I saw a sort of self-congratulatory comic a few days ago, which unfortunately I can’t locate. But it went something like this:

A: “Science doesn’t need philosophy! Science gets by on its own.”
B: “Why is science worth doing?”
A: “Well…”
B: “And you’re doing philosophy!”

There are other versions of this, which I’m about 50% confident I’ve also seen in comic or meme form:

A: “Science doesn’t need philosophy! Science gets by on its own.”
B: “How do you know that the universe is uniform? How do you know that the scientific laws won’t just change tomorrow for no reason? How do you know that just because past electrons have all behaved one way that future electrons will behave the same way? How do you know that your experiments aren’t modifying the behavior of the things you observe in such a way that makes your conclusions irrelevant for predicting outside behavior? How do you know…”
A: “Well…”
B: “And you’re doing philosophy!”
Gotcha! Call this kind of argument the “gotcha!” argument. You ask a person who is skeptical of the value of philosophy a question about science, and she responds by doing philosophy. So, therefore, isn’t philosophy valuable?

The problem, though, is that the conversation could continue as follows:

B: “Ok, you got me. Those are interesting questions and science itself doesn’t really answer them. So, do philosophers have good answers to these questions? Have they solved these problems?”
A: “Well…no, not really. I mean, I think my latest article in Synthese helps, but basically everyone disagrees with me, and pretty much every possible answer to these questions has really good arguments for it and really good arguments against it. Not only do we lack any consensus in philosophy on the interesting questions, but, if I’m honest with myself, it’s entirely reasonable for us to lack consensus, because none of the work is compelling enough to deserve widespread acceptance.”
B: “Great. I’m going to go back to doing science and just ignoring you. Maybe let us know if you manage to settle anything in the next 2500 years.”
A: <sniff>