Introduction | The Philosophy Of Science [1st Edition]

        “Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness

        could have known that billions of years later, some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic

        molecules would fall together to make a place called Earth.  Or that life would arise, and thinking

        beings evolve, who would one day capture a little of that galactic light and try to puzzle out what had

        sent it on its way.”

        – Carl Sagan^I

        “Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.”

        – Willard Van Orman Quine^II

        Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am.^III  René Descartes' famous words are as much a declaration that he is a philosopher as they are a starting point for all of thought.  Is this statement chiefly one of epistemology, or ontology?  All philosophies consist of a two-sided coin: epistemology is the way of generating and vetting ideas, whereas ontology is the world those ideas are attempting to describe.  Ontology is the object; epistemology is the method for discovering its nature.  When Descartes says, “I think,” he is relying on that shared experience of all people: who but a charlatan could deny that they have a first-person, conscious experience—thought.  When he concludes, “therefore I am,” he is making explicit that since we're all experiencing consciousness, we must assume that something, some you must exist to do that thinking.  I think that it is a good thing that it is difficult to tease apart epistemology from ontology, in this case: it appears the foundation of science is some kind of prototype, or unification of the two, as all epistemology is performed through thought, and all thought occurs in objects, namely, brains (ontology).  Beginning with “I think” seems to imply that epistemology comes first, but the conclusion “therefore I am” argues that ontology must have preceded this thinking; one cannot flip the statement to say, “I am, therefore I think,” as many things are (for example, stones) but do not think, and thus it would be incoherent to suppose they would be able to establish their own existence, let alone the existence of anything else.

        Make no mistake, there is an external reality out there of which every one of us is a part, as stones prove.  In fact, as we will see much later, at least in our small region of the vast cosmos, about the first 10 of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution went by without anyone to notice: an eternity of stones.^IV  This world was always governed by the laws of physical chemistry despite the fact that no one was around to discover the mathematical equations that symbolically describe them.  For most of that time, photons roamed free, doing other business, with no eye balls to detect them.

        The point of science is that since, as we shall much later see, physical chemistry produced self-replicating material, and since biological evolution eventually produced minds, we as minds can (however imperfectly) now understand the universe of which we are a part, outside and in.  To obtain an understanding of that ontology requires we utilize the proper epistemology for elucidating the right answers: there are potentially infinite ways to be wrong and only one way to be right.  All believing things die believing something or another that isn't so.

        And so ultimately, ontology is principally fundamental, whereas epistemology is practically fundamental: we only have access to the former through the latter.  Epistemology itself is actually a facet of ontology, when you think about it: just as some objective planet Jupiter exists in all its physical detail, some objective scientific method exists as the best way for a brain to figure out other ontological information.  Indeed, epistemology itself evolves over time, like any science, as we make new discoveries about it.^V

        Philosophies are world-views, whether we realize it or not: they tell us what the world is and how to navigate it.  This book is a love letter to the philosophy of science, and I hope, an education in those twin pillars: epistemology and ontology; the scientific method and the cosmos.

Steven Gussman

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See “Man In His Arrogance - A Great Speech By Carl Sagan” uploaded to YouTube by user Kiwis Journey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSrL0BXsO40) (0:44 – 1:17).

II. See the entry for this quote in goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7637386-philosophy-of-science-is-philosophy-enough). This quote found it's way to me by philosopher of science James Ladyman on physicist Sean Carrol's Mindscape Podcast (https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/02/11/episode-33-james-ladyman-on-reality-metaphysics-and-complexity/).

III. See The Dream Of Enlightenment: The Rise Of Modern Philosophy by Anthony Gottlieb (Liveright Publishing Corporation) (2016) (pp. 2). 

IV. See Cosmos by Carl Sagan (Random House Publishing Group) (1980) (pp. 27) and Pale Blue Dot: A Vision Of The Human Future In Space by Carl Sagan (Random House Publishing Group) (1994) (pp. 84).

V. See In Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science) by Steven Gussman (Footnote Physicist) (2021) (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/05/in-defense-of-philosophy-of-science.html) which further cites To Explain The World: The Discovery Of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg (Harper Perennial) (2015) (pp. 9, 254-255).