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Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality , Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science.
Intended for undergraduates and general readers with no prior background in philosophy, Theory and Reality covers logical positivism; the problems of induction and confirmation; Karl Popper's theory of science; Thomas Kuhn and "scientific revolutions"; the views of Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend; and challenges to the field from sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. The book then looks in more detail at some specific problems and theories, including scientific realism, the theory-ladeness of observation, scientific explanation, and Bayesianism. Finally, Godfrey-Smith defends a form of philosophical naturalism as the best way to solve the main problems in the field.
Throughout the text he points out connections between philosophical debates and wider discussions about science in recent decades, such as the infamous "science wars." Examples and asides engage the beginning student; a glossary of terms explains key concepts; and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. However, this is a textbook that doesn't feel like a textbook because it captures the historical drama of changes in how science has been conceived over the last one hundred years.
Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates in language that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow.
Intended for undergraduates and general readers with no prior background in philosophy, Theory and Reality covers logical positivism; the problems of induction and confirmation; Karl Popper's theory of science; Thomas Kuhn and "scientific revolutions"; the views of Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend; and challenges to the field from sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. The book then looks in more detail at some specific problems and theories, including scientific realism, the theory-ladeness of observation, scientific explanation, and Bayesianism. Finally, Godfrey-Smith defends a form of philosophical naturalism as the best way to solve the main problems in the field.
Throughout the text he points out connections between philosophical debates and wider discussions about science in recent decades, such as the infamous "science wars." Examples and asides engage the beginning student; a glossary of terms explains key concepts; and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. However, this is a textbook that doesn't feel like a textbook because it captures the historical drama of changes in how science has been conceived over the last one hundred years.
Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates in language that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
307 people are currently reading
3994 people want to read
About the author
Peter Godfrey-Smith
16 books655 followersI am currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York), and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science (half-time) at the University of Sydney.
I grew up in Sydney, Australia. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Sydney, and I have a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego. I taught at Stanford University between 1991 and 2003, and then combined a half-time post at the Australian National University and a visiting position at Harvard for a few years. I moved to Harvard full-time and was Professor there from 2006 to 2011, before coming to the CUNY Graduate Center. I took up a half-time position in the HPS program at the University of Sydney in 2015.
My main research interests are in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. I also work on pragmatism (especially John Dewey), general philosophy of science, and some parts of metaphysics and epistemology. I’ve written four books, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (Cambridge, 1996), Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 2003), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009), which won the 2010 Lakatos Award, and Philosophy of Biology, released in 2014 by Princeton.
My photos and videos have appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, Boston Globe, Boston Review, and elsewhere.
I grew up in Sydney, Australia. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Sydney, and I have a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego. I taught at Stanford University between 1991 and 2003, and then combined a half-time post at the Australian National University and a visiting position at Harvard for a few years. I moved to Harvard full-time and was Professor there from 2006 to 2011, before coming to the CUNY Graduate Center. I took up a half-time position in the HPS program at the University of Sydney in 2015.
My main research interests are in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. I also work on pragmatism (especially John Dewey), general philosophy of science, and some parts of metaphysics and epistemology. I’ve written four books, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (Cambridge, 1996), Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 2003), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009), which won the 2010 Lakatos Award, and Philosophy of Biology, released in 2014 by Princeton.
My photos and videos have appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, Boston Globe, Boston Review, and elsewhere.
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June 30, 2020
With this uneven entry into the annals of the history of the philosophy of science, Godfrey-Smith starts off on a tour-de force tour and takes us on a grand tour of the field for the last hundred years. Well, up to twenty years ago, since the book is almost twenty years old now. If only he ended it the way he started it, Godfrey-Smith's guided tour would be one to remember. Instead, it's more like a trip through the Guggenheim where you start off with Frank Lloyd Wright and end up with experimental contemporary art befitting galleries around college campuses.
Godfrey Smith, who started his career as a mainstream philosopher of science, has had a bit of a resurgence since 2015 with his new persona as a scuba diving philosopher of science and his excellent and intriguing tract on the consciousness of the octopus. All of that was a good ten plus years in the future at the time Theory and Reality was written.
If only we remember experiences for how they begin, this book would have a timeliness rather than a dated feel. Godfrey-Smith starts off hot out of the gate. He does just a bang up job guiding the tour from the aims of science inherited form the Enlightenment, past the logical positivists who he takes seriously and does a nice job of highlighting their strengths and contributions, as they have become something of a strawman to knockdown in recent times. The same goes for his treatment of Karl Popper. The highlight and showcase of the tour, though, is Thomas Kuhn, who features as Godfrey-Smith's lodestar and hero throughout. The comparisons between Kuhn and his paradigms, Lakatos and his research programs, Laudan and his research traditions, and Feyerabend and his contrarianism ends the first third on a high note with the tour firing on all cylinders.
The middle third marks a shift. Godfrey-Smith takes a detour after Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan and Feyerabend through the sociology of science, science studies, and feminism. In hindsight, the tour should have ended after this detour, which in Godfrey-Smith's hands marked a well-curated exhibit. After this interesting and informative sidelight through the sociology of science, the chapter on science studies and feminism marks the segue between the stellar first third and the marked drop off in the final third. Like an athlete who can't quit while he is ahead, Godfrey-Smith keeps plodding along.
The problem is that if the tour starts off with a bang, it ends with a whimper. We could rightfully call this third act problems. The late 1990s and early 2000s clearly marked an interregnum in philosophy and the world in which philosophy, science, and philosophers were embedded. Rather than recognizing the interregnum for what it was, Godfrey-Smith plods through into introductions of naturalism, scientific realism, Baysianism, without the command, gusto, and clarity that distinguished the earlier chapters. This culminates in a slapdash attempt to affect a synthesis between empiricism, naturalism, and scientific realism. The problem is that the last third of the book runs into a wall. Rather than come back and revisit these areas with greater time, reflection, and maturity, Godfrey-Smith ran smack into them.
Luckily, with time and distance, we knew he got back up and found a second act of his writing career. We will always have the first two-thirds of this book to remind us of his first act.
Godfrey Smith, who started his career as a mainstream philosopher of science, has had a bit of a resurgence since 2015 with his new persona as a scuba diving philosopher of science and his excellent and intriguing tract on the consciousness of the octopus. All of that was a good ten plus years in the future at the time Theory and Reality was written.
If only we remember experiences for how they begin, this book would have a timeliness rather than a dated feel. Godfrey-Smith starts off hot out of the gate. He does just a bang up job guiding the tour from the aims of science inherited form the Enlightenment, past the logical positivists who he takes seriously and does a nice job of highlighting their strengths and contributions, as they have become something of a strawman to knockdown in recent times. The same goes for his treatment of Karl Popper. The highlight and showcase of the tour, though, is Thomas Kuhn, who features as Godfrey-Smith's lodestar and hero throughout. The comparisons between Kuhn and his paradigms, Lakatos and his research programs, Laudan and his research traditions, and Feyerabend and his contrarianism ends the first third on a high note with the tour firing on all cylinders.
The middle third marks a shift. Godfrey-Smith takes a detour after Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan and Feyerabend through the sociology of science, science studies, and feminism. In hindsight, the tour should have ended after this detour, which in Godfrey-Smith's hands marked a well-curated exhibit. After this interesting and informative sidelight through the sociology of science, the chapter on science studies and feminism marks the segue between the stellar first third and the marked drop off in the final third. Like an athlete who can't quit while he is ahead, Godfrey-Smith keeps plodding along.
The problem is that if the tour starts off with a bang, it ends with a whimper. We could rightfully call this third act problems. The late 1990s and early 2000s clearly marked an interregnum in philosophy and the world in which philosophy, science, and philosophers were embedded. Rather than recognizing the interregnum for what it was, Godfrey-Smith plods through into introductions of naturalism, scientific realism, Baysianism, without the command, gusto, and clarity that distinguished the earlier chapters. This culminates in a slapdash attempt to affect a synthesis between empiricism, naturalism, and scientific realism. The problem is that the last third of the book runs into a wall. Rather than come back and revisit these areas with greater time, reflection, and maturity, Godfrey-Smith ran smack into them.
Luckily, with time and distance, we knew he got back up and found a second act of his writing career. We will always have the first two-thirds of this book to remind us of his first act.
January 14, 2019
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is" (Yogi Berra).
After reading this book I’m convinced that Yogi’s quip could be modified and extended to the philosophy of science as such;
in theory science is easy to circumscribe, explain, or even define - in practice it ain’t.
That doesn’t make it any less fun to try though.
And that’s the subject of this book.
The author -Peter Godfrey Smith- brought the philosophy of science to life, with precision, scope and depth, and most importantly for any popularization, with charm.
I read this as a supplemental text for a history and systems of psychology course. And I liked it so much that it made me want to run away and go to philosophy school.
I ultimately thought better of that, but the fact that it was even a fantasy speaks volumes, particularly in consideration of all of the other, clearly more fantastic things one could fanaticize about.
After reading this book I’m convinced that Yogi’s quip could be modified and extended to the philosophy of science as such;
in theory science is easy to circumscribe, explain, or even define - in practice it ain’t.
That doesn’t make it any less fun to try though.
And that’s the subject of this book.
The author -Peter Godfrey Smith- brought the philosophy of science to life, with precision, scope and depth, and most importantly for any popularization, with charm.
I read this as a supplemental text for a history and systems of psychology course. And I liked it so much that it made me want to run away and go to philosophy school.
I ultimately thought better of that, but the fact that it was even a fantasy speaks volumes, particularly in consideration of all of the other, clearly more fantastic things one could fanaticize about.
July 4, 2017
It was an exhausting, long, and sometimes boring read. Nevertheless considering the depth of the field and the amount of disorder and confusion surrounding it, these were expected. Author definitely deserves an applause for successfully outlining basic trends in philosophy of science during twentieth century. However this is the furthest I can go with praising him.
There are two serious problems with structure of the book. Solely concentrating on a century and leaving all other eras related to the discussion is a fatal one. Things don't get any better with unnecessary comments of the author on the subject. Mixing up introduction and criticism is not something new though.
Although this was by no means a bad book. I doubt there is another introduction to the topic as concise and informative as Theory and Reality.
There are two serious problems with structure of the book. Solely concentrating on a century and leaving all other eras related to the discussion is a fatal one. Things don't get any better with unnecessary comments of the author on the subject. Mixing up introduction and criticism is not something new though.
Although this was by no means a bad book. I doubt there is another introduction to the topic as concise and informative as Theory and Reality.
