A Will to Philosophy

What makes a person scientific? What makes a person philosophic? What are the differences between science and philosophy? To answer these questions it is helpful to begin by asking how science and philosophy are similar.

Both science and philosophy have as goals the discovery of truth about universe. Their scope may range from the grandness of all the cosmos to the tininess of quanta, from the farthest and oldest of galaxies to the nearest and newest of simple wonders here on earth, from the elegant concreteness of physics to the entangling nebulousness of metaphysics. Always both seek discovery of truth through practical investigation rather than through revelation or a dependence upon the supernatural.

Their investigations both follow specific method, but here lies the fundamental difference. The method of science is experiment and theory; the method of philosophy is reason alone. Science seeks truth through evidence and repeatability; philosophy does not. Science is philosophy with falsifiability.

This key difference may make science seem the better of the two, but evidence and falsifiability are not always advantageous in the search for knowledge. While they help science to discover knowledge with better accuracy and reliability, and from that we achieve some rather fantastic results, such as putting men on the moon and safely returning them to earth, science's need for evidence and reliability forbears it from seeking out truth that is currently untestable. Scientists may speculate at great length about the untestable, but when doing so they are being philosophers, not scientists.

I like science, but I am no scientist. I enjoy thinking speculatively, and I enjoy identifying and understanding complex patterns in the world around me. I prefer to build knowledge upward toward the abstract more than downward toward the concrete. I enjoy grand ideas. I also don't like to be proved wrong, and so I am a philosopher.

I'd like to make a shift here at Just Enough Craig and share more philosophy and less lifestyle--at least, fewer aspects of lifestyle that have little application of philosophy. I think I'll start with my next post by discussing some of my reflections on the most dismal of sciences, which I think is not so much a science as it is a philosophy: economics.