Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
Erik,
The question, like some of yours, was rhetorical. Still, the Bible teaches flat earth in exactly the same sense that it teaches a global flood. ‘The circle of the earth’ is a pretty clear depiction of ‘Hebrew cosmology’. Many flat-earth advocates take their position explcitly because they consider the Bible to be an ultimate, infallible source, quoting that very passage. It is illustrative of the extent to which some, even if not you, are prepared to blind themselves to the facts. Why, then, are they wrong but global-flood advocates not?
Speaking of scientists venturing into philosophy, it seems Sean Carrol’s next book is mostly exactly that. Start of TOC:
* Part One: Being and Stories
* Part Two: Knowledge and Belief
* Part Three: Time and Cosmos
* Part Four: Essence and Possibility
Erik,
Thereby avoiding addressing the substantive part of the paragraph.
I’ll leave it to KN to tell you how far away flat-earth advocates are from Hebrew cosmology.
No scripture in any part of the world teaches flat earth. The Bible is the least clear in this matter, so that in medieval Europe flat-earthism gained considerable ground, but this was a temporary and local aberration. Otherwise the earth and the universe have been described as the yolk of an egg or a bubble in the air.
What do they say about the mome raths? Do they take them really to be outgrabe?
No, the mome raths are just a metaphor. However, the slithy toves do literally gyre and gimble in the wabe.
Thanks for that clarification KN.
Incidentally, I think you have opined that Erik is not actually a Christian, but a Neoplatonist. If so, I wonder if he agrees with Porphyry’s comment that “the Christians are a confused and vicious sect.”
I guess the bible is allegorical except when the believer says it isn’t.
Well, see, the mountain was really, really high. And probably bendy, too.
It all works together for good to them that love patching in whatever it takes to save the text.
Glen Davidson
I’m good with the whole thing being allegorical, but it would be dishonest to claim — after the fact — that the parts proven impossible by science are allegorical, and the parts not yet disproved are history.
Since no one posting here is dishonest (by definition), I’m sure someone will be happy to list the parts that are history and the parts that are poetic or allegorical. And the evidence for placement on one list or the other that does not involve special pleading.
Mung,
I wouldn’t mind if you apologized for quote mining, but I don’t expect you to demonstrate that much integrity.
Exactly. That seems to be the key trick here. That it’s all true is axiomatic. Whatever needs to be done to understand it follows.
Erik,
Rather depends how one reads it …
The Egyptians and the Babylonians had a flat earth cosmology. Are we to suppose that their neighbours, the Hebrews, did not? On what grounds? The Bible is hardly unambigous on the matter. It certainly does not read as written by someone aware that the earth is a globe.
Erik,
Why was that reading aberrant, but a literal Flood was not? Preferably something other than common myth, since
a) Flat earth is a common myth
b) Myths can become held in common through lateral meme transfer.
Depends on which Bible. The Mormon God seems to have been aware of the Americas. Even sent emissaries.
No?
I’m confused. How do you distinguish myths from truth, except by demonstrating one of them to be untrue, presumably via science.
We have different definitions of the term myth. I use the same definition as in folkloristics, yours is equivalent to “damn lie”. Your confusion stems from that.
Nowadays you can google stuff, you know. “In Babylonian cosmology, the Earth and the heavens were depicted as a “spatial whole, even one of round shape” with references to “the circumference of heaven and earth” and “the totality of heaven and earth”. Their worldview was not exactly geocentric either.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_astronomy#Cosmology
And flat earth was not as common even in medieval Europe as you make it out to be. “Since the 20th century the consensus among historians of science has been that medieval Europeans, with rare exception, put little confidence in a flat Earth model.”
Yes, you can Google stuff, and even follow links. One link in your link has this to say:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth
Round doesn’t necessarily mean spherical, and the evidence does indeed point to Babylonians modeling the world (the land, anyway) as a flat disk, at least if we believe Wikipedia (and here I have no reason not to do so, especially as early Greek tales, such as Theogony sensibly tell of a flat earth).
Glen Davidson
And given that “physics” and “physicalism” share the same root, and that physicists often make philosophical fools out of themselves whenever they mix up their science with the world view of physicalism, it will always remain a messy topic.
