Philosophers seem unreasonably bad at science. This article supports, to an extent, the claim that they are in fact frequently bad at science (both understanding it and doing it); that the ineptness is unreasonable given their intellectual acumen; speculates upon the factors that tend to make them bad at it; and finally suggests how philosophers could frame their thinking about science in order to interact more productively with science.
I do not mean to suggest that all philosophers are bad at science. Patricia Churchland is arguably the most thoughtful eliminative materialist around, and it is because of her excellent grasp of both philosophy and science. One might think Churchland is thoughtfully mistaken in her outlook, but it is very hard to support any claim that she badly misunderstands science (and even harder to claim that she is not a philosopher!). As another example, Massimo Pigliucci (formerly on Medium) has a perfectly sound grasp of science (to the point where he has written an excellent philosophically-grounded book on how one is to distinguish science from pseudoscience and other forms of nonsense). The claim is not that philosophers uniformly do not grok science but rather that the frequency with which they don’t (and then let us know) is troubling.
I also do not mean to make any claim at all about whether scientists are or are not bad at philosophy. You can certainly find scientists saying silly things about philosophy. You can also find scientists saying silly things about politics, history, art, and whatever else. Scientists are humans! Science is like magic, but it doesn’t transform humans into an alternate type of being simply by learning how to do it. So I am simply not making any claim about scientists’ grasp of philosophy at all.
Given that much of this is historical, a disclaimer: there is a lot to history, and I do not here aim to be comprehensive, and I may take a more strongly opinionated stand than is fully warranted given the evidence. There are several places where, if I were motivated, I would be inclined to argue vigorously against myself. I’m not thusly motivated; as of this writing, I’m content to leave some spots as a slightly unfair caricature…but if you challenge me in the comments (with good evidence!), maybe I’ll change my mind. Regardless, I do (mostly) provide sources you can check, and anyway, this article is not itself science.
Let’s begin.
Part 0: Science is the Universe’s Cheat Mode
On a tiny speck of rock around a fairly typical main-sequence star in one of a hundred billion or so spiral galaxies, some (non-dark) matter somehow or other ended up arranging other matter to be patterned like itself, eventually resulting in creatures that banded together for mutual aid to find food and to fight and love and reproduce, in a world of rivers and trees and lions and ticks and tides and day and night. And they did their loving and eating and fighting and so on for thousands and thousands of years, telling stories about gods who were nice or mean or to whom you’d better pray or it’d never be summer again. They gradually invented and forgot stories, accumulated tricks like using heat to turn some rocks into some hard pliable rock-like stuff, and so on. Loving, fighting, a few more tricks, for generation after generation after generation.
And then in the blink of an eye (some twenty generations), they found their place in the universe, their place in the history of life on their planet, the fundamental operation of the universe relevant to almost everything they could observe; and they used it to give themselves powers surpassing those of the gods they had imagined. Much like some of their gods, they did not always use their powers wisely.
Something absolutely extraordinary has happened.
It’s happened a little bit too slow for us to notice using our evolved intuitive sense of things. We’re quite good at figuring out the human-scale here-and-now stuff. After all, our survival depended on it. But if you study a little bit of history, maybe read a Greek play, or some old Chinese literature, you’ll see: the people of history were people very much like us. Changing the climate of the entire planet by accident was not something they could do. (“I don’t want to change the planet’s climate, but mmm, hamburgers!”) The only reason we can do this is that we understand the universe. We turned on cheat mode. Global telepathy? Done. Fly to the moon (which was a way bigger challenge than most ancient humans realized)? Done. Reproduce the power of the sun on earth? Done.
How could this have possibly happened?
If you want to know, you could ask a scientist. But you might not get the whole story. For that, you’ll also need to ask a philosopher. But not just any philosopher, because philosophers are, too often, bad at science. Not just bad at doing it, but also bad at understanding it, and bad at understanding why or even that it works.
Some do understand — and you should listen closely to them! — but you have to choose carefully.
Part 1a: Philosophers are (Historically) Bad at Science
Philosophers are nominally (literally) lovers of wisdom, and understanding how the universe works seems like a type of “wisdom”. However, although many of our early advances in understanding came from philosopher-scholars, by and large philosophers have done a pretty mediocre job at informing us about how the universe works.
