The Philosophy of Science

by Jeffrey L. Kasser

"Science can't be free of philosophy any more than baseball can be free of physics." With this bold intellectual swing for the fences, philosopher Jeffrey L. Kasser launches an ambitious and exciting inquiry into what makes science science, using the tools of philosophy to ask:

* Why is science so successful?
* Is there such a thing as the scientific method?
* How do we distinguish science from pseudoscience?
* Is science rational, cumulative, and progressive?
Focusing his investigation on the vigorous debate over the nature of science that unfolded during the past 100 years, Professor Kasser covers important philosophers such as Karl Popper, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, Carl Hempel, Nelson Goodman, and Bas van Fraassen.
All of these thinkers responded in one way or another to logical positivism, the dominant movement influencing the philosophy of science during the first half of the 20 th century. Logical positivism attempted to ground science exclusively in what could be known through direct experience and logic.
It sounds reasonable, but logical positivism proved to be riddled with serious problems, and its eventual demise is an object lesson in how truly difficult it is—perhaps impossible—to secure the logical foundations of a subject that seems so unassailably logical: science.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Education, Sociology

Audio CD

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not going to lie, this lecture series was at times complex and would lose me, but it never lost my interest and that's why I stuck through until the end. It's hard to explain how such an esoteric subject such as the meaning of what science is could change how I view the world. From time to time, men who I really admire speak of how pointless philosophy is. They should first listen to and try to understand a lecture like this one, before making such a statement and they would see how silly their statements really are.

For my money a good Great Course lecture from audible for one credit is one of the best deals going. I would recommend "Science Wars"before this lecture, it's easier to follow and covers the same kind of subjects.

Any lecture series that can change how you perceive the world is a winner. This lecture is a winner.

[Amirography · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit heavy on on the middle, a bit boring at the end. But in all, I found it fascinating.

[Kayson Fakhar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended for anyone who is interested in what really is science and who said what about what property of science!

[Behrooz Parhami · Rating 5 out of 5]

This course is about the intersection of philosophy and science as fields of study. According to American Heritage Dictionary, “philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science.” That there is a branch of philosophy dealing with science is evidence of the importance of science and its special place in human history and culture.

The philosophy-of-science discipline aims to answer questions such as:
What qualifies as science?
Are scientific theories reliable?
What is science’s ultimate purpose?

Ethical dilemmas in science, such as questions in bio-experimentation and scientific misconduct, are usually not considered part of philosophy of science but subjects within ethics.

Philosophy clearly has a lot to say about science, sometimes questioning the very foundations of physics, biology, and other disciplines. It is also concerned with distinctions between good science, bad science, and pseudoscience. One may wonder whether science also has things to say about philosophy? Yes, it does. In fact, some philosophers do use scientific results to reach conclusions about philosophy itself.

Philosophy of science has deep roots in history, but when we discuss it today, we use vocabulary and concepts that are only about a century old. Our discussions are based on logical positivism, aka logical empiricism. Positivism holds that every rationally justifiable assertion admits logical or mathematical proof, thus dismissing metaphysics and theism. Empiricism, developed in the 17th and 18th centuries by the rise of experimental science, maintains that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience.

There is fundamental tension within science, because it requires scientists to be both cautious and bold. This inner tension is what creates some of the nastiest philosophical debates.

Here is a brief table of contents for this excellent course:

Lectures 1-12 introduce the basics, demarcate the problems, and tell us why induction is illegitimate and how this very serious objection can be overcome.

Lectures 13-24 begin with Kuhn and his ideas and take us through discussions of revolutions, sociology, postmodernism, probability, and reduction.

Lectures 25-36 discuss meaning, realism, naturalism, Bayesianism, and entropy, wrapping things up with a lecture entitled “Philosophy and Science.”

This isn’t a course to go through sequentially just once, expecting to absorb all the important concepts. I, for one, plan to revisit the 36 lectures of this course (whose CDs I happen to own) from time to time, as I learn more about the foundations of science and challenges faced by scientists.

[Rrrrrron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost all about logical positivism. Boring because that whole discourse treats science as physics or chemistry as the only paradigm and leaves out the practices of medicine, biology, psychology and all the social sciences. Quit at 20%.

