Lately there has been a rediscovery on the blogia of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures - which initially was the divide between those who understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and those who don't, but is now, it appears, between those who know math and those who don't, and the respective attitudes. In Chad's initial post, the discussion turned to the Sokal hoax and what it is supposed to prove. So what I want to do here is a little "compare and contrast" between what is usually thought to be the main themes of postmodern philosophy (not being an expert, I may be... no I certainly am misrepresenting it, for it is a fluid and hydra-headed school of thought, like any such school, I suppose) and those of the philosophy of science. There are some interesting overlaps of concern, but exclusions of approach. It's no accident that three of those who influence modern philosophy of science - Wittgenstein, Quine and Kuhn - are also thought of as contributors to postmodern philosophy in various ways that may or may not be fair. Think of this as a start to a rapprochement.
The first question is that of scientific realism - does science objectively tell us about the world or do we construct reality? To many scientists, the very idea that we "construct" reality is absurd, and yet even in the most analytic of philosophical traditions, the question of external or internal realism, as Putnam dubbed the approaches, is a very live issue. Bas van Fraassen in his The Scientific Image, while proposing a semantic account of theories (the "semantic conception") based on an erotetic (question and answer) logic, famously argued in favour of internal realism - what is real is what our theories tell us, and there is nothing more. So in that case, what we believe to be true is constructed by scientists as they build and test theories. This follows Quine's famous paper "On what there is", in which one's ontology is determined by the quantifiers of a logical sentence that expresses your best theory: if your best theory T says that xs exist, because when you make it logical you get some quantifier (either ∀(x), "all xs..." or ∃(x), "there are some xs") over x, then you must believe that x is a class of things in your best theory, and hence you must believe in them.
Unsurprisingly, there are others who are realists in the metaphysical sense as well - the other major semantic conception guy, Frederick Suppe, was a scientific realist, so thinking that theories are semantic constructions doesn't commit you to being an antirealist. But I have a friend, Sahotra Sarkar, who once chid me for talking about the objects of theories (in this case., species) as real - "Why do you need that religion?" he asked me. I had and have no good reply. But I think that what underpins the whole scientific enterprise is the idea that there is a world out there that we are denoting when we speak our theory sentences. Otherwise, why bother?
And that too is a postmodern view: we construct reality for political reasons rather than cognitive ones (or perhaps the two are coincidental). This is not original to postmodernism either. Thomas Merton George Sarton, the famous historian of science, as well as people like Kuhn, Feyerabend, Hull, and feminist philosophers of science all noted that political power games in science are not only real things, but necessary aspects of science as it is practiced. Myself, I think politics is a way to ensure that research traditions do not get stuck on suboptimal solutions. The existence of gadflies and eccentrics in a science acts like noise in an ANN, or jitter in what is called ""simulated annealing" - science is like a simulated annealing process of global optimisation. Removing the political aspect of science would result in moribund and largely self-satisfied sciences that would inevitably be turned to political ends anyway. This is sometimes called the "sociology of knowledge" in the postmodern tradition, and often is criticised for not attending to what is sometimes called the "internal" content of science. That is, sociologists of science are accused (and in some cases this is entirely true) of treating scientific institutions and players as if they were merely anthropological subjects of no greater interest than a Papuan mountain tribe. But others say that while this is true, if they are to understand their subjects, they have to internalise the beliefs of scientists as much as they would a Foré Mountains tribe. This does not placate the pro-science side much, because it is hard to see how one can internalise science without believing it to be the best source of knowledge, but that, too, is part of a wider debate about understanding other cultures, times and philosophies that can be found in Kuhn or Wittgenstein, or under the rubric of "hermeneutics".
Postmodern philosophy tends to treat ideas as texts without authors, taking what was once called the "intentional fallacy" that the author's intentions must be taken into account when understanding any text as a mistake. In the case of science, though, it has long been the practice of scientists to treat written scientific publication as a self-standing report independent of the authors' intentions. It is only recently that analytic philosophy of science has started to look closely at the reasons why particular research was done in the way it was, and possibly in response to the postmodern approaches. Here analytic and postmodern philosophy have run parallel courses. Before the "historical turn" in modern philosophy of science, and still for many philosophers, discussion of prior scientific and philosophical positions, even from the Greek period, is done as if the author was sitting across the table from the philosopher of today. This leads to egregious misinterpretations of older philosophies, making Aristotle, for example, sound like a Cambridge don. Neither side can claim purity on this issue, but Foucault's "archeology of knowledge" is itself a very historical turn. Historians of science like Ian Hacking, however, contextualise (another postmodern word) research in a rigorous manner.