But it indicates a necessity to recognise the difference between science and philosophy and to respect that difference, doesn’t it?
So, if you find scientific practices in them, then you will consider them sciences, but as the default position, they are not sciences? Not a good start, particularly when you are trying to give an impression that you acknowledge science as something broader than physics/biology.
Your definition of scientific practices is curiously tied to physics/biology. For example, “…theories of a mature science, taken descriptively, make true statements about structures in the world.” What other science fits here besides physics/biology?
Now, linguistics is the kind of science that would take your statement and examine the content and entailments of your usage of words and phrases like “theories”, “descriptively”, “true statements” and “structures in the world”. Linguistics studies the nature of statements and descriptions versus what is being stated or described. This is fundamental to linguistics. Does it sound like not science? Do you think physicists have nothing to learn from this?
The problem with this stance is manifold, but a fundamental issue here is that it stems from physics, which studies the physical aspect of reality, and thus when you conclude physicalism based on this, then you are actually presupposing your own conclusion. Which is a logical fallacy. Therefore I conclude: Logic first, physics later.
There’s a strong tendency to ontologize one’s own favorite science, to assume “This science teaches about reality, it shows how things are in reality,” and to forget about other aspects of reality. In my view, linguistics is superior to physics/biology because linguistics provides the dialectics with which to analyze reality, instead of stating or presupposing, like physicists tend to, that reality is exclusively physical or whatever and that the taxonomy and terminology currently favored in the science is reality.
Physicists falsely assume they have direct access to reality. Linguists correctly know they have an analytical tool to approach their data.
Physics studies the physical aspect of reality and ignores the rest. It is quite ignorant to ignore that there’s something that physics ignores.
So those are not sciences either? Sigh.
It doesn’t necessarily mean flat either. I am yet to encounter an explicit statement about flat earth in any ancient writings (apart from pictorial depictions, they didn’t even try to convey perspective or any other aspects of 3D world).
Quote the relevant passage. The way I read it, earth is occasionally personalized in Theogony along with other gods and natural forces, and occasionally it reads like something akin to “prime matter”. If you get a flat disk impression somewhere (not sure where in Theogony though), you can read it as modern “continent”.
All these are legitimate uses of the word “earth” without any stretch. Note that in ancient times a smaller vocabulary was used to describe the same things as we do today, so our semantics is structured differently. Modern semantics is splintered compared to ancient.
My quote from Theogony, “And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her (=earth) on every side…”
Yes, and my real point is that you would be unable to actually come up with similar descriptions, contradictory or otherwise, that you could give as examples. There was a reason you picked wave/particle duality and not something more along the lines you presumably are getting at. Once again you whine that X should be allowed, but cannot give any actual examples of X or why it should be allowed or be considered useful.
Yes, I do think the word “science” means something and we cannot apply it to anything people do. I described the practices I think it requires.
Isn’t language or folklore part of the world?
Yes they would. And I think linguists would have something to learn from physicists.
I agree that your version of physicalism would be problematic. But it is not my position.
I read this post as trying to trying to pick a fight with me by attributing positions to me I do not hold. I’m not interested in that kind of exchange.
Sorry if I misread you.
Good if you think it is, but I suspect that when you evaluate it on the scale of important-unimportant or true-false, it will not look so good.
The thing I specifically mentioned that physicists would do well to learn from linguists was to drop the assumption that they have direct access to reality and to understand that they are dealing with data which is only an aspect of reality discernible by means of the senses.
In turn, what would you have linguists learn from physicists?
It would help a lot if you were more open about your position so I didn’t have to make assumptions about it. When you make it feel like pulling teeth, then I am not interested in it either.
FWIW, this is an area in which I agree with you and disagree with Bruce and KN. I don’t take the Quinean line that philosophy shades into the empirical sciences, that’s it’s a continuum.. They seem to me entirely different sorts of endeavor. But, as I’ve said before, I don’t that makes philosophy more important, as you do. In some ways, it could even reasonably be considered irrelevant to everything that’s really important to humanity.
But, e.g., to figure out just WHAT is actually important or how that is to be decided….those aren’t empirical questions–even if there ends up being a scientific manner of determining the results of those questions.
