this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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I've tried explaining this to people, and they just don't get it. They say philosophy is just some pointless, meaningless, armchair activity. I tell them, "All fields of study are a subdiscipline of philosophy" and they call me a misinformed idiot.
Like, dude, whatever you study, the field itself wouldn't exist if it wasn't first developed by philosophers upon a philosophical foundation that was in turn developed by generations of philosophers.
The history of philosophy is the history of human ideas and of humanity itself. All of the sciences, both hard and soft, are simply highly specialized fields of philosophy.
Something that I often end up ranting about when I've had a few drinks at the pub is how I wish that all science education included some philosophy. I don't mean as a brief, one off unit, but actually woven throughout.
I actually got really into learning about the philosophy of science because I found this insufficiency became apparent when learning about machine learning systems in the context of bioinformatics and protein structure prediction. There were some absolutely brain-dead takes in papers that seemed to believe that big data methods have the potential of basically removing scientists from the process of science. Fortunately, there were also papers that called this out as nonsense, because expert knowledge is more important than ever in building and using machine learning systems.
Shout out to Sabine Leonelli, author of Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, which was the book I read that looked at this in detail. Her work is what really cemented my passion for the philosophy of science, and got me into philosophy more generally.
Yup, if someone is simply applying the scientific method without truly understanding its theoretical underpinnings, what are they really doing?
It's like driving a car with no mechanical knowledge. Not impossible, but if something goes wrong with the internal structures of it then you won't be able to figure out the problem and fix it on your own without seeking the help of someone who understands it.
And to be honest, I've seen a lot of dogmatic assertions from self-proclaimed atheists who view themselves as scientifically-minded while having no understanding of the philosophy of science.
Empiricism is great for what it's good for, but it's limited to observable phenomena. And without rationalism, it's like having a bunch of pieces of a puzzle and being unable to fit them together.
Here's a fact, here's another fact, and here's a third fact, but whether we realize it or not, we can't construct those facts into a coherent argument which leads to an accurate conclusion without utilizing rational processes. It's like focusing on factual soundness without paying any mind to logical validity.
And I see so many scientists making logical leaps that are quite simply invalid or fallacious. The most common one I see is "There's not enough evidence to support this hypothesis, therefore it must be untrue." It commits the fallacy of negating the antecedent.
I've seen this xkcd expanded with philosophy way off to the right saying something like "hey, what are all of you talking about over there?" since philosophy was the first asking "how?" or "why?" and all the others came later as more directed persuits of those individual questions. Philosophy first and foremost teaches logic and rhetoric, through which all sciences rely on.
This one?
https://lemmy.zip/comment/24226034
Kinda, but that one's a different edit referencing it coming full circle with philosophy on both sides. The specific edit I'm referring to just has philosophy wayyyyyyy off to the right, doesn't have sociology saying that(which I've never heard before and doesn't make sense) and doesn't have the logicians addition either.