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Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues
The most comprehensive anthology of its kind, Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues offers an exceptionally balanced introduction to the main currents in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Forty-nine articles and self-contained excerpts by Thomas S. Kuhn, Karl Popper, Carl G. Hempel, W. V. Quine, and other prominent philosophers survey the foundational questions in the field: What distinguishes science from pseudoscience? Is scientific change a rational process? In what sense is science objective? What are natural laws, and what do they describe? Are scientific theories to be understood as offering a true account of the world? and others.
To help uninitiated readers navigate the sometimes challenging literature in the field, the editors of this collection provide unusually extensive apparatus. Brief introductions to the nine thematic sections sketch out the major issues addressed in the subsequent readings. Fair-minded and thorough commentaries following the readings discuss the selections in depth and draw connections to other pieces in the anthology; they also develop salient arguments, explain unfamiliar theories, and place the readings in a wider philosophical context. A bibliography, a glossary, and two indexes - one for subjects, the other for names - further enhance this volume's value as a reference.
To help uninitiated readers navigate the sometimes challenging literature in the field, the editors of this collection provide unusually extensive apparatus. Brief introductions to the nine thematic sections sketch out the major issues addressed in the subsequent readings. Fair-minded and thorough commentaries following the readings discuss the selections in depth and draw connections to other pieces in the anthology; they also develop salient arguments, explain unfamiliar theories, and place the readings in a wider philosophical context. A bibliography, a glossary, and two indexes - one for subjects, the other for names - further enhance this volume's value as a reference.
1379 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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July 2, 2016
Alice’s Adventures in Science Wonderland
Chapter One: Down the Philosophical Rabbit Hole
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the science textbook her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?”
Then she spotted a Philosophical Rabbit running by. “Maybe he can help make sense of this,” she thought. Burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. Down went Alice after it. Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Chapter Two: The Reduction
At the bottom she saw a tiny door. “How ever can I get through that?” she wondered. Nearby there was a large mushroom growing, with a caterpillar on top of it. It got down and crawled away, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter. We call that a reduction in Wonderland.” Alice nibbled the left side of the mushroom, and sure enough she became small enough to fit through the door.
On the other side she was greeted by some of the strange inhabitants of Wonderland. "I am sure glad that reduction let me fit through the little door!” Alice exclaimed.
A mouse named Quine replied, “Reductionism is the doctrine that every meaningful synthetic statement is logically equivalent to some sentence containing only experiential terms joined together with logical connectives.”
Alice was confused. “Can you,” she asked, “explain that to me?”
“Certainly,” he replied. “An explanans gives an explanation about an explanandum...”
“No, no,” interrupted Nagel, a curious looking mole, “that is a homogeneous reduction because disparate phenomena are reduced to a single set of laws.”
Alice thought that seemed more like a unification, but because she had just arrived she said nothing.
Then Nickles the Turtle interjected, “That is a Reduction 1, the achievement of postulational and ontological economy obtained by derivational reduction. On the other hand, Reduction 2 is a varied collection of intertheoretic relations rather than a single, distinctive logical or mathematical relation.”
“But that is what I mean by an inhomogeneous reduction,” said Nagel.
“Not really,” Nickles retorted. “All your reductions amount to domain combining.”
Alice was wondering why none of them described reduction the way scientists normally do when a Mad Hatter named Tom arrived on the scene.
Chapter Three: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Parties
The Mad Hatter took Alice by the hand and told her, “Let me explain the structure of all this scientific thinking to you.” He led her to the house of the Ptolemy Hare. There was a circular table set out under a tree in front of the house, with a tea party in progress. Alice exclaimed, “I love tea parties!”
The Mad Hatter replied, “We call them paradigms in Wonderland.”
There was a teapot at the center of the table and teacups all around it. The table was spinning around and around.
Ptolemy Hare, who was seated at the table, noticed Alice. “Welcome to my paradigm. Have you noticed that everything goes in circles?”
“Oh, yes, so many things do that here. Even the logic sometimes,” replied Alice.
The Hare then told Alice that all the circles must revolve around him, because, after all, it is his paradigm.
The Mad Hatter muttered under his breath, “(Just like the philosophy of science revolves around me ever since I wrote my book.)”
The Hare added, “I can tell where all the cups are by inventing epicycles that go around the circles the table is making.”
Alice asked if that was not a complicated way to find the cups. The Hare replied “Young lady, we have been doing it this way for a thousand years, so by now we have it all figured out.”
This all made Alice’s head spin. She left the table and spun round and round until she came to another tea party, or paradigm she supposed, in progress.