And rigor seems to be the main bone of contention. The Sokal hoax was supposed to show a lack of rigor in postmodern work, and it is true that specific case demonstrated that, but one can find slapdash work in any field. A considerable amount of work done by popular science writers, for example, is often lax in its attention to detail or its critical reasoning. While it is true that any discipline in which criticism consists of saying "this is highly problematic" without laying out why it is, and giving an account that is more than a matter of personal aesthetics or political inclination, is fundamentally screwed (that's the technical term), it no more follows that the whole enterprise is worse off than the uncritical assumptions and reflections made by those on the "other side".
That said, I find the way postmodern work is done somewhat too intuitive. That might sound a bit weird, for "intuitive" is thought to be a marker of good ideas, but experience tells me that when someone says something is counterintuitive, it is often because they don't understand the work that led to that conclusion. Intuition is a very bad guide to the world, because intuition is usually based on commonsense, and commonsense, we know, is the sum total of prejudices one has acquired at the age of eighteen. The world is only intuitive in the most limited case.
And this gets us back to the methodological aspect of this debate or war of the books: can you understand science if you don't know the basics of its language, mathematics? All science ends up being mathematical, and some science starts out that way (e.g., physics). Not understanding math means stupidities like the claim that Newton's Principia is a "rape manual" or that fluid dynamics is unsolved because fluid is female and rigidity is male. But I do not know much math, not because I am stupid but because I wasn't taught it properly or well (that is, the teachers were teaching stupid stuff under the rubric of "new math", and what math they did teach me was taught badly), and I claim to understand quite a lot of science. Am I just being a stupid humanities guy? I don't think so - I have tried to engage with what the scientists say, but retain my "meta" stance about science as best I can. I have tried to understand the math where math is used, and to understand the terminology used in terms that a scientist in the field would. It ain't easy. But I don't do badly (especially if I can find a tame mathematician to explain it to me).
There is a cultural divide between the humanities and the sciences, but it is not a simple one. It has to do, ultimately, with respect. The division is between those who respect science, and those who respect the humanities (and the other human-related subjects, like social science, political science and so on). Yes, we in the humanities treat science like a text. This is because, as we are not doing science, we interface with that vibrant tradition via the texts of science, mostly. And we are being, as philosophers, very "meta" about science - that is, we are discussing its discussions, and reflecting upon its reflections. Textualisation is impossible to avoid, although one can correct for it. But some of us respect science. We respect it for the same reason that Locke, Hume, Kant and Mill respected science - it is where the knowledge is gathered (or made, or constructed out of data, etc.), so it is the single most important part of human cognition and social organisation to a philosopher. The beliefs of the Azante are not that important unless you are interested in that society. This is our society, and we must treat it with overall respect.
Scientists often do not respect humanists, either. It is a running gag that PZ or Larry Moran will tweak me and others for being mere philosophers, but the gag is that most scientists really do think philosophy is a waste of funds and office space. Likewise they think the same thing about literary studies, history, social sciences, and in fact everything that is not their own specialty. It's not hard to see this as special pleading, but if scientists want respect, they had better show some. It's not impossible: Ed Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould are just two examples of scientists who - for all their faults - respect the humanities. Nobody has the time or energy (or mental capacity) to become experts in both fields; there's barely enough time to become expert in one subspeciality of one discipline of one field); but we can respect those who do learn those limited domains even if they are not our own. This is a plea for respect too, between the analytic and continental styles of philosophy. Neither is totally stupid nor totally on track. Rather than reject the other styles, perhaps what we should do is mutually support each other to do what we do well.
And also we need world peace...
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Without philosophers and informed intuition there would be virtually no scientific hypotheses of any merit.
Congratulations, John, on being the first to mention The Two Cultures in this discussion! I'll have to rip my Flanders and Swann CDs this evening, and send you their take on the whole issue.
I was musing about the maths thing this morning, and I wonder if a lack of understanding of maths forces the humanist to focus more on the verbal descriptions of scientists, so that they miss the real action. This is similar to Jerry Fodor complaining last year that we don't have a good metaphor for natural selection - my response was that we do, but it's mathematical. I guess it's unfair to expect philosophers to follow the details of the maths, but how much bias do you introduce when you compensate?
Raymond Tallis?