Ancient Greece was perhaps the best setting for philosophy and inquiry into the natural world prior to Renaissance Europe. By the standards of the time, their technological innovations were impressive. In Miletus especially, rational inquiry into the workings of the natural world was stressed, with Thales (~600 BCE) arguably the first prominent natural philosopher we know of (at least in the Western tradition): one who sought natural rather than mythological explanations. Perhaps the students of Thales would have hit upon the key ingredients of the scientific method, given time; but alas, Miletus was destroyed. Greece survived, but despite this promising start, Aristotle (~350 BCE) somehow ended up with the ideas that solid and liquid things fall because the four elements in them each seek their natural place and for earth and water that’s the land and sea; that hibernating animals literally died and were reborn in the spring; that timidity, thirst, and other physiological functions were a function of blood temperature; and all sorts of other misconceptions that even at the time could have been checked without a great deal of effort.
Aristotle also made many correct observations too, of course, but there was a serious issue of quality control. Aristotle came to be revered, and rightly so, for his formalization of logic, his persuasive and often insightful thinking about society, and for his insight that metaphysics was an important area of inquiry. The good parts were preserved (largely through Islamic philosophers); but also, a lot of the misconceptions stuck, and a systematic way to eliminate the misconceptions was not fully identified. It’s customary to identify Aristotle as one of the founders of science; I think, rather, that he was an albatross, even if he provided a slightly better foundation than Plato did with his emphasis on the purity of thought alone (Platonic forms and all the rest). For a scathing condemnation of Aristotle (a little harsh for my tastes, and over-optimistic about how spectacular lost Greek science and technology was, but judge for yourself), check out this article by Viktor Blasjo.
We needn’t trace the entire history of philosophers failing to quite grasp how to approach understanding the universe, but it’s instructive to examine some key developments.
In the Western/Middle Eastern tradition (which is really one tradition, given how the Islamic natural philosophers learned from the Greeks, and the Europeans then learned from them in turn), we see Ibn Sina grappling productively with how to gain knowledge from experiments (~1000 CE) only for politics and the criticisms of Al-Ghazali (~1100 CE) to torpedo it again. Al-Ghazali’s critiques of the deficits in Ibn Sina’s philosophy were mostly fair — but Al-Ghazali took the very unfortunate step of rescuing matters by inserting God everywhere, insisting on the primacy of faith over Ibn-Sina-style philosophy. This was especially true where there was something unknown: without a knowledge of exothermic oxidative reactions, Al-Ghazali maintained that when flame touches cotton it is not the flame that burns the cotton but rather God who does. Although it is still possible to accept this and nonetheless to try to experimentally determine God’s rational will — Al-Ghazali himself seems to have advocated for this to a substantial degree — I, at least, find it completely unsurprising that the pace of discovery in the Islamic world slowed drastically after this point.
Renaissance Europe wasn’t always much better. The fitful embrace of almost-scientific methods adopted via the church from Islam and extracted from Aristotelian logic and methods of observation was producing some gradual improvements in understanding, and the idea of an orderly God whose mind could in part be understood by examining His creation may have played some role in getting the right thought processes in order. But at the end of the 1500s, one would not have thought that anything more extraordinary was happening than in the golden ages of either Greece or Islam. Perhaps less.
The breakthrough event, if we are to pick one, was in the insights of Lord High Chancellor Francis Bacon, who immodestly declared, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” Perhaps he needed that degree of immodesty to break free from the Aristotelian mold. As a natural philosopher — Bacon does not appear to have much respect for most other aspects of philosophy — he advocated for a skeptical, evidence-based approach that broke with tradition. He wrote a withering critique of the “distempers of learning” that blasted both pseudoscientific thought as vain imaginations that were shielded from proper criticism, but also the “vain altercations” of philosophers who would argue endlessly rather than finding things out. He proposed an alternative, heavily-inductive, heavily evidence-based approach that, while a bit unwieldy, has the recognizable core of the scientific method. And he was careful to point out some of the key cognitive biases that can lead one astray — and still do lead people astray all the time.
In many ways, Bacon’s ideas weren’t new. I like to think that if he’d strolled into Miletus instead of the Persian army, the Milesians would have said, “Oh, yeah, that sounds right, that’s a good way to think about the things we’ve been saying!” As a student of Ibn Sina who was willing to stray yet farther from Aristotle, and embrace experimentation and induction more deeply, he would have fit right in. His ideas weren’t new, but they were stated forcefully enough, and were empirical enough, and emphasized doubt and testing enough, for the genie to get out of the bottle. (Luckily, Isaac Newton was around to give the genie a bit of an extra nudge.)
