Does Philosophy Impinge on Scientific Theory?

 

There can certainly be philosophical objections to scientific theories. Indeed there have been very many such objections over the years.

However, putting it that way may be to unduly separate science from philosophy in the first place. That is, the idea that firstly there's a scientific theory and then the philosophical objections follow. What if the scientific theories contain many philosophical assumptions or components from the very beginning? (I believe that they do.)

This isn't to say that science has never had an impact on what philosophers have argued or that scientific findings haven't made philosophical views untenable. They have. Though that simply means that those philosophical views were wrong; not that science always has the last word on matters (as such).

Some philosophers have argued that the final arbiter must always be science, not philosophy; though that itself would require a philosophical backup and argumentation. (This is the position of “naturalist philosophers” such as Quine, etc.)

Here again it can be said that philosophy and science don't move in non-contiguous parallel lines.

Analytic Philosophy & Argument

It's a mistake to conflate positions within analytic philosophy with the attitude that most analytic philosophers have to (doing) philosophy itself.

It's not really necessary for all analytic philosophers to explictly accept, say, that “beliefs require justification”, “adding ad-hoc hypotheses to an idea is bad”, or “that philosophers must have knowledge of logical fallacies” - even if most of them do!

What makes analytic philosophy superior to other traditions (in my view) is very simple (i.e., not very sexy): the commitment to argumentation. I suppose that this is broadly related to the idea that “beliefs require justification”; though that's a particular position within epistemology (at least as it's expressed above).

All statements about analytic philosophy and other traditions will of course involve generalisations. You can't escape that. All I can do is give examples of what I mean.

I've read a bit of Continental philosophy. Most of it doesn't seem to take argument very seriously at all. In that sense it becomes more like literature, poetry or political rhetoric than philosophy. Indeed some philosophers (such as Jacques Derrida) have made this point themselves.

For example, I read an article by Jean Baudrillard which is really just one long list of statements (rather than a piece of augmentation). All those statements are also expressed in an extremely poetic manner. It can be said, however, that arguments (or chains of reasoning) might have led up to those statements; though they aren't contained in the text itself. (This is also true, at least to some extent, of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.)

Thus, again, I would say that argumentation (as well as little rhetoric) sums up analytic philosophy. Not a commitment to specific positions within philosophy.