rationalskepticism.org

epepke wrote:

Mr.Samsa wrote:I'm not sure it's accurate to claim that physics was initially philosophical and then became scientific. Physics, as termed by Aristotle, was a part of 'natural philosophy', which later became known as 'science', so whilst in a strictly literal sense it is true that physics went from being a 'philosophy' to 'science', this is simply because of a terminological change. To say that a field was once philosophical (i.e. it was a system of thought that was tested for logical consistency) but is now a science (i.e. a system dedicated to creating consistent empirical models about naturalistic claims) is really nonsensical since philosophy and science deal with different subject matter, use different tools, and have different ultimate goals.

I don't think that's what the claim is. The claim is that certain things (in this case, objects, their motion, and matter) were historically owned by philosophers and dealt with by methods that even now we would consider philosophical, and the control was later wrested away by people using methods we would even now consider scientific.

If we were to claim that scientific fields emerged from philosophical thought, then certainly we could probably list nearly every branch of science, but I can't even begin to imagine how a philosophical field could become scientific.

It's not so much that philosophical fields became scientific. It's that science managed to get a better handle on things that were formerly the province of philosophy.

The problem, however, is that we're discussing a pre-scientific time, where it's inaccurate to say that these things were dealt with by philosophy instead of science, because the natural philosophy of the time was science. It was poorly conducted perhaps, and used methods that we no longer use, but the core components, assumptions and axioms were the same. To say that science "wrested away" these fields from philosophy, is like saying modern geneticists "wrested away" evolution from early Darwinists.

epepke wrote:

For example, I'm not sure how a field like the philosophy of mind could become scientific - what tests could or would we run to falsify dualism or to support materialism, etc?

I don't know what tests anybody could run, but it's certainly possible that scientists could say so much about the mind that philosophical concepts like dualism could become trivial by comparison.

Trivial in what sense? For creating useful models of observations science could suggest that claims of dualism are unnecessary, but this obviously doesn't mean that dualism is false or any less likely to be true. The thing to keep in mind is that science is not a tool for discovering truth or reality, it's a tool for creating practical frameworks of knowledge. Issues of ontology and metaphysics are of course outside the reach of science.