Synthetic philosophy

This is a good essay: "Synthetic philosophy", by Eric Schliesser. Ostensibly a review of recent books by @danieldennett & Peter Godfrey-Smith, it's a good discussion of a type of intellectual project.

Maybe that's what I am, a synthetic philosopher??https://t.co/QD05T4WI2t

— Thom Scott-Phillips (@tscottphillips) April 28, 2019

From Schliesser's essay:

By ‘synthetic philosophy’ I mean a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both). Synthetic philosophy may, in turn, generate new research in the special sciences, a new science connected to the framework adopted in the synthetic philosophy, or new projects in philosophy. So, one useful way to conceive of synthetic philosophy is to discern in it the construction of a scientific image that may influence the development of the special sciences, philosophy, public policy, or the manifest image. [...]

Synthetic philosophy, which shares kinship with what was once known as ‘natural philosophy’ or (later) ‘philosophy of nature’ is made possible by, and a response to, the intellectual division of labor within and among the scientific disciplines. It requires skills that are orthogonal to the increasing specialization within the increasingly esoteric sciences. It is, thus, a modern phenomenon of the last two centuries. Of course, it is not the only possible philosophical response to such specialization; for example, Neurath’s conception of orchestration and the development of a unified, scientific language was an alternative approach.

I suppose there's a lot of synthetic philosophy around these days. I certainly had something like that in mind in the first two paragraphs of Synch, Song, and Society, my essay review of Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals:

There are at least two reasons why an intellectual specialist writes for a general audience, including intellectual specialists from other disciplines. One is to contribute to civic life by explaining difficult but important subjects in a way that makes them accessible to the citizen who is curious about the world. Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct is a distinguished recent example of such a book. But a specialist in some discipline may also seek a broader canvas than is available within the guiding principles of the specialized journal article or professional monograph. Here I think of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. When done well, a book of this type has a value for the specialist that the unadorned popularization, no matter how well done, does not have.

There are important problems that cannot be handled within confines of a single intellectual discipline. The origins of humankind is one of these problems. No matter which facet of that problem interests you, you inevitably find yourself looking at everything – or so it seems. Is music an offshoot of language or did a music-like activity evolve prior to language? In principle we could answer this question by traveling back in time and making direct observations. Unfortunately, that particular principle cannot be realized in the world as we know it, so we must instead approach human origins indirectly by gathering evidence from a wide variety of disciplines – archeology, physical and cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and the neurosciences – and piecing it together. Such work entails a level of speculation that is incompatible with the publication demands of the specialist literature. It also demands a breadth of knowledge that is all but impossible. When done well, however, such a book contributes to specialist investigations by establishing a framework within which more detailed work can be done.

I figure my own Beethoven's Anvil is of this type as well. In my preface I characterized my method as speculative engineering:

Beethoven’s Anvil is about the building blocks and design principles, not so much of music, but of the brains and societies that create that music. My argument is simply that these building blocks—mostly neural circuits and social structures—are necessary. I have no particular reason to believe that I’ve defined the complete set; in fact, I have some some small reason to believe that the set is not yet complete, nor ever will be. The nervous system is plastic, taking the impress of its environment. As culture molds the human environment, so it molds the nervous system. I see no end to culture’s possibilities. Thus, it seems to me quite possible that our descendents a century or two from now will have nervous systems that differ from ours in small but critical ways.

Thus I like to think of this book as an exercise in speculative engineering. Engineering is about design and construction: How does the nervous system design and construct music? It is speculative because it must be. The purpose of speculation is to clarify thought. If the speculation itself is clear and well-founded, it will achieve its end even when it is wrong, and many of my speculations must surely be wrong. If I then ask you to consider them, not knowing how to separate the prescient speculations from the mistaken ones, it is because I am confident that we have the means to sort these matters out empirically. My aim is to produce ideas interesting, significant, and clear enough to justify the hard work of investigation, both through empirical studies and through computer simulation.