I think philosophers are probably quite jealous of science and this is why
they come up with all this nonsense to try to show it’s not as reliable as
people like to think it is. Look at how successful science is – philosophy is not
successful – it’s achieved nothing
if philosophy hadn’t existed –
“Iwas thinking before you came,
apart from Aristotle – what
would we not know? The
answer is that it wouldn’t have made the
slightest difference.”
I had gone to see the biologist Lewis Wolpert
in his North London home expecting to be told
the subject at the heart of my work was total
rubbish, and he did not disappoint. I first came
across his uncompromising views back in 1992
when I saw him give a lecture at University
College London. He had nearly finished a
captivating talk about his book, The Unnatural
Nature of Science, when, almost as an afterword,
he briskly dismissed all philosophy of science as
having nothing useful to say.
What he said must have stuck because when,
a few years later, I was putting together a dummy
of what tpmwould look like, I included in the
contents an interview with Wolpert. It took over a
decade, however, before I actually got around to
conducting it.
Over that time, Wolpert’s star as a public
figure has risen tremendously. His book on
depression, Malignant Sadness (1999), was a
breakthrough success, combining a thorough
overview of all we know about what depression is
with some very personal sections dealing with his
own battles with it. The book spawned a
television series, and in 2006 his book on the
evolutionary origins of belief, Six Impossible
Things Before Breakfast, was a popular science
bestseller.
Now 78, Wolpert has not exactly mellowed
when it comes to his hostility to philosophers. He
is personally charming, but when we got to
philosophy, the phrases “totally unintelligible”,
“no use whatsoever” and “gobbledegook” were
bandied around with a vigour that was somewhere
between irritation and zest.
We got off to a good start when I asked him
when he first came into contact with philosophy.
“It was probably in relation to the philosophy
of science, and I can’t even remember where it
was, but it was quite late in life. I did read Popper’s
book, and I hated it. I once wrote that it was the
most over-rated book in the last 500 years.”
Wolpert had first-hand experience of how
scientists worked, and simply found Popper’s ideas
about the scientific method had nothing to do
with that, and no one else he has come across
since has been any better.
“Nothing in Popper or in any other philosophy
of science has anything relevant to say about
science. I don’t know of any scientist who takes
the slightest interest in the philosophy of science,
although I do think Peter Medawar was quite
keen on Popper, to my surprise.”
A lot of people who claim philosophy is a
waste of time can be tricked into conceding at
least something by being drawn into an obviously
philosophical discussion about the value of
philosophy. With commendable consistency,
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