Chapter Four: Alice Shifts to a New Paradigm
The Mad Hatter explained to Alice that her revolutions had led to a paradigm shift. Alice thought to herself that so many revolutions would soon make her dizzy. At the party she had shifted to, the table was also spinning, with the teacups going around the teapot at the center. The Mad Hatter introduced Alice to Copernicus, who was seated and quietly watching the cups go around. He said, “You can clearly see the cups are revolving around the central teapot. This is a much simpler way to find the teacups.”
“I do think this is a rather more sensible tea party than that of the Hare,” Alice said. “But he did have a very pretty teacup over there. Can I bring it here?”
“No!” replied the Mad Hatter emphatically. “A teacup in one paradigm is not the same as one in another. What one takes to be facts depends on the theory that describes them. It is as if they are speaking a different language at the other party. One cannot even hold both paradigms in mind together and compare them.”
“But any language can be translated into any other one,” thought Alice. “And surely a teacup is still a teacup.”
The Mad Hatter continued, “There is no reason to think that successive theories approximate more and more closely to the truth. The notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its ‘real’ counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. The appeal of the Copernicus tea party is aesthetic rather than pragmatic.”
Alice’s head was beginning to hurt. Surely the Copernicus tea party had the better explanation. But good explanations did not seem to matter much around here.
The Mad Hatter then pointed out that there were many more tea parties, hosted by creatures called Newton and Einstein, among others. But he had studied the Copernicus party first, and as it was very revolutionary compared to Ptolemy Hare’s, it must follow that all the other parties are equally revolutionary.
“Well, revolutions were oh so very popular in the sixties when you wrote that stuff,” thought Alice. But she said, “I remember learning about that in my cognitive psychology lessons. They called it ‘priming’. The way you interpret later events is filtered on the basis of your first experience.”
From the look the Mad Hatter gave her, Alice realized one does not mention such things in Wonderland.
Chapter Five: Newton’s Vacuous Party
The Mad Hatter then led Alice to Professor Newton’s party. But on the way they met a duck named Mellor, who told them, “Don’t waste your time going there. Their talk is all vacuous.”
“How so?” asked Alice.
Mellor replied, “Newton’s first law of motion says bodies not acted on by other forces will move at a constant speed in a straight line. But his gravitational theory says all bodies exert gravitational forces on each other, meaning there cannot be a body without other forces acting on it. Thus the law is about something that cannot exist, therefore it is vacuous.”
“But if we subtract the gravitational forces the law of inertia will apply!” exclaimed Alice.
Alice turned toward the Duchess Nancy, who had just joined them. “So ladies can come to these tea parties too?” she asked.
“As long as we are even more obtuse than the gentlemen,” the Duchess replied, “That is the only way we can get tenure at this party.”
To demonstrate this, she explained, “It is not valid to use vector arithmetic to subtract the gravitational forces because vectors are not real things. A result based on something that is not real cannot itself be real.”
Alice asked, “Could we use this as an opening to explore the relationship between mathematics and science?”
“Not in Wonderland,” was her reply. “We just use it to prove science does not describe reality.”
“So this is yet another meaning of reduction,” thought Alice, “Reducing everything to vacuous nonsense.”
Chapter Six: Therapy for Reverend Bayes
At that moment, a Mr. Horwich joined the gathering. He announced, “Consider the hypothesis that all ravens are black.”
“Well,” said Alice, “I have never seen a white one.”
Mr. Horwich replied, “Ah, but your shoe is white. That shows a non-black object is a non-raven.”
“What does a shoe have to do with a raven?” asked Alice, thinking such logic is non-sense.
“Let me explain,” Mr. Horwich continued. “Wittgenstein regarded philosophy as therapeutic: its goal is to dissolve problems and resolve paradoxes by untying the knots in our thinking. A good philosophical theory is one that unravels and connects the misleading assumptions that have led us into confusion and error.”
“You see,” he added, “In Wonderland we love to lift a sentence from Wittgenstein to support our argument.”
“And then you argue the opposite,” said Alice, pleased with herself for learning the ways of Wonderland.
“Not necessarily, my dear,” he responded, “You are assuming we have some idea of what he was talking about in the first place.”
“But let me continue. Therapeutic Bayesianism uses probability theory to shed light on problems with theory verification. Let H be the hypothesis that all ravens are black, and E is the evidence of your white shoe. The factor by which the rational degree of belief in H is enhanced by E is indicated by the ratio of subjective probabilities, P(H|E) / P(H), for a rational person…” He then wrote a whole page of Bayesian probability notation on the blackboard to illustrate his point.
“But all you did is bury the assumption that there is little connection between shoes and birds in all that math!” cried Alice. “You only created confusion by tying everything up in notational knots. I could use some therapy for the headache you have given me.”