Anyway, thanks for a typically stimulating essay. Luckily I had had my first coffee before reading it.
I think the real problem is that the concept of 'the humanities' covers such a wide spectrum of disciplines, some of which (including philosophy) can and should be of great use to scientists, while others really are 'a waste of funds and office space'.
It would be unfair to dismiss the whole of 'science' because of some of the so-called disciplines that claim to be scientific (the philosophy of science helpfully attempts to make some sort of distinction); it is equally unfair for some scientists to dismiss the whole of humanities - although there is undoubtedly plenty of dross in there.
Earnest question from a guy who hasn't paid adequate attention to philosophy of science: how do hard-core postmodernists explain the fact that science comes up with interesting STUFF like drugs and computers and rockets?
Newton's Principia is a "rape manual"
His rough hands gripped her throat, his thumbs pressing her windpipe closed. He stared into her frightened eyes as a wicked leer played across his lips. Forcing her legs apart he rammed his huge hard circumjovial planet into her tight rectilinear ascent!
"Specializing" or focusing is a great way to get fast results. No question about it. But over the long term, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything begins to look like a nail - i.e. let's explain everything in terms of evolution or mathamatics, because that's all we've ever known. But do we ever consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe... there might be more to reality than nails?
I'd say no subject in the humanities is a waste of office space intrinsically but in terms of actual projects going on there are probably more that are a waste of office space than in the sciences.
The sciences and the humanities often see the strawmen of each other -- especially for the humanities because often the most vocal opinions and the ones with the most coverage also contain the most nonsense.
"Postmodern philosophy tends to treat ideas as texts without authors, taking what was once called the "intentional fallacy" that the author's intentions must be taken into account when understanding any text as a mistake."
There's also Bruno Latour's principle, according to which, when studying the history of a scientific controversy, the matter of who was right or wrong, scientifically speaking, must not be taken into account, and you must consider that it played no part in the resolution.
This position strikes me as stunningly absurd. If I try to understand its rationale, all I can think of is a logical error. "Naive" positivist epistemology ("science is truth") considered that the purely scientific aspect is all that matters. Of course, it's false. But taking the exact opposite of this statement, when you should take its logical negation, looks to me like nothing but a fallacy. I must surely be wrong, as so many great minds wouldn't have fallen into such a trivial trap. But until now, I still haven't found anything else that this extravagant position could be based upon.
I enjoyed this essay, but I'm not sure you are right about the Sokal paper being "supposed to show a lack of rigor". Having read it didn't seem like it was supposed to show anything, at least in the sense of containing an actual argument. The paper struck me more as a (somewhat obscure) work of political satire. He was mocking people in positions of status and influence who he disapproved of and getting laughs out of it (the stuff about axiomatic set theory and liberal feminism - I LOL'd).
As I understand he's claimed his motivation for ridiculing these thinkers was their influence on practical politics. I really think it is a mistake to see it as containing an argument (maybe Sokal's later writing on the same subject did). It's like trying to find an argument about theology in the act of throwing a custard pie at the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Reply to ngong #4
To some postmodernists, it's not that reality doesn't exist. It does, but we're unable to know it as such. Reality for us is our mental representation of that reality. So, when we turn on a computer, while we are physically interacting with an actual device, we're also interacting with a representation of that device that may or may not conform to reality.
Some postmodernists stop there, while others conclude that because we construct a mental representation of reality we must also construct reality itself.
It's a bullshit "anything goes" philosophy.
A very interesting post - thanks John. The issue of respect (either due, expected or given) is worth pursuing, but I can't help but feel you pulled a bit of switcheroo on us by returning to the two cultures as seen within academia.
I felt that Chad was discussing the more general, non-academic, cultural phenomenon where one is sneered at for not immediately understanding what a "Mondrian" is (or worse, not thinking Mondrian was an interesting or good artist!) while being viewed as some sort of elitist for understanding how to calculate percentages or compound interest. In wider society who gets respect and who doesn't seems to be reversed from within academia.
Christophe - I think you're missing that Latour is (was?) a sociologist of science. What he was asking was how scientists arrive at the conclusions they do. the problem is that so-and-so discovered the correct structure of TRF, but how do we know what the right one was? Because that's what they found. If you're not careful, the argument either becomes circular, or a Whig history.
Latour's solution is to ban that sort of argument, and look at the process by which scientists come to some conclusion (after all, that's what he's interested in as a sociologist). His approach (in Laboratory Life) was to see the results we obtain as coming from "inscription devices", and then focussing on how we interpret these inscriptions, and change them from one form to another, and assign credit and competence to the actors.
