Rasha Shraim had taken an undergrad degree in biology and philosophy:
… my study of formal logic turned out to be very helpful in my transition from a wet-lab undergraduate scientist to a computational scientist on my master’s programme as I learnt coding languages, which involve elements such as logical operators and if-then reasoning. It also helped me to understand inference, the process of arriving at conclusions from evidence and reasoning. None of my science classes has formally taught the difference between induction (these frogs are all from this pond and they are all green: therefore all of the frogs in the pond are green) and deduction (all frogs in this pond are green and this frog is from this pond: therefore this frog is green), nor have any of them taught how to methodically evaluate arguments. Reading, studying and evaluating philosophical arguments as premises and conclusions has shaped my ability to scrutinize evidence and conclusions in research reports.
Rasha Shraim, “How philosophy is making me a better scientist” at Nature (April 23, 2021)
This is a far cry from Stephen Hawking’s famous denunciation of philosophy in 2011 as “dead” because it was out of step with theoretical physics. From Cardiff U philosopher Christopher Norris at Philosophy Now:
This brings us back to the point likely to provoke the most resistance from those scientists – chiefly theoretical physicists – who actually have the most to gain from any assertion of philosophy’s claim to a hearing in such matters. It is that scientists tend to go astray when they start to speculate on issues that exceed not only the current-best observational evidence but even the scope of what is presently conceivable in terms of testability. To speak plainly: one useful job for the philosopher of science is to sort out the errors and confusions that scientists – especially theoretical physicists – sometimes fall into when they give free rein to a speculative turn of mind. My book Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism found numerous cases to illustrate the point in the statements of quantum theorists all the way from Niels Bohr – a pioneering figure but a leading source of metaphysical mystification – to the current advocates (Hawking among them) of a many-worlds or ‘multiverse’ theory. To adapt the economist Keynes’ famous saying: those scientists who claim to have no use for philosophy are most likely in the grip of a bad old philosophy or an insufficiently thought-out new one that they don’t fully acknowledge. (2011)
Yes. Most of the denunciators could have used some philosophy themselves.