August 14, 2014
This was a letdown, in that it was sold to me (by a book about the philosophy of science as applied specifically to geology) as a great introduction to the current state of philosophy of science, but seems as if writing such a broad survey tired its author. In some ways, the earlier chapters are better, because there were fewer workers in the field and it's easier to write a coherent narrative--in my own field, geology, this would be just as true. On the other hand, the early chapters are where some of the more annoying personality traits of philosophers come out: the snippiness, the attempt to find fault on the most asinine of grounds, the envious iconoclasm, etc. The author almost seemed at pains to imply as clearly as possible that Popper's reputation among practicing scientists is envied, in a very crude and juvenile way, by other philosophers of science. (This is backed up by what little experience I have talking with philosophy students about Popper.) Both Popper and Kuhn are subjected to extremely specious criticisms, especially the non-criticism that "they didn't provide a complete model of how science works"...as if any one philosopher (or psychologist, or sociologist) will ever do that. Each of them contributed specific, groundbreaking insights. Leave it at that.
I was gratified to find out that philosophic realism is actually reviving and playing an important role of some kind in contemporary philosophy of science. I have no idea what the "Explanation" chapter was supposed to be about. I was marginally intrigued by the Bayesian approach of many current philosophers. There is a bit of irony in that the author discloses that his reviewers thought the last chapter would be "a muddy paste" of supposedly contradictory viewpoints, as the author sketches the combination of empiricism, "naturalism", and realism that he thinks is the best description of science and allied ways of dealing with the world. In fact, that is not true; it's the several chapters before it, on contemporary trends, that are the muddy paste. On that subject, as a geologist, I can't imagine how awful peer review must be for philosophers. They seem to be so catty, so desperate to find some reason to tear each other down, I'm not even sure what the value would really be.
At this point, dissatisfied as I am with this broad, vague, weary overview, I guess the next thing to do would be to pick an author or subfield and start reading from there, but this book has so sapped my interest in contemporary philosophy that I'm not sure what I'll do next. I suppose I'll dig up some Whitehead. At some point I'll have to make myself read some Peirce, as much like a root canal as that sounds.
I was gratified to find out that philosophic realism is actually reviving and playing an important role of some kind in contemporary philosophy of science. I have no idea what the "Explanation" chapter was supposed to be about. I was marginally intrigued by the Bayesian approach of many current philosophers. There is a bit of irony in that the author discloses that his reviewers thought the last chapter would be "a muddy paste" of supposedly contradictory viewpoints, as the author sketches the combination of empiricism, "naturalism", and realism that he thinks is the best description of science and allied ways of dealing with the world. In fact, that is not true; it's the several chapters before it, on contemporary trends, that are the muddy paste. On that subject, as a geologist, I can't imagine how awful peer review must be for philosophers. They seem to be so catty, so desperate to find some reason to tear each other down, I'm not even sure what the value would really be.
At this point, dissatisfied as I am with this broad, vague, weary overview, I guess the next thing to do would be to pick an author or subfield and start reading from there, but this book has so sapped my interest in contemporary philosophy that I'm not sure what I'll do next. I suppose I'll dig up some Whitehead. At some point I'll have to make myself read some Peirce, as much like a root canal as that sounds.
January 2, 2023
The book starts well - by presenting logical empiricism, induction, confirmation, Popper's refutation, Kuhn's paradigms, the superiority of Kuhn's over Popper's theory of science, and a few more. But at some point it drops the philosophy of science in favor of the sociology of science, and then starts promoting “naturalism” and “realism”. Naturalism – as a theory of science - is based on science itself and on some forms of empiricism and psychology. Kuhn is then criticized for not being “real enough” - as measured against a common-sense and no-nonsense understanding of the “real”. As fashionable for almost all books written 20-30 years ago, Bayesian theory is presented as the most likely candidate for the future theory of science. Additionally, all the above theories are relaxed in their assumptions in order to generalize them; and moreover three competitive theories are forced together in order to create a unified “theory of everything”. However, the main flaw of this book is this in my opinion: in trying to avoid any obvious metaphysical entanglements, the author do not commit to any ontology – except the common-sense understanding of the “real”; but this “real” is in fact a highly metaphysical construct. Instead of reading this book, one should go directly to Popper, Kuhn, or even better - to the main source of all these issues – that is to Kant.
October 19, 2018
The quintessential reading on the Philosophy of Science, a book to be read and re-read by those engaged in all modes of scientific inquiry, both in physical and social sciences. This is an excellent historical narrative, that argues and explains its way past each new development in the manner and social order of scientific thinking. One must not claim to understand it in one go, nor attempt such foolishness- a careful evaluation of each thought and idea presented is an opportunity to refine one's own scientific outlook and mature into the world of science. Godfrey Smith is a classic, a book I plan to revisit and re-read throughout my doctoral and academic journey. Highly recommended.
December 22, 2020
یهكهك له تایبهتمهندییهكانی مرۆڤ ئهوه كه له لایهك توانای پرسیاركردنی ههیه له جیهانی دهوروبهری خۆی و له لایهكی ترهوه مێشكی مرۆڤ توانای بیركردنهوه و داهێنانی بیرۆكهی جییاجییا و ئهبستراكتی ههیه بۆ وهڵامدانهوهی ئهم پرسیارانه. كاریگهری ئهم تایبهتمهندییانهش به درێژایی مێژوو دهركهوتووه، مرۆڤهكان به ههموو جۆر پرسیاریان خولقاندووه و به دوای وهڵامی جۆر به جۆر كهوتوون بۆ پرسیارهكانییان و زۆربهیجار خۆیان بهپێی شیردنهوهو بیردۆزهكانییان وهڵامیان داناوه. ئێستاشی لهگهڵدابێت له جیهانی ههنووكهیی و به تاییبهت له چهند سهدهی كۆتاییدا دهبینین كه مرۆڤایهتی بهر لێشاوی لێكدانهوه و شیكردنهوه كهوتووه كه زۆر لهم لێكدنانهوه دژیهكیشن. چۆن؟ له كۆتایی ئهم نوسینه دهزانیت.
مرۆڤ چهندین رێگای گرتۆتهبهر بۆ گهیشتن به وهڵامهكانی دهكرێت ههمان پرسیار به شێوهیهكی (فهلسهفی، ئاینی، زانستی،،هتد) وهڵام بدرێتهوه. بهڵام له چهند سهدهی رابڕدوو تێبینی ئهوه دهكهین كه وهڵامه زانستییهكان باوترین و ویستراوترینن، له دیبهیت و گفتووگۆكاندا تیۆری و بهڵگهی زانستی وهك دڵنییاترین سهرچاوه بهكاردێن و له دڵی خهڵكیش زانست خهریكه له ركابهرهكانی دهباتهوه ئهمهش هۆكاری خۆی ههیه كه دواتر لێیان دهدوێین. بهڵام لێرهدا چهند پرسیارێك دێته ئاراوه ئهویش ئهوهیه كه ئایا پهیوهندی (تیۆری)، (ئهبسترهكشن) و (لێكدانهوه) زانستیهكان لهگهڵ راستی و جیهانی واقیعدا چییه؟ ئایا تا چهند دهتوانین دڵگهرم و دڵنییابین له تیۆری زانست؟ ئایا زانست توانای ئهوهی ههیه كه ( جیهان) وهك خۆی بناسێنێ؟ و پێویسته زانست چۆن كاربكات كه بتوانێ بمانگهینێته وهڵامه دروستهكان؟ و زانین چۆن له رێگهی زانستهوه بهدهست دێت؟
ئهمانه كۆمهڵێك پرسیارن كه دوو رووی بابهتهكه دهخهنه ژێر تێبینی، پرسیار لهوه دهكهین كه زانست چۆن كاردهكات و چهند دڵنییایی دهدات كه روه وهسفیهكهیهتی(descriptive)، روهكهی تر ئهوهیه پێویسته زانست چۆن كاربكات(normativity) كه ههر ئهمه فهلسهفهی زانست له خودی زانست جییادهك��تهوه. ههروهها ئهم پرسیارانه دهكهونه بازنهی (ئێپیستیمۆلۆجی) هوه كه بوارێكی فهلسهفییه كه گرنگی به سروشت و سنوورهكانی زانین دهدات وله چۆنییهتی بهدهستهێنانی زانین دهكۆلێتهوه و ئێمه لێرهدا ئاراستهی زانستی دهكهین. له فهلسهفهدا و بهتایبهت فهلسهفهی زانستدا وهڵامی ئهم پرسیارانه به چهندها جۆر دراوهتهوه كه باسی گرنگترین و نوێترینیان دهكهین:-
- بازنهی ڤییهنا كه له چهندین فهیلهسوف و زانا و كۆمهڵناسی وڵاتی نهمسا پێكهاتبوو كه له ژێر كاریگهری فهلسهفه سهرهتاییهكهی فهیلهسوفی نهمسایی ڤیتگنشتاین دا بوون (له كتێبی تراكتاتسدا لهوه دهدوێت كه ئێمه لهرێی زمانهوه شیكردنهوه بۆ جیهان دهكهین ههر بۆیهش بۆ تێگهشتن لهوهی ئێمه چۆن له جیهان تێدهگهین پێویسته سهرهتا له چۆنیهتی كاركردنی زمان بگهین) وهڵامهكهیان بهستهوه به لۆجیك و ههروهها فهلسهفه و تیۆری زمان، ئهمانه كۆمهلێك زانا بوون كه لهو بروایهدابوون زانین و زانستیش له ڕێگهی ئهزموونكردنهوه بهدهست دێت (Empiricism) و ئهم ئهزموونه ئهبستراكت هش له ڕێگهی زمان هوه و باشترین شیكردنهوهش بۆ زمان و ئزموون برییه له شیكردنهوهیێكی لۆجیكی. له زماندا راستییهكان بهسهر دوو جۆردا دابهش دهبن (Analytic/ Synthetic Distinction)، كه (Analytic truthes) ئهو راستییانهن كه بههۆی زمانهكهیانهوه راستن و راستی و دروستییان له چوارچێوهی زمان دهرناچێت بهوپێیهش راستی بهتاڵن وهك ئهم رستهیه( ههموو پیاوێكی سهڵت بێ ژنه) یاخود ئهو بهشهی ماتماتیك كه ناتوانرێ به شێوهیهكی پراكتیكاڵ بهكاربهێنره (pure mathematics) . (Synthetic truths) ئهو راستییانهن كه بۆ ئهوهی راست بن پێویسته به زمان و ههروهها راستیان له جیهانی دهرهوهدا پشتراست بكرێنهوه وهك ئهمڕۆ باران دهبارێت یاخود ماتماتیكی پراكتیكاڵ و ههروهها لهو بڕوایهدان راستیه زانستییهكانیش جۆرێكن لهمانه كه پێویستییان بهوهیه بۆ پشتراستبوون له جیهانی دهرهوه لێی بكۆڵدرێتهوه نهك له سیستهمێكی ئهبستراكت كه نهتوانرێت له واقیعدا بهكاربێنرێت. جا زانست به پێی (verification theory meaning) یهكهكێكه لهو جۆرانهی راستیه (synthetic) كه توانهی پاسهدانی ههیه. ( تیۆری پاسهدانی مانا) كه بۆ راستییه (synthetic) بهكاردێت و بانگهشهی ئهوه دهكات كه ههر راستییهك بۆ ئهوهی راست بێت و مانایهك ببهخشێت پێویسته بتوانرێت پاسهدان بكرێت و مهبهستیش له پاسهدان ئهوهیه كه بتوانرێت راستی و دروستییان له واقیع دا تاقیبكرێتهوه ههتا ئهگهر له تاقیكردنهوهكهدا رهتش بكرێنهوه، یان به جۆرێ تر توانای ئهزموونكردن و تاقیكردنهوهیان ههبێت . و ئهگهر تێبینی بكهی راستیه زانستیهكان به زۆری لهم جۆرهن و بهپێی بروای زانستی بازنهی ڤییهنا ههر راستیهك لهم جۆرهنهبوو بێمانا و نازانستی له قهڵهم دهدرێت.
