One example is falsifiability. As of today, statements which are unfalsifiable are seen as pseudoscience and not science. This distinction was largely promoted by Karl Popper, a philosopher. And widespread adoption of falsifiability happened mostly in the 60s and 70s IIRC.

Prior to that point, theories were often accepted as true if they had a lot of explanatory power, in other words, if they seemed to explain a large set of observations. This made it very difficult to rigorously argue that, e.g., Astrology should not be considered scientific, because it seemed to have a lot of confirming evidence.

This is one of those things that seems really obvious in hindsight, but was a surprisingly big advance in how science was conducted in several fields. A more concrete example is how it affected social sciences like Psychology. Prior to Popper there were a lot of widely held theories that made no falsifiable predictions, today theories that seem to explain everything are generally seen as substantially less rigorous and scientific than ones that are falsifiable.

Interesting. Let me stick to physics because that is the field I am most familiar with. If the idea of falsifiability was not well understood before the 60s, then how did physics manage to progress after Newton? I mean well before the 60s physicists had discovered mechanics, electrodynamics, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, etc. There were many other proposed theories, but these were the theories that survived empirical tests. Theories that made no testable predictions did not survive. So, based on the history of physics, it seems to me that physicists understood this idea well before Popper came along. Do you agree?

If you agree, then perhaps Popper was responsible for spreading this idea to the social sciences, but he was not the one who introduced it to science.

Now, falsifiability is in fact an outdated notion, and this too was appreciated well before the 60s. As a first example, consider quantum mechanics which was formulated in the beginning of the 20th century. It postulates that the state of a system is described by a wave function, but only certain aspects of the wave function can be observed. The theory makes many testable predictions, but not all aspects of it can be tested (and therefore falsified). Popper argued against this theory (along with Einstein), but it turns out he was wrong. So it seems to me that, not only did physicists understand falsifiability before Popper, but they actually understood more than Popper did (or at least some of them did, like Schrodinger).

A second point about falsifiability is that it is in fact quite a naive and unproductive idea, even without the complexities of quantum mechanics. It is true that theories cannot be proven, but it is also true that they generally cannot be falsified, except in very simple cases. If I have a theory that the sun rises every day, this theory can be falsified. But most theories rely heavily on statistical measurements, which are inherently uncertain. Therefore we can only assign a probability to whether the theory agrees with measurements or not. If we start thinking that we actually 'falsified' some theories, this can actually damage the progression of science. If you like Bayesian statistics, for each theory we can assign a probability of it being correct, based on our measurements, but the probability is rarely 0 or 1. This, again, is well understood by physicists, and I don't think this idea was introduced to physics by philosophers.

People worked during the day and not at night for ages before astronomers came along and described how the sun and the earth relate to each other. So, based on the history of human work, humans understood the solar system well before astronomers came along, otherwise no work would have been achieved. Do you agree?

The entire arena of String Theory was a clearly philosophical detour in physics. It captured the hearts and minds of the physics world for years... yet it was pretty much entirely conjectural.

> clearly philosophical detour

No. I am a string theorist. String theory was created by physicists to solve concrete theoretical challenges -- first the description the strong force (this did not work as intended), and later quantum gravity. These were longstanding open questions in physics. I am familiar with the history of string theory, and as far as I know no philosophers had any influence on it.

Perhaps my question wasn't clear, so let me rephrase. What contribution did philosophers make to science in the last 100 years?

There's a significant fault in your reasoning, that 'philosophy' is only performed by people who are socially recognised as being 'philosophers'. It's like saying that the only people who cook food are chefs - professionals recognised as food cookers. People who are professionally recognised as 'philosphers' are a miniscule fraction of the people who use and engage in philosophy, just like chefs are a miniscule fraction of the people who cook.

What you describe about string theory is philosophy. It's just not your personal definition of philosophy, which is based on a faulty stereotype. The funny thing is that it's only because you assign philosophy a stigma that you want to distance yourself from it.

I'm not sure if it's faulty reason, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.

It seems to me he's asking the equivalent of "what value do chefs have nowadays in the area of food preparation," which is a fair question independent of whether many people cook, and independent of whether cooks have in the past been immensely useful.

One answer I can think of is that keeping the 'profession' of philosophy alive encourages non-philosophers to ask important questions too, and even if it's nothing more than that, that might be good enough.

That said, while I think the profession of philosophy is much more than just that, I would also like to hear some answers to his (or otherwise just my) question.

Well, the chef analogy breaks down a little because much of what a chef does has a time limit measured in hours.

Modern-day philosophers don't have a lot to offer modern-day physicists I guess... because most of the relevant philosophical problems have largely been solved, especially in the area of experimental design.

I'm not a philosopher, and I don't bill myself as one. I was trained in science, have done a partial PhD on the visual system, and worked as a medical scientist. I have had zero formal classroom training in philosophy. I have one article published in a second-tier peer-reviewed journal. I see myself as a scientist and spent a quarter of my career working as one. I started out with the same ridiculous prejudices against philosophy as the naysayers here in this thread.

