Scientists Vs Philosophers

Hume, the great Scottish Empiricist philosopher's birthday is this week - and so I thought of this epistemological question.

Do Philosophers know anything at all? And if Scientists know just a little, is that more than what the philosophers do?

Here is the gist of my thinking on this question:

Our senses are our portals to the world, however limiting they are. Red is probably red because of the eye and is potentially not red in and of itself.

But if we did not have a mind that perceives patterns, then sense data is just noise. So Hume's prescription of heeding sense data and applying the scientific method to it is paramount.

In conversations, my friend remarked that Hume's empiricism consisted in the idea that it is our knowledge, and not our ability to conceive, that is restricted to what can be experienced. To be sure, Hume thought that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any possible experience, through the operation of faculties such as custom and imagination, but he was skeptical about claims to knowledge on this basis.

In summary, it seems to me that the philosopher, who questions the fundamental reality of sense data, and wonders what else the universe holds not revealed through our senses, may not 'know' more than the scientist. But he is not willing to be enslaved by one's senses either.