[Teo · Rating 3 out of 5]

2019.06.03–2019.06.04

Contents

Kasser JL (2006) (18:17) Philosophy of Science

01. Science and Philosophy
02. Popper and the Problem of Demarcation
03. Further Thoughts on Demarcation
04. Einstein, Measurement, and Meaning
05. Classical Empiricism
06. Logical Positivism and Verifiability
07. Logical Positivism, Science, and Meaning
08. Holism
09. Discovery and Justification
10. Induction as Illegitimate
11. Some Solutions and a New Riddle
12. Instances and Consequences
13. Kuhn and the Challenge of History
14. Revolutions and Rationality
15. Assessment of Kuhn
16. For and Against Method
17. Sociology, Postmodernism, and Science Wars
18. (How) Does Science Explain?
19. Putting the Cause Back in “Because”
20. Probability, Pragmatics, and Unification
21. Laws and Regularities
22. Laws and Necessity
23. Reduction and Progress
24. Reduction and Physicalism
25. New Views of Meaning and Reference
26. Scientific Realism
27. Success, Experience, and Explanation
28. Realism and Naturalism
29. Values and Objectivity
30. Probability
31. Bayesianism
32. Problems with Bayesianism
33. Entropy and Explanation
34. Species and Reality
35. The Elimination of Persons?
36. Philosophy and Science

[Ji · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book is one that you encountered at the right moment in your life. This book is almost perfect, if it were not for the apologies about mentioning some math at the beginning of Lecture 31.

Another thing to mention is that the book intentionally started at Popper, but the book provides a modern philosophical point of view about science. It's pretty dense overall. I plan to re-visit it as a reference book in future.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the densest Great Courses course that I've listened to. The material was always just at the edge of my ability to track, which is possibly why I enjoyed it so much. It's immediately going on my 'to read again' list, although it's an intellectually exhausting journey to take.

This series kind of covers The Most Important Topic, which is, how do we know what Reality is. Science is basically the study of reality, but what it means to study it (legitimately), and what it could possibly be, are Foundational. Kasser doesn't really give an answer, he just surveys the various views and approaches that have dominated humankind since the Greek Giants.

I would love to take a class from Kasser. He seems to know a great deal about a great deal of great deals, and he can pull it all together when it counts, ie, every topic builds on and relates to the previous topics he's mentioned.

If I were to criticise anything in this course, I think it would be (apart from at times it being too dense) that he could have elucidated better the issue of solipsism in science - humans can never escape the human mind.... All thoughts are human-mind thoughts, even the thoughts about an objective reality. All data are subjectively processed, all experiments eventually subject to subjective experience. Nothing escapes this. Nothing. And while he does deal with this in different ways, it didn't seem head on enough for my liking. Perhaps that's asking too much of this course, I don't know.

I'd also like to see someone tie the idea of solipsism to quantum mechanics a bit better. The universe itself is solipsistic - it can't escape itself in order to observe itself objectively. And I think that's why we get the weirdness of QM. I don't mean it's weird in a spooky, new agey kind of way, but in an inescapable naturalistic way.

Well, if anyone else is reading this review, sorry if it's rambly, I'm just kind of journaling....

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm FINALLY done listening to this lecture series. It only took me *checks date* almost a month, and most of that was in a short period because I gave myself a deadline and pushed myself to finish. It was either that or drop it, because I really struggled to get through this.

The Philosophy of Science is a lecture series that's mostly about how philosophers think about science. I had picked it up during a two-books-for-one-credit audible sale because I tend to like Great Courses productions, and I thought it was about how we - that 'we' meaning scientists, the general public, and a view of science through the ages - viewed science as a subject and how that subject was/is actually practiced, including examples. The Philosophy of Science was not that. It was a very, very dense series of lectures regarding primarily - as far as I could tell - rhetorical arguments about how science should proceed, then lectures on the counterarguments to the proposed philosophy. Only the last four lectures dealt with the various philosophies of science as applied to actual scientific disciplines (namely physics, biology, and psychology, as well as one last wrap-up lecture).

Perhaps I am just the wrong audience for this subject, but the first thirty-two lectures were only vaguely interesting, at best. With the exception of the lecture on demarcation (what's actually a science and what's not?), examples were few and far between, and some of the explanations came across as mind bogglingly abstract. The series on a whole was an okay as an overview and a way to better understand some terminology, I guess, but this isn't something that I would generally recommend. The only chance I would recommend this was to someone expressing specialized interest or need, and maybe not even then.

