Masterdoc: Philosophy of Science

Chapter 2: Empiricism

Definition and types

Empiricism is often summarized with the claim that the only source of knowledge is experience.

The most important stage in the development of empiricist philosophy was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the work of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.

“Classical” forms of empiricism were based upon theories about the mind and how it works. Their view of the mind is sometimes called “sensationalist”. Sensations, like patches of color and sounds, appear in the mind and are all the mind has access to. The role of thought is to track and respond to patterns in these sensations.

Empiricists have often tended to think of the mind as confined behind a “veil of ideas” or sensations. The mind has no access to anything outside the veil.

Issues:

A problem for empiricism has been a tendency to lapse into skepticism, the idea that we cannot know anything, or can only know much less than is usually supposed, about the world and its workings.

External world skepticism: questions whether we can ever know anything about a physical world that might lie behind the flow of sensations we receive.
Inductive skepticism: why do we have a reason to think that the patterns found in past experiences will also hold in the future?

Rationalism vs Empiricism

It is common to talk of a battle between the “rationalists” and “empiricists” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rationalists believed that pure reasoning can be a route to knowledge that does not depend on experience. Mathematics seemed to be a compelling example of this kind of knowledge. The term “rationalism” was often used in a broad way, to indicate confidence in the power of human reason.

Empiricists insisted that experience is our only way of finding out what the world is like.

In the late eighteenth century, a sophisticated intermediate position was developed by Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that all our thinking involves a subtle interaction between sensory experience and preexisting mental structures that we use to make sense of experience. Concepts, such as space, time, and causation cannot be derived from experience because a person must already have these concepts in order to use experience to learn about the world. Kant also held that mathematics gives us genuine knowledge but does not require experience for its justification.

Making a sweeping generalization, it is fair to say that the empiricist tradition has tended to be (1) pro-science, (2) worldly rather than religious, and (3) politically moderate or liberal. Empiricist ideas have tended to be allies of a practical, scientific, down-to-earth outlook.

The Vienna Circle and logical positivism

A new form of empiricism was developed in Europe after World War I by a group of people who were scientifically oriented and thought they could avoid many of the problems with traditional forms of empiricism. This group has become known as the “Vienna Circle”. The usual name for the view the Vienna Circle developed is “logical positivism”.

The logical positivists were inspired by developments in science in the early years of the twentieth century. They also thought that developments in logic, mathematics, and the philosophy of language had shown a way to put together a new kind of philosophy. Logical positivism was a plea for Enlightenment values, in opposition to mysticism, Romanticism, and nationalism. The positivists championed reason over the obscure, the logical over the intuitive. The logical positivists were also internationalists, and liked the idea of a universal and precise language that everyone could use to communicate clearly.

Many of the Vienna Circle had socialist leanings, some were Jewish, and there were certainly no Nazis. So the logical positivists were persecuted by the Nazis, to varying degrees.

Earlier empiricist views were based on views about the mind and perception. Logical positivism, in contrast, was based in large part on theories about language - especially about what language can and can’t express. ==Their central idea was the verifiability theory of meaning: knowing the meaning of a sentence is knowing how to verify it. If a sentence has no possible method of verification, it has no meaning.==

To explain: By “verification”, the positivists meant by means of observation. The positivists had testability in mind, because testing is an attempt to work out whether something is true or false.

The verifiability theory was only supposed to apply to a particular kind of meaning, the kind seen when a person is trying to state something about the world.

There are parts of languages that are supposed to have factual meaning, and are supposed to say something about the world, and fail to do so. For the logical positivists, this includes most traditional philosophy, much of ethics, and theology as well.

A second part of positivists’ view of language is the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences.

==analytic sentences are sentences that are true or false simply in the virtue of the meaning of the words within them, regardless of how the world happens to be. Analytic truths are, in a sense, empty truths with no factual content.==
==synthetic sentences are true or false in virtue of both the meaning of the words in the sentence, and how the world actually is.==

\ Another part of their view of language which brings us closer to issues about science, is a distinction they make between observational and theoretical language. Usually the distinction between these was applied to individual terms. “Red” might be put in the observational language, while “electron” in the theoretical part.

Though traditional philosophy was largely seen as a waste of time, logical positivists did think there were some real tasks for philosophers to do. They saw logic as the main tool for philosophy, including philosophical discussion of science. The most useful thing that philosophers can do is give logical analyses of how language, mathematics, and science work. Logic, in general, is the attempt to give an abstract theory of what makes some arguments compelling.

In short: Logical positivism was a revolutionary version of empiricism, based largely on a theory of language. The aim of science - and the aim of everyday thought and provlem-solving as well - is to track and anticipate patterns in experience. We can make rational predictions about future experiences by attending to patterns in past experiences, but we nevet get a guarantee. We could always be wrong. There is no alternative route to knowledge besides experience; when philosophy has tried to find such a route, it has lapsed into meaninglessness.