But philosophers didn’t all notice. Even the illustrious and brilliant Rene Descartes pushed science backwards as much as forwards with numerous ill-supported (but fabulously thoughtful) musings on how, for instance, color and vision worked: consistent with Descartes’ own ambition to ground reliable knowledge in thought and the impossibility of God being a deceiver, and not very much in the vein of Bacon’s empirical scrutiny.
Berkeley and Hume tag-teamed the approach, with Berkeley criticizing materialism (without which empirical study is on very shaky ground) and Hume attacking induction. Unfortunately for Berkeley, much of what he so carefully reasoned about now reads like laughable gobbledygook to anyone who knows a little neuroscience (George, listen, there are light-activated ion channels that convert a scene you view into action potentials; and thought is built from action potentials…that’s one example of how ideas and outside matter are coupled!). And though Hume’s critique was largely correct in terms of logic, it still hasn’t brought us any closer to understanding why science works so well. (Except indirectly: for instance, by stimulating Thomas Bayes to develop his ideas on induction and probabilistic reasoning, which have turned out to be fantastic tools to help us understand complex phenomena…even though this hasn’t ended up saving us from the problem of induction as described by Hume.)
More bafflingly, as science’s accomplishments have grown more numerous and impressive — thereby necessitating an explanation all the more — if anything we find increasingly many prominent philosophers seemingly explaining to us that it can’t, or doesn’t, or shouldn’t work at all.
Of course, some have taken up the challenge — Carnap, for instance, or Popper who really did make a nice contribution to our understanding of what is needed for something to be appropriately but tentatively supported by evidence.
But more yet seem to have missed the point. Adorno opined that “the mind is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real” but philosophy must “construct keys before which reality springs open.” Except it already had (the scientific method), and with his Frankfurt School buddies he was busy running away from its tenets (seemingly without realizing it). Lyotard seems only to understand science in terms of desire of scientists and the will to subjugate the world (and possibly one of many perspectives), apparently forgetting that people have willed thus for thousands of years so that even if the tempting engineering applications play a sociological role in the amount of resources we’re willing to invest, the power-centric view misses the forest, and the trees too, regarding how we gain the knowledge in the first place. Even Feyerabend fell off the deep end when, after careful consideration of the philosophy of science, he decided that in science “anything goes,” notwithstanding the millennia of anythings that didn’t go. He explains that he wanted: “to free people from the tyranny of philosophical obfuscators and abstract concepts such as “truth”, “reality”, or “objectivity”, which narrow people’s vision and ways of being in the world.” It’s true (um, “true”?) that there is a lot of mental freedom when one is blissfully unconstrained by how things actually work, but very swiftly one finds oneself hemmed in by constraints like dying of syphilis or being on the wrong side of an ocean or pegasuses not being real or people having a proclivity to believe sensational misinformation.
Not an encouraging record.
Part 1b: Philosophers are (Still) Bad at Science
Rather than examine contemporary academic philosophers, whose positions are very often derivatives of those who came before (whom I’ve already criticized), for this part let’s accumulate some easily-verified anecdotes from Medium. This is a not-completely-unreasonable approach because philosophers on Medium are, typically, a product of the philosophical standards of the day.
(If we were to do it the literature-review way by looking at publications and conference proceedings mostly from grad students: from what I’ve seen, philosophy students specializing in the philosophy of science mostly have a fairly sensible outlook; those in epistemology and philosophy of language are more of a mixed bag, with some things like practical stakes coming out backwards; metaphysics and ethics and feminist philosophy drifts farther yet. Basically, at this point, philosophers who pay attention largely have a fairly reasonable perspective, but the less attention they pay, the greater the chance of getting it wrong. Of course, there’s little reason why a feminist metaphysicist/ethicist can’t have a sensible perspective; it’s just not all-but-automatic as one might hope. You can’t escape learning what epistemology is, as a philosopher, but you can apparently escape having to confront the most mindboggling application of non-intuitive epistemology.)
Even on Medium — where every writer is necessarily extremely heavily invested in the gadgets we’ve produced from our unprecedented expansion of knowledge of reality (you cannot write stories here on parchment with a quill, after all) — the trend towards oddly underperceptive views of science is often evident among the philosophers without scientific training who nonetheless feel moved to comment upon science.
