I found the following, I think apt, quote from Dan Dennett:
"In a review of Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, in New York Review of Books, the British geneticist Steve Jones had the following comment to make: "To most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex. It is cheaper, easier and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it." Now that view is all too common, and I understand it from the depths of my soul. I appreciate why people think this, but I think it is also important to combat this stereotype in a friendly and constructive spirit, and no place better than in a center for research in cognitive science. What philosophers can be good at – there aren't many things we can be good at – is helping people figure out what the right questions are. When people ask me whether there's been any progress in philosophy I say, "Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."
>"Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."
To this I might add a rhetorical question: how would science have gone about discovering the scientific method? Indeed, in which discipline would that question fall even today?
An the answer to a rhetorical question in case anyone is interested: Philosophy of Science. Specifically read Hume (Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding) who demonstrated that inductive reasoning to universal laws (empiricism) was fundamentally based on circular reasoning. Then Karl Popper developed the idea of falsification to show that while Hume is correct--you cannot prove natural laws as true, you can prove them false. He essentially codified the idea that scientific laws have to be testable, and falsifiable. So scientific laws are contingent. They are they closest we have to the truth, until someone devises a test that proves them wrong.
Philosophy of Science is definitely the right field to explore. It's worth noting that aspects of Popper's views are pretty controversial. Popper literally argued that evidence cannot increase the probability a hypothesis is true–for example, collecting a sample of 1,000,000 crows and observing that all of them are black cannot increase your confidence in the belief "at least 99% of crows are black." It can only decrease your confidence in opposing theories such as "at least 99% of crows are white." Very few people would agree with that view today.
The general problem of whether we can increase the probability that a theory is true by observing favorable evidence is the problem of induction, and there are no clear cut answers. A lot of philosophy focuses on situations like this: where all the proposed answers have flaws, but some have fewer flaws than others.
For example, one approach that's been gaining popularity is Bayesianism. Bayesianism is the idea that we have some prior belief in the probability of a hypothesis, and that we can update our confidence in that hypothesis by observing evidence and comparing the relative probabilities that evidence would hold in worlds where the hypothesis was true vs. worlds where the hypothesis was false. The key weakness of Bayesianism is the question of where priors come from, and how to formulate good priors. This is a glaring weakness, but all proposed solutions have glaring weaknesses–that's what makes Philosophy of Science hard.
"In a review of Steven Pinker's book, How the Mind Works, in New York Review of Books, the British geneticist Steve Jones had the following comment to make: "To most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex. It is cheaper, easier and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it." Now that view is all too common, and I understand it from the depths of my soul. I appreciate why people think this, but I think it is also important to combat this stereotype in a friendly and constructive spirit, and no place better than in a center for research in cognitive science. What philosophers can be good at – there aren't many things we can be good at – is helping people figure out what the right questions are. When people ask me whether there's been any progress in philosophy I say, "Oh yes, mathematics, astronomy, physics, physiology, psychology – these all started out as philosophy, and once we philosophers got them whipped into shape we set them off on their own to be sciences. We figured out how to ask the right the questions, and and then we turned them over to other specialists to answer."