بازنهی ڤییهنا ناوی به رێكخراوی (لۆجیكی-ئهزموونگهر) یش دهركرد له دوای جهنگی جیهانی و ئهو دیدگایه لۆجیكییهش كه بۆ زانست ههیانبوو وهك (دهیڤید هیوم) بوو كه باوهریان وابوو راستییه زانستییهكان به شێوهی ئینداكشن (induction) و ئهزموونكردن بهدهست دێن. ( ئێنداكشن جۆرێكه له لۆجیك كه بهم جۆره كاردهكات : پێكدێت له بهڵگهیهك یان زیاتر كه پێی دهوترێت (Premise) ئهم بهڵگهیه پاڵپشتی له بانگهشه زانستیهكه یاخود تیۆرییهكه دهكات كه دهبێته ئهنجام (Conclution). جا لۆجیكی ئینداكشن بهڵگهكانی له ئهزموون هكانی پێشترهوه وهرگرتووه بهوپێیهش ناتوانین لێی دڵنییابین و ناتوانرێت به دڵنییاییهوه هیچمان بۆ بسهلمێنێت، چونكه ئهو شتهی له رابردوو روی داوه مهرج نییه به دڵنییاییهوه له داهاتوش روبدات. نم\ دوێنێ و پێر و رۆژهكانی پێشتریش رۆژ له رۆژههڵاتهوه ههڵیكردووه كهواته بهیانیش رۆژ له رۆژههڵاتهوه ههڵدهكات. به ئهگهری زۆرهوه بهیانیش رۆژ له رۆژههڵات ههڵدهكات بهڵام ئهم ئهگهره %١٠٠ و دڵنییا نییه) . ئیتر ئهم جۆره لۆجیكه له زانست بهكاردێت كه ههتا ئهگهر سودبهخش و راستیش بێت بهڵام دڵنییا و رهها نییه. بهوپێیهش راستییه زانستییهكان ئهگهر به زۆرترین رێژهش راست بن بهڵام هیچ كات دڵنییایی و رههاییله %١٠٠ له زانستدا نییه و ههر كاتێك له كاتهكان دهكرێت گۆرانكاریهكی كتوپر روبدات. لهمهوهش دهگهینه ئهو ئهنجامهی كه ئهزمونگهره ڤییهنییهكان به زۆری باوهریان بهوه نهبووه كه زانست دهتوانێت شیكردنهوهی راست و دڵنییای جیهان و واقیعمان بۆ بكات به تتهواوی بهڵام لهو بروایهشدابوون كه زانست دهتوانێت دڵنییاترین واسفمان بۆ بكات.
تا ئێرە با بەس بێت، ئەوەی تری با بۆخۆم بمێنێ. ئێوەش ئەگەر دەتانەوێت بیرورای پۆپێر، کوهن، کواین، لاکتۆز، فایێربان، لێویس و چەندین فەیلەسوفی تر بۆ وەڵامی ئەم پرسیارانە بزانن و ئەگەر دەتانەوێت زیاتر ئاشنای چۆنییەتی کارکردنی زانست بن دەست کە بە خوێندنەوەی ئەم پێشەکییە ناوازەیە....
مرۆڤ چهندین رێگای گرتۆتهبهر بۆ گهیشتن به وهڵامهكانی دهكرێت ههمان پرسیار به شێوهیهكی (فهلسهفی، ئاینی، زانستی،،هتد) وهڵام بدرێتهوه. بهڵام له چهند سهدهی رابڕدوو تێبینی ئهوه دهكهین كه وهڵامه زانستییهكان باوترین و ویستراوترینن، له دیبهیت و گفتووگۆكاندا تیۆری و بهڵگهی زانستی وهك دڵنییاترین سهرچاوه بهكاردێن و له دڵی خهڵكیش زانست خهریكه له ركابهرهكانی دهباتهوه ئهمهش هۆكاری خۆی ههیه كه دواتر لێیان دهدوێین. بهڵام لێرهدا چهند پرسیارێك دێته ئاراوه ئهویش ئهوهیه كه ئایا پهیوهندی (تیۆری)، (ئهبسترهكشن) و (لێكدانهوه) زانستیهكان لهگهڵ راستی و جیهانی واقیعدا چییه؟ ئایا تا چهند دهتوانین دڵگهرم و دڵنییابین له تیۆری زانست؟ ئایا زانست توانای ئهوهی ههیه كه ( جیهان) وهك خۆی بناسێنێ؟ و پێویسته زانست چۆن كاربكات كه بتوانێ بمانگهینێته وهڵامه دروستهكان؟ و زانین چۆن له رێگهی زانستهوه بهدهست دێت؟
ئهمانه كۆمهڵێك پرسیارن كه دوو رووی بابهتهكه دهخهنه ژێر تێبینی، پرسیار لهوه دهكهین كه زانست چۆن كاردهكات و چهند دڵنییایی دهدات كه روه وهسفیهكهیهتی(descriptive)، روهكهی تر ئهوهیه پێویسته زانست چۆن كاربكات(normativity) كه ههر ئهمه فهلسهفهی زانست له خودی زانست جییادهك��تهوه. ههروهها ئهم پرسیارانه دهكهونه بازنهی (ئێپیستیمۆلۆجی) هوه كه بوارێكی فهلسهفییه كه گرنگی به سروشت و سنوورهكانی زانین دهدات وله چۆنییهتی بهدهستهێنانی زانین دهكۆلێتهوه و ئێمه لێرهدا ئاراستهی زانستی دهكهین. له فهلسهفهدا و بهتایبهت فهلسهفهی زانستدا وهڵامی ئهم پرسیارانه به چهندها جۆر دراوهتهوه كه باسی گرنگترین و نوێترینیان دهكهین:-
- بازنهی ڤییهنا كه له چهندین فهیلهسوف و زانا و كۆمهڵناسی وڵاتی نهمسا پێكهاتبوو كه له ژێر كاریگهری فهلسهفه سهرهتاییهكهی فهیلهسوفی نهمسایی ڤیتگنشتاین دا بوون (له كتێبی تراكتاتسدا لهوه دهدوێت كه ئێمه لهرێی زمانهوه شیكردنهوه بۆ جیهان دهكهین ههر بۆیهش بۆ تێگهشتن لهوهی ئێمه چۆن له جیهان تێدهگهین پێویسته سهرهتا له چۆنیهتی كاركردنی زمان بگهین) وهڵامهكهیان بهستهوه به لۆجیك و ههروهها فهلسهفه و تیۆری زمان، ئهمانه كۆمهلێك زانا بوون كه لهو بروایهدابوون زانین و زانستیش له ڕێگهی ئهزموونكردنهوه بهدهست دێت (Empiricism) و ئهم ئهزموونه ئهبستراكت هش له ڕێگهی زمان هوه و باشترین شیكردنهوهش بۆ زمان و ئزموون برییه له شیكردنهوهیێكی لۆجیكی. له زماندا راستییهكان بهسهر دوو جۆردا دابهش دهبن (Analytic/ Synthetic Distinction)، كه (Analytic truthes) ئهو راستییانهن كه بههۆی زمانهكهیانهوه راستن و راستی و دروستییان له چوارچێوهی زمان دهرناچێت بهوپێیهش راستی بهتاڵن وهك ئهم رستهیه( ههموو پیاوێكی سهڵت بێ ژنه) یاخود ئهو بهشهی ماتماتیك كه ناتوانرێ به شێوهیهكی پراكتیكاڵ بهكاربهێنره (pure mathematics) . (Synthetic truths) ئهو راستییانهن كه بۆ ئهوهی راست بن پێویسته به زمان و ههروهها راستیان له جیهانی دهرهوهدا پشتراست بكرێنهوه وهك ئهمڕۆ باران دهبارێت یاخود ماتماتیكی پراكتیكاڵ و ههروهها لهو بڕوایهدان راستیه زانستییهكانیش جۆرێكن لهمانه كه پێویستییان بهوهیه بۆ پشتراستبوون له جیهانی دهرهوه لێی بكۆڵدرێتهوه نهك له سیستهمێكی ئهبستراكت كه نهتوانرێت له واقیعدا بهكاربێنرێت. جا زانست به پێی (verification theory meaning) یهكهكێكه لهو جۆرانهی راستیه (synthetic) كه توانهی پاسهدانی ههیه. ( تیۆری پاسهدانی مانا) كه بۆ راستییه (synthetic) بهكاردێت و بانگهشهی ئهوه دهكات كه ههر راستییهك بۆ ئهوهی راست بێت و مانایهك ببهخشێت پێویسته بتوانرێت پاسهدان بكرێت و مهبهستیش له پاسهدان ئهوهیه كه بتوانرێت راستی و دروستییان له واقیع دا تاقیبكرێتهوه ههتا ئهگهر له تاقیكردنهوهكهدا رهتش بكرێنهوه، یان به جۆرێ تر توانای ئهزموونكردن و تاقیكردنهوهیان ههبێت . و ئهگهر تێبینی بكهی راستیه زانستیهكان به زۆری لهم جۆرهن و بهپێی بروای زانستی بازنهی ڤییهنا ههر راستیهك لهم جۆرهنهبوو بێمانا و نازانستی له قهڵهم دهدرێت.
