STEM’s Philosophy Problem
It seems fashionable for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) people to dismiss and deride the humanities in general and philosophy in particular. Stephen Hawking (PhD.) said “philosophy is dead”. Popular STEM cartoon strip XKCD often derides philosophy as contrarian and/or useless.
A photo taken during an engineering lecture at University of Canterbury in New Zealand. I understand that it’s a joke (and if I’m being honest, it’s not entirely unfunny), but “in the context of an ideological war on critical thinking coupled with the anti-intellectualism that infects this country”, there are surely better ways to address this.
Many STEM people just don’t understand the point of philosophy. They think that science is about facts and philosophy is about opinions, that science is precise and philosophy is imprecise, that science is objective and philosophy is subjective, and perhaps most worrisome, that science is hard and philosophy is easy.
STEM Misconceptions of Humanities
It’s frustrating for humanities people to hear STEM criticisms because it’s so obvious that STEM people don’t understand the minimum amount necessary to discuss these disciplines meaningfully. Let’s put philosophy aside for a moment and take a brief look at three of the most popular humanities.
If you don’t know anything about history, you might think that it’s barely more than a series of names and dates and that’s all on Wikipedia so the entire history department is a waste of space.
When you study history, however, you realise that history is a series of competing narratives, and the project of historians is to identify, evaluate (and assemble) those narratives. Names and dates are mere facts. Facts have no meaning.
Students of history will be constantly aware of the need to keep an open mind, to adapt their approach to different types of information, to understand that the prevailing theory is just that; the prevailing theory, and that phrases like “we only use the facts” and “this is an objective account” are fairly reliable indicators that something is about to go badly wrong.
If you don’t know anything about psychology, you could regard it as pseudo-scientific bullshit that gives women something to do at university.
When you study psychology, however, you realise that it’s an ongoing process of applying critical thinking to rigorous research methodology to learn about human development at all stages of life and to better understand yourself and the people around you.
Psychology ultimately helps explain how to arm people with the tools they need to navigate the world and human interactions. Freud might have been wrong about everything, but I personally know people (and at least seven Woody Allen movies) who would not be here today were it not for Freud’s pioneering work. Are you going to tell those people that a study of psychology is a waste of time? That psychology isn’t a “real” science? Good luck with that.
If you don’t know anything about literature, you could think it’s a bunch of made-up stories by dead white men, or so pretentious and intentionally abstruse that you might as well not bother.
When you study literature, however, you realise it’s supposed to challenge you. It’s supposed to improve your understanding of the world around you and maybe even your understanding of other people. It forces you (sometimes rather violently and against your will) to think about something apart from yourself. It should make you kinder and more empathetic and constantly push yourself to be a better person.
STEM Misconceptions of STEM
However irritating it is to hear STEM misconceptions about the humanities, it’s even more peculiar to hear STEM misconceptions of their own disciplines.
All STEM relies heavily on the humanities, and philosophy in particular, for meaning, direction, and operating assumptions. If you go back far enough, STEM and humanities were literally the same thing: philosophy. Even now, the highest academic degree awarded by most universities is a PhD, which stands for Philosophiae Doctor.
Nobel physicist, Richard Feynman, says in his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, that when the first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert, all the scientists watching from a distance whooped and cheered. They were not grotesquely cheering for the upcoming holocaust of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; they were cheering because the numbers worked out. That’s as far as any of them could see.
There are people who work so hard and so long in fields of mathematics that they honestly believe, without any evidence at all, that “math is the language of the universe”, when it has been demonstrated - by a mathematician! - that math isn’t even the language of math.
There is nothing in STEM that can tell you, in any non-superficial sense, what the hell you’re doing, or whether it’s the right thing to do, or what any of it means. The recent controversies swirling around many well-known technology companies illustrate that this needs to be addressed for the good of society.
If you want to question the assumptions underlying whatever STEM thing you’re doing, you need to get your philosophy on.
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