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

[meserach]

physics does a better job of talking about electrons than music critics do of talking about t.A.T.u. and the Veronicas See again, you have this focus on talking about electrons as if doing so was a good in and of itself, when my whole position is that I don;t give a shit about electrons except insofar as they are useful conceptual tools that allow humans to achieve cool shit, such as, for one example, allowing me to argue the merits of t.A.T.u vs. the Veronicas over the internet, which would not have been achieved without the precision conceptual tool of quantum mechanics' description of electrons

[koganbot]

you have this focus on talking about electrons as if doing so was a good in and of itself

No. You don't yet have enough information to know what my focus on talking about electrons is. Also, I don't think it's possible to talk about what electrons are without talking about what they do, so I don't see that you and I would necessarily be at odds here. In fact, it was what electrons did that caused physicists to posit electrons' existence in the first place. And then coming up with theories about the electron and about atomic structure and so on helped people to do more with electrons. But trying to understand why practitioners in the hard sciences are so much more successful at this sort of thing than are practitioners of the social sciences was one of Thomas Kuhn's motives for inventing the notion of "paradigm" (which is actually several related notions). How is it that when practicing physics, people get on the same page as to what electrons do, whereas when discussing, say, social class, sociologists don't succeed nearly as well

[meserach]

Well, partly that is my response!

But I haven't found much of what I've read very edifying. Some people accuse paradigms of being relativism, focusing on the concept of incommensurability and claiming that it weakens the concept of independent scientific truths since concepts are only evaluable for truth value within paradigms and not between them. Others strenuously insist that it isn't like that at all, that incommensurability doesn't mean there can't be means for comparing paradigms one to the other and choosing the best one (this makes sense to me because certainly that's what physicists actually do - pick the model that's appropriate for the problem). But if there is a basis for choosing between paradigms, what's the big deal?

I was a lot more comfortable with Popper.

[koganbot]

But I haven't found much of what I've read edifying.

Well, much of what you've read by whom? Which is to ask, what does Kuhn have to say on these subjects? Remember, among other things, he's trying to account for the success of the hard sciences, both at (1) doing a good job at answering the questions they pose, and at accumulating knowledge much better than the social sciences seem to do, and, when the question answering breaks down, (2) at periodically overthrowing some of their basic assumptions and coming up with new ones that are productive (i.e., that answer the questions, that provide a context for rapid advance). "Incommensurability" (which was a bad word choice on his part, but he didn't know in the early '60s how people were subsequently going to misread him) only is an issue for #2. Not sure what "independent scientific truths" means, but the idea of, say, the lack of theory-independent whatever ("facts," perhaps? except that even that makes the assertion seem too provocative) doesn't weaken the notion of "truth" in the

[dubdobdee]

For some reason Meserach's post reminded me of a quote i've always liked from Adorno's pupil the critic, historian and musicologist Carl Dahlhaus: “The life of compositional history is to be found less in its actual results that in its problems and utopias.”

CD was talking -- was only really interested in -- the composed music of the Western tradition, Bach-Boulez, as it were; and in a sense there's a definitional thing going on here (viz it only counts as "composition" in the sense CD cares about IF AND WHEN it's the case that the "life" of it is to be found in discussion of problems solved and utopias evoked and aimed at)

[dubdobdee]

I studied philosophy of mathematics rather than philosophy of science, and in effect what it largely was a kind of border patrol: of what was acceptable as mathematics, and what shouldn't be

[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

[braisedbywolves]

physics, chemistry, biology, paleontology etc. have had nothing interesting to say about them or anything like them

I'd dispute that - those sciences may have a lot of interesting things to say about them (though of course who's deciding 'interesting' counts for a lot) - just not necessarily anything about them as distinct from other humans.

[koganbot]

This post made me smile.

Perhaps physics and biology can explain some things that have long puzzled me, which is how it is that Lena and Yulia manage to live in outer space, how some stars can be black, and how outer space can contain endless seas.