It’s an interesting time to be making a case for philosophy in science. On the one hand, some scientists working on ideas such as string theory or the multiverse — ideas that reach far beyond our current means to test them — are forced to make a philosophical defense of research that can’t rely on traditional hypothesis testing. On the other hand, some physicists, such as Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, were notoriously dismissive of the value of the philosophy of science.

That value is asserted with gentle but firm assurance by Michela Massimi, the recent recipient of the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal, an award given annually by the U.K.’s Royal Society. Massimi’s prize speech, delivered earlier this week, defended both science and the philosophy of science from accusations of irrelevance. She argues that neither enterprise should be judged in purely utilitarian terms, and asserts that they should be allies in making the case for the social and intellectual value of the open-ended exploration of the physical world.

In addition to serving as a defender of the value of science, Massimi investigates issues surrounding “realism” and “anti-realism”: how, if at all, science relates to an objective reality. Her work asks whether the process of science approaches a singular, true conception of the world, or whether it is content with simply describing physical phenomena, ignoring any sense of whether the stories it tells about the world are true. Massimi, Italian-born and currently based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, comes down on the side of the realists, and argues, in a position she calls “perspectival realism,” that science can make progress — a much-contested word in philosophy — despite being inevitably shaped by social and historical factors. Quanta caught up with Massimi as she prepared to deliver her prize lecture. An edited and condensed version of the interview follows.

Richard Feynman is often quoted as saying that the philosophy of science is of much use to scientists as ornithology is to birds. How do you defend it?

Dismissive claims by famous physicists that philosophy is either a useless intellectual exercise, or not on a par with physics because of being incapable of progress, seem to start from the false assumption that philosophy has to be of use for scientists or is of no use at all.

But all that matters is that it be of some use. We would not assess the intellectual value of Roman history in terms of how useful it might be to the Romans themselves. The same for archaeology and anthropology. Why should philosophy of science be any different?

What use, then, is philosophy of science if not for scientists themselves? I see the target beneficiary as humankind, broadly speaking. We philosophers build narratives about science. We scrutinize scientific methodologies and modeling practices. We engage with the theoretical foundations of science and its conceptual nuances. And we owe this intellectual investigation to humankind. It is part of our cultural heritage and scientific history. The philosopher of science who explores Bayesian [statistical] methods in cosmology, or who scrutinizes assumptions behind simplified models in high-energy physics, is no different from the archaeologist, the historian or the anthropologist in producing knowledge that is useful for us as humankind.

Many scientists in the early 20th century were deeply engaged with philosophy, including Einstein, Bohr, Mach and Born. Have we lost that engagement?

Yes, I think what we have lost is a distinctive way of thinking about science. We have lost the idea, dating back to the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, that science is part of our broader cultural history.

In the early 20th century, the founding fathers of relativity theory and quantum mechanics were trained to read philosophy. And some of the most profound debates in physics at that time had a philosophical nature. When Einstein and Bohr debated the completeness of quantum mechanics, what was at stake was the very definition of “physical reality”: how to define what is “real” in quantum physics. Can an electron be ascribed “real” position and “real” momentum in quantum mechanics even if the formalism does not allow us to capture both? This is a profound philosophical question.

It is hard to find similar debates in contemporary physics, for many reasons. Physicists these days do not necessarily read other subjects at university or get trained in a broad range of topics at school. Large scientific collaborations enforce a more granular level of scientific expertise. More to the point, the whole ethos of scientific research — reflected in institutional practices of how scientific research is incentivized, evaluated, and research funding distributed — has changed. Today, science has to be of use to a well-identified group, or it is deemed to be of no use at all.

But just as with philosophy, we need fundamental research in science (and in the humanities) because it is part of our cultural heritage and scientific history. It is part of who we are.

One criticism made is that science moves on, but philosophy stays with the same old questions. Has science motivated new philosophical questions?

I think that again we should resist the temptation of assessing progress in philosophy in the same terms as progress in science. To start with, there are different views about how to assess progress in science. Is it defined by science getting closer and closer to the final true theory? Or in terms of increased problem-solving? Or of technological advance? These are themselves philosophical unsolved questions.

The received view up to the 1960s was that scientific progress was to be understood in terms of producing theories that were more and more likely to be true, in the sense of being better and better approximations to an ideal limit of scientific inquiry — for example, to some kind of theory of everything, if one exists. With the historical work of Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, this view was in part replaced by an alternative that sees our ability to solve more and more problems and puzzles as the measure of our scientific success, regardless of whether or not there is an ideal limit of scientific inquiry to which we are all converging.