What is philosophy of science supposed to achieve?

[koganbot]

Ha! In my head I'd been composing a post in response to meserach's claiming, "any position toward the philosophy of science which fails to give a good accounting of how science achieves 'better' practical results than other ways of thinking about the universe is ultimately bankrupt," where I say that the hard sciences so far have a very limited

Comments

[dubdobdee]

Very loosely, the philosophy of science that i do know a bit about -- Karl Popper, for example -- is also primarily concerned with border patrol: what counts as science, what doesn't, why this might matter. And this topic treated as a project in itself, rather than ad hoc disciplinary skirmishing and interdeparmental politics and funding battles.

Another territory it might be fruitfully concerned with -- possibly rather more urgent than the "what is and what isn't science" -- is the study of the effects within knowledge as a whole of what was termed "Balkanisation", of particular disciplinary fields.

In both cases, the issue would be overview, to various ends. The question would be, is philosophy as currently constituted good at tackling such an issue; and if not, how should it change.

[meserach]

The term for this border patrolling is the "demarcation problem". Again I find much of it rather silly - the demarcation for me isn't between ideas that are scientific and those that aren;t, but between ideas that work (i.e. have instrumental value, make accurate predictions) and those that don't.

It happens to be the case that "scientific" ideas tend to be the instrumental ones, and this is I believe because "science" tends to pay a good deal more attention to instrumental value than non-science.

I uh.. hope that makes some kind of sense...

[jauntyalan]

with 'pure utility' criteria like this how do you view the theoretical science (it is still science) that has yet to pay off?

[koganbot]

In regard to Balkanization: Kuhn thought that, in the hard sciences, specialization was an inevitable outcome of scientific evolution: after a paradigm shift, there would likely be more offspring than there'd been parents, and the offspring would be technically more difficult and elaborate, and each would have a narrower range.

Based on something Richard Rorty once wrote back in 1980 or so, I got the impression that philosophy's Balkanization is of a different character: it isn't so much the creation of ever more subspecialties but the creation of competing schools, both figuratively and in some cases literally, a department at a particular college having one emphasis, a department at another having a different one, this being the result of analytic philosophy's no longer having a common idea of what it is to do an analysis.

the philosophy of science that i do know a bit about -- Karl Popper, for example -- is also primarily concerned with border patrol: what counts as science, what doesn't, why this might matter.I'd hope that the

[meserach]

Now THIS interests me as a reason for the paradigm idea!

[koganbot]

Sorry I haven't gotten back to this discussion. Ke$ha intervened. But in the next couple of days I'll resume posting. Think you'll like Kuhn once we sidestep the relativism that other people projected onto him. We need to wipe the slate clean of how most people have tried to frame the discussion, start with the issues that were of concern to Kuhn himself. And a good place to begin would be the gap he perceived between the hard sciences and the social sciences.

[jauntyalan]

Re rorty. But that's his 'ah what's the point' schtick