I asked this question about Scientism and the answers there quite brilliantly explained to me why Scientism is philosophically inconsistent.

But I just want to know: What is the relationship between Philosophy and Science?

Personally, I think the scientific method must be assumed as an axiom/premise in Philosophy. My argument is that there is no way to deny the sure success of the sciences (like Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, etc).

So, what is the relationship between Philosophy and Science?

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    The relation is clearly bi-directional. Science has been heavily influenced by philosophy: atomism, spce and time, are example of ideas widely discussed by philosophy before science understood how to manage them. At the same time, today philosophy can hardly ignore the universal success of science and the fact that some (at least) ancient philosophical problems have been succesfully addressed by science. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Mar 1 '18 at 15:12
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    Philosophy was originally science; Newton called himself a Natural Philosopher and not a scientist; Rutherford published in a philosophy magazine; the word 'scientist' is a fairly recent coinage; today that relationship is rather less close - though you have the fields of the philosophy of science, physics or biology; more widely, philosophy also asks questions about the relationship of science to society and to man. – Mozibur Ullah Mar 1 '18 at 16:07
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    "THE scientific method" continues to never have existed. – jobermark Mar 1 '18 at 19:39
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I find it useful to approach this question from the bottom up. You made a philosophical argument:


One of the things I love about philosophy is once you take a stand like this, there's always a line of questioning which can unsettle your position. I find it's useful to unsettle it first, and then use that uncertainty to explore the other interesting parts of the question. So that being said, I will not deny the sure success of the sciences.

Instead, I will question it.

I'm not going to say that the sciences haven't had sure success, I'm simply not going to immediately accept that the sciences have been a sure success. I'm going to ask you to convince me. How sure are we? You will almost certainly point to the wide acceptance of science. Science is everywhere in our society! To which I will reply that bacteria are everywhere as well. Does that mean bacteria are a success? Is it really good if something succeeds, simply because "succeeds" is the word we used?

Are we happy because of science?

Do we have meaning, because of science?

Are we better people because of science?

These are harder questions. There are a lot of very strong arguments suggesting that science and technology have actually made us less happy, and further from meaning. After all, that's the general pattern which drives people to become monks, and monasteries are alive and well today. They're "succeeding" too.

Now I, myself, tend to find the science arguments compelling. I'm choosing to be the person questioning science here, but I understand where you're coming from. What I'm really picking at is


(Emphasis mine). Such wording is a very powerful claim when speaking in the philosophical world. And, generally speaking, powerful claims are very hard to justify in philosophy. And, in fact, you will find that the scientific method actually does not always appear in every philosophy. I once attended a great lecture on what Traditional Chinese Medicine is, and the speaker explained a difference in how their tradition is developed as compared to Western medicine:

  • Western medicine tears the body apart into components, develops hypotheses about these components, then builds them up. At each step, it develops testable hypotheses, and tests them. From there, it finds things which may provide results, and tests those.
  • TCM starts with the body as a whole, finds things that cause good results, then develops testable theories about why the results occurred.

There's clearly a difference in methodology. Many would claim that TCM does not follow the scientific method. But TCM is deeply steeped in Chinese philsophy, so a claim that philosophy must assume the scientific method as a premise invalidates 4000 years of Chinese philosophy, declaring it to "not be philosophy because it doesn't assume the scientific method." You can understand why such a claim is not popular.

Or you might claim that TCM has the scientific method hiding in it. As it turns out, there is no one "The Scientific Method." We talk about it as though there is only one, but there isn't. It's actually a rather large class of approaches ranging from the very precise definitions that are used at the LHC when making observations of subatomic particles all the way out to a very broad "guess and check" mentality. You could choose to define the scientific method to be broad enough to admit Chinese philosophy, thus making it easier for others to accept your claim.

But there's a catch. The weaker you elect to define the scientific method, the harder it is to have absolute confidence that it must be a good thing and a successful thing. It's actually a really fun exploration, which digs at the heart of what it means to be "science."