Whereas in my view, philosophy and science can be seen as a kind of continuum, because in different contexts the line between the two is different, but they are certainly different ends of the continuum and different ends of the continuum are conceptually distinct, just like it’s not safe to mix up black and white, opposite ends of the same continuum. Even more so when I take philosophy to be a higher category.
This is an example why I take philosophy to be logically prior to science.
Why do you keep trying to attribute things to me? Just asking me what I think works better, I believe.
As I said in a previous post, physicists who claimed conclusions about reality are doing philosophy, not physics. So any such conclusions have to be evaluated as philosophy, not as physics.
I happen to believe that all sciences can give access to structures of reality, but I also recognize that that philosophical issue is far from settled.
Linguists can learn physics from physicists.
I don’t say that to be flippant. It is in response to a previous post of yours where I read you as saying TSZ posters privilege physics over linguistics, whereas you prefer to privilege linguistics over physics. My point is that each contributes to human knowledge.
But if linguists made a conclusion about the world that differed from physics, for example that gravity worked differently (in the CNN sense of interpreting and reporting the world) during the historical times reported by the writers of the flood story, then I would see that as an issue to be resolved.
Not necessarily in physics favor. For example, early in the 20th century, some physicists said stars like the sun could not have existed long enough for evolution to have occurred according to biology and natural selection. It turned out the physicists were wrong and the biologists were correct, because the physicists did not understand how stars worked. So in general one would have to look at the evidence on both sides.
In the case of gravity, it would seem highly unlikely that the findings in other other science could successfully survive if they contradicted gravity as understood in physics (in making CNN-framework predictions about how the world worked.)
In response to this: I used to try to create posts which anticipated counter-arguments or questions and tried to answer them in advance.
I found they turned out to be long and meandering.
More importantly, they could correctly be interpreted as putting words into someone else’s mouth or guessing at what was important to them.
So I try to keep posts shorter and more focused, with the expectation that is there is something specific about them that is unclear or incomplete and important to anyone replying to my post, then they will point that out.
The rise (?) of experimental philosophy would seem to be another indicator of that continuum.
But I do agree that one aspect of the specialness of some aspects of philosophy is the focus on norms.
That being the case, how can questions like “how should we live meaningful lives” and “how should we act morally” not be important to humanity?
If that’s not your position, then you can correct me. I am open to corrections. You could be open about your position, if you wanted to be. “That’s not my position (full stop)” is not open and is not a correction.
What would it take to settle the issue? And as long as it’s not settled, how can you claim that all sciences can give access to structures of reality, how do you know what the scientific method is (as opposed to philosophy), etc?
So, you are saying that my reading of the flood story implies that gravity worked differently? Because on Hebrew cosmology there used to be layer of water around the planet? Or for some other specific reason?
I am not making the assumptions that others are making here. For example I have no clue why we should have to assume 8 km of water layer, as if the geography of the continent had to be the same and as if we knew the scale of the flood. And why specifically water, when water in the atmosphere is clouds, not lakes. Those savvy in the physics should be able to make the relevant adjustments, but no hope of that here. What I learn from physicists here is to laugh out textual universals and call forefathers liars.
Conservation of mass and energy, and the basic concept of fluid pressure.
These things have ALL been explained to you.
This too as been explained to you.
I’d separate that into two questions:
First, why should we use science and not eg philosophy to answer questions in a scientific domain having to do with explaining, controlling, and predicting aspects of that domain.
I’d say because the methods of science work when that is our goal. By “methods” I mean the generic methodologies of science as applied and specialized within that domain by the ongoing work of the community of scientists.
Second, what does that success tell us about the structure of reality?
One could say science works because its methods cause its theories and models to converge on reality. That is a philosophical position that I hold, but it is not science.
ETA: If you are asking what the methods of science are, and not when they apply, then they are as listed in previous posts. An important part of those methods is the meta-practice of adjusting the details of their nature and application to meet the goals of prediction, control, explanation of questions in the domain of that science.
I see philosophy as continuous with science but not the same as it, eg because of the questions it answers (eg on norms or origins) and its emphasis on analysis over empirical experimentation. But I do think philosophy must be informed by science where appropriate (“appropriate” being judged by the community of philosophers). For example, philosophy of time which ignores the physics of relativity had better explain in detail why that is justified.