Chapter Seven: The Trial
Alice was still recovering from her Bayesian headache when a cry of “The trial is beginning!” was heard in the distance. “Come on!” cried the Mad Hatter, and taking Alice by the hand they hurried off. The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their thrones when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them— “I wish they'd get the trial done,” she thought, “and hand round the refreshments!”
'Herald, read the accusation!' said the King. The Herald read:
“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!”
The King thanked the Herald, and said, “We must find the cause for the condition we find ourselves in. After all, a cause is an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition. I thereby call the first witness, Professor Fire Bend!”
The professor took the stand and began, “First, we must consider the phrase ‘he stole those tarts’. We must not attach too great an importance to ‘what we mean’ by a phrase, and we must be prepared to change whatever little we have said concerning this meaning as soon as the need arises. Flexibility and even sloppiness in semantic matters is a prerequisite of scientific progress.”
“Hear, Hear!” cried some of the audience.
“It is important to have as many alternative hypotheses as possible,” he continued. “It is bound to happen that the alternatives do not share a single statement with the theories they criticize. The exist also facts which cannot be unearthed except with the help of alternatives to the theory to be tested and which become unavailable as soon as such alternatives are excluded.”
He then concluded, “The first step will therefore be the formulation of fairly general assumptions that are not yet directly connected with observations; this means the first step will be the invention of a new metaphysics.” To much cheering, the professor returned to his seat.
The King said, “Indeed, we must consider all verification-transcendent truth-conditions. Call the next witness.”
The Mad Hatter stood up and said, “If some of these hypotheses are different paradigms, there may be no meaningful correspondence between them. Recall that the choice of paradigm is a matter of aesthetics.”
Eddington the Bear interjected, “For example, which tarts are really there: the solid ones we can taste, or those composed of speeding electric charges and are therefore mostly emptiness?”
“If the meaning is empty,” said the King, “that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. But let me call the first witness for the prosecution.”
Musgrave the Muskrat took the stand. “Realists,” he began, “think science explains facts about the world and they think a realist philosophy of science explains facts about science.”
A murmur of disapproval rose from the crowd. He continued, “Can you not all see the tarts in question? A real explanation does not remove one mystery by postulating another one.”
The Duchess cried out, “Take off your glasses. What do you see now?”
The Muskrat removed his thick spectacles, and blinked a few times. “I can’t see a thing. Everything is a blur,” he finally said.
The Duchess exclaimed, “Then the tarts are clearly a consequence of the instrument with which you observe them. The instrument is based on theory, as is the existence of the tarts. The tarts, your spectacles, indeed all of our language is thoroughly theory-laden, or theory-infected, even theory-impregnated.”
“That is not entirely appropriate language for a children’s book,” the King of Hearts warned. “However, if one cannot prove the reality of the Knave or the tarts, and it is not possible to distinguish between alternate hypotheses, I must find the Knave innocent. Court dismissed!”
“Everything is getting curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice. “This whole thing is nothing but a house of cards!”
Final Chapter: The Awakening
At this the whole pack of cards rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister. “Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you've had!”
“Oh, I've had such a curious dream!” said Alice. “I was in a very strange world. For a place called Wonderland there was little sense of wonder about the mystery and beauty of science. All the creatures were obsessed with staking out intellectual territory for themselves based on a selective interpretation of the meaning of words. They love to talk about how science is underdetermined…”
“You mean that there are no definitive proofs?” asked her sister.
“Yes,” replied Alice, “But philosophy is even more underdetermined. You can never prove objects or theories represent real things, any more than you can prove any particular philosophy is correct. It makes more sense to ask how the choice of a certain philosophy affects the practice of science. Maybe instrumentalists and realists have different biases, and it is simply best to have some of each.”
“Instead we get a lot of talk about reductionism, while they all reduce science into arbitrary collections of components,” Alice continued. “And not once did they mention the concept of emergent properties, which are rather fundamental to understanding science.”
Her sister tried to console her, “It all sounds like a bit of a nightmare.”
“Yeah,” Alice sighed, “If we ever applied the demarcation problem to philosophy, the results might not be pretty.”
Chapter One: Down the Philosophical Rabbit Hole
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the science textbook her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?”
Then she spotted a Philosophical Rabbit running by. “Maybe he can help make sense of this,” she thought. Burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. Down went Alice after it. Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.
Chapter Two: The Reduction
At the bottom she saw a tiny door. “How ever can I get through that?” she wondered. Nearby there was a large mushroom growing, with a caterpillar on top of it. It got down and crawled away, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter. We call that a reduction in Wonderland.” Alice nibbled the left side of the mushroom, and sure enough she became small enough to fit through the door.