This is the Philosophy of Science, and the point where I can segue to answer your original question. The philsophy of science is considered to be a subdiscipline of empiricism. Empiricism is the study of that which we can "know" with our senses, i.e. empirical observation. There are other subdisciplines of empiricism as well besides science. Empiricism, itself, is a subdiscipline of epistomology, which is the study of what we can "know." Knowing is an incredibly complex and nuanced thing in philosophy because it has to actually address questions along the lines of "How do we know that we know something? How do we know that we know that we know something?" and so on and so forth.

Epsitomology, itself, can be contrasted to ontology. Ontology is the study of what is real. Most of us assume that we know what "reality" is, but ontologists really question it. It turns out to be a tremendously interesting topic, but it's almost completely divorced from science.

Which is interesting. We often have the opinion that science is a tool which leads us to the truth of reality, but when you dig far enough down into philosophy, you start to see that that isn't quite what it does. In fact, some even argue that it does the opposite: instead of leading us to the truth, it tries to lead the truth to us.

But that's just one argument. The point being, that philosophy explores a class of questions and their answers which reach far broader than science does. And that's a good thing. Diversity is good. Science is great at what it does (that is to say, science is great at being scientific). Philosophy is great at what it does (that is to say.... whatever philosophy does. It's actually a rather funny exercise to try to pin down precisely what philosophy does). Both are valuable in this world, and neither should really replace the other.

Now I have pointed out how much separation there is between science and philosophy. But there is a very important connection between them: philosophers are people. Their ideas mingle with the ideas of the population around them. While there is no explicit connection between science and ontology, you will find that many ontological philosophers strive to develop their research to fit nicely with the ontological claims that science sometimes makes (when they technically can't make such claims, being empirical). Other philosophers will explicitly strive to make their work conflict with science's claims, just to explore that "what if the world isn't the way we think it is" sort of question. Their philosophy will naturally reject the claims that the scientific method must be assumed, because the point of their work is to see what happens when you reject it.

So science absolutely influences all of philosophy, though often in a very indirect way. Likewise, philosophy forms the cornerstone of what science, itself, is. But many find it's digging and questioning to be a bit of a bore, so we often ignore this connection to philosophy.

  • I love your answer. But, I don't think science has made us lose meaning in life and made us more unhappy. Personally, for me, that is the farthest you get from the truth. I am more happy, inspired because of science. What is meant by "meaning" in life and how can we say that science leads us away from it. Science has always proven helpful for millions of people and continues to be so, does it not? – BlowMaMind Mar 2 '18 at 10:18
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    You've got a false argument there. Happiness and the betterment of humanity are not the goals of science. Really, it is simply to ask "how well does our understanding of this reflect reality?" with a followup of "let's make it more accurate". This may have beneficial consequences (you don't now have to bury three times as many children as survive to adulthood) but not necessarily (the same knowledge of bacteria which saves lives also gave us weaponised anthrax). The goal is not happiness - it is reduction of ignorance. And more, it is rejection of habits of thought which promote ignorance. – Graham Mar 2 '18 at 13:03
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    The failure of TCM is that it does not do what you say. Instead it says "we're going to give you this because someone once said it gave good results". It's full of hypotheses, but never once follows up hypotheses with controlled experiments to see whether the results take place as expected. Fair enough, they didn't know about the placebo effect at the time - but now we do. (And just by the way, from a UK Trading Standards sweep of TCM products, a large number resulted in prosecution because the "active" part was actually illegal-strength doses of steroids. Not so traditional!) – Graham Mar 2 '18 at 13:08
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    "There are a lot of very strong arguments suggesting that science and technology have actually made us less happy" → I know most people think of smartphones rather than clean water when they're thinking of science, but a philosophical argument should be careful to appeal to what's true rather than what's easy to believe. It's not like philosophy has a great track record. – Veedrac Mar 2 '18 at 13:26
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    @Graham I think we might need to move this to a chat room. Our conversation, while interesting, is drifting off topic, and to properly respond to your opinion would require me to drive it even further off topic. Rest assured, I think we have demonstrated why it is tricky to assume that philosophy must accept the axioms of the scientific method. All of our discussion shows how difficult it would be to consider the scientific method to be at the heart of TCM, much less Chinese philosophy. – Cort Ammon Mar 5 '18 at 17:36

Starting from Aristotle, science is a branch of philosophy, the branch that attempts to explain actual outcomes. 'The Physics' is as much a physics as any later one, but it failed. So it evolved and was replaced by things that worked better.

