What do philosopher's 'get' that physicists don't?

I’m a touch apprehensive about the strong wording used in this question - I don’t really think you can speak for broad groups of individuals and say that one group ‘gets’ something that the other does not.

Nevertheless, I will try to answer this question to the best of my ability by providing you with my unique perspective on what exactly there could be within the overlap between the two fields which would be more commonly misunderstood by a physicist than by a philosopher.

One of the most remarkable instances of this is epitomized by a topic on Quora called “Theories of Everything (Physics)” which is followed by no less than 72 thousand people! Of course, to my eyes this presents a simple contradiction in terms - if a supposed ToE explains all physical phenomena, satisfying the criteria for a Grand Unified Theory of Physics, then the probability that, in one fell swoop, it manages to simultaneously explain and justify the existence of a physical system in the first place is relatively low.

That is, if a theory explains and unifies all physical phenomena, but fails to explain or justify physics itself, then is it really a Theory of Everything? I’d say no.

Despite this fact, almost every time I see a reference to a Theory of Everything (which is properly the realm of metaphysics, not physics), it is being made by a physicist who doesn’t quite know what they are saying - don’t get me wrong, perhaps many of them do indeed know what they are saying and merely consider my point irrelevant to their discipline. Fair enough, but I’m going to have to insist that they are precise in their terminology on this issue, and ask that they reserve the term ‘theory of everything’ for that which it is genuinely applicable to.

In fact, implicit in the proposition that one can apply the term ‘Theory of Everything’ to the scientific domain of physics is a subtle assertion that everything which can be said to exist is physical; upon analysis however, it quickly becomes clear that this is ignorant to the breadth of thought which has existed throughout history with regards to the topic in question - existence. Who is to say that physics is all that exists, and is there really any physicist out there so confident in their discipline that they’d be willing to assert such a thing outright? I would hope not.

Physics is not capable of producing a theory of everything, because such a theory would rely on an ontological, metaphysical model in order to existentially ground the physical system in which we reside - if it did not meet this criterion, then it would fail, by definition, to qualify for the title “Theory of Everything”, as physics is indeed a ‘thing’ of some variety, and it does in fact require an explanation.

In conclusion, a philosopher’s scope is much broader than that of a physicist’s and this difference in scope permits distinctions in clarity in both directions. This means that a physicist will be able to provide you with predictive calculations which correspond to empirically observable phenomenon, and they are able to demonstrate the accuracy of those calculations to many decimal places.

On the other hand, a philosopher will not be able to provide anything that is even really close to accuracy of this kind, yet instead they can offer insight into issues that a physicist cannot even approach from such a technically obsessed perspective - what can a physicist really tell you about morality or aesthetics? Very little, I would imagine, and what they can tell you is, in general, sorely lacking in elaboration as such a topic is simply beyond their realm of expertise.

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Originally published at http://www.quora.com.