OK, I’m taking the slice of philosophy that is science and lambasting the rest of the pie.
Whatever "lambasting" of the rest of the pie you do it will not change the piece of pie to being anything other than part of the pie, fundamentally constituted by the substance of "pie".
So you think that scientists merely collect data and never create hypotheses and test their hypotheses by experiment? Really? I wonder how you are able to divorce science from the scientific method; they seem to be perfect bedfellows.
What is being done when a scientist creates a hypothesis meant to be a universal law is inductive reasoning, and as I'm sure I've stated before, induction cannot be justified by science, we assume induction for epistemic purposes.
I don’t think the areas you mention support this. In fact, I think that they exemplify what I have been saying.
Let me go through and give examples of what philosophy has added in regards to each of these topics. I can't actually flesh out all of the arguments in regards to each of these topics (it would take too long), so for most of them I'll just refer you to the actual work or a summary of it.
The topic of ethics is a perfect example. Define “good” in utilitarian terms and then good is directly determined by science.
I've repeatedly made it clear that I hold descriptive ethics to be purely definitional, hence why I find it so useless. Where philosophical reasoning comes in during ethics is in prescriptive ethics. Science is always descriptive and never prescriptive. I've argued against objective prescriptions by using the philosophical Is-Ought Problem, and attempts to derive an Ought from an Is are always done philosophically, such as
egoism,
the categorical imperative, or a
Searlian derivation.
Define “good” in divine command theory terms and then what is good is based on empirical facts (Does God exist and what are his commands?) that can be investigated by science.
As a note here I don't think that the existence of god can be proven or disproven solely empirically, because god is claimed as existing outside of the universe and thus transcends empirical observation. Indeed the existence of god rests on the topics named that we are discussing here, so if I am correct about these other areas of dispute, that philosophy derives new facts about them, then it would also be true that philosophy is involved in discussing the existence of god.
Additionally, I think even if god exists, there is still no objective prescriptive theistic ethics and my reasons for doing so are philosophical. You can see these in my thread
The Is Ought Problem, Theistic Morality, and If Ought Moral Rationality and the ensuing debate with DanteFox.
Different theories of time are discussed in physics with some having better empirical basis than others; what new information has pure philosophy brought to the table?
From what I understand, science has gotten its view of time (B-Theory) from Einstein's physical interpretation of the theory of general relativity, however there is an alternate view of time (A-theory) which springs from Lorentz's interpretation. These are empirically equivalent and thus settling the dispute lies beyond the realm of science. Philosophy can serve as an ample "tie-breaker" here because there is a rich debate on the nature of time and I'll just refer you to an
overview of some of the philosophical considerations in this field.
Nothingness is mainly just wordplay, no new information.
Not so, I think that purely philosophically I can derive facts about "nothing" that are not purely definitional. The definition of nothing is the absence of any positive reality, the absence of something. From this definition I think I can prove that it is possible that the universe came into being out of nothing. For the lack of any positive reality entails that there can be no rules, no order, no principles or laws by which nothingness is held to, there is no causality. So to say that something could not come into being out of nothing is to impose a rule, a law on nothingness which is absurd because there are no laws governing nothingness. Hence it is possible that something can come into being out of nothing. Big bang cosmology tells us the universe began as an extremely dense mass of matter called the singularity. Because anything at all can come of out of nothing, there is no law to restrict what can come out of it, the singularity, and thus the universe, could have come into being out of nothing.
And because the universe is something, and we have no empirical access to anything outside of or beyond the universe, we cannot empirically study nothingness.
For epistemology, you can either define knowledge as justified true belief or by reliabilism. If defined via reliabilism, then science can decide the best epistemic process. If by justified true belief, how do you determine whether something is true or not (in order to add new information), by science? On this definition, no information is added past the definition.
Knowledge just is defined as justified, true belief. That's not really the question or where the controversy lies. You can't define knowledge as reliabilism, reliabilism is a theory of knowledge, it tries to give an explanation for how we gain knowledge, it is not knowledge itself: Knowledge is not an epistemological position. The question answered by reliabilism is how we gain knowledge, and the argument for reliabilism being the true epistemology is a philosophical one, not a scientific one. There is no way to scientifically prove an epistemological position, science just is an applied epistemology itself. Furthermore I think that there are good philosophical reasons to reject reliabilism, but this could be whole debate by itself I'd refer you
here to start.
Even if I were to grant both that reliabilism is true, and that it is true purely by definition, you would still need to argue that science is the reliable process by which we gain knowledge. Reliabilism only states that knowledge is gained by arriving at a belief through a reliable process, it does not state what process that is. And to argue that science is the reliable process, you would necessarily have to use philosophy if you are not to simply beg the question by arguing for science by already assuming and using science. Not that that is to grant that you could even make arguments of that type scientifically however, that argument would be outside of empirical access.
Realism and anti-realism probably falls nicely into science once you define what is real and what is not, and if not, and then it probably provides no new information.
You can't just define things into and out of reality (
). It strikes me that you probably don't even know what the realism and ant-realism debate concerns. Here I will limit myself to the discussion of scientific realism, since it is most close to the subject at hand. Scientific realism is one of the biggest issues in the philosophy of science and concerns whether or not our scientific models are really accurate representations of reality, or whether or not we can know if our scientific models are accurate representations of reality. Again, all I will present you with here is a
general overview of the topic, it is enough to know that this debate lies beyond the purview of science because it calls into question the very underpinnings of scientific laws and theories itself, such that it is impossible to argue scientifically about it.
Induction is a label to certain forms of inferences; I don’t see how this adds any new information about reality unless you are speaking about the inductive process known as science.
Yes I am talking about "the inductive process known as science" and you'd better hope that it adds new information about reality or else science is toast! Science relies on induction for its conclusions and thus to try to offer a scientific argument for induction would be making a circular argument equivalent to:
1. Induction
2. Therefore induction
This is beyond what science can do and therefore you'd better hope that we have some good philosophical justifications for induction.
Model logic doesn’t give us any new information by pure philosophy, unless we feed empirical facts into it. The same applies to any other form of logic.
Modal logic concerns the nature of the possible and the necessary. One way that we determine what is only contingently true and what is necessarily true is by using "possible worlds". A possible world is a maximum description of the way reality could be. Anything that is necessarily true is true in all possible worlds, anything that it is not true in all possible worlds is only contingently true. We only have empirical access to the actual world, so this too is beyond the scope of science. Unless you want to defend the contention that we get no new information by the use of modal logic then you have to grant that philosophy produces new information.
I’m not sure what new information you think philosophy of mind has given us, but considering our knowledge in cognitive science is starkly bare, I don’t think it would be too adventurous to guess not much.
Well perhaps you might be interested in some of the philosophical arguments for dualism, if they are true, dualism is true. You would agree that is new information, correct?
The Qualia Argument
Tying quite nicely with my previous segment to also show that modal logic can produce new information, here's a modal argument for dualism:
1. It is imaginable that one's mind might exist without one's body.
2. Therefore it is conceivable that one's mind might exist without one's body.
3. Therefore it is possible one's mind might exist without one's body.
4. Therefore one's mind is a different entity from one's body.
It is also argued philosophically that the incompleteness theorem and Turing's halting problem show that the mind cannot be purely physical.