For instance, Douglas Giles, PhD writes fantastic and accessible posts on philosophy, covering in an engaging and competent way key contributions of many different philosophers. He also expertly applies philosophical wisdom to issues of import today. If you want to know something about philosophy, or benefit from it, his stories are a great resource. But when talking about the idolization of science (which is, indeed, a problem — the core of the scientific method is to not idolize things but rather to hold beliefs tentatively and in proportion to evidence), he describes people describing science as their religion (such people very much miss the point, and are rare indeed save in jest — mostly it is naysayers who claim sciency types are just following another religion) and responds with:
Now, the idolizers of science will retort that the ideas of science do explain some phenomena. That is true. What humans do, continually, is create beliefs to explain phenomena around them. Many beliefs do that. In this, science is just one way, among many, of human attempts to explain things.
Does he go on to explain how vastly this one way, among many, has extended the reach of our understanding? No — it’s just “one way, among many”. Numbers, too, are just one way among many to keep track of how much stuff one has. One can guess, one can use linguistic methods (“lots”, “not so much”), one can pair objects with fingers, one can free people from the tyranny of concepts like “three” and “multiplication” which narrow people’s ways of being in the world. Numbers are just one way, among many, of human attempts to deal with questions of how much.
Except numbers work. They work amazingly well. You can run a global economy with numbers. You can’t with fingers and freedom from the tyranny of multiplication. And, likewise, science also works amazingly well. The reason you ought not idolize science isn’t that it’s just one way among many ways to understand, ho-hum, nothing special, no reason to put it on a pedestal; it’s that idolization is diametrically opposed to the approach you need to do science. The reason science is tricky (as Douglas rightly puts in his title) is in large part that as soon as you switch from constant scrutiny to cheerleading — very natural once you achieve some manner of success — you stop doing science and the magic is gone. (It’s okay to do cheerleading with constant scrutiny; the key mistake is dropping the scrutiny.)
I don’t mean to pick just on Giles. Benjamin Cain is wonderfully eloquent but like Lyotard (and in the manner of Nietzsche), he appears caught by the idea that it somehow has to all be about power. Among other things, he suggests that scientists must understand things by being subjective and control-oriented:
For instance, to understand temperature you must deem some temperatures to be good and others to be bad. And you’ve got to be free and driven enough to alter or to move away from bad temperatures.
But while this subjective goal-oriented outlook might encourage us to investigate temperature, and it might be a necessary survival trait (neither freezing to death nor burning oneself on the campfire is pleasant), how does this impact the recognition that macroscopically, heat transfer is proportional to difference in temperature? Or that microscopically, temperature is mean velocity of gas molecules, and mean vibrational energy in solids?
How?
Why…it…doesn’t. At all. Understanding can be a recognition of a previously-unrecognized systematic pattern (heat transfer), or a bridge between two different types of phenomena that can be recognized as the same (heat-by-thermometer and heat at the molecular level). Indeed, goals beget motivated reasoning, driven by desire to achieve subjective ends, and this is one huge failure mode of science! Francis Bacon even warned us about this with the Idol of the Cave, wherein you let yourself be limited by your likes and dislikes.
Cain has it exactly backwards: science is impeded by a subjectively-motivated, control-oriented approach. The latter continually criticizes basic research for not getting to the point and wishes to switch funding to something more applied, and yet it is basic research with only a light sprinkling of “hm, this is probably of practical import” that has produced almost all of the transformative discoveries.
Again, this sort of misunderstanding of science (or scientism) isn’t universal among modern philosophers, even those on Medium. Paul Austin Murphy writes very cogently on philosophy and its intersection with science, including taking scientists to task when they fail to appreciate the valuable and distinct role that philosophy (including philosophy of science) can play; but he also clearly recognizes the problems some philosophers have when thinking about science or the philosophy thereof.
I would be remiss if I did not point out that Giles, Cain, and others often have good, insightful points about science too. But the weird thing is that the I-seriously-do-not-get-it kinds of perspectives come up fairly often, and not just as thought experiments to easily debunk.