I don’t think one can answer the question of which is more important without first specifying the question one is asking and the type of answer one expects.
No, I did not mean to attribute that to you. I simply said “if…” as an example.
I understand you to be saying there are multiple ways of interpreting scripture, some more important than others. I agree with that position. I do admit to being confused about which interpretation you are taking when you talk about how long people before the flood lived and how that relates to radiation getting through a steam canopy (I’m going my memory on what you said, so I may have the details wrong on that).
I don’t know of any professional physicists who currently post at TSZ. There used to be a few, but they have have not posted lately.
I do think there are people who post here who subscribe to scientism taken in a negative sense, that is, applying science in general or certain types of science in particular to domains of knowledge and to questions where they are inappropriate. At least, that is how I read some of their posts.
My view is not the Quinean view that philosophy is continuous with science, and in fact my view conflict with Quine at a number of points.
Rather, I think that constitutive explications (i.e. descriptions of the world and of ourselves when we reflect on the most general features of our experience) and enabling explanations (i.e. models of the causal processes whereby our cognitive and affective capacities are implemented in space and in time) reciprocally constrain each other.
This is superficially similar to the reciprocal constraint of phenomenalism and physicalism that one can find in Quine, but in the details very different.
I guess it’s ok with me to call philosophy important. I don’t denigrate it because I think it’s not interesting or is irrelevant to people’s lives. As you point out, there’s a sense in which nothing is more significant. This is why I also have no major problem with terming philosophy “logically prior” to science. But as I construe that “priority” there’s also a sense in which philosophy is not a very big deal at all.
I say that because all the philosophical analysis is capable of is a kind of “conceptual cleansing.” It doesn’t tell us anything new about the world if it’s done correctly; it just enables us to make some inferences from presuppositions of language and thought that may at first be hidden. But, IMO, in the end, it leaves us not far from our original, commonsense perspectives. Where those perspectives fail, science has to tell us.
It’s my view that “experimental philosophy” (so-called) is little more than a bundle of confusions. Complete waste of time and space.
As indicated above, I have no problem with your “priority” claim (construed rightly).
OTOH, re your continuum claim, I will demur, in spite of living in nearly constant fear of the all-devouring sorites paradox.
I believe the empirical sciences are categorially different from philosophy. I mean, I suppose one could truthfully say that philosophy involves a sort of empirical investigation of language and the forms of thought. But I think such a description is mostly misleading.
One other thing I want to mention is that I don’t know why you never mention chemistry as a physical science. As Bruce has noted, however, probably a majority of contemporary analytic philosophers don’t believe (even) either that (the science of) chemistry is reducible to (the science of) physics or that (the science of) biology is reducible to (the science of) chemistry.
Reductions of that kind are pretty much all unsuccessful.
I think I might be ok with that. Not sure, exactly. Such different types of constraints!
As you hopefully acknowledge, the problem here is definitely philosophical and settled by means of philosophy, not science. If this is not settled (and in your view it was not settled), then science cannot even get started because science is not defined yet! Yet science exists and works in its domain. Therefore this philosophical issue has been settled. If this were not settled, it would be impossible for your next questions to arise.
Define success. Obviously, the success of science is limited to the scientific domain which is defined by philosophy. So, what about success of philosophy?
Like with any other text, I attribute importance to the biblical flood story in proportion to its internal and external integrity. Externally its validated for example by the fact that the flood story is universal. Internal evaluation depends on what kind of genre we attribute to it, lie or myth or scripture. Or Fox News. Context and semantics of the text largely determine the genre.
Unfortunately these things can go wrong. I see on Wikipedia it’s calmly written that flat earth theory used to be common in archaic times, even though the preserved texts (and current stone age cultures!) don’t allow such interpretation (not without difficulties anyway). Like with physicists, mishaps occur in the area of textual analysis too. For example, many scholars assume that Theophrastus’ Characters is an attempt at a systematic psychology, whereas it could be a simple collection of anecdotes ridiculing an array of human traits (the fact that the selected traits are exclusively negative should speak for itself). And Nietzsche is widely miscategorized as a philosopher. It takes an expert to notice and argue about things like this.
