The evolving hierarchy of naturalized philosophy: A metaphilosophical sketch

Abstract

Some scholars claim that epistemology of science and machine learning are actually overlapping disciplines studying induction, respectively affected by Hume's problem of induction and its formal machine-learning counterpart, the “no-free-lunch” (NFL) theorems, to which even advanced AI systems such as LLMs are not immune. Extending Kevin Korb's view, this paper envisions a hierarchy of disciplines where the lowermost is a basic science, and, recursively, the metascience at each level inductively learns which methods work best at the immediately lower level. Due to Hume's dictum and NFL theorems, no exact metanorms for the good performance of each object science can be obtained after just a finite number of levels up the hierarchy, and the progressive abstractness of each metadiscipline and consequent ill-definability of its methods and objects makes science—as defined by a minimal standard of scientificity—cease to exist above a certain metalevel, allowing for a still rational style of inquiry into science that can be called “philosophical.” Philosophical levels, transitively reflecting on science, peculiarly manifest a non–empirically learned urge to self-reflection constituting the properly normative aspect of philosophy of science.