS to FOX, nowadays) to do much boning up on current philosophy of science and no one on TV or radio or podcast is going to call him on it.  I have noted before how Paul Feyerabend dressed down an earlier generation of scientists on their ignorance of philosophy

The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth.

If there's one thing obvious about the guys mentioned in Pigliucci post, they ain't no Feynmans or even Schwingers.    As I recall Pigliucci took part in the round table discussion led by Carroll that motivated my post, linked to.  It makes me wonder why he doesn't see through the arrogant ideological position that has led to the ignorance of these conceited geniuses.

Rupert Sheldrake recently commented on the massive ignorance of most scientists whose training was so incredibly narrow as to make them entirely ignorant of other things that used to be part of a general, liberal education.  If I can find a transcript I'll post that.   It's especially hilarious for someone who has read philosophy to hear how often these guys gas on in a philosophical manner even as their education doesn't clue them into the fact that they are philosophizing.

Update:   Here's where Rupert Sheldrake made that point, at 20:55, a point which even Colin Blakemore has to agree with, for the Sheldrake detractors out there.

Update: 2  RMJ has written a better piece about this.