But it should be obvious how grossly wrong it is to say something like, “Not reported on CNN, therefore false.”
walto,
I think that philosophical reflection does a lot more than conceptual analysis.
(In fact, I’m not sure it ever does any conceptual analysis, if conceptual analysis involves the specification of necessary and sufficient conditions. As Kenneth Westphal has pointed out in his work on Carnap, natural languages call for conceptual explication, not analysis; see here.)
In addition to conceptual explication, philosophy can also involve metaphysical speculation (which, on my pragmatist view, is subject to the dual constraints of science and phenomenology) which almost always involves conceptual creation. More generally, philosophy can assist in helping people to be more critical, more self-aware, less dogmatic, less committed to their own ideology and less prone to being manipulated by someone else’s.
Conceptual analysis is not that important, useful as it may be under specific conditions — but there’s far more to philosophy than conceptual analysis. There is also synthesis.
I also don’t know why Erik thinks that Anglo-American philosophers are committed to the reduction of biology and chemistry to physics.
From what I can tell, there’s a three-way debate in philosophy of science between
(i) unity of science requires reductionism, and unity of science is true, so reductionism is true (Alex Rosenberg);
(ii) unity of science requires reductionism, but reductionism is false, so unity of science is false (Nancy Cartwright, John Dupre, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philip Kitcher);
(iii) unity of science does not require reductionism, so unity of science is true even though reductionism is false (James Ladyman and Don Ross, possibly Dan Dennett).
I find the differences between (ii) and (iii) very fine-grained, since (iii) really just means that nothing described by any science other than fundamental physics can violate a principle of fundamental physics.
However, there is still the very interesting and hard question as to whether we should think that physics describes law-like structures, and objects are explained in terms of structures (structural realism), or whether all sciences — including physics — model causal powers, and laws are just convenient ways of describing what powers do.
Intriguing as structural realism is, I find myself far more drawn to realism about causal powers which I would take up in a pragmatist rather than strictly neo-Aristotelian framework. (But I also want to help rescue pragmatic realism from the pragmatic anti-realism of Rorty and Putnam.)
This finally brings us back to the question: is philology a science?
I would say that, like history, political theory, literature, etc. philology is a disciplined, rigorous and methodological inquiry but not a scientific one. And here I am going to say something highly controversial and perhaps false: science actually does escape the hermeneutic circle, and actually does tell us something about objective reality, precisely because the techniques used in scientific inquiry force a mediated confrontation between our conceptual frames and real causal powers.
???????????????????????
Erik,
1) It isn’t.
2) I told Bill who told Bob who told Sam who told …. soon everyone was telling it. My original story? Never happened. But it is ‘universal’.
Have you controlled for, say, Christian missionaries, particularly among those involving ravens and doves (in whatever order)? It is the equivalent of lateral gene transfer in biology. You are simply assuming (because it helps your narrrative) that transmission has been ‘vertical’ – that the story has been retold only within descendant populations from the moment it happened (or the day it was made up).
@KN
There’s a difference between a philologist and a philosopher. Nietzsche, being a writer on most philosophical topics, is on the borderline, but since his argumentation rests entirely on antique literary and mythological parallels – and on nothing else – I’d say he was more properly the former.
Your source?
Does philosophy ever settle anything?
Why would science have to wait for a philosopher’s definition?
Why would you have to have premises before you arrive at a conclusion? Why can’t you just presuppose the conclusion?
Answer: You can, like ffm. But you’d be wrong.
Not sure what most of that means, but, as you know, it’s notoriously difficult to say precisely what “conceptual analysis” is, and until one does, asserting that it’s not worth much isn’t itself actually worth much. It may be that what you’re calling “synthesis” or “metaphysical speculation” or “conceptual explication” or “conceptual creation” are included in what others call “conceptual analysis.” The famous “paradox of analysis” would seem to prevent conceptual analysis from literally being no more than….well….analysis….as a chemist might understand that term.
Re Carnap, there’s a really interesting new paper by Stephen Yablo on Carnap and Thomasson regarding “easy ontology” that Yablo just uploaded to his academia.edu page.