Problems of logical Positivism (Quine and Feigl)

There was considerable difficulty in getting a good formulation of the verifiability principle. For example, if we could empirically show the first part of the claim to be false, then the whole claim would be shown false (if A is false, then A&B must be false too, no matter what B is) because of the logic of statements containing “and”.

Quine argued for a holistic theory of testing. He argued that mainstream empiricism had been committed to a badly simplistic view of testing. Logical positivism, he said, must be replaced with a holistic version of empiricism.

A holist argues that you cannot understand a particular thing without looking at its place in a larger whole. Holism about testing says we cannot test a single hypothesis or sentence in isolation. Instead, we can only test complex network of claims and assumptions. This is because only a complex network of claims and assumptions makes definite predictions about what we should observe. Whenever you think of yourself as testing a single idea, what you are really testing is a long, complicated conjunction of statements. It is the whole conjunction that gives you a definite prediction.

However, logical positivists already accepted that testing is holistic. Hertbert Feigl said that no scientific assumption is testable in complete isolation. Only whole complexes of inter-related hypotheses can be put to the test.

Quine also argued that there is no way to make scientific sense of a sharp analytic/synthetic distinction. He connected this point to his holism about testing. For Quine, all our ideas and hypotheses form a single “web of belief”, which has contact with experience only as a whole. An unexpected observation can prompt us to make a great variety of possible changes to the web.

For the traditional empiricist philosopher, understanding scientific theorizing in a way that posits a layer of observable phenomena and a layer of hidden structure responsible for the phenomena takes us too close to bad old philosophical views like Plato’s. We are too close for comfort, so we must give a different kind of description of how science works. The result is the insistence that, ultimately, the only thing that language can do is describe patterns in the observable realm. It was written: “in science there are no ‘depths’; there is surface everywhere”. This is a vivid expression of the empiricist aversion to a view in which the aim of theorizing is to describe hidden levels of structure. Science uses unusual theoretical concepts, which initially look like attempts to refer to hidden things, as a way of discovering and describing subtle patterns in the observable realm.

So the logical positivists and the logical empiricists talked continually about prediction as the goal of science. Prediction was a substitute for the more obvious-looking, but ultimately forbidden, goal of describing the real hidden structure of the world.

Changes in logical Positivism

In the years after World War II, the analytic/synthetic distinction was regarded as questionable for the logical positivists now referred to as logical empiricists.

The verifiability theory was replaced with a holistic empiricist theory of meaning. Theories were seen as structures that connect many hypotheses together. There structures are connected, as wholes, to the observable realm, but any part of a theory, claim, hypothesis, concept, etc., does not have some specific set of observations associated with it.

Logical positivists views about the role of logic in philosophy were basically unchanged. For Hempel, to explain something is to show how to infer it using a logical argument, where the premises of the argument include at least one statement of a natural law.

As an empiricist, Hempel was attracted to the idea that the only possible role for those parts of language that seem to refer to unobservable entities is to help us pick out patterns in the observable realm.

Feigl himself said the logical positivists were right to emphasize the role of observation in providing evidence for our claims, but they pushed this emphasis so far that they lost sight of the objects that these claims are typically about. He stated that the positivists, with their eyes fixed on evidence, were not seeing what lies beyond that evidence.

Chapter 3: Evidence and Induction --

Need for Evidence (problem of induction)

In some ways,, the fundamental problem over the last hundred years of philosophy of science is the problem of ==understanding how observations can provide evidence for a scientific theory==.

The aim of the logical empiricisits was to develop a logical theory of evidence in science. The confirmation of a theory is a kind of supposrt that theories can get from evidence. The logical empiricists wanted to treat confirmation as an abstract relation between sentences.

The confirmation of theories is closely connected to another classic topic in philosophy: the problem of induction. What reason do we have for expecting patterns of observed in our past experience to hold in the future? What justification do we have for using past observations as a basis for generalization about things we have not yet observed? Hume was an inductive skeptic and asked, what reason do we have for thinking that the future will resemble the past?

Induction and Deduction

The logical empiricists were not trying to develop a recipe for confirming theories, rather the aim was to give an account of the relationships between the statements that make up a scientific theory and statements describing observations, which make the observations support the theory.

But the logical empiricists thought that the aim of science is to discover and establish generalizations. Sometimes the aim was seen as describing “laws of nature”.

The simplest and most traditional case of induction is: if we see a multitude of white swans, and no other colors, why does that give us a reason to believe that all swans are white? ==Godfrey-Smith uses the term “induction” only for inferences that go from particular observations to generalizations.==

Deduction is a less controversial kind of logic. ==A deductive argument has the feature that if the premises of the argument are true, then the conclusion is guaranteed to be true.== An example of this is that if the premises of an argument are that all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then the conclusion would be that Socrates is mortal.

