Presenter: Dr. Basit Bilal Koshul
Professor - Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Dr. Basit Bilal Koshul is a Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He joined LUMS in 2006 after teaching at Concordia College (Moorehead, MN) for four years. He earned his first PhD in 2003 from Drew University in Religion and Society (specializing in the Sociology of Religion) and the second in 2011 from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies (specializing in Theology, Ethics, Culture and Scriptural Reasoning). His areas of research include the philosophy of science, sociology of culture, philosophy of religion, philosophical theology and the contemporary Islam-West encounter. He is especially interested in integrating the insights of Muhammad Iqbal, Charles Peirce, and Max Weber.
Respondent: Dr. Bilal Masud
Former Professor and Director - Center for High Energy Physics, University of the Punjab
Dr. Bilal Masud has a doctorate (D. Phil.) from University of Oxford, England, and till recently has been professor and director, Center for High Energy Physics, University of the Punjab. He has worked (for post-doc fellowships) in USA and Finland. He has a number of publications in reputed Physical Review D and in other journals on mathematical modelling in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), some of them having a connection with string theory. He has also published and supervised PhDs on differential geometry and general relativity. In addition to particle physics, mathematics and computational physics courses, he has taught general relativity, and philosophy of science to both physics and commerce students. His YouTube channel has, so far, many videos on quantum mechanics.
Summary
The follow-up session to second event of The Two Cultures Initiative titled "Does Science Need Philosophy?" was arranged due to enthusiastic participation and strong interest of the audience. The session began with Ammar Qaseem presenting a summary of the results of the questionnaire collected from the audience in the previous session. This questionnaire asked the audience for their answer to the question 'Does Science Need Philosophy?' along with their reasons for the answer. The collected responses indicated that 74% of the participants answered yes while 9% said they were not sure. Only 17% answered in the negative.
The discussion started with Dr. Basit who took the analogy of the house - put forward by Dr. Bilal previously - further and highlighted that while science indeed has a right to define who gets to come in its house, it is nevertheless part of a community which is part of a bigger society whose norms and decorum it is expected to follow. Furthermore, science may be a single individual for a limited period but it will soon have - in fact it already has - its own children who will then treat it the same way it has been treating other members of the community.
In his response, Dr. Bilal reminded that he used the analogy of a house to make a distinction between the conditions of entry in a house and the list of those who enter the house. For the house of science, the former is the subject matter of the philosophy of science and the latter is the contents of science. He agreed that science does need the philosophy of science; that did indeed play an important role in keeping the ambitions of science in check. He agreed with the statement by Dr. Basit that "science is part of a community which is part of a bigger society whose norms and decorum it is expected to follow."
In the question-and-answer session, one member questioned the meaning of the question itself, positing that science and philosophy are essentially the same. In response, another member of the audience noted that whatever the ideal case may have been, the present divisions have to be reckoned with, so the question being raised is indeed relevant. Another audience member raised the question, "Does Science Need Philosophy?" in the context of hyper-specialization, using physics as an example. He contended that it is commonsensical that physics would require experts and specialists in physics, and non-physicists should not be part of the internal discussions. To highlight the difficulty the logic of this statement creates, Dr. Basit pointed out that the question raised by the member pertains to specialization, which is a topic Weber spent his life on, and that following their logic, only sociologists should then be allowed to speak on this topic. Giving a counter-example as to why specialists in physics actively need philosophy, Dr. Basit called into question the search for a "theory of everything" even though physicists and mathematicians have known at least since the 1920s, from Gödel's incompleteness theorems, that such a theory is mathematically impossible. The event ended on a note of appreciation and the need to continue and carry forward these discussions, despite, or because of the productive back and forth between the speakers and the audience it involves.
Reading Material
Science as a Vocation
Max Weber
Science as a Vocation is a renowned essay by the German sociologist and political Economist Max Weber, delivered in 1917 at Munich University just 3 years prior to his death. In this essay Weber asks the important question 'what is the value of science?' This question inevitably brings him to ask a related set of questions such as whether science can be free from suppositions, whether it can make a position worth holding and most importantly, whether scientific inquiry is (or has to be) underpinned by an ethic. Weber goes on to emphasize the need for separation of facts from values in a classroom setting, the double responsibility of a scholar in qualifying also as a teacher - "One can be a preeminent scholar and at the same time an abominably poor teacher" - and the important role which devotion and inspiration play in scientific inquiry. Finally, Weber highlights the fate of our times which is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by a "disenchantment of the world."