بازنهی ڤییهنا ناوی به رێكخراوی (لۆجیكی-ئهزموونگهر) یش دهركرد له دوای جهنگی جیهانی و ئهو دیدگایه لۆجیكییهش كه بۆ زانست ههیانبوو وهك (دهیڤید هیوم) بوو كه باوهریان وابوو راستییه زانستییهكان به شێوهی ئینداكشن (induction) و ئهزموونكردن بهدهست دێن. ( ئێنداكشن جۆرێكه له لۆجیك كه بهم جۆره كاردهكات : پێكدێت له بهڵگهیهك یان زیاتر كه پێی دهوترێت (Premise) ئهم بهڵگهیه پاڵپشتی له بانگهشه زانستیهكه یاخود تیۆرییهكه دهكات كه دهبێته ئهنجام (Conclution). جا لۆجیكی ئینداكشن بهڵگهكانی له ئهزموون هكانی پێشترهوه وهرگرتووه بهوپێیهش ناتوانین لێی دڵنییابین و ناتوانرێت به دڵنییاییهوه هیچمان بۆ بسهلمێنێت، چونكه ئهو شتهی له رابردوو روی داوه مهرج نییه به دڵنییاییهوه له داهاتوش روبدات. نم\ دوێنێ و پێر و رۆژهكانی پێشتریش رۆژ له رۆژههڵاتهوه ههڵیكردووه كهواته بهیانیش رۆژ له رۆژههڵاتهوه ههڵدهكات. به ئهگهری زۆرهوه بهیانیش رۆژ له رۆژههڵات ههڵدهكات بهڵام ئهم ئهگهره %١٠٠ و دڵنییا نییه) . ئیتر ئهم جۆره لۆجیكه له زانست بهكاردێت كه ههتا ئهگهر سودبهخش و راستیش بێت بهڵام دڵنییا و رهها نییه. بهوپێیهش راستییه زانستییهكان ئهگهر به زۆرترین رێژهش راست بن بهڵام هیچ كات دڵنییایی و رههاییله %١٠٠ له زانستدا نییه و ههر كاتێك له كاتهكان دهكرێت گۆرانكاریهكی كتوپر روبدات. لهمهوهش دهگهینه ئهو ئهنجامهی كه ئهزمونگهره ڤییهنییهكان به زۆری باوهریان بهوه نهبووه كه زانست دهتوانێت شیكردنهوهی راست و دڵنییای جیهان و واقیعمان بۆ بكات به تتهواوی بهڵام لهو بروایهشدابوون كه زانست دهتوانێت دڵنییاترین واسفمان بۆ بكات.
تا ئێرە با بەس بێت، ئەوەی تری با بۆخۆم بمێنێ. ئێوەش ئەگەر دەتانەوێت بیرورای پۆپێر، کوهن، کواین، لاکتۆز، فایێربان، لێویس و چەندین فەیلەسوفی تر بۆ وەڵامی ئەم پرسیارانە بزانن و ئەگەر دەتانەوێت زیاتر ئاشنای چۆنییەتی کارکردنی زانست بن دەست کە بە خوێندنەوەی ئەم پێشەکییە ناوازەیە....
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August 8, 2018There is a white-coated, Latinate veil of competence draped over the world of science in English - one of the reasons the Anglo-Saxon nomenclature of Uncleftish Beholding is so jarring, as is learning scientific terms in a language besides English. Hearing talk about "water-stuff" or "sour-stuff" rather than Hydrogen or Oxygen sounds rather amateurish; we have convinced ourselves that the recondite Classicism of "deoxyribonucleic acid" represents something essential and unmoving, nature as it is.
Of course, this is a fiction. Science grubs together assumptions and guesses, moving in fits and starts, not always in the right direction, and its practitioners are just as vain and susceptible to groupthink as the rest of the human race. Recent news of the "replicability crisis" has further weakened the consensus around the existing system of experiment, peer review and publication.
And yet. Most systematic critiques of science, the ones proposing a whole new system, are far more terrifying than the system they seek to replace. I'm a pretty open-minded person, but some of the ideas summarised in this book - whole-cloth rejections of science as an imperialist relic of the Enlightenment, thrown around by the kind of people mocked by l'Affaire Sokal, are pretty awful.
The philosophy of science goes back around 100 years. The main schools are the Logical Positivists, pretty much dead now (they believed that nothing that couldn't be demonstrated had any meaning), Popper's verificationism (probably the best known theory, popular with scientists), Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts, and a spattering of feminist, sociological, economist, and social constructivists critiques that score some valid points but often seem untethered from reality.
Today, the dominant ideas are naturalism, the idea that natural forces are all there is, motivated by what Hilary Putnam called the "miracle" of science; empiricism, a sort of skeptical-Kantian claim that all we can know is the phenomenal world, and there's no point speculating on anything metaphysical; and scientific realism, similar to naturalism but claiming that moral or mathematical facts also exist as part of a scientific reality. Godfrey-Smith is a competent but not overly ambitious or exciting narrator (though his squirming in a section on Bayesian Inference is amusing), and this seems like a good summary of the general ideas. This didn't make me want to read more Phil of Sci: one gets the impression that beyond some basic paradoxes (the nature of reality, Goodman's new riddle of induction, metaphysical realism) a lot of the century seems to have been spent going in circles. Science: it's a bit silly, really, but as long as those rockets launch and bridges stand up, it's the best we've got.
Of course, this is a fiction. Science grubs together assumptions and guesses, moving in fits and starts, not always in the right direction, and its practitioners are just as vain and susceptible to groupthink as the rest of the human race. Recent news of the "replicability crisis" has further weakened the consensus around the existing system of experiment, peer review and publication.
And yet. Most systematic critiques of science, the ones proposing a whole new system, are far more terrifying than the system they seek to replace. I'm a pretty open-minded person, but some of the ideas summarised in this book - whole-cloth rejections of science as an imperialist relic of the Enlightenment, thrown around by the kind of people mocked by l'Affaire Sokal, are pretty awful.
The philosophy of science goes back around 100 years. The main schools are the Logical Positivists, pretty much dead now (they believed that nothing that couldn't be demonstrated had any meaning), Popper's verificationism (probably the best known theory, popular with scientists), Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts, and a spattering of feminist, sociological, economist, and social constructivists critiques that score some valid points but often seem untethered from reality.
Today, the dominant ideas are naturalism, the idea that natural forces are all there is, motivated by what Hilary Putnam called the "miracle" of science; empiricism, a sort of skeptical-Kantian claim that all we can know is the phenomenal world, and there's no point speculating on anything metaphysical; and scientific realism, similar to naturalism but claiming that moral or mathematical facts also exist as part of a scientific reality. Godfrey-Smith is a competent but not overly ambitious or exciting narrator (though his squirming in a section on Bayesian Inference is amusing), and this seems like a good summary of the general ideas. This didn't make me want to read more Phil of Sci: one gets the impression that beyond some basic paradoxes (the nature of reality, Goodman's new riddle of induction, metaphysical realism) a lot of the century seems to have been spent going in circles. Science: it's a bit silly, really, but as long as those rockets launch and bridges stand up, it's the best we've got.
January 22, 2019
I went into this with vague questions regarding how to conceptualize “science” in time and space (i.e. how does it fit into human history? How to distinguish it? What is its scope of inquiry/use?). After reading this, I see a great need for a study on the political economy of science…
The Good:
--I quite enjoyed the author’s writing style and approach to the topic. Recognizing the inevitable abstraction, this book has a clear structure; the first half is a historical chronology and the latter half follows up on several topics. Plenty of historical examples and thought experiments… top marks for accessibility (this is half the struggle with philosophy, is it not?).
--After traversing through various intersecting and conflicting landscapes (empiricism, Popper, Kuhn, relativism, naturalism, realism, etc.), it turns out the author’s own inclinations (a late-Dewey “normative naturalism”) is reflected in his style of using scientific and historical examples in his theorizing (as opposed to philosophical foundationalism).
The Missing:
--I was impressed by how wide-ranging and conflicting the philosophy of science is, to the point where I am compelled to always enclose the word “science” in quotations. But, this is the “nature” of “philosophy”. There are certain levels of abstraction that bring vivid frameworks and insights to otherwise noisy and opaque complexities. But philosophy frequently reaches levels that bring out the nihilism in me.
--This book helped me clarify my own questions/interests towards “science” as a whole. I can reserve abstractions like empiricism’s attempts to theorize “science” using language theory and logic for another life. I find much more compelling the social structure/organization of scientific practice and institutions throughout history…
--Ideas of challenging everything (Nullius in verba), cumulative knowledge, balancing controlled criticism/competition with networks of trust/cooperation, reward systems and interactions between individual and community… the author mentions these but in my eyes only has the tools to extend these ideas to the intellectual sphere of western liberalism. To integrate further into the messy real-world, I would like to see what political economy can make of this.
The Good:
--I quite enjoyed the author’s writing style and approach to the topic. Recognizing the inevitable abstraction, this book has a clear structure; the first half is a historical chronology and the latter half follows up on several topics. Plenty of historical examples and thought experiments… top marks for accessibility (this is half the struggle with philosophy, is it not?).
--After traversing through various intersecting and conflicting landscapes (empiricism, Popper, Kuhn, relativism, naturalism, realism, etc.), it turns out the author’s own inclinations (a late-Dewey “normative naturalism”) is reflected in his style of using scientific and historical examples in his theorizing (as opposed to philosophical foundationalism).
The Missing:
--I was impressed by how wide-ranging and conflicting the philosophy of science is, to the point where I am compelled to always enclose the word “science” in quotations. But, this is the “nature” of “philosophy”. There are certain levels of abstraction that bring vivid frameworks and insights to otherwise noisy and opaque complexities. But philosophy frequently reaches levels that bring out the nihilism in me.
--This book helped me clarify my own questions/interests towards “science” as a whole. I can reserve abstractions like empiricism’s attempts to theorize “science” using language theory and logic for another life. I find much more compelling the social structure/organization of scientific practice and institutions throughout history…
--Ideas of challenging everything (Nullius in verba), cumulative knowledge, balancing controlled criticism/competition with networks of trust/cooperation, reward systems and interactions between individual and community… the author mentions these but in my eyes only has the tools to extend these ideas to the intellectual sphere of western liberalism. To integrate further into the messy real-world, I would like to see what political economy can make of this.
July 27, 2018
I've been reading a bunch of us if science lately, for some reason decided to do for this field when I should have done in macroeconomics and go back and read an introduction to get my bearings. Overall, that was a good idea, and this book is a decent stab at it. It breaks down into more or less 3 parts. All of them have a very conversational explanatory style that makes the book a breezy read, but it serves the purpose of clarity very differently in each part.
In the first third, Godfrey-Smith is at his best. He breaks down most of the early 20th century positions and debates in philosophy of science in clear terms that emphasize why they are important (i.e., what each thought experiment is designed to prove) and makes quick and easy work of pointing out their fatal flaws. In this phase of the story, the main concern was to establish the logical relationship between scientific inquiry and truth. This endeavor is plagued by what in retrospect seem like several obvious problems, from the reliance of scientific observation on theories and assumptions, Hume's logical proscription against induction, and the appearance impossibility of falsifying most theories.
The second third of the book moves from pure philosophy to scholars that mix history and sociology of science with philosophy and advice equal measure. If the goals of the philosophers and the first section were too narrow, the goals and approach here are all over the place. Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, and Laudan all seem to be trying to figure out the philosophical nature of scientific knowledge by describing the way that scientists have created knowledge in the past, but in the process discovering an angle they then present as normative. This seems like a huge mess to me, and Godfrey-Smith does little to help keep things straight. He makes the distinction between descriptive and normative theories sometimes but not others, and never really makes it clear what relationship these ideas have to the questions posed in the first part.
