Last week I gave a paper at a conference, "Is Philosophy Useful for Science, and/or Vice Versa?," in celebration of the first year of the Doctor of Science program in Mathematics, Philosophy and Physics (MPP) at Chapman University, Schmid College of Science and Technology. It was based on and an extension of this blog-post on synthetic philosophy.
During Q&A, Emily Adlam asked me why I was leaving out philosophy of physics or physics in my argument. This puzzled me (I have no such intention). After some back and forth I realized that my use of ‘special sciences’ (as in ‘the effect of the cognitive division of cognitive labor on the special sciences and their relations’) was causing confusion.
Adlam assumed that the contrast to “special sciences” is physics. Adlam’s expectation is not idiosyncratic. For example, the first sentence of Jerry Fodor’s classic (1974) "Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)." Synthese 28.2: 97-115 starts with this sentence: “A typical thesis of positivistic philosophy of science is that all true theories in the special sciences should reduce to physical theories in the long run.” While in his argument, Fodor wants to reject the substantive thesis, he maintains the contrast between special sciences and the “generality” of physical theory.
By contrast, I tacitly assumed that physics has no special standing relative to other sciences and was just one among many special sciences. Within the division of cognitive labor, all sciences can provide constraints and mutual support to each other’s enquiry. And in so far as I treat (what I call) synthetic philosophy as a means of connecting locally different special sciences, physics has no special standing and so is a ‘special science,’ too.
Part of the terminological confusion between Adlam and myself was, however, the effect of my recent readings in 19th century works related to synthetic philosophy. (For I had planned to supplement my lecture on synthetic philosophy with some historical background.) During the nineteenth century, there was, in fact, a lively debate prompted by Comte and Spencer on the classification of philosophy and the sciences. This debate is, for example, discussed in Mill’s essay on “August Comte and Positivism.”
In this debate metaphysics (or system of metaphysics) or general philosophy is the contrast to ‘special science.’ (Mathematics and logic are often also treated as special sciences during such discussions.) So, for example, “METAPHYSIC is the science which considers existence in its most general aspect, so that the few most general laws which are to be established in this science must be capable of conforming to all the laws of the special sciences; and conversely, all the laws of the special sciences must agree in being capable of harmonising with the general laws of metaphysic, before they can be admitted as proved laws of existence.” (p. 345 in Time and Space A Metaphysical Essay By Shadworth Hollway Hodgson · 1865). Hodgson is a fascinating character (and the first president of the Aristotelian society).
The debate generated this really wonderful work by Robert Flint (1904): Philosophy as scientia scientiarum: and, A history of classifications of the sciences. (This book seems to have been written in anticipation of a reading by Justin E.H. Smith-Ruiu.) Flint shows how in different classificatory schemes the relationship between philosophy and the special sciences is reconfigured. I return to it below.
But even outside the confines of the debate, philosophy is treated as the general form of inquiry in contrast to the special sciences. In William Wallace’s posthumously published, Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics (which started out as a Gifford Lectures), he writes:
philosophy is no mere sum or generalization of the positive sciences. It is a view, or attempt at a view of Nature, i . e. the whole sum of facts, lived, experienced, and believed in their unity it is the fulfilment of the task which, according to Bacon, is appointed to man, to be the minister et interpres Naturae. That is more than the special sciences do or profess to do it is the work of a science, which is ideal no less than positive; a science which includes art, religion, and morality as its handmaids, but handmaids who are maids of honour and not mere helps in the kitchen of humanity. (103)
Unlike Hodgson, Wallace was very much part of a professionalizing philosophy and ended his life as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford.
Flint’s book is cited by Oppenheim and Putnam near the end of their (1958) influential "Unity of science as a working hypothesis” and one of the implied targets of Fodor (as Joseba Pascual-Alba noted in correspondence to me). Oppenheim and Putnam use Flint as an authority to the claim that their idea “of reductive levels employed…. may plausibly be regarded as a natural order of sciences” is really new. In fact, they use Flint to claim that in the past the order was “made on more or less intuitive grounds; it does not seem to have been realized that these orderings are "natural" in a deeper sense, of being based on the relation of potential micro-reducer obtaining between the branches of science.” (p. 28) In the footnote they remind readers of Comte’s anticipation(s) of their own view, but miss that they hold a very different view on the relationship among the sciences. For them linguistic unity comes from reducing the terms of special sciences to a privileged science like physics (or psychology) not philosophy.
I wrote a query to the HOPOS list serve about the possible sources of Fodor’s use of ‘special sciences.’ In response Michael Kremer alerted me privately to the following note that appeared in a 1948 issue of Mind:
Reading this pleased me greatly because it meant that my way of using ‘special science’ is not an archaic (and pre-analytic philosophy) artifact. (Some other time I will return to the connection between philosophy of science and history of science.)
So my current hypothesis is that the apparent exclusion of physics from the special sciences is an artifact of debates over reductionism among the sciences and the exceptional prestige of particle physics mid twentieth century. For the synthetic philosophers of the future, without such commitments, physics is not a special science, even if it may (for some purposes only) be primes inter pares sometimes.
Yes, I think this is exactly right. It's clear that, at different times over the last couple of centuries, different sciences have been thought to be 𝑓𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 in a non-reductionist sense. Chemistry, for example. It's only, IMHO, with the success of the atomic theory c. the turn of the century --1900-- that the reduction-to-physics conceptual model took real grip. At least that's the way I read history.