I think his approach makes sense if one is studying the sociology or history of science. Of course it may not be the best approach to take: I'm sure there are times when it gets in the way. But I think it's valuable in giving us another avenue to explore how we do science.
"Not understanding math means stupidities like the claim that Newton's Principia is a "rape manual" or that fluid dynamics is unsolved because fluid is female and rigidity is male."
Great post, but I completely fail to understand how feminist critiques of the culture in which science is practiced are the result of "not understanding math."
Although I think the critiques you mention are overstated and inflammatory, and I always end up arguing against them at cocktail parties, I don't like them being labeled as "stupidities," either. They are rooted in valid concern about the historical lack of female influence on the culture of scientific practice. It's not stupid to be concerned about a general problem that has not gone away. Nor is this concern an indication of mathphobia.
(Just to head off the argument that we have achieved gender equity in science - not in my experience we haven't. I had a male student tell me just two years ago that "couldn't respect me as an anatomy professor" because I'm A) female and B) young. Nice, eh? I think science is great, but the culture of "Science" still needs a bit of work.)
Constructing reality
IMO, philosophers have made a mess of the idea of construction. And when I say "philosophers", I include postmodernists, traditionalists, uncle Tom Cobbley and all.
In Euclidean geometry, mathematicians construct the bisector of an angle. Yet they agree that the bisector existed before they constructed it. Here the construction can be seen as a means of discovery, a way of gaining access. Mathematicians would deny that they are creating the bisector out of whole cloth.
My contention is that construction in science is similar. The world is constructed in place (where it already was), as a way of discovering it and of gaining access to it. (I call that construction in situ).
Matt, what Sokal did was slip, amongst the PoMo jargon, basic falsehoods about physics into the paper. After it was published in Social Text, Sokal rightly mocked the editors for lack of intellectual rigor.
Thomas Merton is one of my favorite authors, but I don't think he has written much about history of science. He was a Trappist monk who wrote about the contemplative life. Perhaps you are thinking of Robert K. Merton.
A relativistic approach makes a certain amount of sense if one is to pursue sociology or history, but Latour takes it much too far, and from his methodological relativism concludes a rather sweeping epistemological and metaphysical relativism (or, at least, he seems to--he also has an obnoxious habit of making ambiguous statements).
Latour is one of the voices claiming things along the line of "Nature has no role in determining the outcome of scientific investigation"--this seems preposterous to me. It could only be true if one were to suppose that scientists were interacting only with each other, and never with an object which is not a politically motivated scientist. But that seems so preposterous it's almost mind-boggling. If one admits that scientists are also interacting with objects in addition to other scientists, the radical relativist position becomes untenable.
That's not to say that it's impossible for methodological social constructivism to prove epistemological or metaphysical social constructivism. If one wishes to claim that knowledge is merely a social construction, which does not accurately represent an objective "nature", then one must be able to show how all current scientific knowledge can be explained exclusively through the interactions of scientists with each other and with society. But if the social interactions are not enough to explain the phenomenon of science (and I would say emphatically that they are not nearly enough), then one must admit that something beyond mere social construction is going on here.
The fact that sexism in science is a real and legitimate concern in no way absolves Harding or Irigaray or their ilk of their patently ludicrous statements about "rape manuals" and "sexed equations" and the sexism of fluid dynamics. Crime, for example, is a legitimate concern, but that doesn't mean that the Natural Law Party's claim that they reduced crime in Washington DC by meditating a lot is anything other than nonsense.
Yes, sexism is a genuine problem in science. No, that does not change the fact that many of Sandra Harding's (and others') "critiques" of science are downright idiotic. There's no reason to mince words on that matter.
Most of the biologists I know, who think about philospphy of science at all, think of themselves as some kind of Popperian. I call myself an incomplete Popperian because I do not understand all of what he had to say. I'm amazed that you can talk about philosophy of science without mention of Popper (maybe I missed it.)
Yeah, I'll tweak you...but I think you know I put a pretty high value on philosophy as a valuable resource for learning and training scientists.
Matt Heath @ # 9: It's like trying to find an argument about theology in the act of throwing a custard pie at the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Y'know, if such were the standard form of theological discourse, that field's reputation might be significantly enhanced in many circles.
Thomas Merton is one of my favorite authors, but I don't think he has written much about history of science. He was a Trappist monk who wrote about the contemplative life. Perhaps you are thinking of Robert K. Merton.