It is common now to think of things like Alchemy as simply never having been science. But Newton took Alchemy quite seriously, and it did have actual productive discoveries.

For us to retroactively redefine 'science' by looking backward from a place where we have centuries more experience with what does and does not work is intellectually dishonest. All of this stuff was science.

But nothing has changed the fact that science relates to logic, uses learning, has human processes, etc. It needs an ontology, an epistemology, and to some degree even a prescriptive politics (with a moral obligation to honest disputation, a proper structure for peer review institutions, etc.). So all science takes place within a broader philosophy, and can only ever be part of a philosophical system.

  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Keelan Mar 7 '18 at 17:28

Philosophy is known as the "mother of the sciences," and in practice, when we understand a subject well enough that we can design reliable, replicable experiments around it, we start considering it as a science, not a branch of philosophy. But if science is a set of boxes containing tools, philosophy is what is outside the boxes --arguably including the design and definition of the boxes themselves.

The reason philosophy continues to exist is that there continue to be important questions we want to think about that we cannot yet approach scientifically --and things we might never be able to. There is no science of morality, nor of art, nor of religion, although people have made attempts at all of those. Also, when debates about the role and nature and ethics of science arise, philosophy must adjudicate them. Science was not designed to study itself --it is not its own proper subject.

As far as whether philosophers must accept the scientific method as a primary axiom, the best we can say is that some do, and some don't. Since philosophy lacks universal acceptance criteria there's no way of mandating something like this. It's worth noting, however, that philosophical inquiry far predates the development of the modern scientific method --before that point, what we now know as the sciences were instead considered "natural philosophy."



That's not a simple matter. F.e. nowadays some metaphysicians, like Ladyman and Ross in Every Thing Must Go, argue that metaphysics can and should be informed by physics (to some degree).


There's no such thing as the scientific method. In detail, the various conceptions of what the scientific method is supposed to be do vary.


Success isn't the same as truth. That is, we can hold scientific anti-realism and think that the results of our scientific processes are empirically adequate (see Van Fraassen) or functional while agreeing that the enterprise of science is important and successful.

So, what is the relationship between Philosophy and Science?

Like others mentioned, many philosophers think that science rests on a backdrop of epistemology etc. But some philosophers think that it can go the other way around. Some moderately so - I've given an example above -, fewer formulate it quite radically. Take for example Quine who thinks that epistemology and metaphysics can be "naturalized", that is, explained by natural science. For epistemology he thinks that the explanation can be done with psychology etc. Although he sort of argues against a distinction between science and philosophy in general. Quine is heavily criticized (and imo rightly so), so keep that in mind.

edit: typo


One important and clarifying distinction is that, science has no mechanism for making value judgments. That is, the scientific method can explain problems such as "how does a kidney function?" but not questions such as "how should I live my life?". It's very difficult to make a scientific argument as to what one should do in the Trolley Problem, for instance, but there are plenty of other philosophical arguments that can attempt to answer that question. It can describe which method of ammonia synthesis is optimal under certain conditions, but isn't well-equipped to tell us whether or not it's acceptable to lie.

Science is a facet of philosophy, and like any philosophical mode, it has certain uses and certain other areas that it is not useful for.


The answer should follow automatically from actionable definitions for philosophy and science. For that to work, we assume that the correctness of a definition is much less important that its predicativity.

== Definitions ==

statement: a claim, an expression fact: a change in the real world

Philosophy: statements about statements Science: statements about repeatable facts (for which it is possible to look for counterexample facts)

== Consequences ==

Hence, according to these definitions, statements about science are always philosophical: statements about statements (about repeatable facts).

Science, however, can impossibly make claims about philosophy (=not facts). Science cannot even make claims about itself. It is also obvious that the rules governing science can only be philosophical.

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