The problem becomes even more confounding when he reaches the Strong Program. This, for some reason, he does treat as an exclusively descriptive approach to science, with little to say about the philosophical problems discussed elsewhere. Aside from raising the question of why it was included in the first place, this annoys me because the Strong Program does actually have good answers to many of the misguided questions posed by philosophers. Perhaps those are answers that philosophers don't like, because they are perceived as too circular or reflexive, but they happen to provide a coherent account of why exactly induction and falsification are not necessary, which takes holism and the theory-laden nature of observation as premises and not problems, and explains why scientific knowledge cannot but also does not need to be logically airtight. To add insult to injury, he concludes his brief, dismissive account of the best theory in the book with a few paragraphs about how the school of thought got tangled up in "navelgazing"and failed to contribute anything worthwhile (which might be true; it's hard to find contemporary works in the framework, but it certainly seems worth mourning if so). Then he goes on to spend a much longer action discussing Latour's botched attempts to do something similar but much less coherent. He is rather generous to Bloor personally, as a writer and thinker, but that doesn't seem to make up for the weird omissions here.
The final third is where things get really confusing. This is where he stops discussing specific thinkers and starts covering contemporary schools of thought and his own opinions in broad strokes. I maybe didn't give this an extremely fair read, moving too quickly, but it definitely tried my patience to take it slow. It tries to define and redefine terms like naturalism, empiricism, and realism, in a way that ultimately isolates and then resolves their contradictions to reveal a complete consilience. This endeavor largely returns to the same questions posed in the first part of the book, but something about the examples and the context that he gives made it hard for me to recognize what was at stake and what implications his conclusions had.
I think this last is a problem that dooms much of the philosophy of science as an endeavor. Rather than fitting science into a broader epistemological framework, they set out to prove that it is special. When logic fails, they turn to describing historical patterns. When that turns up answers they don't like, they turn back to logic, but this time they have to prove reality is real even though all of the obvious ways to try to do that have already been debunked.
The conclusions that Godfrey-Smith comes to seem to rely on evolution as the guarantor of empiricist sensory perception, as if that avoids any of the problems he levied against the sociological answer and isn't in fact just a bigger version of that same answer. Idk this field seems like a bit of a mess.
In the first third, Godfrey-Smith is at his best. He breaks down most of the early 20th century positions and debates in philosophy of science in clear terms that emphasize why they are important (i.e., what each thought experiment is designed to prove) and makes quick and easy work of pointing out their fatal flaws. In this phase of the story, the main concern was to establish the logical relationship between scientific inquiry and truth. This endeavor is plagued by what in retrospect seem like several obvious problems, from the reliance of scientific observation on theories and assumptions, Hume's logical proscription against induction, and the appearance impossibility of falsifying most theories.
The second third of the book moves from pure philosophy to scholars that mix history and sociology of science with philosophy and advice equal measure. If the goals of the philosophers and the first section were too narrow, the goals and approach here are all over the place. Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, and Laudan all seem to be trying to figure out the philosophical nature of scientific knowledge by describing the way that scientists have created knowledge in the past, but in the process discovering an angle they then present as normative. This seems like a huge mess to me, and Godfrey-Smith does little to help keep things straight. He makes the distinction between descriptive and normative theories sometimes but not others, and never really makes it clear what relationship these ideas have to the questions posed in the first part.
The problem becomes even more confounding when he reaches the Strong Program. This, for some reason, he does treat as an exclusively descriptive approach to science, with little to say about the philosophical problems discussed elsewhere. Aside from raising the question of why it was included in the first place, this annoys me because the Strong Program does actually have good answers to many of the misguided questions posed by philosophers. Perhaps those are answers that philosophers don't like, because they are perceived as too circular or reflexive, but they happen to provide a coherent account of why exactly induction and falsification are not necessary, which takes holism and the theory-laden nature of observation as premises and not problems, and explains why scientific knowledge cannot but also does not need to be logically airtight. To add insult to injury, he concludes his brief, dismissive account of the best theory in the book with a few paragraphs about how the school of thought got tangled up in "navelgazing"and failed to contribute anything worthwhile (which might be true; it's hard to find contemporary works in the framework, but it certainly seems worth mourning if so). Then he goes on to spend a much longer action discussing Latour's botched attempts to do something similar but much less coherent. He is rather generous to Bloor personally, as a writer and thinker, but that doesn't seem to make up for the weird omissions here.
The final third is where things get really confusing. This is where he stops discussing specific thinkers and starts covering contemporary schools of thought and his own opinions in broad strokes. I maybe didn't give this an extremely fair read, moving too quickly, but it definitely tried my patience to take it slow. It tries to define and redefine terms like naturalism, empiricism, and realism, in a way that ultimately isolates and then resolves their contradictions to reveal a complete consilience. This endeavor largely returns to the same questions posed in the first part of the book, but something about the examples and the context that he gives made it hard for me to recognize what was at stake and what implications his conclusions had.
I think this last is a problem that dooms much of the philosophy of science as an endeavor. Rather than fitting science into a broader epistemological framework, they set out to prove that it is special. When logic fails, they turn to describing historical patterns. When that turns up answers they don't like, they turn back to logic, but this time they have to prove reality is real even though all of the obvious ways to try to do that have already been debunked.
The conclusions that Godfrey-Smith comes to seem to rely on evolution as the guarantor of empiricist sensory perception, as if that avoids any of the problems he levied against the sociological answer and isn't in fact just a bigger version of that same answer. Idk this field seems like a bit of a mess.
April 4, 2020
This title generally presents a broad overview of the philosophy of science covering logical positivist thought and induction/confirmation. It explores aspects of Karl Popper's theory of science, Kuhn's scientific revolutions and varied sociological theory elements. The author also highlights philosophical naturalism and considers the interconnections of scientifically related philosophical debates.
May 25, 2020
I read the book "Other Minds" from Peter Godfrey a few years ago, which I really enjoyed. And lately, I started getting interested in the philosophy of science and decided to do some reading of it. I actually found and ordered this book without recognizing the author, and it was only when the book was on my shelf that I hit me that I've read him before.
The book begins by trying to sketch what science is and how it works. It presents the most basic 3 ideas that have been argued. The first being empiricism, claiming that all knowledge comes from experience and science is the systematic study of experience. The second view is a mathematical one, and science is the understanding of the world through mathematical tools. Finally, the third view is that science is based on its social structure. It is the organization of science that makes it successful. The author explores each one, giving it a foundation for the following chapters.
It starts by exploring the history of logical positivism. It was argued that there is nothing "hidden" about the reality that science attempts to describe. The goal should be prediction alone. It was empiricism taken to its extreme. While it made science seem appealingly simple and rationally grounded, it led to all types of problems, and trying to solve such problems was the key arena of modern philosophy of science.
The first big-name in the philosophy of science was Karl Popper. He is still widely known today, and his idea of falsification was hugely influential. In Popper's view of science, there was no such thing as confirming a theory. All we could do was try to refute it, and that's it. The second big name was Thomas Kuhn, who claimed that science is not an ever-increasing accumulation of knowledge but rather functions by paradigms and revolutions. It popularized a historical and sociological approach to science which has stayed ever since.
These two names are likely ones you know if you are close to the field of either science or philosophy. But that was only the start, and the 20th century continued developing countless rebuttals and theories. Lakatos, Laudan, Feyerabend, Merton, and others are mentioned, often trying to pull the field away from what they perceive is a wrong approach to science. While epistemology remained a significant problem, more social aspects took an important role. How science is actually organized within a field by research programs, how science is moved by incentives of prestige, the balance of competition and cooperation, how open science should be to competing theories, and so forth.
The latter part of the book comes back to more fundamental problems. The place of the "unobservable" within science, an optimistic or pessimistic scientific realism, laws of nature, the problem of causality, the need for explanations, Bayesian probability, and many others.
The last chapter is Godfrey's own approach to the philosophy of science. It tries to combine empiricism, naturalism, and scientific realism. It explores its benefits, the conflict between them, and how he resolves them.
I liked reading the book, although I can't say it was the most enjoyable thing I've read lately. It occupies a weird in-between world of not being so technical and in-depth to be categorized as a textbook, but it's also well beyond a basic overview for the layman. While the book is marketed as sort of the best of both worlds, I felt like I got the worse of both worlds. A very superficial analysis of many of the problems that plague the field, but at the same time, it seems to go into more detail than needed for a simple introduction.
The first part of the book was a bit difficult to read for me, and other parts got a bit tedious. I'm glad that I didn't go for a longer book. While I find many aspects of the philosophy of science appealing, reading this made me also realize that many are not that interesting. At times there were arguments that I couldn't quite understand, but I also didn't bother to put the effort to try to understand, because I felt like it would make no difference.
I don't think it is a bad book, but I was expecting it to be a little more enjoyable. It mostly rests on the nature of the field, however, and not on Godfrey's writing. If you want to dive into the philosophy of science, this will provide both a good historical background and some of the problems that it tries to tackle. But I would recommend reading a shorter introduction, to make sure that this something that you would like. Especially if your view of philosophy of science rests heavily on Popper or Kuhn, which was my case. After knowing tons of other philosophers covered in this book, they nevertheless remained the most interesting. So most of the new stuff I learned was the boring part.
If you want to dive directly into this book, make sure you're fine with this in-between approach the author took. You will cover a lot more than a simple introduction, but also not enough to fully grasp all the nuance. If you want something shorter and more concise, Okasha has written an introduction for Oxford's "very short introduction" series and might be a good resource if you want to get a simpler overview of the field.
The book begins by trying to sketch what science is and how it works. It presents the most basic 3 ideas that have been argued. The first being empiricism, claiming that all knowledge comes from experience and science is the systematic study of experience. The second view is a mathematical one, and science is the understanding of the world through mathematical tools. Finally, the third view is that science is based on its social structure. It is the organization of science that makes it successful. The author explores each one, giving it a foundation for the following chapters.
It starts by exploring the history of logical positivism. It was argued that there is nothing "hidden" about the reality that science attempts to describe. The goal should be prediction alone. It was empiricism taken to its extreme. While it made science seem appealingly simple and rationally grounded, it led to all types of problems, and trying to solve such problems was the key arena of modern philosophy of science.
The first big-name in the philosophy of science was Karl Popper. He is still widely known today, and his idea of falsification was hugely influential. In Popper's view of science, there was no such thing as confirming a theory. All we could do was try to refute it, and that's it. The second big name was Thomas Kuhn, who claimed that science is not an ever-increasing accumulation of knowledge but rather functions by paradigms and revolutions. It popularized a historical and sociological approach to science which has stayed ever since.
These two names are likely ones you know if you are close to the field of either science or philosophy. But that was only the start, and the 20th century continued developing countless rebuttals and theories. Lakatos, Laudan, Feyerabend, Merton, and others are mentioned, often trying to pull the field away from what they perceive is a wrong approach to science. While epistemology remained a significant problem, more social aspects took an important role. How science is actually organized within a field by research programs, how science is moved by incentives of prestige, the balance of competition and cooperation, how open science should be to competing theories, and so forth.