Actually it's worse than that. I'm thinking of George Sarton... oy.
Myself, I was thinking of Paul Merton. Comparing him to the leading pomo lights, it's a toss-up as to who's the funnier - or do I mean who's the biggest tosser?
I can't speak for our anthropoid host but I can give my explanation as to why the statement that Newton's Principia is a rape manual is totally stupid and could and should be avoided if one understands mathematic. The statement rests on a wide spread myth concerning Newton and Bacon that can only be avoided if one actually reads the Principia and one can only do that if one understands mathematic.
The accusation that the rise of modern science in the 17th century is equivalent to a male rape of nature is based on the writings of Francis Bacon and contains more than a grain of truth. Bacon's rhetoric about man's dominion over nature really does read like a male chauvinist manual for the misuse of women a fact that was clearly pointed out by holist philosophers of science in the 1960s and 70s such as Bateson and Capra. They were however using this allegory, in the first instance, not as a proof of the sexism of science but as a condemnation of reductionist analytical science. This argument has however a major flaw as Bacons philosophy is not reductionist analytical science, in fact the arguments of Bacon, that the holists quote, are not science at all but are fantasies about science based technology an area that didn't really come into being until the nineteenth century.
The problem of Newton's Principia arises in a major mistake that is made not just by post modernists but also by many philosophers and historians who claim that Newton's science is the realisation of Bacon's theory. This is complete rubbish as the scientific methods of Newton and Bacon are totally different; they are in fact mutually exclusive and contradictory. In the words of Ernst Rutherford Newton is a physicist and Bacon is a stamp collector (see in particular my comment in the linked posting). In order to understand the difference one has to read both Bacon and Newton. Now a lot of philosophers and historians are happy to read Bacon's New Atlantis, which is regarded as a great piece of utopian literature but almost none of them ever read Newton's Principia because it is a book of mathematical physics.
Principia is divided into three books the first of which is a purely theoretical mathematical discourse on the dynamics of bodies under the influence of various forces; although Newton famously never actually says what a force is. The third book is the application of the theory, developed in book one, to the subject of celestial mechanics. Here Newton, amongst other things, proves Kepler's first two laws of planetary motion, a thing Kepler had neglected to do. He then proceeds to show that under the assumption of the law of gravity along side his own laws of motion he can derive Kepler's third law. He also shows that if instead you assume Kepler's third law you can derive the law of gravity thereby proving that the law of gravity and Kepler's third law are logically equivalent. The second book is interesting in the light of claims of sexism in fluid dynamics as it is a brilliant excurse on the application of the theory from book one to fluid dynamics in order to prove that Descartes' vortex theory is impossible. In order to discover this one has to be able to read the Principia which means one has to be able to understand mathematics.
$0.02 from a guy in history/area studies, which straddles social sciences and humanities.
A friend of mine made the comment that it's hard to find post-modernists anymore, because post-modernism has won. The less ambitious ideas of post-modernism have gained nearly universal acceptance. These include things like the idea of flexible or fragmented identities, the post-structuralist critique of structuralism (and structuralism isn't limited to the humanities, Saussure was a structuralist), and more generally an emphasis on how traditions of interpretation are passed on between people, generations, etc., as opposed to trying to classify or fix the specific details of a given tradition or style. There is a general direction that the humanities went along with post-modernism as a movement, and I don't see any backtracking happening there anytime soon.
And you could also say that post-modernism is dead, because few people really take the more extreme assertions of post-modernism (the intentional fallacy, e.g.) all that seriously anymore--at least that's my experience.
I think scientists' lack of respect for humanities often comes from their not appreciating that it's a discipline with its own disciplinary skills, and moreover, these skills are not the ones that they use. Certainly, as a historian, I would never dismiss the importance and validity of scientific method for, say, determining the age of strata in an archeological dig, or for historical questions in general. But what if literary evidence was involved? Would I trust a scientist to tell me if a travelogue was trying to score a political point in the Ottoman court? Probably not. And that kind of evidence ends up being important for understanding even the more physical, material aspects of history.
Ultimately reality is fluctuation, conventionally reality appears more solid. You can't have one without the other, these aspects or concepts exist simultaneously, they are interdependently originated. Hat tip to Gautama Siddharta. What postmodernism and philosophy of science have in common is a failure to articulate this beyond the lab and impress it into our day to day consciousness.
