Anna Alexandrova in a series of posts at The Brains Blog about her new book ‘A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being’ does what philosophers *should* be doing! Thinking carefully about whether the terms they throw about have any real meaning – and looking for that meaning in the way those terms are actually used and understood.
I often sneer at the notion that philosophers are needed to tell scientists what they should be doing in order to further their purely scientific enterprise, but when it comes to using science “to establish an evidence base for governments, organisations, businesses, and individuals” to use in their political and personal decision-making, then I am much more sympathetic – but only to those philosophers who focus primarily on helping people clarify to themselves and to one another what it is that they are saying or doing, rather than on pretending to have any special expertise about what they “should” be saying or doing.
The use of “for” rather than “of” in Alexandrova’s title is particularly apt because I think it shows less inclination to interfere in the scientific process itself than to consider which scientific questions are of interest to the non-scientist and how the corresponding answers might be best used for personal and political guidance.