Philosophy is a natural extension of science. A good scientist needs to be a bit of a philosopher.
After all, philosophy is basically analysis, extracting meaning from what we see, and projecting meaning out beyond what we can see. If science gathers the data, it is philosophy that analyses it and formulates the new questions for further investigation.
Its a natural part of the process, and a really good scientist, the ones who go for the big questions, have to walk on the wild side.
Its not merely ok, its the way it is. We just need to be clear when we are doing the one, and when we are doing the other, and in fact the line gets fuzzy, but there is a line. The beauty of the process is that we keep pushing the line farther and farther back, converting the unknown into the known, and handing it off to the engineers and techs who take it from there.
I certainly don't see science as in competition with philosophy. Their job is to gather the data. I'll make sense of it if I can. If I can't, clearly they need to gather more data. There are few philosophical questions that can't be settled by either time, experience, blood on the battlefield, or more data.
"After all, philosophy is basically analysis, extracting meaning from what we see, and projecting meaning out beyond what we can see. If science gathers the data, it is philosophy that analyses it and formulates the new questions for further investigation."
"Its a natural part of the process, and a really good scientist, the ones who go for the big questions, have to walk on the wild side."
That was, I believe, more or less Einstein's attitude on the matter.
Well pre-Enlightenment, science was called "natural philosophy." The word "science" never surfaced until the 18th century.
Both science and philosophy are basically analytical processes, "extracting meaning from what we see, and projecting meaning out beyond what we can see."
Still to the extent that science depends on observables, it cannot account all by itself for everything that is, which realistically includes "non-observables" such as logic and physical laws. In short, it relies for the prosecution of its own business on entities that its own method cannot explain or account for.
Then there is the small matter of whether reality reduces to the observable. Human beings are strongly visually-oriented. Which I gather is why such a premium is placed on "observability." But this is not the same thing as saying that all of reality reduces to the observable; merely that human beings will tend to focus on it, to the exclusion of anything else that might exist, though not in a physically observable state.
Then there is that saying, "in the mind's eye." The human mind can "see" non-observables. Which tells us that reality does not finally reduce to what the physical eye can tell us.
Thanks so much for your excellent post, marron!