The Philosophical Use and Misuse of Science

Abstract

Science is our best way of finding out about the natural world, and philosophers who write about that world ought to be sensitive to the claims of our best science. There are obstacles, however, to outsiders using science well. We think philosophers are prone to misuse science: to give undue weight to results that are untested; to highlight favorable and ignore unfavorable data; to give illegitimate weight to the authority of science; to leap from scientific premises to philosophical conclusions without spelling out their relevance; to treat mere resonance between a scientific theory and a philosophical view as empirical evidence for the philosophical view. This article identifies and illustrates some of the ways in which philosophers misuse science, explains why these pitfalls are easy to fall into, and concludes with suggestions for avoiding them.

COVID passports: discrimination, inequality and coercion

“…We are philosophers, not scientists, and in any case the science in this area is fast moving -see Kingsbury and Dare (2017) for suggestions about how to avoid some of the pitfalls of appealing to scientific results as a non-scientist. 14 There may be a practical problem with my practical suggestion to target incentives at the 'merely' vaccine hesitant.…”