On the other side she was greeted by some of the strange inhabitants of Wonderland. "I am sure glad that reduction let me fit through the little door!” Alice exclaimed.
A mouse named Quine replied, “Reductionism is the doctrine that every meaningful synthetic statement is logically equivalent to some sentence containing only experiential terms joined together with logical connectives.”
Alice was confused. “Can you,” she asked, “explain that to me?”
“Certainly,” he replied. “An explanans gives an explanation about an explanandum...”
“No, no,” interrupted Nagel, a curious looking mole, “that is a homogeneous reduction because disparate phenomena are reduced to a single set of laws.”
Alice thought that seemed more like a unification, but because she had just arrived she said nothing.
Then Nickles the Turtle interjected, “That is a Reduction 1, the achievement of postulational and ontological economy obtained by derivational reduction. On the other hand, Reduction 2 is a varied collection of intertheoretic relations rather than a single, distinctive logical or mathematical relation.”
“But that is what I mean by an inhomogeneous reduction,” said Nagel.
“Not really,” Nickles retorted. “All your reductions amount to domain combining.”
Alice was wondering why none of them described reduction the way scientists normally do when a Mad Hatter named Tom arrived on the scene.
Chapter Three: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Parties
The Mad Hatter took Alice by the hand and told her, “Let me explain the structure of all this scientific thinking to you.” He led her to the house of the Ptolemy Hare. There was a circular table set out under a tree in front of the house, with a tea party in progress. Alice exclaimed, “I love tea parties!”
The Mad Hatter replied, “We call them paradigms in Wonderland.”
There was a teapot at the center of the table and teacups all around it. The table was spinning around and around.
Ptolemy Hare, who was seated at the table, noticed Alice. “Welcome to my paradigm. Have you noticed that everything goes in circles?”
“Oh, yes, so many things do that here. Even the logic sometimes,” replied Alice.
The Hare then told Alice that all the circles must revolve around him, because, after all, it is his paradigm.
The Mad Hatter muttered under his breath, “(Just like the philosophy of science revolves around me ever since I wrote my book.)”
The Hare added, “I can tell where all the cups are by inventing epicycles that go around the circles the table is making.”
Alice asked if that was not a complicated way to find the cups. The Hare replied “Young lady, we have been doing it this way for a thousand years, so by now we have it all figured out.”
This all made Alice’s head spin. She left the table and spun round and round until she came to another tea party, or paradigm she supposed, in progress.
Chapter Four: Alice Shifts to a New Paradigm
The Mad Hatter explained to Alice that her revolutions had led to a paradigm shift. Alice thought to herself that so many revolutions would soon make her dizzy. At the party she had shifted to, the table was also spinning, with the teacups going around the teapot at the center. The Mad Hatter introduced Alice to Copernicus, who was seated and quietly watching the cups go around. He said, “You can clearly see the cups are revolving around the central teapot. This is a much simpler way to find the teacups.”
“I do think this is a rather more sensible tea party than that of the Hare,” Alice said. “But he did have a very pretty teacup over there. Can I bring it here?”
“No!” replied the Mad Hatter emphatically. “A teacup in one paradigm is not the same as one in another. What one takes to be facts depends on the theory that describes them. It is as if they are speaking a different language at the other party. One cannot even hold both paradigms in mind together and compare them.”
“But any language can be translated into any other one,” thought Alice. “And surely a teacup is still a teacup.”
The Mad Hatter continued, “There is no reason to think that successive theories approximate more and more closely to the truth. The notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its ‘real’ counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. The appeal of the Copernicus tea party is aesthetic rather than pragmatic.”
Alice’s head was beginning to hurt. Surely the Copernicus tea party had the better explanation. But good explanations did not seem to matter much around here.
The Mad Hatter then pointed out that there were many more tea parties, hosted by creatures called Newton and Einstein, among others. But he had studied the Copernicus party first, and as it was very revolutionary compared to Ptolemy Hare’s, it must follow that all the other parties are equally revolutionary.
“Well, revolutions were oh so very popular in the sixties when you wrote that stuff,” thought Alice. But she said, “I remember learning about that in my cognitive psychology lessons. They called it ‘priming’. The way you interpret later events is filtered on the basis of your first experience.”
From the look the Mad Hatter gave her, Alice realized one does not mention such things in Wonderland.
Chapter Five: Newton’s Vacuous Party
The Mad Hatter then led Alice to Professor Newton’s party. But on the way they met a duck named Mellor, who told them, “Don’t waste your time going there. Their talk is all vacuous.”
“How so?” asked Alice.
