Philosophy and Science’s Conception of Well-Being

August 2021

In this paper, I will avoid the extensive task of defining well-being and instead focus on what causes the gap between the scientific community’s empirical conception of well-being and philosophers’ conceptual study of it. In doing so, I will adopt a rudimentary definition of well-being to better help investigate the cause of division between both fields. I will then consider and eventually disagree with Anna Alexandrova’s claim that the lack of communication between the two fields results from philosophers’ single and obscure conception of well-being. Instead, I will argue that the division between the two fields is likely a consequence of different theoretical constraints under which philosophy and empirical science operate. Therefore, by establishing a paradigm-like shift, we can attempt to bridge the two binary fields and develop a synergetic relationship through stronger empirical articulations of philosophical theories of well-being, yielding a better conception of well-being.

Before I dive into the crux of my argument, I will adopt Sam Harris' ambiguously broad, utilitarian definition of well-being, which can broadly account for both the scientific and philosophical arenas. In doing so, my objective is to avoid any semantic constraints and solely lay out a basic conception of well-being. As seen below,

“...It can be understood as the primary aspect of the good life (i.e., the thing that helps people flourish)...”

Harris’ simplified definition is problematic in itself as it runs into many issues. Namely, it avoids explaining how to measure well-being, does not specify who the well-being is for (i.e., individuals or society), avoids distinguishing different kinds of good, and fails to clarify over what time frame is the well-being. While what makes one criterion of well-being more challenging to measure than the other depends on how conceptual that criterion is (i.e., measuring well-being over an x time frame is highly arbitrary and complex compared to a conceptual metric such as personal satisfaction). Nevertheless, this broad definition does help present a level of disconnect between its conceptual study in fields such as philosophy and the empirical study of it in fields such as psychology.

Now that we have roughly defined well-being let us discover why philosophy and science appear to be divided. According to Anna Alexandrova, author of A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being, philosophers make overall assumptions that imply “a single substantive theory of well-being which yields conditions under which a person’s life goes well” (2012a, 6).

This view can be labeled as “invariantism,” which becomes problematic when philosophical analysis is unusable by empirical science. Alexandrova claims that social/medical sciences that deal with well-being make context-specific evaluations and not philosophically general ones that philosophers purport. For instance, psychologists can predict a child’s long-term well-being by factoring in the environment of their upbringing and measuring their engagement with the world. This reveals that a child’s development operates within its own well-being construct, which is distinct from the constructs philosophers typically use, such as exercising virtues or satisfying desires.

Alexandrova’s above proposition suggests that if the assessment is correct, a standard philosophical analysis of well-being entails invariant features incompatible with social/medical sciences. Thus, to satisfy social/medical sciences, the conditions of the philosophical analyses must shift from invariantism to variantism. Doing so will satisfy well-being measures across different contexts. However, I argue against this particular diagnosis and believe that invariantism is not the core issue of the disconnect. Instead, it is that modern empirical science uses measurements and operationalizations that constrain its dialogue with philosophical practice. For instance, when a scientist collects data on the well-being of individuals, he is required to possess both:

(A) a conception of what the individual’s well-being consists of

(B) an idea of how to measure it.

These two constraints are magnified based on the complexity of the aim (i.e., collecting a significant sample size of data). For example, let us consider a hypothetical study involving participants who suffer from gum disease. The aim of the study is to measure the disease’s effects on the participants' well-being gathered through an online questionnaire. This indicates that these scientists are solely interested in the participants’ current state of well-being (the aspects in which the gum disease is affecting) and not their general state of well-being.

To further strengthen my claim, let us consider a more complex example, such as measuring the well-being of a child with an amputated limb. This experiment requires the scientist to identify an alternative measurement besides a questionnaire that corresponds with suffering. To achieve this, the scientists presumably will either ask the child’s parents for information about the child’s well-being or observe them. Nonetheless, these two methods both imply that the scientists adopt their own subjective view of well-being regardless of how objective they may claim to be. Moreover, this subjective aspect could come into play when scientists disagree over which aspect of well-being to measure as their conception of it might differ.