According to Goodman, the deductive validity of arguments depend only on the form or pattern of the argument, not the content. Any argument that has the same form is just as good:

All Fs are G.

Object a is F.

Object a is G.

Any argument with this form is deductively valid, no matter what we substitute for “F”, “G”, and “a”.

Chapter 4: Popper

Falsificationism

The logical positivists developed their theory of science as a part of a general theory of language, meaning, and knowledge. Popper was not much interested in these broader topics; ==his primary aim was to understand knowledge==.

All of Popper’s philosophy starts from his proposed solution to the ==problem of demarcation.== “Falsificationism” was the name Popper gave to his solution, and this is also referred to as the hyppthetico-deductive method. ==Falsificationism claims that a hypothesis is scientific if and only if it has the potential to be refuted by some possible observation.== He also claimed that all testing in science has the form of attempting to refute theories by means of observation. Crucially, for Popper it is never possible to confirm or establish a theory by showing its agreement with observations. the only thing an observational test can do is to show that a theory is false. Popper believed it is not possible to confirm a theory, not even slightly, and no matter how many observations the theory helps us to predict successfully.

Popper had a fairly simple view of how testing in science proceeds. We take a theory that someone has proposed, and deduce an observational prediction from it. We then check to see if the prediction comes out as the theory says it will. If the prediction fails, then we have refuted, or falsified, the theory. If the prediction comes out as predicted, then all we should say is that we have not yet falsified the theory. The theory might be true, but we cannot say more than that. After repeated attempts to falsify, with no results, we can say that the theory has now survived repeated attempts to falsify it, but that’s all. We never stop trying to falsify it.

Science, according to Popper’s theory, changes via a two-step cycle that repeats endlessly.

==Stage 1 is conjecture: a== scientist will offer a hypothesis that might describe and explain some part of the world. A good conjecture is a bold one, one that takes a lot of risks by making novel predictions.

==Stage 2 is attempted refutation==: the hypothesis is subjected to critical testing, in an attempt to show that it is false.

Once the hypthesis is refuted we go back to stage 1 where a new conjecture is offered, which is followed by stage 2, and so on.

Popper made much of the difference between confirming and disconfirming statements as scientific law. If someone proposes a law of the form “All Fs are G”, all it takes is one observation of an F that is not a G to falsify the hypothesis. This is a matter of deductive logic.

Popper’s and the logical empiricists’ aim was to describe testing in situations where there is a huge or infinite number of cases covered by a hypothesized law or generalization. So Popper stressed that universal statements are hard or impossible to verify but easy, in principle, to falsify.

In context of Scientists

Popper’s picture of science’s search for truth is that all we can do is try out one theory after another. A theory that we have failed to falsify up to now might be true. But if so, we will never know this or even have reason to increase our confidence.

One thing that a scientist should not do, however, is react to the falsification of one conjecture by cooking up a new conjecture that is designed to just avoid the problems revealed by earlier testing, and that goes no further.

A case where individual A does the conjecture and individual B does the refutation will be suspicious to Popper. If individual A is a true scientist, they should take a critical attitude toward their own ideas. If individual A is completely fixated on their conjecture, and individual B is fixed on showing that A is wrong in order to advance a different conjecture, this is not good scientific behavior, according to Popper.

Good scientists should retain a tentative attitude toward all theories, including their own: “whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than to defend it”.

Objections to Popper on Confirmation

Popper believed that theories can never be confirmed by observations, and he thought that inductive arguments are never justified.

A simple problem that Popper has a very difficult time with is that of the question of which design of a bridge is stable and will support the weight that it will carry, if needing to use physical theories. Engineers and scientists in this situation will undoubtedly tend to use physical theories that have survived empirical testing; they will use “tried and true” methods as far as possible. The empiricist approach to the philosophy of science holds that such a policy is rational.

Popper can say something about why we should prefer to use a theory that has not been falsified over a theory that has been falsified. Theories that have been falsified have been shown to be false. But suppose we have to choose between (1) a theory that has been tested many times and has passed every test and (2) a brand-new theory that has just been conjectured and has never been tested. Neither theory has been falsified. Why exactly would it be irrational, for Popper, to build the bridge using a new theory that has not yet been tested?

Popper said that a theory that has survived many attempts to falsify it is “corroborated”. And when we face choices like the bridge-building one, it is rational to choose corroborated theories over theories that are not corroborated.

If corroboration is so different from confirmation - so different that we cannot regard corroboration as any guide to a theory’s truth - then why should we choose a corroborated theory when we build the bridge?

Confirmation, as understood by the logical empiricists, is something like a letter of recommendation for a scientific theory. It says something about what it has done, and also makes claims for what it is likely to do in the future. Corroboration, for Popper, is more like saying what it has done, but does not contain explicit predictions about what it will do in the future. And Popper thought that no good reasons could be given for believing that past performance is a reliable guide to the future.