Then I started looking in a bit more detail about how and why we do experiments the way we do. The stuff we take for granted - things like minimising independent variables, or the null hypothesis, or peer review, or ethics in research, or the importance of being very specific in your starting definitions, or knowing how to ask a robust, testable question - all these kinds of things were reasoned about and a path(s) was found to the best way to do things to get robust results. And these things aren't inherent to the physical world - they're issues around reasoning. Not physics or biology or chemistry. It was eye-opening just how much ridiculous stigma and bad stereotypes are promoted by a certain kind of scientist.

Thing is, the two fields are not in conflict. For the most part, they are looking for truth in different areas - hence why doing physics and doing philosophy aren't mutually exclusive. They're not in competition, for the most part, and one field isn't 'better' than the other field. It's a silly, childish thing to suggest that these fields are competing; that there has to be a 'winner'. Does psychology 'win' over chemistry? Who 'wins' in the competition between music and mathematics? These fields aren't seen as being in competition (and there's some synergy between maths and music, just like I'm saying there is between physics and philosophy).

Asking "so, what have philosophers given physicists lately"(the occupations) is really a meaningless question, and implies that philosophy (the field) is only valid if it's constantly giving new insights to physics (the field). One could just as easily say "what have physicists given philosophers lately? Are philosophers of consciousness better able to discuss their topic because of the work of physicists?". Put that way, it's clear how silly it is to make these fields compete. Yes, there may be some conflict on the fringes ('what is the nature of existence' type stuff), but for the most part, they're harmonious entities, not enemies.

In short, the two fields are not dichotomous. You are in fact a significantly better scientist if you understand the reasons underlying why you conduct experiments the way you do. It allows you to modify your experimental procedures in a robust way. It's amusing to see people so stigmatising philosophy that they demand that their own philosophical utterances are due to a different field - as if it somehow hurts to say "this part of what I do is philosophy, that part is physics, and the other part is chef work". Elsewhere in this thread you'll see a lovely example, where someone uses Occam's Razor against philosophy... :)

Great, I think I now understand your biases, and I think you understand mine, and currently I do not spot any disagreement between us. So please allow me to refocus the discussion to the context of the original article. The article said:

> To redress the balance a bit, philosopher of physics Wayne Myrvold has asked some physicists to explain why talking to philosophers has actually been useful to them. I was one of the respondents, and you can read my entry at the Rotman Institute blog. I was going to cross-post my response here, but instead let me try to say the same thing in different words.

So in the context of the original article, 'philosophers' are clearly those individuals who hold philosophy degrees, have offices in the philosophy department, etc. You know, those individuals that people usually think about as philosophers. This is the context I was answering in.

You argue that a good scientist should think about philosophical questions that have to do with the nature of his research, and not just about concrete scientific problems. I completely agree. I also agree that when a scientist engages in this activity he is doing philosophy and not science. Therefore, I agree that doing philosophy is important (and in fact necessary) for doing good science.

I do not think that science and philosophy are competing in any way, and I apologize if I gave this impression. My question of "what have philosophers given physicists" is entirely in the context of the original article, which tried to claim that it is a good idea for physicists to talk to philosophers (the official ones, yes?). I am simply asking for evidence that it is indeed a good idea for these two groups of people to communicate.

I hope these comments put us on common ground. We both agree that good things happen when scientists engage in philosophy, today. My question is what good comes of philosophers engaging in philosophy, today. If you like, we can broaden this question well beyond science, and ask -- what concrete positive things have philosophers (the official ones!) contributed to humanity in the last 100 years?

To be fair, the 'competing' angle was mostly from my interaction with snowwrestler below, but there's elements of it wherever philosophy is given a stigma. I've seen similar positions from other scientists. The odd thing is that if there's a scientist who's of the opinion that their science is the only one that's important or true, it's usually a physicist. I haven't seen a biologist or chemist or the like take this position. Strangely, I have seen it from a psychologist.

I found the context of the article to be more talking about philosophy the field with occasional mentions of philosopher the occupation. In any case, I haven't read a lot of stuff from 20th C occupational philosophers - but it was talking to a philosopher that opened my eyes to the seeds of questioning my own stigma of the field. That lead me to more investigation of the methods and histories and reasoning of why we do science the way we do, and realising that understanding the process means you know why you're doing it that way, and where you can appropriately modify your methods

For example, I've butted heads here on HN before with people who think that the only way to 'do science' is with a null hypothesis and a double-blind trial. For some cases in medicine, this isn't possible (usually due to both low n and ethics), so case studies are used. Case studies are recognised as not being as robust and subject to a number of caveats, but they still give us knowledge that can be used to make predictions and repeatable actions. Keep in mind the caveats, and you're drawing from a valuable pool of knowledge. The difference here is understanding what you're trying to get (robust, repeatable data, preferably published), rather than having a golden method that is the One True Thing and any departure from it is straying from the right path.

But back to the question of what occupational philosophers have given to society recently, I don't know. But philosophy has given us astounding amounts, including most of the egalitarian and civil rights advances we've seen. I get the impression that occupational philosophers 'keep the flame alive', and that their work infiltrates other fields via philosophy fans in those fields. Certainly for physics and science in general, most of the philosophical problems have been solved, though there are still some hanging about, like how do we define consciousness? In order to study it, we need good definitions, and this one eludes us with great agility - philosophical discussions on this at least help nail down what it isn't.