In which I take on Stephen Hawking

As some people may have noticed Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have a new book out on the 9th September called The Grand Designer; an extract of which was published in the Times’ Eureka supplement. Now I admire and respect (Dr.?)Hawking but in this extract they make the following claim which really annoyed me.

“How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? … Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. [Emphasis mine]Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

Now aside from the fact that I spent the last three years of my life studying philosophy why did this statement annoy me? The most glaring reason is that betrays either a lazy use of language or a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy. Philosophy is a very broad subject. It is usually divided into four main branches: metaphysics, ethics, epistemology* and language. Now I could understand if they wanted to claim that metaphysics was dead. It is in area which has ceded a lot to science and is likely to cede even more. (It is also incredibly abstract, dry and difficult.) But metaphysics is only one branch of philosophy. If he is claiming that ‘science, particularly physics’ has also killed off ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of language then he is saying something truly bizarre! So they are either lazy because they fail to make the distinction between a branch and the whole of the subject, or ignorant because they don’t know that there is a difference. I suspect it’s the latter and hope it’s the former.

Now it may or may not be true that metaphysics is dead. Hawking is far from alone from thinking this, for example many Kantians (philosophers who are inspired by Kant’s philosophy) regard metaphysics as a hopeless endeavour. Not only dead, but stillborn. I don’t have the expertise to argue this one way or another.
A second reason is that a few paragraphs later the authors are engaging in epistemology. They quickly explain that because modern physics can not proceed by direct observation; and to deal with this they decide that:

“We shall adopt and approach which we call model-dependent realism’. It is based on the idea that brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it… the quality of reality or absolute truth.”

If philosophy is dead why are engaging in it? Moreover this extract illustrates one of the reasons why the philosophy of science* is still important. The counter intuitive nature of science, particularly physics’ findings requires epistemological investigation to explain why it is that these findings are valid. Sorry for the long rant, but I think that this is an important issue. It would be tragedy to abandon the centuries of thought that have gone into western philosophy and have contributed ( and continue to contribute) so much to such wonders as science, the enlightenment and parliamentary democracy. Also I suspect this book will be very interesting and informative, so its a shame to see such a mistake so early on.

*The study of how we know things.
*The study of how science works and epistemological consequences.