Hypothetico-deductivism

Formulations of the hypothetico-deductive method differ, but some are basically a combination of Popper’s view of testing, and a less skeptical view of confirmation.

Chapter 5: Kuhns Revolution

Paradigms

A paradigm, in Kuhn’s theory, is a whole way of doing science, in some particular field. ==It is a package of claims about the world, methods for gathering and analyzing data, and habits of scientific thought and action.== In Kuhn’s theory of science, the big changes in how scientists see the world - the “revolutions” that science undergoes every now and then - occur when one paradigm replaces another.

Kuhn argued that observational data and logic alone cannot force scientists to move from one paradigm to another, because different paradigms often include within them different rules for treating data and assessing theories.

Kuhn used the phrase “normal science” for scientific work that occurs within the framework provided by a paradigm. A central feature of normal science is that it is well organized. Scientists doing normal science tend to agree on which problems are important, on how to approach these problems, and on how to assess possible solutions. A scientific revolution occurs when one paradigm breaks down and is replaced by another.

Conjecture and Refutation

While Popper claimed that science is characterized by a permanent openness (a permanent and all-encompassing critical stance even with respect to fundamental ideas in a field), Kuhn argued that science would be worse off if it had the kind of openness that philosophers have treasured.

For Popper, all science proceeds via a single process, the process of conjecture and refutation. There can still be episodes called “revolutions” in such a ciew, but these are just bigger in degree from what goes on the rest of the time. For Kuhn, there are two distinct kinds of scientific change: change within normal science, and revolutionary science - these are bridged by “crisis science”.

Normal science

Normal science is research inspired by a striking achievement that provides a basis for furhter work. Each scientific field starts out in a state of “pre-paradigm science”. This science is not well organized and not very effective. At some point, however, some striking piece of work appears. This achievement might be a strikingly successful experiment, such as Mendel’s experiments with peas, which eventually became the basis of modern genetics.

This achievement is taken to provide insight into the workings of some part of the world, and it supplies a model for further investigation. A tradition of further work starts to grow up around it. The field has its first paradigm.

\ In general, Kuhn’s picture has it that there is one paradigm per field per time.

\ A paradigm’s role is to organize scientific work; the paradigm coordinates the work of individuals into an efficient collective enterprise. Because scientists doing normal science agree on these fundamentals, they do not waste their time arguing about the most basic issues.

\ Although the normal scientist is not trying to find phenomena that lead to paradigm change, these detailed discoveries often contain the seeds of large-scale change and the destruction of the paradigm that produced them.

\ Normal science is structured in a way that makes its own destruction inevitable, but only in response to the right stimulus. That stimulus is the appearance of problems that are deep rather than superficial, problems that reveal a real inadequacy in the paradigm.

Anomaly and Crisis

According to Kuhn, the rejection of a paradigm happens only when (1) a critical mass of anomalies has arisen, and (2) a rival paradigm has appeared.

An “anomaly” for Kuhn is a puzzle that has resisted solution. Kuhn holds that all paradigms face anomalies at any given time. As long as there are not too many of them, normal science proceeds as usual, and scientists regard them as a challenge. But the anomalies tend to accumulate. Eventually, the scientists start to lose faith in their paradigm. The result is a crisis.

Crisis science, for Kuhn, is a special period when an existing paradign has lost the ability to inspire and guide scientists, but when no new paradigm has emerged to get the field back on track. As a consequence, the most fundamental issues are back on the table for debate.

\ For a Popperian, and many forms of empiricism, these anomalies should count as “refutations” of the theory. Kuhn thinks that science does not treat these ubiquitous anomalies as refutations, and it also should not. If scientists dropped their paradigms every time a problem arose, they would never get anything done.

\ To Kuhn, normal science is full of rather close-minded individuals, usually with no one trying to knock over a paradigm. But by their intensely focused work and the exploration of anomalies, they produce the paradigm’s collapse.

Revolutions

Revolutionary periods see a breakdown of order and questioning of the rules of the game, and they are followed by a process of rebuilding that creates new concepts, methods, and practices. Revolutions involve a breakdown, but they are essential to science as we know it. They have a function within the totality of science.

In Kuhn’s story, large-scale scientific change usually requires both a crisis and the appearance of a new candidate paradigm. A crisis alone will not induce scientists to regard a large-scale theory or paradigm as “falsified”. But also, the switch to a new paradigm does not occur just because a new idea appears that looks better than the old one. Without a crisis, scientists will not have any motivation to consider radical change.

\ There are two kinds of scientific change in Kuhn’s picture. Change within normal science is orderly and responsive to evidence - but normal science is orderly via a closing of debate about fundamental ideas. Revolutionary change does involve challenges to fundamentals, but these are episodes in which the orderly assessment of ideas breaks down.