The above two examples effectively demonstrate a more accurate discrepancy between science and philosophy. Specifically, a discrepancy caused by practices regulated by different aims in current scientific practices. When contrasting this explanation with Alexandrova’s explanation, we recognize that her “constructs” appear to emerge out of a study’s need to measure and process operationalization.

Now that we have established an existing discrepancy, our task is to identify whether it is positive or negative. Some might argue that a discrepancy between the two fields may actually be a positive development. Others may claim that a discrepancy will not affect one’s well-being as a whole. Nevertheless, from a logical perspective, I believe that a discrepancy between science and philosophy is, in fact, a negative development, as it produces an incomplete conception of well-being. To unpack this claim, viewing well-being as a complex black box may be the best way to decode the puzzling dependent relationship philosophy and science hold.

Employing a Kuhnian perspective on the development of science can help unpack the black box by demonstrating the necessity of philosophy for science. Kuhn does not describe scientific progress through theoretical formulation or experimental confirmation/disconfirmation of scientific theories. Instead, he explains scientific progress as a series of revolutions and paradigm changes (i.e., instrumentation practices, worldviews, research traditions, etc.). Kuhn holds that scientists who operate in different paradigms experience differing world views, impacting their assumptions on what entities exist. Consequently, scientists employ presuppositions (i.e., epistemic, ontological, and ethical) in their scientific practices, and this appears to be a necessary part of science in pursuit of truth. Thus, philosophical presuppositions contribute to scientific theories.

This approach accounts for independent theories as formations of axioms that inevitably rest on assumptions about how the terms relate to empirically measurable quantities. They inevitably demand a consensus predicated on a common language and placed in a broader paradigm in determining the meaning of each term and to which entity it applies. One can neither confirm nor disconfirm a theory without a form of direction. Nevertheless, employing paradigms to formulate theories that describe different entities suggests philosophy holds a heuristic function in identifying new scientific theories.

As mentioned, philosophy plays a role in scrutinizing and clarifying scientific theories and concepts by deconstructing the inferred assumptions in a given scientific paradigm (i.e., concepts of causality, information, etc.). Philosophers communicate the inherent assumptions used in such concepts and apply their analytic capacity by integrating different concepts insofar as the scientific concepts relate. For instance, philosophers took issue with Newton's theory of gravity which entailed action at a distance, while mechanistic philosophy strictly admitted forces from the mechanical paradigm. Thus, through collaboration, they collectively pivoted their understanding of the theory of gravity and adopted Einstein's general relativity.

Now that we identified the need for philosophy and science, we must discover how to merge the two fields. In doing so, we must recognize current philosophical theories of well-being as too abstract and lacking sufficient empirical articulation as the issue. Given that, we can hypothesize that certain philosophical theories are more problematic to empirically articulate than others, given the available instruments—for instance, a rational desire theory entails determining what is rational for most people to desire, which reduces normative notions of well-being to non-normative notions. From this, we can recognize that to develop new empirical instruments, philosophers need to determine which current theories of well-being are satisfactory, given the current instruments and the current state of empirical well-being analysis and which ones require further development. Once philosophers objectively investigate the theories, they can collaborate with the appropriate scientists in developing more fitting empirical instruments to better measure well-being. This solution, of course, will not satisfy all theories of well-being as some theories are more challenging to articulate than others. Nevertheless, it will get the two fields to prioritize measuring theories of well-being that are more feasible to articulable while ultimately nearing a core conception of well-being.

The above collaborative solution faces at least one setback: dismissing the correct theory, which leads to an incomplete conception of well-being. Nevertheless, without rationally sifting through theories, we will also face an incomplete conception of well-being as there will be no progress in the pursuit of truth. Thus, the former route seems like a better play as it leads to a potential outcome.

In conclusion, I have disproved invariantism to be the cause of the discrepancy between the science and philosophy of well-being. In place of invariantism, I have instead argued that their discrepancy stems from the fact that empirical methods operate under the limitations forced by operationalization. Consequently, scientific practice seeks to produce empirical measurements of qualities with no clear conceptual connection to well-being, while philosophers produce an abstract conception of well-being with no empirical articulation of it. Thus, the two are deemed incompatible. Nevertheless, the gap may be bridged by collaboration between the two fields in articulating empirical results of theories of well-being to help improve and develop more effective methods to measure well-being, yielding a more accurate conception of it.