The latter part of the book comes back to more fundamental problems. The place of the "unobservable" within science, an optimistic or pessimistic scientific realism, laws of nature, the problem of causality, the need for explanations, Bayesian probability, and many others.
The last chapter is Godfrey's own approach to the philosophy of science. It tries to combine empiricism, naturalism, and scientific realism. It explores its benefits, the conflict between them, and how he resolves them.
I liked reading the book, although I can't say it was the most enjoyable thing I've read lately. It occupies a weird in-between world of not being so technical and in-depth to be categorized as a textbook, but it's also well beyond a basic overview for the layman. While the book is marketed as sort of the best of both worlds, I felt like I got the worse of both worlds. A very superficial analysis of many of the problems that plague the field, but at the same time, it seems to go into more detail than needed for a simple introduction.
The first part of the book was a bit difficult to read for me, and other parts got a bit tedious. I'm glad that I didn't go for a longer book. While I find many aspects of the philosophy of science appealing, reading this made me also realize that many are not that interesting. At times there were arguments that I couldn't quite understand, but I also didn't bother to put the effort to try to understand, because I felt like it would make no difference.
I don't think it is a bad book, but I was expecting it to be a little more enjoyable. It mostly rests on the nature of the field, however, and not on Godfrey's writing. If you want to dive into the philosophy of science, this will provide both a good historical background and some of the problems that it tries to tackle. But I would recommend reading a shorter introduction, to make sure that this something that you would like. Especially if your view of philosophy of science rests heavily on Popper or Kuhn, which was my case. After knowing tons of other philosophers covered in this book, they nevertheless remained the most interesting. So most of the new stuff I learned was the boring part.
If you want to dive directly into this book, make sure you're fine with this in-between approach the author took. You will cover a lot more than a simple introduction, but also not enough to fully grasp all the nuance. If you want something shorter and more concise, Okasha has written an introduction for Oxford's "very short introduction" series and might be a good resource if you want to get a simpler overview of the field.
October 27, 2022
An excellent book on the philosophy of science: a thorough and well-written account of hitherto scientific ideas and theories in how they have impacted the way we think and reason about reality.
A must-read for anybody remotely interested in science, philosophy, and/or psychology.
A must-read for anybody remotely interested in science, philosophy, and/or psychology.
June 10, 2020
The broad relevance of the content, combined with the clear and engaging prose, made this book hard to put down. I started several books at the same time, but this —by a wide margin— was the first one I finished. Among other fine qualities, I found reading this text to be high-scoring in terms of its learning-to-effort ratio.
In addition to its engaging style, Theory and Reality is thoughtfully structured. Godfrey-Smith gives a good historical sketch of the last 100 years of philosophy of science before moving into contemporary topics in the field. The result is an overview of the "greatest-hits" of philosophy of science —logical positivism, Popper, Kuhn, and so forth— that provides the necessary context to understand current debates ranging from the metaphysical (e.g., scientific realism) to the mathematical (e.g., Bayesian statistics).
Yes, at times the logical critiques of scientific methodology were a bit pedantic. Yes, the author's presentation of his own philosophy of science became, in my view, unnecessarily technical. Nonetheless, the text succeeds in its stated goal of providing solid introduction to the philosophy of science and, for that reason, is well worth the read. Recommended.
In addition to its engaging style, Theory and Reality is thoughtfully structured. Godfrey-Smith gives a good historical sketch of the last 100 years of philosophy of science before moving into contemporary topics in the field. The result is an overview of the "greatest-hits" of philosophy of science —logical positivism, Popper, Kuhn, and so forth— that provides the necessary context to understand current debates ranging from the metaphysical (e.g., scientific realism) to the mathematical (e.g., Bayesian statistics).
Yes, at times the logical critiques of scientific methodology were a bit pedantic. Yes, the author's presentation of his own philosophy of science became, in my view, unnecessarily technical. Nonetheless, the text succeeds in its stated goal of providing solid introduction to the philosophy of science and, for that reason, is well worth the read. Recommended.
September 19, 2008
This book is to be commended for its brevity! It covers the history of the philosophy of science swiftly, which makes the tedious bits bearable.
I'm astounded the author actually takes the time to give a fair hearing and explanation of the stupid 'theories' that deny objective reality.
Like the 'philosophy' that we can't know anything about anything because we can't prove causality exists.
Or the 'observation' that because everything we experience is an experience, we can therefore never know anything about real things -- we can only know about experiences.
Or the 'idea' that thousands of years ago, say, in Aristotle's time, things like plutonium and electrons and the Andromeda galaxy literally did not exist. Because no one had theorized them yet. And if people aren't thinking of or haven't thought about it, it doesn't exist!
I use 'scare quotes' above because these 'concepts' are the worst kind of solipsistic shit that is so much bullcrap. That inane junk made it hard to follow or get into the more serious, interesting bits of the philosophy of science.
Oh, well!
I'm astounded the author actually takes the time to give a fair hearing and explanation of the stupid 'theories' that deny objective reality.
Like the 'philosophy' that we can't know anything about anything because we can't prove causality exists.
Or the 'observation' that because everything we experience is an experience, we can therefore never know anything about real things -- we can only know about experiences.
Or the 'idea' that thousands of years ago, say, in Aristotle's time, things like plutonium and electrons and the Andromeda galaxy literally did not exist. Because no one had theorized them yet. And if people aren't thinking of or haven't thought about it, it doesn't exist!
I use 'scare quotes' above because these 'concepts' are the worst kind of solipsistic shit that is so much bullcrap. That inane junk made it hard to follow or get into the more serious, interesting bits of the philosophy of science.
Oh, well!
March 14, 2017
1) Physics is thought as the purest example of science. Molecular biology, however, is probably the science that has developed most rapidly and impressively over the 50 years or so. A few as suggested that theoretical physics is becoming less scientific than it is used to be, as it is evolving into an esoteric, mathematical model-building exercise that has little contact with real world.
2) A descriptive theory is an attempt to describe what actually goes on or what something is like, without making value judgements. A normative theory makes value judgements; it talks about what should go on, or what things should be like.
3) Although describing a special scientific method looks like a natural thing to try to do, during 20th century many philosophers and others became skeptical about the idea of giving anything like a recipe for science. Science, it was argued, is too creative and unpredictable process for there to recipe that describes it. This is especially true in the case of great scientists like Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. For a long time it was common for science textbooks to have an early section describing the scientific method but recently textbooks seem to have become more cautious about this.
4) Empiricist philosophers have long used these anecdotes. For example, empiricist philosopher Carl Hempel used the anecdote of Ignaz Semmelweiss. Semmelweiss worked in Vienna in 19th century. He showed that if doctors washed their hands before delivering babies, the risk of infection in the mothers was hugely reduced. For this radical claim he was opposed and eventually driven out of the hospital.
Another example is John Snow. Cholera was a huge problem in 18th and 19th centuries. There were various theories of how cholera caused. John Snow hypothesized that cholera was spread by drinking water. He mapped the outbreak of one epidemic in London in 1854 and found that it seemed to be centered on a particular public water pump in Broad Street.
For a counter example to empiricism, Robert Koch isolated the bacteria responsible for cholera. Pettenkofer, however, unconvinced. To prove Koch wrong, he drank a glass of water mixed with the alleged cholera germs. Pettenkofer suffered no ill effects and he wrote to Koch saying he had disproved Koch's theory. It is thought that Pettenkofer might have had high stomach acid, which can protect people against cholera infection or the cholera germs might have dies in that sample. The case reminds us that direct empirical tests are no guarantee of success.
5) Steven Shapin argues that empiricism often operates within the fantasy that each individual can observationally test hypotheses for himself. Empiricism is supposed to urge that people be distrustful of authority and go out to look directly at the world. But of course it is a fantasy because almost every move that a scientist makes depends on elaborate networks of cooperation and trust. If each individual insisted on testing everything himself, science would never advance. Cooperation and lineages of transmitted results are essential to science.
6) The worldview that had been inherited from the Middle Ages was a combination of Christianity with the ideas of Aristotle. The combination is often called the Scholastic worldview.
7) Why does an object dropped from a tower fall at the foot of the tower, if the earth has moved a considerable distance while the object is in flight? Copernicus's 1543 had an extra preface written by Andres Osiander, who had been entrusted with the publication urging that theory be treated just as a calculating tool. This idea is now known as Intrumentalism.
8) In some way Newton's physics contributes to the mechanical worldview, however, in some way it offers a post-mechanical worldview since it posited some forces that were hard to interpret in mechanical terms.
9) The classical forms of empiricism were based upon on theories about mind and how it works. Their(Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) view of the mind is often called 'sensationalist'. Sensations are the only things that the mind has access to and role of mind is to track and respond to patterns in these sensations.
Discussions and a problem for empiricism has been a tendency to lapse into skepticism, the idea that we cannot know anything about the world. One aspect is about external world(metaphysics) and second aspect, made vivid by Hume is inductive skepticism: what is the reason for us to think that the pattern in the past will also hold in the future? Many empiricists have though that they don't care about the possibility that there might be real things behind the flow of sensations.
Perhaps our concept of world is just a concept of a patterned collection of sensations, which is called 'phenomenalism'.
Generally empiricist tradition has tended to be pro-science, worldly rather than religious and politically moderate or liberal.
Logic + Empiricism: The earlier version is called 'logical positivism' and the latter is called 'logical empiricism'. To contrary their names, the earlier version was more empiricist than the latter. Carnap is the one who suggested the change in name in the mid-1930s, the time druing which logical positivist ideas changed after WWII. Logical positivism was a form of empiricism developed in Europe after WWI. The movement was established by a group of people, which is known as Vienna Circle, who were scientifically oriented and who disliked much of what was happening in philosophy. The logical positivists were inspired by developments in science, especially the work of Einstein. They were also inspired by the early ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was not an empiricist at all.
After rising of Hitler, many logical positivists fled to the US and became responsible for a great flowering of American philosophy such as Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel and Feigl. Unfortunately Schlick couldn't make it and murdered by his one of former student.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 12, 2023
Godfrey-Smith covers the 20th century and today’s trends. He (rightly) favors naturalism tied to a broad empiricism and a broad realism.
October 3, 2024
Excellent go at 'how to bring philosophy of science to the masses in an easy digestible format without boring the reader to death'; the author succeeded, even mentioning some of the lesser known philosophers of science so often ignored; in particular Michael Polanyi, albeit that his philosophy is barely even glanced over; of course the usual suspects are discussed (Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend) in quite the details, and that only speaks for the rigour of the story.
April 5, 2013
I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this book. It was well written but it spent more time telling you what science is not as opposed to what it is. It did go into great detail about the history of various schools of thought within the realm of science in regards to evaluating the information we have at our disposal & what to make of it. Perhaps, I was expecting more of this book, expecting something from it that it wasn't supposed to give. My goal was to gain a better understanding of what science is, a deeper understanding of how thinking scientifically works. There is a lot of a good information in it & it's definitely worth reading. It just wasn't exactly what I was looking for. I did learn from it what to avoid & where I would personally lean or at least use as a tool in regards to where I would lead. It gives you various pieces that are a part of a larger whole & what I got from it is that these guides or general rules or flexible, depending on what field on is working in & that some aspects may work better in others. Inference, induction & falsifiability are definitely major parts of scientific though. I will definitely be reading more books on the Philosophy of Science. This was an okay place to start.