\ Science for Kuhn is a social mechanism that combines two capacities. One is the capacity for sustained, cooperative work. The other is science’s capacity to partially break down and reconstitute itself from time to time.

Without the tenacious commitment to a paradigm seen in normal science, investigation tends to be shallow. But without a descent into crisis, there is no motivation to consider radically new ideas. Significant innovation requires both normal and revolutionary modes of change.

Furthermore, a Kuhnian revolution in one field might prompt a no-crisis revolution in a neighboring field simply by being an impressive and relevant breakthrough.

Incommensurability, Relativism, and Progress

Here, “incommensurable” most literally means not comparable by use of a common standard or measure. Two rival paradigms can be compared well enough for it to be clear that they are incompatible. But if we look from “above” at two people who are arguing during a revolutionary period, defending different approaches to their field, it will often appear that the two people are talking past each other.

There are two aspects of the problem of incommensurability. First, people debating fundamental ideas will not be able to fully communicate with each other; they will use terms in different ways and in a sense will be speaking slightly different languages. Two people operating within different paradigms might seem to use the same word but the meanings of these terms will be slightly different because of their different roles in the two rival theories.

Second, even when communication is possible, people in this situation will use different standards of evidence and argument. They will not agree on what a good theory is supposed to do. Kuhn argues that paradigms bring with them their own standards for what counts as a good argument or good evidence, and these standards change across a revolution.

One of Kuhn’s best examples here involves the role of causal explanation, which is the question of whether a theory should be required to make causal sense of why things happen, or if one should always hope to understand the mechanisms underlying events.

Kuhn’s view is that there is no general answer to the question of whether scientific theories should give causal mechanisms for phenomena; this is the kind of goal that will be present in one paradigm and absent from another.

\ Kuhn’s discussion of incommensurability is the main reason his view of science is often referred to as “relativist”. Rougly speaking, relativist views hold that the truth or justification of a claim, or the applicability of a rule or standard, depends on one’s stiuation of point of view.

Kuhn argued that different paradigms often carry with them different standards for good and bad scientific work. So far, this does not tell us whether Kuhn was a relativist - there might be an advance in standards as well as in theories, where better ones replace worse ones as time passes. But Kuhn also argued that the paradigms we have in science now are not closer than earlier paradigms to an “ideal” or “perfect” paradigm. Scientific fields do not head steadily toward a final paradigm that is superior to all others. This could take us closer to a relativist view about the standards and ideas that are not shared across paradigms.

When confronted with the question of how to understand the progress of science, Kuhn made the claim that our present paradigms have more problem-solving power than earlier paradigms did.

He gave two different explanations for the apparent large-scale progress we see in science. The first is consistent with a relativist view of the changes between paradigms: science will inevitably appear to exhbit progress because each field has one paradigm at a time, the victors after each revolution will naturally view their victory as progressive.

His second explanation conflicts with relativist reading: Kuhn argued that science has a special kind of efficiency, and this efficiency results in a genuine form of progress across revolutions. The number and precision of solutions to problems in a scientific field tend to grow over time.

\ \

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Chapter 8: Science is Political

Introduction

Through much of the last three hundred years, science has been regarded in Western societies as a progressive, anti-authoritarian force, able to challenge and break down entrenched ideas and arrangements. Science came to be seen as a force in the maintenance of the status quo, especially with respect to political inequalities. The institution of science itself, it was argued, is full of hidden features that exclude some individuals and welcome others. Revealing the connections between scientific institutions and political power would show that “science is political”, rather than being an institution outside of politics that enjoys a special authority derived from neutrality.

The most important manifestation of this new attitude is found in some forms of feminist philosophy of science.

Feminist Thinking

Feminist thinking about science has been unified to some extent by the idea that science has been a part of a structure that has perpetuated inequalities between men and women. Science, as well as mainstream theorizing about science and knowledge, has helped to keep women in a second-class position as thinkings, investigators, and intellectual citizens. According to feminist analyses, society has suffered from this, and so has science itself.

In Genevieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason, she argues that the historical development of ideas about reason and knowledge was greatly affected by views about the relation between maleness and femaleness. The concept of reason evolved in Western philosophy in a way that associated reasonableness with maleness, and associated the female mind with a set of psychological traits that contrast with reasonableness.

Francis Bacon attacked the ancient Greek picture of knowledge as contemplation. For Bacon, real knowledge is manifested in control of nature: knowledge is power. As Bacon developed this idea, he retained the image of nature (fertile, source of life) as female. His model for the relation between the mind and nature was the model of marriage; a marriage between the knower (man) and nature (woman). The features of a good marriage, as run by the man, corresponds to the features of successful knowledge of the world. A good husband is respectful, but he is also firm and definitely in charge - “nature betrays her secrets more fully when in the grip and under the pressure of art than when in enjoyment of her natural liberty”.

