Fleeting thoughts: Science as Philosophy vs. Philosophy as Science

One can formulate two versions of scientism according to that whether science or some area of it is considered as the source of general philosophical principles or as a model for philosophy to be build or stated. The former is designated as “science as philosophy”, and the latter, as “philosophy as science”.

An essential enough part of philosophy addresses some corpus of principles necessary to be deduced some area of human experience and knowledge from them. That approach obtains a completed and rigorous form in deductive-axiomatic method arisen at almost the same time as philosophy with Euclid’s “Elements”. If an area of scientific experience and knowledge is given, the deduced principles can refer to a much broader domain as long as it contains the initial area, from which the principles are deduced, and be discussed as an inductive conclusion if there are no known facts contradicting them or if those facts can be treated as “anomalies” or “exceptions”.

Thus an answer given by science about what underlies the world can be accepted as an inductive justified hypothesis about the universal substance and principles understood in a generalizing philosophical sense and as an example of the scientism defined thus.

Indeed the Gödel incompleteness theorems forbid for any axiomatics, including Peano’s arithmetic and therefore infinity in a sense, to be exactly equal to any corpus of knowledge. Its axioms can always comprise an area broader than what is meant and thus be discussed as a philosophical generalization.

That approach implies a simple and attractive methodology consisting in transferring of ideas, principles, and conclusions from the initial area to others not only scientific ones as different interpretations of the same principles inductively granted as general. One can consider the principle of complementarity in quantum mechanics or Freud’s psychoanalysis as examples for this.

On the other hand, science or selected areas of it can be a model for philosophy to become a “rigorous science”. Husserl’s phenomenology is the most famous attempt for that. However the result is a new kind of speculative metaphysics founding on the rather dubious experience of subjective contemplation. This example manifests the basic deficiency of “philosophy as science”: the difficultness or even impossibility to be defined some reach or access to specifically philosophical experience absolutely necessary to be applied scientific methods on it.

A scientism approach intermediate between the above two is science as a whole to be considered both as that corpus of knowledge, which can be inductively generalized as philosophy, and simultaneously as the model, which philosophy should follow to be right built and state. This approach is often paraded as “philosophy of science”, which can unify the two currents and movements. Unlike any speculative metaphysics referring to unobservable und thus unconfirmed and uncorroborated experience, its subject can be science of science. However its corpus of knowledge and its significance is incomparably less than those as the “big science” as mathematics, physics, biology, etcetera, and thus it is extremely unreliable as a source of generalizations.