Is Philosophy Science?

My mission has always been to remind people that there is also a social philosophy, not just a hyper critical one or a scientism. It does what philosophy was supposed to do and it denies atomism (breaking truth into individualized particles without irony, without connections). It denies tying truth to a single man in an armchair telling us everything about the fundamental aspects of the world.

After reading Noam Chomsky (linguist, 94) it occurs to me that our world has a difficult time distinguishing between philosophy and science.

He is a scientist. When I read about linguistics (his PhD) it appears to be a science of language. It focuses on the particular and not the general, on the applied and concrete and not the abstract and fundamental. Chomsky certainly comes off as a political scientist and a social critic. The term "public intellectual" which is often used to describe him seems apt. But when people refer to him as a philosopher it shows a type of blindness that we have for the discipline perhaps because we know so little as a culture about it.

A linguistic scientist studies particular elements of language and how these particularities function in the real world (though this may not have always been the case). Classifying language, attempting to understand what people mean, and exploring inter-cultural interpretation - this is all science. Chomsky's attack on corporate hegemony is certainly political science and social criticism. But in contrast philosophy might be suggesting that we have built in "scaffolding," a natural structure on which our language is hung (see Reid).

Social criticism is not automatically philosophy. When you read about linguistics, certainly, there is a component that asks larger questions. So, this would naturally lead to philosophy. I could not find any as fundamental as: the relationship between consciousness and language, or between words and action (Reid and Wittgenstein, etc.). What seems evident is that our modern view of philosophy condemns it to being outdated and purely academic, if not discursive and taut0logical (circular). This view could be part of the reason we are unconcerned with the distinction - applied issues in linguistics are all that are important for us.

I think highlighting the difference between our most esteemed public intellectuals and the missing philosophers, points our analysis in the right direction. We cannot truly comment on language particulars if we don't have a sophisticated view of language. And as always, this view is only really possible as a social concept, shared socially, and explored through the social context.