Sadly, when sufficiently-widely-accessible philosophy escapes from its academic silos, the confused perspective seems enriched. Philosophers’ confusion about science is spreading into areas where it may yet cause substantial harm, including to science itself. Ideas that germinated in philosophy have found their way into culture to the point where you will occasionally get professors in scientific disciplines saying things like how we should respect the work of ancient indigenous scientists. But there weren’t any who we know of (not even in New Zealand: https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/2545-matauranga-maori-and-science)! There were thoughtful, observant people, who practiced the same kind of intuitive proto-science that everyone does (especially kids!), and in some cultures we could rightly say that there were natural philosophers. I would accept a claim that there was a Maori epistemology. Regardless, when considering various peoples we should respect their intellect and discoveries, but “science” isn’t a label that we apply to good smart stuff that people do any old way. It’s a very particular type of approach that isn’t anything goes, but rather intentionally subjects our beliefs to a rigorous crucible of scrutiny and evidential testing so that belief is solid enough to build upon.
Part 2: Philosophers are Unreasonably Bad at Science
If philosophy and science required radically different styles of thinking, or if philosophy were easy and science were demanding, one could easily enough explain the frequent missteps of philosophers: they just don’t have what it takes for science.
But a quick investigation reveals quite the opposite. Aristotle had keen powers of observation; his scientific contributions as a naturalist were significant. Descartes and Berkeley were expert mathematicians. Husserl wrote a sophisticated defense of logic not being just a matter of human psychology (displaying considerable acumen with both); and though his approach was, roughly speaking, useless, phenomenology predicted key questions in cognitive science. On Medium, Giles and Cain both deftly dismantle poor arguments that people occasionally drop on their posts. (Aside: why, oh why, would you write a comment to a philosopher that was filled with poor reasoning?!)
This is all rather anecdotal, of course. But people have studied IQ in different areas of study, and philosophy majors always come out right near the top — usually just shy of physicists, and usually well clear of average practitioners in some of the less quantitatively demanding sciences like biology.
Furthermore, many of the key skills one needs to practice science today are also those in high demand in philosophy: a keen grasp of logic, exploration of causal factors and alternative ways of looking at things, and so on.
Neil deGrasse Tyson bemoans the wasted effort. Massimo Pigliucci bemoans Tyson’s bemoaning. But even if Tyson’s critique could stand to be a little more sophisticated, is he actually that wrong? Isn’t he (approximately) restating Francis Bacon’s “vain altercations” as one of the distempers of learning? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the Philosophy of Science dourly notes, “By the close of the 20th century the search for the scientific method was flagging.”
Pigliucci is correct, I think, that philosophy could yet have a considerable amount to offer us in understanding the world, that its job isn’t to do science itself, and that there are examples of philosophy providing some useful input into thorny science-adjacent areas. However, empirically, Tyson has the upper hand here: there’s scant evidence that it actually has done all that much, at least since Popper. Thus, as a scientist, Tyson is correct(ish): the hypothesis that science-with-philosophy is significantly better than just-science (taking for granted the philosophical contributions through, let’s say, the 1970s) is hard to argue, Pigliucci’s evidence of exceptions notwithstanding. However, logically, Pigliucci has the more solid argument, at least to my eye. That is, he’s right, technically, and Tyson is wrong.
But as the saying goes: in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren’t.
To me, the simplified way to view the situation is: philosophers could be really good at understanding science and thereby helping humanity understand things (via more effective science). Nothing ought to be stopping them. But in practice, they very often aren’t. Much of what scientifically literate philosophy is good for is helping ward off scientifically inane philosophy that has escaped from its academic silos.
Part 3: Speculations on the Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Many Philosophers
Cory Doctorow has a very nice article, published on Medium, called Takes One to Know One. In it, he makes the point that — and gives multiple examples of — how people’s stated fears often reflect their own nature and flaws more than the flaws of those they try to criticize. He had his own targets that richly deserved critique, but what if we try to use this approach on philosophers?
Whether you consider Plato’s ideal forms or Berkeley’s immaterialism, you find a strong thrust towards supposing that ideas are the stuff that everything is made of in one way or another. Perhaps a carpenter would think everything is made of wood, a baker of dough, a writer of words, and a master craftsman of ideas — a philosopher — would think it was ideas? Hmmm.
Speaking of writers liking words, is it really any surprise that the philosophers of the Continental tradition both are known for their linguistic skill (whether it be the flowery and evocative prose of Nietzsche or the inscrutable but clearly nonrandom Derrida) and tend to stress a language-heavy view of the world? Perhaps we should interpret deconstruction not as a particularly informative way to understand texts in general, but the things written by Derrida and his compatriots specifically? Perhaps when philosophers seem to put great emphasis on the value-laden nature of theories, they mean that they can’t evaluate hypotheses in ways that aren’t heavily dependent on their own values and biases?
