For what it’s worth I think there is a way to rescue Sabine’s bad philosophy. She says:
Look, I am a scientist. Scientists don’t deal with beliefs. They deal with data and hypotheses. Science is about knowledge and facts, not about beliefs.
And from a certain point of view this is right, science is pragmatic and about ignoring large parts of problem space in order to act as if we did have the ability to know facts directly. And it works pretty well as far as it goes, as the modern world makes clear with all it has enabled us to do and have that did not happen without science.
There are still some technical problems here. Claiming that “scientists don’t deal with belief” is sort of like trying to say “scientists are not embedded agents” which is just nonsensical given what we observe about the world. But if we squint we can see this as more saying science is not about the folk notion of belief, i.e. it’s not about all your thoughts, regardless of how well they predict future experiences. I also think when she says that science is about “knowledge and facts” she doesn’t necessarily mean what a philosopher would mean by knowledge (a kind of belief that is believed to be correlated with “reality” or at least predictions of future experiences) or facts (universally, eternally true statements), but instead a folk version of these where knowledge some set of accessible facts that can be called up when needed and worked with and facts are statements that accurately predict the world up to the limit of our predictive abilities (and if she lacks a subjective, probabilistic model of knowledge, maybe just statements that predict future experiences 100% of the time).
And in this way it’s not at all at odds with philosophy, although it is antagonistic. Speculating, it seems Sabine is hoping that philosophy can remain a separate magisterium she doesn’t have to deal with by carving out hard lines between it and science, and although she’s clearly not a strong philosopher or else she would have chosen her words more carefully (although I am reading them out of full context, so it’s possible I am the one being insufficiently careful!), this is a stance a large part of Western philosophy took for most of the 20th century before it was proven unworkable since no such hard line can be made to exist.
As I like to think of it, we are all philosophers whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, and whether we’re good at it or not. We can wish it were otherwise, but the world we are embedded in is not shaped such that it could be, so even if we want to be pragmatists and avoid dealing with many deeper issues in philosophy, we should at least be honest and upfront about that, rather than what Sabine seems to be trying to do, which is slyly dismiss the need for philosophy rather than simple admitting to her pragmatism so she can get on with being a scientist.
For what it’s worth I think there is a way to rescue Sabine’s bad philosophy. She says:
And from a certain point of view this is right, science is pragmatic and about ignoring large parts of problem space in order to act as if we did have the ability to know facts directly. And it works pretty well as far as it goes, as the modern world makes clear with all it has enabled us to do and have that did not happen without science.
There are still some technical problems here. Claiming that “scientists don’t deal with belief” is sort of like trying to say “scientists are not embedded agents” which is just nonsensical given what we observe about the world. But if we squint we can see this as more saying science is not about the folk notion of belief, i.e. it’s not about all your thoughts, regardless of how well they predict future experiences. I also think when she says that science is about “knowledge and facts” she doesn’t necessarily mean what a philosopher would mean by knowledge (a kind of belief that is believed to be correlated with “reality” or at least predictions of future experiences) or facts (universally, eternally true statements), but instead a folk version of these where knowledge some set of accessible facts that can be called up when needed and worked with and facts are statements that accurately predict the world up to the limit of our predictive abilities (and if she lacks a subjective, probabilistic model of knowledge, maybe just statements that predict future experiences 100% of the time).
And in this way it’s not at all at odds with philosophy, although it is antagonistic. Speculating, it seems Sabine is hoping that philosophy can remain a separate magisterium she doesn’t have to deal with by carving out hard lines between it and science, and although she’s clearly not a strong philosopher or else she would have chosen her words more carefully (although I am reading them out of full context, so it’s possible I am the one being insufficiently careful!), this is a stance a large part of Western philosophy took for most of the 20th century before it was proven unworkable since no such hard line can be made to exist.
As I like to think of it, we are all philosophers whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, and whether we’re good at it or not. We can wish it were otherwise, but the world we are embedded in is not shaped such that it could be, so even if we want to be pragmatists and avoid dealing with many deeper issues in philosophy, we should at least be honest and upfront about that, rather than what Sabine seems to be trying to do, which is slyly dismiss the need for philosophy rather than simple admitting to her pragmatism so she can get on with being a scientist.