Weber, M. (2004). Science as a Vocation. In T. B. Strong & D. Owen (Eds.), & R. Livingstone (Trans.), The Vocation Lectures (pp. 75–105). Hackett Publishing Company. (Original work published 1919)
Notes on Scientific Philosophy
Charles Peirce
In this text, Peirce presents his vision of a "scientific" philosophy. In the introduction to this kind of philosophy, he notes that every science takes certain propositions to be true, on which the structure of the entire activity of that science rests. Yet, the science itself has no means to verify them. It is the function of scientific philosophy alone to examine those propositions and prescribe the degree of confidence that may safely be reposed in them. In the later sections of the text, staying true to the character of the proposed philosophy, he carries out an examination of the established epistemic ideals of 19th century scientific thought. He proposes a "course correction" that the ideals of absolute certainty, absolute exactitude, and absolute universality should be repaired with fallibilism, continuity, and evolution respectively. Consequently, true "scientific" knowledge of an object according to Peirce is not that which is beyond any doubt, precise to the last dot, and without any exceptions whatsoever but that which is the most approximate to facts, which is continuous with previous data and findings, and that which is capable of enlargement and enrichment with the passage of time.
Sanders Peirce, C. (1935). Notes on Scientific Philosophy. In C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss (Eds.), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Vol. I (pp. 64–81). Harvard University Press.
Max Weber's Work and Our Times:
The Sociological Significance of Weber's Methodological Insights
Basit Bilal Koshul
In this essay, the author primarily highlights the value of Weber's reflections on the methodology of the social and cultural sciences in clarifying science's understanding of itself. The author argues that Weber's contribution to the self-understanding of these sciences is just as significant as the contribution of Einstein and Bohr/Heisenberg towards the self-understanding of physics. The author goes on to put forward Weber's position on four different points which set the social and cultural sciences apart from the natural sciences and from each other. In doing so, he seeks to bring out a number of unexamined presuppositions that shape the self-understanding of modern science. Finally, the author touches upon why the question of self-understanding of science is so important. Since science has played a major role in the disenchantment of the world, a change in the self-understanding of science brings with it novel possibilities for re-thinking the relationship between science and the larger culture and its implications for the “fate of our times.”
Bilal Koshul, B. (2022). Max Weber’s Work and Our Times: The Sociological Significance of Weber’s Methodological Insights. The Routledge International Handbook on Max Weber, 103–117. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003089537-10
Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought:
Kepler to Einstein
Gerald Holton
In this text, Holton presents a thematic study of developments in physics from Kepler to Einstein. He uncovers the "unverifiable, unfalsifiable, and yet not-quite-arbitrary" thematic hypotheses at the heart of these developments. By doing so, he shows that the popular opinion that science is (or is supposed to be) completely independent of culture is a view that is not only false, but also the exact opposite of this is true. Without such "unverifiable" and "unfalsifiable" hypotheses, scientific activity cannot even initiate. By drawing attention to actual case studies from Kepler to Einstein, he hopes to provide the philosophers of science with a new kind of data that has so far been ignored in their inquiry after the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Furthermore, he hopes to enable the intellectual historians to see with greater clarity the relationship between science and culture. Finally, he hopes to prompt science educators to modify their textbook definitions of science and the scientific method in light of this study.
Holton, G. (1988). Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (2nd ed.). Harvard University Press.
On the Art of Scientific Imagination
Gerald Holton
In this text, Holton draws attention to the indispensable element of the "art of imagination" in scientific activity in addition to the well-known elements of rationality, instrumentation, and mathematical modeling. He notes that most scientists are reluctant to talk about it, perhaps because they think their "public science" should be kept separate from their "private science" because the latter is detrimental to the success and growth of the former. He then elaborates this element by presenting the three ways in which this art is conducted: the visual imagination, the analogical imagination, and the thematic imagination which refers to the "thematic commitment" of that activity as elaborated in the other text.
Holton, G. (1996). On the Art of Scientific Imagination. Daedalus, 125(2), 183–208. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20013446
Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science
Lorraine Daston
Whereas Holton hinted at the reason why most scientists are reluctant to accept the "art of imagination" as integral to their activity as modeling and experimentation, Daston addresses this question directly. She exposes in no ambiguous words, the (self)-"fear" and the (self)-"loathing" that is the primary reason for this attitude. She examines the origins of this (self)-"loathing" and finds that it is rooted in the division between the personae of the "individualistic, brashly subjective," "artist" and the "collectivistic, objective," "scientist" in the middle of the 19th century.
Daston, L. (1998). Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science. Daedalus, 127(1), 73–95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027477