Philosophy of Science

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Philosophy of Science

• The last fifty years

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Divergence

• Questioning methods, validity, facts
• Realism/Antirealism
• Incommensurability
• The emergence of relativism in epistemology and
  antirealism in ontology.

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Paul Feyerabend

• Two false assumptions
• - the first is that there is a theory-independent
  observation language with respect to which
  theories may be evaluated
• the second false assumption is that it is
  possible for a theory to agree with all the known
  facts in its domain
• Return to the sources (history of science)
• Anything goes (?)

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The Strong Programme

• Edinburgh University
• Challenging the internal/external division in the
  the writing of history of science
• The main principle the interpreter of science
  should uncover the scientists beliefs by
  invoking the same types of cause to explain both
  rational (true, successful) belief and irrational
  (false, unsuccessful) beliefs
• Causal analysis the causes are produced by
  social structures the roles of the sociologists
  and philosophers of science

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The social construction of a scientific fact

• Bruno Latour (S. Woolgar)
• anthropological approach
• social constructivism
• the task of the sociologist of science is to
  give a debunking account of scientific practice,
  showing how scientists delude themselves into
  believing that they discover a reality rather
  than constructing it

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Realism

• Ontologically, realism is committed to the
  mind-independent existence of the world
  investigated by the sciences.
• Semantically, realism is committed to a literal
  interpretation of scientific claims about the
  world realists take theoretical statements at
  face value.
• Epistemologically, realism is committed to the
  idea that theoretical claims (interpreted
  literally as describing a mind-independent
  reality) constitute knowledge of the world.

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Arguments for realism

• The no-miracles argument realism is the only
  philosophy that doesn't make the success of
  science a miracle (H. Putnam).
• The basic explanation our best theories are true
  (or approximately true, or correctly describe a
  mind-independent world of entities, properties,
  laws, structures).

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Arguments for realism (contd.)

• Corroboration the same entity or property is
  conceivably capable of being detected by not just
  one, but rather two or more different means of
  detection this may serve as the basis of a
  significantly enhanced argument for realism.

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Arguments for Realism (contd.)

• Selectivity entailing an epistemically positive
  attitude towards those aspects of theories that
  are most worthy of epistemic commitment.

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Antirealism

• Antirealism doubts the existence of unobservable
  entities posited by theories (electrons, quarks),
  claiming that these entities are used in an
  instrumental way in order to develop particular
  explanations or accounts of phenomena

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Varieties of antirealism

• The pessimistic induction on the history of
  science) large numbers of past successful
  theories have proved false to the conclusion that
  successful contemporary theories are also
  incorrect (L. Laudan)

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Varieties of Antirealism (contd.)

• Constructive empiricism scientists build
  models that are designed to save the phenomena
  by yielding correct predictions about
  observables, but there is no need to grant a real
  existence to these entities (B. Van Fraasen)

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Science Wars

• - standpoint epistemology
• - values, judgments, politics
• - postmodernism and science
• - who has the rights to speak about science?
• Alan Sokal, Transgressing the boundaries. Toward
  a transformative hermeneutics of quantum
  gravity, Social Text, 46-47 (1996).

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Descriptive philosophies of science

• The modest version
• aiming at a historical reconstruction of actual
  evaluative practice
• uncovering the evaluative standards whose
  application lead scientists to prefer one theory
  to antoher (e.g. Newtons rejection of the
  Cartesian Vortex Theory)

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• The robust version derives from the conclusions
  of modest descriptivism, a theory about
  evaluative practice this theory is put forward
  as a contribution to our understanding of science

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Conceptual Evolution

• - an application of the Darwinian Theory of
  Evolution to the historical development of
  science
• - recommendation that philosophers of science
  shift attention from logical relations between
  propositions to the progressive modification of
  concepts (Toulmin).

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Selection

• The General Theory of Selection Processes
• The surviving concepts are called replicators
  and individual scientists or groups are called
  interactors. Interactors compete within an
  environment, while replicators are entities of
  which copies are made and transferred.

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Epigenetic rules

• Evolutionary-Origins View (opposing the
  Evolutionary Analogy View) scientific inquiry is
  directed by the application of epigenetic rules
  that have been encoded in homo sapiens during
  evolutionary adaptation, namely
• - possessing certain capacities and dispositions
  because it was advantageous for our ancestors to
  have them.

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Concluding Remarks

• Questioning the search for laws of nature
• Alternatives
• searching for symmetries in physics
• using approximate generalizations in biology
• deploying models in other areas of the sciences