Mellor replied, “Newton’s first law of motion says bodies not acted on by other forces will move at a constant speed in a straight line. But his gravitational theory says all bodies exert gravitational forces on each other, meaning there cannot be a body without other forces acting on it. Thus the law is about something that cannot exist, therefore it is vacuous.”
“But if we subtract the gravitational forces the law of inertia will apply!” exclaimed Alice.
Alice turned toward the Duchess Nancy, who had just joined them. “So ladies can come to these tea parties too?” she asked.
“As long as we are even more obtuse than the gentlemen,” the Duchess replied, “That is the only way we can get tenure at this party.”
To demonstrate this, she explained, “It is not valid to use vector arithmetic to subtract the gravitational forces because vectors are not real things. A result based on something that is not real cannot itself be real.”
Alice asked, “Could we use this as an opening to explore the relationship between mathematics and science?”
“Not in Wonderland,” was her reply. “We just use it to prove science does not describe reality.”
“So this is yet another meaning of reduction,” thought Alice, “Reducing everything to vacuous nonsense.”
Chapter Six: Therapy for Reverend Bayes
At that moment, a Mr. Horwich joined the gathering. He announced, “Consider the hypothesis that all ravens are black.”
“Well,” said Alice, “I have never seen a white one.”
Mr. Horwich replied, “Ah, but your shoe is white. That shows a non-black object is a non-raven.”
“What does a shoe have to do with a raven?” asked Alice, thinking such logic is non-sense.
“Let me explain,” Mr. Horwich continued. “Wittgenstein regarded philosophy as therapeutic: its goal is to dissolve problems and resolve paradoxes by untying the knots in our thinking. A good philosophical theory is one that unravels and connects the misleading assumptions that have led us into confusion and error.”
“You see,” he added, “In Wonderland we love to lift a sentence from Wittgenstein to support our argument.”
“And then you argue the opposite,” said Alice, pleased with herself for learning the ways of Wonderland.
“Not necessarily, my dear,” he responded, “You are assuming we have some idea of what he was talking about in the first place.”
“But let me continue. Therapeutic Bayesianism uses probability theory to shed light on problems with theory verification. Let H be the hypothesis that all ravens are black, and E is the evidence of your white shoe. The factor by which the rational degree of belief in H is enhanced by E is indicated by the ratio of subjective probabilities, P(H|E) / P(H), for a rational person…” He then wrote a whole page of Bayesian probability notation on the blackboard to illustrate his point.
“But all you did is bury the assumption that there is little connection between shoes and birds in all that math!” cried Alice. “You only created confusion by tying everything up in notational knots. I could use some therapy for the headache you have given me.”
Chapter Seven: The Trial
Alice was still recovering from her Bayesian headache when a cry of “The trial is beginning!” was heard in the distance. “Come on!” cried the Mad Hatter, and taking Alice by the hand they hurried off. The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their thrones when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them— “I wish they'd get the trial done,” she thought, “and hand round the refreshments!”
'Herald, read the accusation!' said the King. The Herald read:
“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!”
The King thanked the Herald, and said, “We must find the cause for the condition we find ourselves in. After all, a cause is an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition. I thereby call the first witness, Professor Fire Bend!”
The professor took the stand and began, “First, we must consider the phrase ‘he stole those tarts’. We must not attach too great an importance to ‘what we mean’ by a phrase, and we must be prepared to change whatever little we have said concerning this meaning as soon as the need arises. Flexibility and even sloppiness in semantic matters is a prerequisite of scientific progress.”
“Hear, Hear!” cried some of the audience.
“It is important to have as many alternative hypotheses as possible,” he continued. “It is bound to happen that the alternatives do not share a single statement with the theories they criticize. The exist also facts which cannot be unearthed except with the help of alternatives to the theory to be tested and which become unavailable as soon as such alternatives are excluded.”
He then concluded, “The first step will therefore be the formulation of fairly general assumptions that are not yet directly connected with observations; this means the first step will be the invention of a new metaphysics.” To much cheering, the professor returned to his seat.
The King said, “Indeed, we must consider all verification-transcendent truth-conditions. Call the next witness.”
The Mad Hatter stood up and said, “If some of these hypotheses are different paradigms, there may be no meaningful correspondence between them. Recall that the choice of paradigm is a matter of aesthetics.”
Eddington the Bear interjected, “For example, which tarts are really there: the solid ones we can taste, or those composed of speeding electric charges and are therefore mostly emptiness?”
“If the meaning is empty,” said the King, “that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. But let me call the first witness for the prosecution.”
Musgrave the Muskrat took the stand. “Realists,” he began, “think science explains facts about the world and they think a realist philosophy of science explains facts about science.”
A murmur of disapproval rose from the crowd. He continued, “Can you not all see the tarts in question? A real explanation does not remove one mystery by postulating another one.”