A few quick points regarding the idea of rigour and mathematics, and the idea that philosophy (including postmodernism) is non-rigorous and arises from "common sense": the mathematician Doron Zellberger quotes the old story (possibly fictional) about Euler's "refutation" of Diderot's atheism by proving the existence of God via an equation he supplied. Zellberger correctly notes:
Mathematical explication does provide a measure of rigour both due to the atomic nature of its progression and by its underwriting the consistency of the presented argument in certain cases. However, this does not preclude rigorous thinking and expression in other areas of activity! Nor does science (as the philosophers of science have documented) proceed in this mathematical fashion, nor can it, at a time when the validity of the proof of a theorem in mathematics itself is decided by committee. By the time we reach softer science like biology, rhetoric and other devices take on a crucial role in establishing successful paradigms.
Regarding the Sokal Prank, it is worthy of note that he chose a non-peer-reviewed open format journal run by two editors. Sokal's acts in themselves offers evidence of the very behaviours of scientists that philosophers of science describe. Unsurprisingly, similar pranks have been successfully carried out on scientific journals, including peer reveiwed ones.
John wrote
Interesting analogy. One can push it a bit further to ask whether there actually is a global optimum -- is the space in which we do science uni-modal or multi-modal?
Ravi: entire careers have been based on hoaxing science journals about science. We call it fraud. That it happens should give scientists some reason to be a little more humble.
RBH: I think overall that presuming one reality exists, which I hope nobody denies, the space is unimodal, although that doesn't mean it has to be monotonic. But specific domains, such as (oh, I don't know...) biology need not be unimodal or anything much like it. What I think might happen is that as a solution is approached, the problem space itself evolves so that we can get something of a natural solution. That might mean, for example, revising what we include or do not include in that domain - culture, for example, might end up as a biological phenomenon. We have to solve for actual problems (as opposed to the problems brought about by language or the contingencies of history of the science) as well as solutions to problems.
"Postmodern philosophy tends to treat ideas as texts without authors, taking what was once called the "intentional fallacy" that the author's intentions must be taken into account when understanding any text as a mistake. In the case of science, though, it has long been the practice of scientists to treat written scientific publication as a self-standing report independent of the authors' intentions."
I think this analogy is flawed. In the humanities the texts tend to be filled emotion and are of a personal nature. Thus the author is linked to the work and understanding the circumstances in which they wrote it becomes important. In science the texts tend to be much more matter-of-fact and thus the author's life and intentions play a lesser role.
"And rigor seems to be the main bone of contention. The Sokal hoax was supposed to show a lack of rigor in postmodern work, and it is true that specific case demonstrated that, but one can find slapdash work in any field. A considerable amount of work done by popular science writers, for example, is often lax in its attention to detail or its critical reasoning. "
The Sokal paper wasn't just "slapdash", it was complete and utter nonsense. A first year physics student could have seen that. Yet the Social Text published it.
As for popular science writers, their audience is the general public. Their readers want a quick overview of the topic, not the details. Stephen Hawking was famously told that every equation he put in "A Brief History of Time" would cut his sales down by half.
"Scientists often do not respect humanists, either. It is a running gag that PZ or Larry Moran will tweak me and others for being mere philosophers, but the gag is that most scientists really do think philosophy is a waste of funds and office space. Likewise they think the same thing about literary studies, history, social sciences, and in fact everything that is not their own specialty."
I don't think "most scientists" think philosophy or anything that is not in their field is a waste of funds. There is a joke that a physics professor is asking for funds from the college don. The don says 'Why can't you guys be like the math department? All they need are pencils, paper, and a trash can. Or better yet the philosophy department, who just need paper and pencil.' Scientists get really cranky when amateurs start derailing science by pushing nonsense that would better belong in the trash. The two cases you gave about Principia being a rape guide and fluids being female and solids male are good examples of that. How about Steve Fuller, so called social epistemologist, testified for intelligent design at the Dover trial? Here is an example of a postmodernist (or whatever he wants to call himself) trying to damage scientific education.
Should scientist give more respect to those in the humanities? Probably. However from what I've seen it seems like those in the humanities are more hostile to sciences than vice versa.
Note: I don't want to give the impression that I think all those in the humanities are pushing nonsense and are hostile to science. This is definitely not the case. Daniel Dennet and Sam Harris are good examples of those in the humanities that can discuss science sensibly.
I suspect the majority of the physics community denies it, at least those who believe in some form of a multiverse. And even if you're a modal realist, mathematically there are no absolute truths (Godel).