“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”: did Feynman say it?

Where we looked

It’s the perfect Feynman put-down: short, cheeky and aimed at philosophers, whom he really did tease. But we couldn’t find him saying it.

Wikiquote files it under “disputed”. We searched the full text of the Internet Archive’s books for “ornithology is to birds”, which found 141 matches, and followed the trail backwards. The oldest science version we found doesn’t come from Feynman at all.

Weinberg heard it somewhere

In June 1987, the physicist Steven Weinberg gave a talk at Cambridge for the 300th anniversary of Newton’s Principia. Nature printed it on 3 December 1987 (doi:10.1038/330433a0), and Weinberg reprinted it in his 2001 essay collection Facing Up. On page 8 of that book, near the start of the talk, he says:

“I’ve heard the remark (although I forget the source) that the philosophy of science is just about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

So in 1987 a leading physicist used the line and said plainly that he didn’t know whose it was. Feynman was still alive, and Weinberg didn’t name him.

The quotation dictionaries followed Weinberg. Scientifically Speaking (2000), a dictionary of science quotations, lists the line as “Unknown” and points to his Nature talk. The earliest dated book we found that credits Feynman is Science Askew (2002), a collection of science humour, which prints it as “Attributed to Richard Feynman”. That’s fourteen years after his death, with no source.

The painter who said it first

The joke is older than the science version, and it started in the art world. In August 1952 the Woodstock Art Conference in New York State brought artists and philosophers of art together to talk. It didn’t go smoothly. The Kingston Daily Freeman reported on the final day, Saturday 23 August, in its issue of 25 August (scan on the Internet Archive). The panel included the philosopher Susanne Langer, Buckminster Fuller, Ben Shahn and the painter Barnett Newman. The paper wrote that Newman “demolished the value of aesthetic study for the artist with the observation that he had known a lot of ornithologists, and ‘they don’t think ornithology is for the birds!’”

The art world remembers it in a neater form, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds”, and Wikiquote gives it to Newman, 1952. From there the pattern travelled, with art criticism, music criticism or art history swapped in. Philosophy of science was just one more subject in the slot.

What Feynman did say about philosophers

He wasn’t shy about it. In The Character of Physical Law (1965), on page 172 of the MIT Press paperback, he imagines a future where every law of physics is known, and the “philosophers who are always on the outside making stupid remarks will be able to close in”. That’s genuinely Feynman, and arguably ruder than the bird joke. Still, it’s a different line, and it shows why the bird joke stuck to him: it sounds like something he’d say.

Even philosophers repeat it with a hedge. Tim Lewens’s introduction to the philosophy of science, The Meaning of Science (2015), quotes it as Feynman’s and adds “assuming he really said them”. Then he points out the flaw in the joke: ornithology is useless to birds because birds can’t understand it.

Our take

Misattributed, as far as the record shows. If you want the joke, the honest credit is “Barnett Newman, about aesthetics, 1952”, or “a remark Steven Weinberg had heard (1987)” for the science version. If you want Feynman on philosophers, use his real line from The Character of Physical Law. If someone has a recording or a document of Feynman saying the bird line, we’ll gladly update this page.