The Duchess cried out, “Take off your glasses. What do you see now?”
The Muskrat removed his thick spectacles, and blinked a few times. “I can’t see a thing. Everything is a blur,” he finally said.
The Duchess exclaimed, “Then the tarts are clearly a consequence of the instrument with which you observe them. The instrument is based on theory, as is the existence of the tarts. The tarts, your spectacles, indeed all of our language is thoroughly theory-laden, or theory-infected, even theory-impregnated.”
“That is not entirely appropriate language for a children’s book,” the King of Hearts warned. “However, if one cannot prove the reality of the Knave or the tarts, and it is not possible to distinguish between alternate hypotheses, I must find the Knave innocent. Court dismissed!”
“Everything is getting curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice. “This whole thing is nothing but a house of cards!”
Final Chapter: The Awakening
At this the whole pack of cards rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister. “Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you've had!”
“Oh, I've had such a curious dream!” said Alice. “I was in a very strange world. For a place called Wonderland there was little sense of wonder about the mystery and beauty of science. All the creatures were obsessed with staking out intellectual territory for themselves based on a selective interpretation of the meaning of words. They love to talk about how science is underdetermined…”
“You mean that there are no definitive proofs?” asked her sister.
“Yes,” replied Alice, “But philosophy is even more underdetermined. You can never prove objects or theories represent real things, any more than you can prove any particular philosophy is correct. It makes more sense to ask how the choice of a certain philosophy affects the practice of science. Maybe instrumentalists and realists have different biases, and it is simply best to have some of each.”
“Instead we get a lot of talk about reductionism, while they all reduce science into arbitrary collections of components,” Alice continued. “And not once did they mention the concept of emergent properties, which are rather fundamental to understanding science.”
Her sister tried to console her, “It all sounds like a bit of a nightmare.”
“Yeah,” Alice sighed, “If we ever applied the demarcation problem to philosophy, the results might not be pretty.”
April 15, 2016
I would say this book would be one of my top 5 books (or lectures) I have ever read (or listened to). I would strongly recommend it to every one. It's taught me a new way to consider the world. Every single writer of science fiction or science books should be aware of the concepts in this book before they write their book. They don't have to necessarily come out in favor of one position but they have to aware of the issues that exist within the philosophy of science.
Before each of the nine chapters there is a short summary of what the chapter will be about, followed by a series of 5 or 6 essays within each chapter, followed by a detailed summary at the end of the chapter on what each of the essay writers were trying to say. Sometimes, within the essay the editors would put clarification footnotes to help the reader, and each chapter is connected at a meta level.
The editors have arranged each chapter as if they are part of a ongoing dialog between various experts on a particular subtopic of philosophy of science. Each chapter follows a pattern similar to this: the first essay will state the thesis, the next essay will amplify the thesis, the next one will give the antithesis, and the last will give some kind of synthesis often telling you why the moderate approach is the best or sometimes it will restate the thesis and show why it is the best way to approach the topic. As the reader is progressing through the chapter, the reader will think the points being made in the essay are overwhelmingly true and they become completely convinced of that view point, until the next essay comes along and they think that is the only way to think about the problem. Fortunately, the editors will then do a summary and give an overall best way to think about the problems.
Within the best parts of philosophy and when it is presented in its best way, philosophy never gives good answers, but, rather gives good questions. So often, we create "convenient fictions" (or as one of the essays said 'facons de Parler' (always use the French instead of the English so everyone knows your pretentious)). The important thing is to understand the question and understand that there can be multiple ways of considering the ontological nature of the way to understand the question under consideration.
After having read this book, I now know Grue is my favorite color, all living Pegasus are green, that blue pen in front of your desk is evidence for all crows being black, explaining something doesn't mean it is explained away, ad hoc theories make it difficult to separate science from pseudoscience, the double slit experiment violates the mutually exclusive rule of logic, and science is always underdetermined (the facts we have can always be explained by multiple theories).
I liked all the chapters. Of all the essays there was only one that frustrated me. That was in the Bayesian chapter and one of the authors used a piece of mathematical notation I was not familiar with and within the text they didn't define the term. Though, that chapter on Bayesian math was well worth reading because it gave a splendid overview of how to think about the problem. BTW, why is Bayesian math so important in the philosophy of science? Because it's the only reasonable way to discount that your blue pen is evidence for all crows being black.
The used first edition of this book should be available for less than 12 dollars delivered to the home. The other thing I really liked about this book within the text there was a whole lot of science explained in the essays.
i
Before each of the nine chapters there is a short summary of what the chapter will be about, followed by a series of 5 or 6 essays within each chapter, followed by a detailed summary at the end of the chapter on what each of the essay writers were trying to say. Sometimes, within the essay the editors would put clarification footnotes to help the reader, and each chapter is connected at a meta level.