Cases like this suggest that views about the relations between men and women were important resources in the development of ideas about reason and knowledge.

The study of social behaviour, especially sexual behaviour, is a clear example of how the gender og researchers has had an effect on the development of ideas, one where science has benefited from an increasing role for women in the field.

In nonhuman primates, such as chims and baboons, these parts of biology initially developed a picture of primate sexual life in which females were seen as rather passive. Social and sexual life were regarded as controlled, sometimes cruelly, by males. That picture was linked to some influential pieces of “high theory” in evolutionary biology. This asymmetry between the sexes is of considerable evolutionary importance in the organisms in which it is found.

But careful observation revealed a more active and complex role for female primates. It became apparent that many female primates have elaborate sex lives, involving a lot more different kinds of sexual contact than one would expect based on the old picture.

This shift in thinking within primatology coincided with an influx of women into the field. Hrdy suggests that women did tend to empathize with female primates and watched the details of their behavior more closely than their male colleagues had.

Feminist epistemology

Feminist epistemology includes work that uses feminist theory as a basis for criticizing how science handles evidence and assesses theories. It also includes feminist criticism of the social structure and organization of science, where that structure affects epistemological issues. Most ambitiously, some have argued that our familiar concepts of “reason” and “truth” themselves are covertly sexist. Furthermore, feminist epistemology often makes suggestions about how to make science better, and how to make science more socially responsible.

Harding distinguishes between three kinds of feminist criticism of science:

spontaneous feminist empiricism: this is the project of using a feminist point of view to criticize biases and other problems in scientific work, but in a way that does not challenge the traditional ideals, methods, and norms of science.
feminist empiricism: here the aim is to reverse and improve traditional ideas about science and knowledge, but to do so in a way that remains faithful to basic empiricist ideals.
radical feminist epistemology: two main approaches might be distinguished within this group.

1. feminist postmodernism: this work tends to embrace relativism, where the members of different genders, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic classes see the world in fundamentally different ways, and the idea of a single “true” description of the world that transcends these different perspectives is a harmful illusion. 2. standpoint epistemology: stresses the role of “situatedness” of an investigator or knower, but as a strength. Standpoint theory holds that some facts will be visible only from a special point of view of people who have been oppressed or marginalized by society. Those at the margins will be able to criticize the basics in ways that others cannot. Science will benefit from taking more seriously the ideas developed by people with this point of view. The marginalized are seen as having better access to crucial facts than other people have, making this position not relativist.

Epistemology becomes a field that tries to distinguish good community-level procedures from bad ones. Good communities include diverse points of view, ensure minority voices are heard, and resolve disputes without coercion.

Postmodernism and the Science Wars

Much of the controversial work in science studies has been allied to the movement in the humanities known as postmodernism. The postmodern movement included a rejection of overarching theories and “metanarratives” of all kinds, and the replacement of those arrogant presumptions by a mosaic of local theories. Postmodernism allied itself with traditions that oppose the idea that language should be analyzed as a system used to represent objects and situations in the world. They described and welcomed a “dissolving” not just of traditional ideas of objectivity and truth, but of the idea that stable meanings are a feature of language at all.

At times, postmodernism has become a tremendously obscure way of arguing for extreme forms of relativism.

The backlash occurred in the form of an attack both on science studies and the humanities more generally. The resulting clash became known as the “science wars”.

Some of the attacks on science studies and other work came from the side of conservatism in political and social thought. Advocates of “traditional” education worried that transmission of the treasures and values of Western civilization was being undermined by radical leftist faculty members in schools.

Values in Science

Here is a question that is often asked: should science be value-free?

From one side, the answer is yes. A crucial part of the intellectual style developed in the Scientific Revolution is the dispassionate and disinterested study of nature, and attempting to be guided by data without prejudices of any kind. When values do have an effect, they make science less objective.

The answer from the other side of this standard debate is no. It would be impossible for science to be value-free.

Here, the word “epistemic” refers to knowledge and evidence. We can distinguish between epistemic and nonepistemic values, and between epistemic and nonepistemic goals. Understanding the world is an epistemic value. Protecting the environment, or advancing the power of your nation over other nations, is a nonepistemic goal.

It would be impossible for science to be unaffected by the political values of scientists, their funders, and other social groups. Given that fact, it’s best to accept the situation - to accept the impurity of scientific choices in this respect - and do a better job with it.

However, Rudner says that how sure we need to be before we accept a hypothesis will depend on how serious a mistake would be. Our decision regarding the evidence and respecting how strong is “strong enough”, is going to be a function of the importance, in the typically ethical sense, of making a mistake in accepting or rejecting the hypothesis.