And what is that characteristic which distinguishes philology from (proper) science? If/since it’s not a science, what is it?
I suggest that if philology (and linguistics along with it) is not a science, physicists should discontinue the use of its disgraced unscientific concoctions like alphabet, vocabulary, semantics, etc.
I don’t like “pulling rank” in conversations like this one, and certainly not in quasi-anonymous online discussions, but I’m going to here. I’m a Nietzsche expert. My dissertation was on Nietzsche, I’ve published two articles on Nietzsche in highly-regarded peer-reviewed journals, and I keep up with the scholarship.
On this basis, the claim that Nietzsche’s arguments rest on nothing other than antique literary and mythological parallels is simply false. He does have many literary allusions, yes. But his arguments also draw on 19th-century science (esp psychology, biology and physics), German philosophy (Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer), Eastern philosophy, American transcendentalism, and so on.
On my estimation, Nietzsche makes major contributions to our understanding of the pragmatics of language, how power works in society, and what is at stake in acknowledging the epistemic authority of empirical science for our culturally mediated self-understanding. He is a philosopher of first-rate importance and a rival with Hegel for the titles of most important German philosopher after Kant and (perhaps along with Peirce) most important 19th-century philosopher.
Yes. Philosophy has settled that philosophy cannot settle anything.
I wonder to what extent Erik (and anyone else here) is tempted by the following line of argument:
Empirical science requires that the senses are usually reliable when used correctly. (Hereafter I shall use “reliable” to mean “usually reliable when used correctly”.) But the reliability of the senses cannot be established by empirical science, since that would be circular. Hence empirical science must presuppose the reliability of the senses. But is it reasonable to believe that the senses are reliable? It is only if we can justify our belief that the senses are reliable. But this justification cannot be empirical (for fear of vicious circularity). Therefore it must be purely rational. If pure reason can justify our belief that the senses are reliable, then a posteriori science rests on an a priori foundation, and therefore philosophy is logically prior to science.
The extremely hard question is whether reason itself stands in need of justification — how do we know that reason is usually reliable when used correctly? — and can reason vindicate itself without vicious circularity?
Skepticism is a Hydra; you slice off one head and two more grow back!
Sorry, but I must respectfully disagree. Insofar as I have read Nietzsche, he does not draw from (in the proper sense of the word) any prior philosophy. He thinks he refutes all philosophers based on allusions to antique literature.
If you quote something from Nietzsche where he says a philosopher was right – and he does not add that this is so because there’s this ancient myth that parallels the philosopher’s view – then I shall bow to your superior expertise.
I have actually used this argument in a more concise and effective form in these discussions. It remains unanswered.
That’s exactly the same kind of asswash as the Republican idiot’s claim that I must not really be an atheist unless I discontinue using their money printed with the slogan “In God We Trust”.
Don’t be a tool.
That would be the case only if the relation between philosophy and science were that of premise and conclusion. But it isn’t, for reasons I sketched out yesterday. The relation is far more complicated and messy; it doesn’t map onto a tidy logical argument.
That seems like a really weird response.
Firstly, I never said that there’s anything wrong, problematic, or even “disgraced” (????) about a field that isn’t a science. It gives us real knowledge — just not scientific knowledge. Unlike you, I have no interest in any hierarchy at all between different kinds of knowledge. As Walto remarked in a response to me earlier today, there are many kinds of constraint. I might add that there are many kinds of priority.
Secondly, philology and linguistics take language as an object of study, but that’s got nothing to do with our use of language in making sense of the world. Human beings were using language for hundreds of thousands of years before any formal, discipline of knowledge took shape. The idea that physics depends on what linguists discover seems as weird as the thought that linguistics shouldn’t weigh themselves on a bathroom scale until physicists discover how mass distorts space-time.
Thirdly, you seem to have an obsession with physics that baffles me. No one present in this discussion is a reductionist. In fact I’m probably further in my anti-reductionism than others here, because I am a realist about teleology with regard to organisms.
The necessity of teleological realism for successful explanations of biological phenomena is the one thing that the Intelligent Design movement gets right.
I recommend the same to you. Physicists can work now because philosophers figured out earlier what science is as opposed to pseudoscience and non-science, how definitions work, what’s the value of experiment, etc.