The editors have arranged each chapter as if they are part of a ongoing dialog between various experts on a particular subtopic of philosophy of science. Each chapter follows a pattern similar to this: the first essay will state the thesis, the next essay will amplify the thesis, the next one will give the antithesis, and the last will give some kind of synthesis often telling you why the moderate approach is the best or sometimes it will restate the thesis and show why it is the best way to approach the topic. As the reader is progressing through the chapter, the reader will think the points being made in the essay are overwhelmingly true and they become completely convinced of that view point, until the next essay comes along and they think that is the only way to think about the problem. Fortunately, the editors will then do a summary and give an overall best way to think about the problems.
Within the best parts of philosophy and when it is presented in its best way, philosophy never gives good answers, but, rather gives good questions. So often, we create "convenient fictions" (or as one of the essays said 'facons de Parler' (always use the French instead of the English so everyone knows your pretentious)). The important thing is to understand the question and understand that there can be multiple ways of considering the ontological nature of the way to understand the question under consideration.
After having read this book, I now know Grue is my favorite color, all living Pegasus are green, that blue pen in front of your desk is evidence for all crows being black, explaining something doesn't mean it is explained away, ad hoc theories make it difficult to separate science from pseudoscience, the double slit experiment violates the mutually exclusive rule of logic, and science is always underdetermined (the facts we have can always be explained by multiple theories).
I liked all the chapters. Of all the essays there was only one that frustrated me. That was in the Bayesian chapter and one of the authors used a piece of mathematical notation I was not familiar with and within the text they didn't define the term. Though, that chapter on Bayesian math was well worth reading because it gave a splendid overview of how to think about the problem. BTW, why is Bayesian math so important in the philosophy of science? Because it's the only reasonable way to discount that your blue pen is evidence for all crows being black.
The used first edition of this book should be available for less than 12 dollars delivered to the home. The other thing I really liked about this book within the text there was a whole lot of science explained in the essays.
i
December 4, 2013
Best anthology in philosophy of science. Period.
August 31, 2023
This book is 25 years old but things don’t change very fast in philosophy of science. Many of the arguments presented in the book are from a hundred years ago or more. I feel reasonably up to date having read it.
Numerous philosophical articles are presented in nine sections defining what the editors deem to be the eponymous central issues. They are “Science and Pseudoscience,” “ Rationality, Objectivity, and Values in Science,” “The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination,” “Induction, Prediction, and Evidence,” “Confirmation and Relevance: Bayesian Approaches,” “Models of Explanation,” “Laws of Nature,” “Intertheoretic Reduction,” and “Empiricism and Scientific Realism.”
The last section is the most exciting and the others build up to it. That issue is about whether science reveals true facts about the world. Many scientists today would not be willing to say so. They’d only say good science produces good predictions about what to expect. Many people working in quantum physics would say that. Other anti-realists would argue that science is only the specialized conversation of a select community, because scientific claims cannot, in principle, ever be verified as true or false.
The book is organized wonderfully for understanding the issues. A thoughtful introduction by the editors sets up the “issue” to be discussed: what it is and why it matters. Then a series landmark papers is presented concerning all sides of that issue. These are by luminaries of the field, writers such as Hempel, Nagel, Quine, Feyerabend, Putnam, Popper, Kuhn, Cartwright. Then a few papers of “criticism” are offered in which other philosophers argue against the ideas put forward in the first part. Finally, the editors provide a summary of arguments pro and con. The organization of the sections is similar in structure to the open peer commentary format of journals like Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa...).
These are pretty deep ideas and not everybody’s cup of tea I realize, but reading this book was my definition of a good time. I filled my copy with underlines and marginal notations. If I had to find something to complain about, I’d say the editors’ summaries at the end of the sections were too long, too detailed, excessively redundant, and not evaluative enough. They’re 95% summary and perhaps only 5% evaluation. I didn’t expect the editors to pick winners and losers, as these are all open issues in the field, but there is an unexamined bias throughout for empirical realism in the analytic philosophy tradition. I would have appreciated a sharper meta-evaluation of the arguments.
The book includes extensive and often illuminating notes at the ends of the sections, a very valuable bibliography, a helpful glossary, and an highly detailed index.
Curd, Martin, & Cover, J.A. (Eds.) (1998). Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. New York: W.W. Norton, 1377 pp.