Chapter 9: Naturalistic Philosophy

Definition and General Ideas

Naturalism is an approach to philosophy that emphasises the links between philosophy and science. It holds that the best way to address many philosophical problems is to approach them within our best current scientific picture of the world. Naturalism is often summarised by saying that “philosophy should be continuous with science”. Naturalists reject the idea that philosophy should be sharply separated from other fields, and think there should be some kind of close connection between scientific theories and philosophical theories. The continuation with science could also be summarised with philosophy using results from the sciences to help answer philosophical questions, and can do this even in the philosophy of science itself.

Naturalists reject foundationalism, which requires that no assumptions be made about the accuracy of particular scientific ideas when doing philosophy of science.

Naturalists think that the project of trying to give general philosophical foundations for science is doomed to fail. They also think that a philosophical “foundation” is not something science needs. Instead, we can only hope to develop an adequate description of how knowledge and science work if we draw on scientific ideas as we go.

Quine, and critique

The birth of naturalism is often said to be the publication of Quine's paper, “Epistemology Naturalized”. In this paper, Quine made a number of claims. He first attacked the idea that philosophers should give foundations for scientific knowledge. He further suggested that epistemological questions - philosophical questions about evidence and justification - are so closely tied to questions in scientific psychology that epistemology should not survive as a distinct field at all. Instead, it should be absorbed into psychology.

In a different version of naturalism, there is such a thing as a philosophical question, distinct from the kinds of questions asked by a scientist. A naturalist can think that science can contribute to the answers to philosophical questions, without thinking that science should replace philosophical questions with scientific ones.

If we think that philosophical questions are important and also tend to differ from those asked by a scientist, there is no reason to expect a replacement for epistemology by psychology and other sciences. Science is a resource for philosophy, not a replacement.

Many naturalists have argued that normative questions are important cases here - questions that involve a value judgment. The term “normative naturalism” is sometimes used for naturalistic views that want to retain the normative side of epistemology. To normative naturalists, the value judgments relevant to epistemology are made in an instrumental way. An action is said to be instrumentally rational if it is a good way of achieving the goals that the agent is pursuing, whatever those goals might be.

\ Yet another set of philosophical questions a naturalist can recognize concerns relations between different sciences. Each of the particular sciences gives us fragments of a picture of what the world is like and how it runs. Do they fit together neatly or are there mismatches and tensions between them? The philosopher patrols the relationships between adjacent sciences.

The Role of Observation in Science

In the empiricist tradition, observation (or sensory experience) is seen as the sole source of knowledge about the world. Observation is the means by which we should arbitrate disagreements, the way we learn which theory to prefer. One of the most important themes of anti-empiricist work as it developed from the 1960s onward was an attack on empiricist views about observation, especially the idea that observation can be an unbiased source of information when choosing between theories. Instead, it was argued that observations tend to be “contaminated” by theoretical assumptions. The general arguments were that observation cannot function as an unbiased way of testing theories, because observation is affected by the theorietical beliefs of the observer.

Theories might affect where you look, how you interpret what you see, and what you see.

Observation is guided or affected by theories because theories tell scientists where to look and what to look for. This fact does not affect the capacity of observation to act as a test of a theory, unless scientists are refusing to look where unfriendly observations might be found.
Theories might affect how you interpret what you see.

a) Scientists use theoretical assumptions to decide which observations to take seriously. Theoretical beliefs can affect this “filtering” of observations, and there is certainly a possibility of bias and other problems there.

b) Another argument concerns the role of language. When a scientist has an experience, they can only make this experience relevant to science by putting it into words. The vocabulary used, and the meanings of terms, may be influenced by the scientist’s theoretical framework. Given the interconnections between the meanings of words in a language, there is no part of language whose application to phenomena is totally unaffected by theories.

Kuhn and others have argued that even the experiences themselves that people have are influenced by their beliefs, including their theories. There is no stage in the processes of observation in science where theories do not play a role. Though we do not realize it, our beliefs about the world are affecting what we see.

This discussion can provide support for a naturalistic approach to philosophy. Observation is a natural phenomenon, studied by fields such as psychology. Those disciplines tell us what perceptual mechanisms are like, and tell us when ordinary human perception is reliable and when it is not.

Naturalistic philosophers can put all these results to use in working out how observation actually operates, and it could operate in science.

AI: Summary better grammar

Traditional empiricism neglected the social structure of science. Kuhn showed how much is lost if you ignore the social side. Naturalistic philosophy has tried to avoid this mistake.

People sometimes ask whether science is a primarily cooperative enterprise, or a competetive one in which scientists are out for personal advancement. David Hull thinks the answer is both, and the special features of science results from an interaction of the two.