The point of philosophers, to a large extent, and especially these days, is to think about things. But if your expertise is in thinking about things, in winning arguments, in writing compellingly (at least to impress a select audience of peers), why would you expect to have any particular success with an endeavor that pretty much requires to assume that your ideas are not only all flawed, but flawed in ways you can’t perceive without testing? As Richard Feynman said, with regards to scientific inquiry, “The first principle is to not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Although philosophy does not quite have the legal tradition’s imperative to win an argument at any cost, it does involve a heck of a lot of defending against thoughtful challenges. (David Hills, a philosopher at Stanford, puts this hilariously like so: “Philosophy is the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.”) But you don’t want to be good at defending your ideas against evidential challenges! You want to say, “Oh, huh, that really doesn’t match the hypothesis very well.” Then you move on to try to find a way to shoot down another one of your own ideas.
So to an extent, it is a professional competency of philosophers to be bad at science. (It’s also hard for scientists to really attack their own ideas, but at least they embrace the goal.)
Furthermore, because of the often tenuous connection between evidence and hypothesis, scientists have had to develop great skill in considering the relative strength of evidence. For instance, they typically develop Bayesian reasoning both explicitly and implicitly. Despite the fact that Thomas Bayes was himself a philosopher, and Bayesian epistemology is a field developed by mathematically-minded philosophers rather than scientists, if philosophers are trying to determine the truth of things they typically tend to reach for predicate logic rather than Bayesian probabilities, and depending on their predilections they may reach for persuasiveness before predicate logic.
This too may result in philosophers’ professional competency pushing them away from the mindset and skillset needed to understand science.
Or maybe not. These things are really hard to test, and without a good set of empirical tests of competing hypotheses, I don’t have much basis to conclude that I’m on to anything profound. I find it an interesting idea; maybe you do too.
Part 4: A Path to Redemption for the Wayward Philosopher
Philosophers are, as I’ve argued, typically quite bright people. So this really shouldn’t be hard.
Science has done something unprecedented in human history. It isn’t qualitatively different from the kinds of advances in knowledge and skill that we had before, but it is so massively quantitatively different that it has produced a profusion of qualitatively immense changes.
All philosophers have to do to almost always start making sense when talking about science is to account for this. Otherwise, stay speculative, or stay quiet.
(This is not to say that science doesn’t have substantial problems. It does, but they’re usually not the ones raised by philosophers who think they have clever insights but can’t account for the overall shocking success of science.)
For example, if you’re going lean towards ontological idealism, you have to explain why thoughtful reflection has not revealed the basis of life, while repeated reference to a supposed external world in conjunction with skepticism about the validity of one’s own ideas has uncovered the genetic code. If you can’t explain that, maybe you should phrase your thoughts as speculations until you’ve worked it out. Likewise if you’re an anti-foundationalist, and so on.
In order to better understand the issues, philosophers who want to weigh in on scientific issues should also probably devote some time to study of a modern science at the level needed to understand how to be a competent experimentalist. When you immerse yourself in concerns about how to adequately power a study and attempt to estimate the size and direction of systematic errors, you gain an intimate exposure to the ways in which science is not like other ways of knowing. You can’t just consider the sociology (which is important) without also considering experimental design, because if the latter part is done correctly, it can buffer the influence of an awful lot of social factors, especially on average, especially over time.
Philosophers are, for the most part, up to the task, should they choose to be. Alas, I am not particularly hopeful, given history, that the ones who are misstepping will stumble onto this themselves or settle on a better way themselves, nor am I particularly hopeful, given the predilection for argumentation, that they’ll take my advice. But I am slightly hopeful.
If you’re a philosopher who already understands science, thank you for your contributions! (For instance: thank you, Bayesian epistemologists! This could be an important area to have worked out really solidly!)
However, if you are a philosopher, and aren’t trained as a scientist as well, I encourage you — if you haven’t already — to think deeply about why science has accomplished so much knowledge-generation in comparison to other human endeavors. If you doubt that it has, just look around at your computer and phone and such and ask: why hasn’t this happened before in history? Or ask your friends who are philosophers of science (and hope you don’t get unlucky).
And if you’re not a philosopher but happen to read something written about science by a philosopher, I encourage you to ask yourself: is the thesis being put forth compatible with the demonstrated accomplishments of science? If not, perhaps it would be wise to be skeptical.