Science has enormous cachet and authority in our culture — for very understandable reasons! And that has led scientists (and non-scientists who claim the mantle of science) to claim public authority, which is all well and good in their areas of expertise. The problem is when they claim authority in areas where they don’t have much expertise.

One recent example is Bill Nye, the “Science Guy,” who isn’t actually a scientist but owes his career as a popular entertainer to his purported scientific expertise. Bill Nye was recently asked to opine about whether philosophy is a worthy pursuit.

Nye fell into the same trap that Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking have been caught up in. Philosophy, these men of science opine, is largely useless, because it can’t give us the sort of certain answers that science can, and amounts to little more than speculation.

There’s obviously a grain of truth in this. Philosophy does not give us the certainty that math or experimental science can (but even then — as many philosophers would point out — these fields do not give us as much certainty as is sometimes claimed). But that doesn’t mean that philosophy is worthless, or that it doesn’t have rigor. Indeed, in a sense, philosophy is inescapable. To argue that philosophy is useless is to do philosophy.