Numerous philosophical articles are presented in nine sections defining what the editors deem to be the eponymous central issues. They are “Science and Pseudoscience,” “ Rationality, Objectivity, and Values in Science,” “The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination,” “Induction, Prediction, and Evidence,” “Confirmation and Relevance: Bayesian Approaches,” “Models of Explanation,” “Laws of Nature,” “Intertheoretic Reduction,” and “Empiricism and Scientific Realism.”
The last section is the most exciting and the others build up to it. That issue is about whether science reveals true facts about the world. Many scientists today would not be willing to say so. They’d only say good science produces good predictions about what to expect. Many people working in quantum physics would say that. Other anti-realists would argue that science is only the specialized conversation of a select community, because scientific claims cannot, in principle, ever be verified as true or false.
The book is organized wonderfully for understanding the issues. A thoughtful introduction by the editors sets up the “issue” to be discussed: what it is and why it matters. Then a series landmark papers is presented concerning all sides of that issue. These are by luminaries of the field, writers such as Hempel, Nagel, Quine, Feyerabend, Putnam, Popper, Kuhn, Cartwright. Then a few papers of “criticism” are offered in which other philosophers argue against the ideas put forward in the first part. Finally, the editors provide a summary of arguments pro and con. The organization of the sections is similar in structure to the open peer commentary format of journals like Behavioral and Brain Sciences. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journa...).
These are pretty deep ideas and not everybody’s cup of tea I realize, but reading this book was my definition of a good time. I filled my copy with underlines and marginal notations. If I had to find something to complain about, I’d say the editors’ summaries at the end of the sections were too long, too detailed, excessively redundant, and not evaluative enough. They’re 95% summary and perhaps only 5% evaluation. I didn’t expect the editors to pick winners and losers, as these are all open issues in the field, but there is an unexamined bias throughout for empirical realism in the analytic philosophy tradition. I would have appreciated a sharper meta-evaluation of the arguments.
The book includes extensive and often illuminating notes at the ends of the sections, a very valuable bibliography, a helpful glossary, and an highly detailed index.
Curd, Martin, & Cover, J.A. (Eds.) (1998). Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. New York: W.W. Norton, 1377 pp.
May 14, 2022
Didn't read all of it, just what was assigned in the course. It is a good anthology with many important papers, but I sometimes wished the introductions where longer and more deatailed. This is some pretty difficult stuff, and much of it I wouldn't have understood without my lectures beforehand.
January 29, 2020
Deep, thought provoking, insightful, witty, and a wide variety of topics...
June 4, 2015
Probably the best anthology in Philosophy of Science. It covers the most important topics in self-contained sections (e.g., science and pseudoscience, values and objectivity, Bayesianism, the Quine-Duhem thesis, intertheory reduction, etc). The comments made by the editors at the beginning of each section provide a useful framework to integrate the collection of papers to be read. Likewise, the comments at the end of each section help the reader to consolidate and synthesize the concepts just reviewed in a coherent whole. In my opinion, the effort of editors to provide a balanced analysis along chapters is not necessarily accomplished, in part, because of the inherent variation in the complexity of sections and related questions. In spite of it, the anthology is probably the best currently available. I highly recommend this book for undergraduate students. Needless to say I use this anthology in my course of Philosophy of Science.
July 1, 2021
From Discovery to Explanation to Scientific Realism, this anthology covers the major problems in the Philosophy of Science. The chapter commentaries are useful but not strictly necessary to understanding the main content of the book, which includes numerous valuable articles written by a wide variety of philosophers of science. The chapters often juxtapose views from the Logical/Empirical Positivists against competing views from the Kuhnian tradition in which science is conceived of as a social enterprise of researchers engaged in puzzle-solving. I highly recommend this anthology to anyone interested in epistemology, philosophy, or the theoretical underpinnings that guide research in the natural sciences. I encourage interested readers to check out the pieces from Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, AJ Ayer and Thomas Kuhn in particular.
April 29, 2009
An excellent collection of various issues within the philosophy of science. Each essay is given an appropriate introduction and the end of each chapter includes a detailed and lengthy recap of the various essays and how they interact, plus additional clarifying details. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject. Also, as my professor recommended, a good book to have your photo taken with.
July 11, 2022
Great anthology of the logical positivist movement and beyond.
March 17, 2009
I don't know of a better collection on the subject. It may be getting out of date right now, but it's wonderfully comprehensive and goes deeper into the major debates than do most collections of essays on any philosophical subject.
December 16, 2015
A really great introduction to the field, compiling essays and excerpts from all the classics of the early and mid-twentieth century. Organized by subject rather than chronologically, it places authors and essays that speak directly to one another in close physical proximity.
July 8, 2008
Pretty good introduction to the field, through a nice collection of primary sources.
January 9, 2025
ISU: Philosophy of Science
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