Hull starts from a picture in which scientists are curious about the world, and he assumes that curiosity is a common human trait. What makes science distinctive is how the energies of different people are organized, especially the relationship between the goals of the individual scientist and the goals of science as a whole. He argues that the main professional motivation for individual scientists is the desire for recognition. And one kind of recognition is most relevant: use. Scientists want other scientists to use their work, giving credit when they do so.

Naturalism is a philosophical approach that emphasizes the connection between philosophy and science. It holds that the best way to address philosophical problems is to approach them within the current scientific understanding of the world. Naturalists believe that philosophy should not be separated from other fields and that there should be a close connection between scientific and philosophical theories.

Naturalists reject foundationalism, which requires that no assumptions be made about the accuracy of particular scientific ideas when doing philosophy of science. They believe that trying to give general philosophical foundations for science is doomed to fail and that a philosophical “foundation” is not something science needs. Instead, they suggest that we can only hope to develop an adequate description of how knowledge and science work if we draw on scientific ideas as we go.

The birth of naturalism is often attributed to Quine's paper, “Epistemology Naturalized”. In this paper, Quine argued that epistemological questions are so closely tied to questions in scientific psychology that epistemology should not survive as a distinct field at all. Instead, it should be absorbed into psychology. However, some naturalists believe that philosophical questions are important and tend to differ from those asked by a scientist. They argue that science is a resource for philosophy, not a replacement.

Observation is a natural phenomenon studied by fields such as psychology. Naturalistic philosophers can use these results to work out how observation operates in science. They recognize that observation is guided or affected by theories because theories tell scientists where to look and what to look for. Theories can also affect how scientists interpret what they see. Therefore, our beliefs about the world are affecting what we see.

Naturalistic philosophy has tried to avoid the mistake of neglecting the social structure of science. David Hull argues that the main professional motivation for individual scientists is the desire for recognition. Scientists want other scientists to use their work, giving credit when they do so. Hull believes that the special features of science result from an interaction between the cooperative and competitive nature of scientists.

AI: Explain Like I’m 5

Chapter 10: Scientific Realism

Basic Ideas

The most basic idea about realism is that a realist about something thinks that it exists in a way that does not depend on our thoughts, language, or point of view.

==Common-sense Realism is a view which holds that we all inhabit a common reality, which has a structure that exists independently of what people think and say about it.==

A realist, in this sense, accepts that we may all have different views about the world and different perspectives on it. Despite that, we are all here living in and interacting in the same world.

Approaching Scientific Realism

A realist will see the activity of science as part of the overall picture. The view called “scientific realism” is usually seen as saying more than this though. One option is to see the scientific realist as asserting that the world really is the way it is described by our current and best-established scientific theories. The world as described by science is the real world. We might say that scientific realism holds that most of our mature scientific theories are at least approximately true.

Another option is to allow that a scientific realist can be much more pessimistic about whether we are getting things right, and perhaps whether we are likely to ever get things right. We might see scientific realims as a claim about the aims of science. There is a world we live in (as in common-sense realism), and science aims to describe it. Science might fail, but there is a real world whose structure we are trying to describe with science. The realist says there is a world our work is aimed at, and the tool kit with which we approach it - theories, mathematical models, observational testing, and so on - is one that could work if things go well. It could enable us to describe what is really going on.

Challenges from Empiricism

Scientific realism has often been challenged by some forms of empiricism.

Traditional empiricists tend to worry about both common-sense and scientific realism, often for reasons having to do with knowledge. If there was a real world existing beyond our thoughts and sensations, how could we know anything about it? Empiricists believe that our senses provide us with our only source of factual knowledge, and many have thought that sensory evidence is not good enough for us to regard ourselves as having access to a world of the kind to which the realist is committed.

Various alternatives to realism were developed. “Idealism” is a term that can be used for several of them. Subjective idealism holds that the “physical” world is really comprised of a patterned flow of sensations, sent to us by God. Later, various philosophers argued for similar views (minus God) by arguing that all we could mean when we talk about “the real world” is some sort of regularity in our experiences. That position is sometimes called phenomenalism.

Metaphysical Constructivism (this chapter is slowly drifting away from realism pls)

“Metaphysical constructivism” is a term used for a family of views including those of Kuhn, which can be said to critique scientific realism. These views hold that, in some sense, we have to regard the world as constructed by scientific theorizing. Kuhn expressed this claim by saying that when paradigms change, the world changes too. For a metaphysical constructivist, it is not possible for a scientific theory to describe the world as it exists independent of thought, because reality itself is dependent on what people say and think.

Some of these ideas can be seen as modified versions of the view of Immanuel Kant. Kant distinguised the “noumenal” world from the “phenomenal” world. The noumenal world is the world as it is in itself. This is a world that we are bound to believe in, but can never know anything about. The phenomenal world is knowable, but it is partly our creation. It does not exist independently of the structure of our minds. For Kant, all humans apply the same basic conceptual framework and have no choice in the matter.