[Benjamin Hare · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quite possibly the most rationalistic presentation I've ever been exposed to. The real achievement in this course is Prof. Kasser's ability to convey context as irrelevant, and reality as unknowable by descending—eagerly—into a swirling Heraclitean flux of ideas that only an academic would consider worthy of investigation. This lecture course is a monument to absurdity and shows us why most people regard philosophy as not only useless but nonsensical. Motivation for any topic shows up only rarely, since motivation is irrelevant to ideas as such. What matters instead are the ideas themselves, most of which only tangentially reference reality while continuously striving to detach from it. At multiple points in the course Kasser warns that we should "avoid metaphysics" in the philosophy of science, and the ideas presented certainly achieve that. Kudos to Prof. Kasser for delivering this verbal smear of "information" so enthusiastically over the course of thirty-six lectures. This is not an introduction to or a broad overview of the philosophy of science. Rather, it's thirty-six warning klaxons to the mind masquerading as erudite lectures delivered by an enthusiastic but thoroughly rationalistic professor. A peril to the intellect—avoid at all costs.

[Lina · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books by Great Courses, and a really important one to understand. If listened to attentively, clears up your mind like not much else can. A MUST "read".

I'm extremely annoyed that by goodreads policy you can't put author of the lecture/audiobook in the "author" field. Who is he then, a LECTURER? I couldn't find the book by its ISBN even though I copied it from the goodreads itself; and there are too many with same title. I GOOGLED it!

[Ralph Trickey · Rating 5 out of 5]

More interesting than expected
I'm not sure what I expected, but this asks (doesn't answer) the question of 'what is science.'

This lecture series walks through history as it tries to answer that question. How do you formulate what science is that best separates out the science from pseudo-science. (Spoiler:It isn't as easy as it sounds) How do you deal with things like climate science (not mentioned in the lecture) where there is only one and you can't repeat your experiments?

[Phil Gorley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This audiobook requires your full attention. In fact, there's a companion PDF (it's a book) that you should utilize to be able to get you through the course. It's dense with information and long, but very interesting. I wish I had followed along with the book.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A competently-delivered and well-organized set of technical yet accessible lectures in what is arguably the most sophisticated modern branch of philosophy. Useful fodder for the daily commute; far superior to the news, &c.

[Fernando Hoces de la Guardia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty hard and lots of material. Will keep it as a reference whenever I need to learn more about any specific topic about philosophy of science.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Needs a relisten and further investigation.

[James Biser · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is far too long. Even though the author understands and lectures on the philosophy of science, it is more than most readers will want commit to. There is too much lecture.

[Heather Hoyt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, but well organized and very interesting.

[Dave Swift · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book melted my brain...before I started reading I knew much, I now know nothing.

This lecture series severely bruised my ego, attacked my mind, kicked me in my biases, smothered me in my own cognitive dissonance, and stripped my of my preconceived notions.

And I absolutely loved every minute of it. 5/5

[Hendrik Strauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good introductory overview of the field.
Informative but not exhaustive.
Some things didn't stick as many theories with whole books at their back were fitted into 5 Minutes at some instances.
That is due to the broadness of the topic presented tho. And my inadequencies in understanding the information offered is not the fault of the lecturer.

Only real quarell is that Kasser genaralizes and says "sociology of science" states "that" and just ellaborates one position and it happens, the theory we will just call "that" is obviously wrong in many aspects and in the power of its claim.
Well, in his defense:
That way are many sociologists. Wrong.

Niklas Luhmann has a good theory regarding the sociology of science which doesn't have to bend to fit into the consideration of philosophicaly or scientificly minded people.
Its a general theory of contingent systems where the scientific system is one of others.
For anyone interested: The science of society.
It is quite a wordy work tho as Luhmann was a theoretician of law, a bureaucrat and really well read.

Kuhn got a lil shortchanged in my opinion but to validate that intuition(I mean falsify, if daddy popper happens to be looking), I have to read his work.
Not overly so anyway, as Kasser is really considerate, cautious and not dogmatic. Perfectly suited for his line of work.

Enough of that, I will research further into the philosophy of science, and at some point revisit this well of knowledge and write a proper review.

[Vincent Russo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the history and actual philosophy of the philosophy of science. The lecturer is very thorough with his coverage, and also adds a nice sense of humor to make the listening experience more enjoyable. If anyone is even vaguely interested in what constitutes as actual science, or is a philosophy student wishing for a supplement to course material, these 36 lectures are very highly recommended.

[Hussein AlSarabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview for some modern and empirical topics, but not a complete or a comprehensive study of the field as a whole.

[valiantdust · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this again for the second time and it was great. A sprawling treatment of the history of epistemology in the Western tradition.