July 22, 2014
While thought provoking and enlightening in parts, the author's writing style perhaps was more laborious than it needed to be. Instead of cutting to the chase, the author approached some subjects in a roundabout way. Additionally, some issues were given too much attention while other, more seemingly important and profound topics, were less well covered. Absent from the entirety of the book is any substantial discussion on the significant differences between the social and physical sciences and the particulars of experimental and non-experimental testing.
In one particular chapter, there is a peculiarly head-scratching moment where the author, in defending his position of a naturalized scientific realism, ignores the very well known, well studied phenomenon in quantum mechanics (the uncertainty principle) which undermines a position where reality is wholly independent of observation. The author breezes right past this issue by stating something along the lines of, "I hope QM is mistaken on this issue!"
Still, this book was interesting as an introductory piece to the field. I probably would not read his other work, but I would recommend it to whoever is interested in some of the confounding philosophical (and sociological) issues of science.
In one particular chapter, there is a peculiarly head-scratching moment where the author, in defending his position of a naturalized scientific realism, ignores the very well known, well studied phenomenon in quantum mechanics (the uncertainty principle) which undermines a position where reality is wholly independent of observation. The author breezes right past this issue by stating something along the lines of, "I hope QM is mistaken on this issue!"
Still, this book was interesting as an introductory piece to the field. I probably would not read his other work, but I would recommend it to whoever is interested in some of the confounding philosophical (and sociological) issues of science.
March 16, 2018
Solid introduction to the general philosophy of science.
First seven chapters look at major 20th century philosophers of science - the positivists, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Laudan. He then has a few chapters on the relationship between traditional philosophy of science and sociology of science & feminist epistemologists. The last few chapters are thematic and look at the debates about certain issues like naturalism, explanation, Bayesian conformation, and realism. He finally offers a loose account of how the traditions naturalism, empiricism, and realism might fit together, but this is pretty hand-wavey and general, and so is quite unmemorable.
He doesn't just present views but also engages with their strengths and weaknesses. As someone who basically agrees with most of his views (which admittedly might not be surprising, since this was my first text on philosophy of science for a course in uni), this makes it seem like a great critical introduction to the massive diversity of issues and viewpoints within the field, and I always come away with a longer "to-read" list when I re-read this book.
First seven chapters look at major 20th century philosophers of science - the positivists, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Laudan. He then has a few chapters on the relationship between traditional philosophy of science and sociology of science & feminist epistemologists. The last few chapters are thematic and look at the debates about certain issues like naturalism, explanation, Bayesian conformation, and realism. He finally offers a loose account of how the traditions naturalism, empiricism, and realism might fit together, but this is pretty hand-wavey and general, and so is quite unmemorable.
He doesn't just present views but also engages with their strengths and weaknesses. As someone who basically agrees with most of his views (which admittedly might not be surprising, since this was my first text on philosophy of science for a course in uni), this makes it seem like a great critical introduction to the massive diversity of issues and viewpoints within the field, and I always come away with a longer "to-read" list when I re-read this book.
November 29, 2015
This is book is a mind opening experience on the subject of science.
This book takes the reader far from the almost mystical like admiration taught in popular culture. It shows us that science is both objective and at times subjective. As the title implies, when it comes to how science is conducted there is "theory and then there is reality". If you are interested to know what science really is then this is your book.
This book takes the reader far from the almost mystical like admiration taught in popular culture. It shows us that science is both objective and at times subjective. As the title implies, when it comes to how science is conducted there is "theory and then there is reality". If you are interested to know what science really is then this is your book.
November 9, 2022
A good introduction into scientific philosophy. He well illustrates much of the history with helpful references at the end of every chapter for further development and in depth reading. Some of the last chapters are less organized, but present his views in the synthetic and a posteriori manner his ideas endorse. Whether or not you agree with his philosophical positions it serves as an enthusiastic example and starting point.
June 10, 2012
A wonderful introduction. Much covered in little time in accessable language.
Godfrey-Smith doea not succeed either at hiding his bias or making it clear, but rarely does it result in a misrepresented view.
Godfrey-Smith doea not succeed either at hiding his bias or making it clear, but rarely does it result in a misrepresented view.
April 8, 2017
"The scientific method is the most reliable way of discovering the truth." That's how I responded when a friend recently challenged me to state my core beliefs. As I ranted about Popper on "falsifiability" and our conversation descended into the depths of definitional disputes, I realized that I actually didn't have a clear definition for what "the scientific method" actually was. That was a problem. Thanks to Godfrey-Smith, it was a problem with a solution... at least sort of.
I read "Theory and Reality to gain a more nuanced understanding of the philosophy and sociology of science. In particular, I wanted to get an answer to "What level of confidence should we have in our current theories, given the dramatic history of change in science?" I finished the book without a clear answer, but with a much better understanding of why this is such a rich and difficult question.
The first half of the book traces the history of big ideas and controversies within the philosophy of science. The presentation of the giants of the field - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Laudan - is particularly good because Godfrey-Smith contextualizes how they all knew each other and how their ideas were related. He concludes each chapter with a thoughtful list of additional reading too - already added a bunch to my list. The second half explores more recent developments and is less clear. This may be because it's too early to have a clear sense of what the major important stories of our time are. His own theory presented in the final chapter is a muddled mess. Still, this book significantly revised some of my fundamental beliefs and for that alone it was well worth the read.
Godfrey-Smith devotes an entire early chapter to Karl Popper because of his fame ("hardly ever does a philosopher succeed in inspiring scientists in the way Popper has") and devastatingly dismantles Popper's philosophical framework brick-by-brick. I had been deeply attracted to Popper's "weaponization" of falsifiability as a way to distinguish science from pseudo-science. But Godfrey-Smith raises major issues with Popper's approach. The first is that Popper refuses to let us say that we are increasing our confidence in a particular theory. The second is that falsifiability is built on a foundation of sand - any experiment relies on a vast web of assumptions and a "falsified" theory can always claim that one of the other assumptions is wrong. Popper also claims that any probabilistic model is unscientific because it is impossible to falsify probabilities - this would classify vast swathes of modern science as pseudo-science. So Popper seems to fail to describe how science actually works in practice. This shocked me and made me question my previous faith in Sir Karl.
But Godfrey-Smith doesn't completely dismiss Popper. He uses Popper's ideas to discuss the idea that the philosophy of science still has no good way to "confirm" theories, rendering all scientific knowledge tentative and subject to revision. And he does give Karl credit:
He also ties Popper back to earlier empiricist thinking on the problem of scientific induction. I was surprised to read that:
So we don't have any strictly logical basis for believing that induction - the foundation of almost all scientific fields - actually works?! This was the first time I had ever even thought of this - seems like a major problem.
From Popper and empiricism, Godfrey-Smith proceeds to Kuhn and his "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." I had read Kuhn's book before (my review here) and like Lakatos, I was concerned that Kuhn was promoting "mob rule" and relativism in science. I was particularly concerned about claims that "people in different paradigms will use different standards of evidence and argument." Godfrey-Smith does a respectable job of defending Kuhn from these accusations, but his argument was a bit fuzzy because Kuhn himself didn't have great responses to some of these questions. The closest we get is:
But since Kuhn doesn't have a clear way to distinguish science from "non-science", I remain unconvinced. This feels like a major hole in Kuhn's approach, but I'm sure my understanding of his theories is incomplete. Later on, Godfrey-Smith dismisses much of the "Science Studies" and "Sociology of Science" fields which he thinks actually *have* slipped down the slippery slope of relativism. As he puts it, "There seems to be no place in the picture for the responsiveness of scientific belief to the real structure of the world being investigated." Savage.
I did appreciate Godfrey-Smith's discussion about how open science should be to evaluating the fundamentals. He explains that a counter-intuitive benefit of Kuhn's "paradigm" approach is that certain areas are off-limits for questioning. Unlike Popper who thinks it is a scientist's duty to question everything all the time, Kuhn correctly says that this would result in no research ever getting done. By focusing the science community's efforts on a defined set of problems, the paradigm approach makes the research enterprise more efficient.
Godfrey-Smith devotes much of his discussion of the sociology of science to the efficiency of overall scientific progress and the incentives of individual scientists. This section was fascinating to me because these issues directly impact the integrity of the overall scientific endeavor. He drew very interesting parallels between the organization of science and Smith's "Invisible Hand" that organizes the economy. And while economics has its market failures, scientific research has its own pathologies. Sadly, Godfrey-Smith only briefly discusses how the incentive structure of modern science can encourage fraud (and the mania to publish). He briefly touches on the relatively recent development of financial rewards for the commercialization of scientific research, but fails to explore this new and important issue.
Instead, Godfrey-Smith mostly focuses on the question of how individual scientists choose which problems to tackle - largely a matter of the rate of progress in the field and how many scientists are already in the community. Knowing many young scientists myself, I found this section to be missing a critical component of the decision-making process. There is no discussion of the role of passion, intellectual curiosity, or any other intrinsic motivation. Many of the researchers I know would appreciate recognition for their work, but they chose their field because they loved the thrill of hunting for new stars or spending time with animals or trying to cure a disease that killed a loved one. These factors are completely ignored in this book.
Overall though, this book gave me lots to think about and some fruitful directions for future exploration. I particularly liked Godfrey-Smith's idea that "The power of science is seen in the cumulative and coordinated nature of scientific work." But as he stresses, the cumulative nature of the work means that it's critical to prevent fraud from destabilizing the work that builds upon it. Godfrey-Smith says that one of the most special parts of science is its ability to "balance between criticism and trust." Are we sure that things are still in balance? As I read Godfrey-Smiths' brief passages on scientific fraud, I was reminded of Charlie Munger's exhortation that the best way to make people behave morally is to make systems that are hard to cheat. Modern science strikes me as particularly easy to cheat - especially in the short term. There are very few incentives (or resources) to reproduce even a tiny fraction of the experiments published each year, and there are significant rewards for claiming a novel discovery. I hope to read more about these issues, and this book has given me a good initial framework for thinking about the modern scientific endeavor.
My full review and highlights at http://books.max-nova.com/theory-and-reality/
I read "Theory and Reality to gain a more nuanced understanding of the philosophy and sociology of science. In particular, I wanted to get an answer to "What level of confidence should we have in our current theories, given the dramatic history of change in science?" I finished the book without a clear answer, but with a much better understanding of why this is such a rich and difficult question.
