Re: Pol.Sci. vs. Poli.Sci

Martin Ambuhl <mambuhl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Philosophy of Science for Beginners:

* General Introductions
Alexander Rosenberg, _The Philosophy of Science_ (Routlege, 2000)
Barry Gower, _Scientific Method_ (Routledge, 1997)

* Popper
Karl Popper, _Logic of Scientific Discovery_ (Basic Books, 1959)
Karl Popper, _Conjectures and Refutations_ (Routlege, 1963)
Donald Gillies, _Philosophy of Science in the 20th Century_, vol IV
(Blackwell, 1993)

* Inference (Lipton & Gillies discuss some Post-Popperian views;
Lipton's is probably more favorably recieved)
Wesley Salmon, _The Foundations of Scientific Inference_ (u Pitt, 1967)
Peter Lipton, _Inference to the Best Explanation_ (Routledge, 1991)
Donald Gillies, _Philosophical Theories of Probabilty_ (Routledge, 2000)

* Explanation (Hempel's covering law model dates from the early 1950s
and was an attempt to correct obvious errors in his fellow Vienna Circle
member Popper's work. It was widely accepted throughout the 1950s,
1960s, and 1970s. Salmon's book describes the debate that followed
Hempel's publication.)
Carl Hempel, _Aspects of Scientific Explanation_, essay 12 (FP, 1965)
Wesley Salmon, _Four Decades of Scientific Explanation_ (U Minn, 1989)

One cannot avoid confronting Kuhn, no matter what one thinks of him.

An excellent text describing the state of the Philosophy of Science
twenty years ago, well worth reading again, applies it to a practical
problem:
Philip Kitcher, _Abusing Scence: The Case Against Creationism_ (MIT, 1982).
If you read in the literature around Creationism, you will find that the
Creationists who don't simply rely of Biblical warrant all use a
Popperian model of science to attack science, and most of the
anti-Creationists do as well. The result is a comedy of errors in which
the scientists and Creationists both get it all wrong. When the
scientists to it, I want to cry, since they do have all the good
arguments on their side.

If you had the time, I would suggest any of the very readable and well
thought out essays by Hilary Putnam, probably the most important
American philosopher of the last half of the 20th century. The problem
with Putnam is that he continually rethinks his own positions, so later
essays frequently attack his own earlier views. Even though his essays
at any stage are worthwhile, it can be a little disconcerting to
discover that the position you thought was Putnam's meets its most
severe and acute criticism from Putnam himself. With all those caveats,
checking the three collections of his earlier essays:
(Vol 1)
Hilary Putnam, _Mathematics, Matter and Method_ (Cambridge, 2nd ed, 1979)
(Vol 2)
Hilary Putnam, _Mind, Language and Reality_ (Cambridge, 1979)
(Vol 3)
Hilary Putnam, _Realism and Reason_ (Cambridge, 1983)

A good shorter introdution is
Hilary Putnam, _Reason, Truth and History_ (Cambridge, 1981)

His publications in the 1990s and 2000s are very important, but
generally require more grounding.

Popper seems
pretty sound to me, off the page, much more so than a bunch of other
professional philosophers.

Popper seems sound to most people who haven't thought through or been
exposed to the flaws in his position. If you ask most physical
scientists what science is and how one does it, you'll probably get a
Popperian answer. If you ask that scientist what he does when he does
science, you'll almost certainly find the reality is one that Popper
would not accept as science.

He ws a professional philosopher and a member of Moritz Schlick's Vienna
Circle. He and a bunch of other profeesional philosophers worked out
the framework of logical positivism together. One of the good things
about Popper was that we was capable of admitting error. He went for
years asserting that Darwinism was not scientific, much to the delight
of quote-mongers from the creationist movement. He published a
well-down retraction when he finally saw the light. There is a lesson
here: even among Popperians the error of labelling something as not a
science comes too easily.

Thanks, I'll keep that for a rainy day. I note no Lakatos featuring
obviously in the above. I've always liked Lakatos's revision of
Popper, with its protected core of assumptions which are untestable
within that research programme (or paradigm). It removes the primary
absurdity of the simplistic view that it's not a scientific hypothesis
if you can't specify an experimental test of it. Lakatos unfortunately
died before being able to write the book his fans were
awaiting.

What's the status of Lakatos among modern philosophers of science?

--
Chris Malcolm cam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

.

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