The first half of the book traces the history of big ideas and controversies within the philosophy of science. The presentation of the giants of the field - Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Laudan - is particularly good because Godfrey-Smith contextualizes how they all knew each other and how their ideas were related. He concludes each chapter with a thoughtful list of additional reading too - already added a bunch to my list. The second half explores more recent developments and is less clear. This may be because it's too early to have a clear sense of what the major important stories of our time are. His own theory presented in the final chapter is a muddled mess. Still, this book significantly revised some of my fundamental beliefs and for that alone it was well worth the read.
Godfrey-Smith devotes an entire early chapter to Karl Popper because of his fame ("hardly ever does a philosopher succeed in inspiring scientists in the way Popper has") and devastatingly dismantles Popper's philosophical framework brick-by-brick. I had been deeply attracted to Popper's "weaponization" of falsifiability as a way to distinguish science from pseudo-science. But Godfrey-Smith raises major issues with Popper's approach. The first is that Popper refuses to let us say that we are increasing our confidence in a particular theory. The second is that falsifiability is built on a foundation of sand - any experiment relies on a vast web of assumptions and a "falsified" theory can always claim that one of the other assumptions is wrong. Popper also claims that any probabilistic model is unscientific because it is impossible to falsify probabilities - this would classify vast swathes of modern science as pseudo-science. So Popper seems to fail to describe how science actually works in practice. This shocked me and made me question my previous faith in Sir Karl.
But Godfrey-Smith doesn't completely dismiss Popper. He uses Popper's ideas to discuss the idea that the philosophy of science still has no good way to "confirm" theories, rendering all scientific knowledge tentative and subject to revision. And he does give Karl credit:
What is Popper's single most important and enduring contribution to philosophy of science? I'd say it is his use of the idea of "riskiness" to describe the kind of contact that scientific theories have with observation
He also ties Popper back to earlier empiricist thinking on the problem of scientific induction. I was surprised to read that:
Hume asked, "What reason do we have for thinking that the future will resemble the past?" Induction is psychologically natural to us. Despite this, Hume thought it had no rational basis. Hume's inductive skepticism has haunted empiricism ever since.
So we don't have any strictly logical basis for believing that induction - the foundation of almost all scientific fields - actually works?! This was the first time I had ever even thought of this - seems like a major problem.
From Popper and empiricism, Godfrey-Smith proceeds to Kuhn and his "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." I had read Kuhn's book before (my review here) and like Lakatos, I was concerned that Kuhn was promoting "mob rule" and relativism in science. I was particularly concerned about claims that "people in different paradigms will use different standards of evidence and argument." Godfrey-Smith does a respectable job of defending Kuhn from these accusations, but his argument was a bit fuzzy because Kuhn himself didn't have great responses to some of these questions. The closest we get is:
So if we want to compare scientific procedures of investigation with nonscientific ones, it is clear that Kuhn thought science was superior. He was not a relativist about this issue, and perhaps that is the most important issue.
But since Kuhn doesn't have a clear way to distinguish science from "non-science", I remain unconvinced. This feels like a major hole in Kuhn's approach, but I'm sure my understanding of his theories is incomplete. Later on, Godfrey-Smith dismisses much of the "Science Studies" and "Sociology of Science" fields which he thinks actually *have* slipped down the slippery slope of relativism. As he puts it, "There seems to be no place in the picture for the responsiveness of scientific belief to the real structure of the world being investigated." Savage.
I did appreciate Godfrey-Smith's discussion about how open science should be to evaluating the fundamentals. He explains that a counter-intuitive benefit of Kuhn's "paradigm" approach is that certain areas are off-limits for questioning. Unlike Popper who thinks it is a scientist's duty to question everything all the time, Kuhn correctly says that this would result in no research ever getting done. By focusing the science community's efforts on a defined set of problems, the paradigm approach makes the research enterprise more efficient.
Godfrey-Smith devotes much of his discussion of the sociology of science to the efficiency of overall scientific progress and the incentives of individual scientists. This section was fascinating to me because these issues directly impact the integrity of the overall scientific endeavor. He drew very interesting parallels between the organization of science and Smith's "Invisible Hand" that organizes the economy. And while economics has its market failures, scientific research has its own pathologies. Sadly, Godfrey-Smith only briefly discusses how the incentive structure of modern science can encourage fraud (and the mania to publish). He briefly touches on the relatively recent development of financial rewards for the commercialization of scientific research, but fails to explore this new and important issue.
Instead, Godfrey-Smith mostly focuses on the question of how individual scientists choose which problems to tackle - largely a matter of the rate of progress in the field and how many scientists are already in the community. Knowing many young scientists myself, I found this section to be missing a critical component of the decision-making process. There is no discussion of the role of passion, intellectual curiosity, or any other intrinsic motivation. Many of the researchers I know would appreciate recognition for their work, but they chose their field because they loved the thrill of hunting for new stars or spending time with animals or trying to cure a disease that killed a loved one. These factors are completely ignored in this book.
Overall though, this book gave me lots to think about and some fruitful directions for future exploration. I particularly liked Godfrey-Smith's idea that "The power of science is seen in the cumulative and coordinated nature of scientific work." But as he stresses, the cumulative nature of the work means that it's critical to prevent fraud from destabilizing the work that builds upon it. Godfrey-Smith says that one of the most special parts of science is its ability to "balance between criticism and trust." Are we sure that things are still in balance? As I read Godfrey-Smiths' brief passages on scientific fraud, I was reminded of Charlie Munger's exhortation that the best way to make people behave morally is to make systems that are hard to cheat. Modern science strikes me as particularly easy to cheat - especially in the short term. There are very few incentives (or resources) to reproduce even a tiny fraction of the experiments published each year, and there are significant rewards for claiming a novel discovery. I hope to read more about these issues, and this book has given me a good initial framework for thinking about the modern scientific endeavor.
My full review and highlights at http://books.max-nova.com/theory-and-reality/
May 9, 2023
Overview:
What defines science, is still in conflict. How science functions has changed over time, and continues to change. This is a history to the philosophy of science, the foundational ideas to science. Questioning how science searches for truths, for patterns. Empiricism has a skeptical edge, questioning how much can actually be known about how reality functions. External skepticism questions the patterns that frame the sensations of the world. Inductive skepticism questions how much the past experience predicts the future.
Generalizations have limited value because of the problem of induction, for generalizations do not contain all observations. The not yet observed can provide contradictions to the generalized, with a single contradiction changing the entire value of an idea. Confirmation of theory, does not mean a theory has been proven. Confirmation provides partial rather than decisive support for theories. Theories need to prove themselves by putting themselves to tests that can potentially falsify them. Theories need to take risks. Ideas can be logically consistent, but that does not mean empirically valid.
There are those who think that objective facts can be separated from value judgements, are part of descriptive theory. Others who think that facts and values cannot be separated, are part of normative theory which also raises claims about what should be. Some ideas might be more objective, but usually there are values attached. Scientists do not passively receive information. They actively select information. Science is about the choices that the scientists make.
Caveats?
This book was meant for students, with a broader audience in mind. The results are mixed. The book can act as a reference book, and be a used as an introduction to the various ideas which are part of science. But, there are sections that would be better understood under the guidance of an instructor. Written in a manner that requires someone who already has knowledge about the ideas to understand the ideas further, or be explained in lecture form.
What defines science, is still in conflict. How science functions has changed over time, and continues to change. This is a history to the philosophy of science, the foundational ideas to science. Questioning how science searches for truths, for patterns. Empiricism has a skeptical edge, questioning how much can actually be known about how reality functions. External skepticism questions the patterns that frame the sensations of the world. Inductive skepticism questions how much the past experience predicts the future.
Generalizations have limited value because of the problem of induction, for generalizations do not contain all observations. The not yet observed can provide contradictions to the generalized, with a single contradiction changing the entire value of an idea. Confirmation of theory, does not mean a theory has been proven. Confirmation provides partial rather than decisive support for theories. Theories need to prove themselves by putting themselves to tests that can potentially falsify them. Theories need to take risks. Ideas can be logically consistent, but that does not mean empirically valid.
There are those who think that objective facts can be separated from value judgements, are part of descriptive theory. Others who think that facts and values cannot be separated, are part of normative theory which also raises claims about what should be. Some ideas might be more objective, but usually there are values attached. Scientists do not passively receive information. They actively select information. Science is about the choices that the scientists make.
Caveats?
This book was meant for students, with a broader audience in mind. The results are mixed. The book can act as a reference book, and be a used as an introduction to the various ideas which are part of science. But, there are sections that would be better understood under the guidance of an instructor. Written in a manner that requires someone who already has knowledge about the ideas to understand the ideas further, or be explained in lecture form.
March 3, 2020
To be honest, I was hoping for a different book, one that ruminates on the tenuous link between our scientific ideas and models and the actual real world they are supposed to describe. It is called “Theory and Reality”, after all. What I got instead (for the main part) was an overview of modern philosophical views about what the concept of science is and sociological models for how it operates. As such, the book is competently written and does what it sets out to do, if we ignore the minor deception of the grandiose title, so yeah, if that’s what interests you, iss all good, dig right in.
On the other hand, man, oh, man. “Philosophy” of science. More like nitpickery and logical acrobatics of science. Is this the kind of thing “philosophers” of science spend their time on these days? Instead of delving into the deepest mysteries of metaphysics, they search for minor holes in tedious arguments and theories about how the scientific community operates (as if it is all a single, monolithic community that can be described by any one single theory or model)? Even with all its problems, science is out there, transforming the world, while philosophers of science are staring at their own navels, playing with words, trying to one-up one another with “cleverly” constructed arguments against the other guy’s (no gals, as far as I can remember) pet theory. I listened all the way through, but I must confess that the sheer tedium of what was discussed made me doze off every now and again.
On the other hand, man, oh, man. “Philosophy” of science. More like nitpickery and logical acrobatics of science. Is this the kind of thing “philosophers” of science spend their time on these days? Instead of delving into the deepest mysteries of metaphysics, they search for minor holes in tedious arguments and theories about how the scientific community operates (as if it is all a single, monolithic community that can be described by any one single theory or model)? Even with all its problems, science is out there, transforming the world, while philosophers of science are staring at their own navels, playing with words, trying to one-up one another with “cleverly” constructed arguments against the other guy’s (no gals, as far as I can remember) pet theory. I listened all the way through, but I must confess that the sheer tedium of what was discussed made me doze off every now and again.
May 11, 2022
One of the more enjoyable textbooks I actually read. An interesting perspective on the philosophy of science. Went in directions I was not expecting, and some of the historic knowledge traditions in the field Godfrey-Smith describes were enlightening. I've grown a better understanding of groups like flat-earths by learning of the positivists, but also seeing the inevitable collapse when you base knowledge off of experience. I also appreciate some of the philosophical limitations of realism (however you wish to define it, tho I found GS's realism relatable). Probably wouldn't read for fun, but enjoyable enough, and worth harkening back to for ideas.
February 11, 2018
Would've been an okay read, but it suffers from some insufferably tedious and irrelevant chapters.
February 20, 2023
4.5
Ebook and audiobook
Ebook and audiobook
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