Who are you favorite philosophers of science? I'd like to read about what science is, what is the best way of doing it, how does it progress, what are its limitations, what can it uncover, what is its purpose, etc.Thanks!
There are two broad approaches you can take: analytic philosophy of science and continental philosophy of science. They are both worth reading but have different flavors. Analytic often conceives itself more as a "handmaiden" or "diligent under-laborer" to science (a la Locke's famous quote in the introduction to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding), with logical and/or linguistic analyses of "classic problems" or paradoxes in science and science-adjacent metaphysics, the aim of which is to "clear the ground" (Locke again) so science can do its thing more freely. Zammito's A Nice Derangement of Epistemes is a nice book on this. Continental's flavor is more like "what we moderns call science is an outgrowth (or mutation) of ancient and early modern 'natural philosophy'; there is no free-floating 'scientific method'; things like 'empiricism', naturalism', 'materialism', 'mechanism', 'mathematical rigor', etc., all have histories, all emerge out of socio-cultural / linguistic / etc. contexts." This contextualism is often employed to critique scientific discourses or paradigms or whatever. Sometimes this is ideologically motivated, for example a leftist historian/sociologist of science might critique "scientism" to show that it is a bourgeois notion intertwined with the rise of capitalism and industrialism, one that justifies exploitation of humans in the name of efficiency or objectivity, or justifies the spoliation of nature in the same way. Canguilhem, Foucault, and Agamben are good examples of the social critique of scientism and claims to scientific objectivity, as enabling the domination and alienation of human beings. But just as often, continental types are interested in critiques of scientistic reductionism, materialism, etc., because they metaphysical idealists of some kind. Thus they might critique neo-Darwinism and molecular biology as unjustifiably aprioristic materialistic reductionist paradigms, in defense of teleology or vitalism. In practice, both analytic and continental increasingly speak the same language. While it was once mildly scandalous to be a "sociologist of scientific knowledge," because you appeared to be claiming that there is no truth and science is just some "bourgeois discourse" and all that matters is Marxist progress (and so on and so forth), so that reading Feyerabend, Fleck, or even Kuhn was briefly a radical act, these days scientific positivism is basically dead and everybody knows what a paradigm is, everybody knows what "theory-ladenness" is, everybody knows about the "myth of the given" and the gavagai problem, etc. Nevertheless, the FLAVORS or styles of the two "schools" persist, so I would recommend making sure you get exposed to both.
>>25386516Also my personal favorite recommendation for a place to start would be E.A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Also reading about the Duhem/Quine thesis, and the idea of "saving the appearances" (Duhem). N.R. Hanson's Patterns of Discovery is also nice. Feyerabend is still great. Kuhn is great and way better than the usual canned undergraduate summary he is given. Don't just read Structure, read The Essential Tension too.
>>25386441Francis Bacon would be your best bet in this department.
>>25386441I just got this but he's more of a historian. I like Kuhn and such but as usual I prefer historians of science to philosophers of science.
>>25386441Len.
>>25386518>>25386516Thanks anon, this rundown is much appreciated, I'll look into your suggested starting points. What got me thinking about philosophy of science is the concept of "low-hanging fruit" and its validity, also the truth of the claim that science is "incremental and cumulative," and also whether high-throughput data processing with computers and AI really is an accelerator of knowledge, or if some human element necessary for true scientific discovery is lost in the process. And if something is lost, what is that thing, and what could possibly be an alternative to pure numerical modeling? Is something lost in numerical reduction? And finally, could even the most accurate and predictive models reveal something fundamentally "true?"
>>25386908The cumulative progress model of science is an artifact of 19th century positivists like Auguste Comte, and was basically tipped over in the 20th century. First you get a trickle of things like Duhem's theory-ladenness thesis and "saving the appearances" (see also Maxwell's refusal to reify his equations - showing that tentativeness about how models correspond to reality actually INCREASES scientific progress, since instead of trying to figure out what the ether "was" he did what Newton also did and said "here's a fucking model that works pragmatically, whatever it happens to be modeling ultimately"), and increasing defense of "intuition" in science (e.g. Poincare), and a lot of Kantians and neo-Kantians pointing out that Kant tells us that we can only know OUR "model" of the world, not the world as it is "in itself" (see du Bois-Reymond's famous "ignoramus, ignorabimus" = we do not know, we shall not know, what really actually is) and Ernst Mach's pragmatic/structural realism etc. There's a backlash against all this with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle (logical positivists) and their defense of science against what tehy perceived as the philosophers' excessive obscurantism and relativism. But this imploded under more internal critiques, for example in Wittgenstein, who caused a massive controversy with his "turn" in his later work, coinciding with the controversies around Kuhn's and Feyerabend's very different types of scientific "relativism." Around this time you also have the publication of Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Sellars' The Myth of the Given, etc., landmarks in the view that science cannot be cumulative because mind doesn't get PROGRESSIVE purchase on reality. The basic point across all of these thinkers and the schools of thought they draw from (linguistic philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology, Kant, French discourse theory, whatever it is) is pretty simple, and can be broken into two subpoints: (1) We don't see reality directly; our perception and conception of reality are models of reality. Okay, fine. But the question is: how do we know our models "refer to," "model," "are adequate to," etc., actual real reality? Now the real problem arises: (2) Given that our minds and their models of reality are PARTS OF reality, we can only model our minds and how our minds' models model reality with more models within our minds. There you go, you now have a PhD in Philosophy of Science. Now go forth and read "Is Water H2O?" and the gavagai problem and Peter Winch's critique of the indeterminacy of ostensive definition and Sellars' critique of the given and so on and so on, and come to the conclusion that you can either be a structural realist on wonky epistemic grounds, or a modern Pyrrhonian who can't explain why electronics work if calculus is "just" a model. Go for Burtt's Metaphyscial Foundations ASAP. It's not long and will get you started at this problem's origin (read: Newton's "hypotheses non fingo").
>>25386441Theodore Schick "Readings of Phil of Sci." will get you up to speed if you can get through it. Pic related was the favorite thing on the topic I read though probably, definitely leans into the anti-Scientific Realist camp.
Troons talking about incels is profoundly ironic. So wholly rejected from the gene pool that they castrate themselves, yet somehow they are above incels. The typical incel is nowhere near as defeated and raped as a troon.
>>25386441science is as much philosophy as mathematics is science
>>25386908AI is an extremely broad topic that is relevant to all major fields of philosophy, not just science. Why inference is even possible is one of the deepest philosophical problems (problem of induction). If you aren't careful you will become distracted by the rest of philosophy. Of course this isn't an issue if you are intending to study everything anyway but if you have a specific goal in mind (or a deadline) then be wary of thinking too much about AI. The other anon responding to you is incredibly knowledgeable. Take his advice wholeheartedly. My only addition would be to consider philosophy of technology as well since modern science is impossible without technology, and what it is exactly is not obvious. There is not much written on it, either. Check out Skrbina's introductory textbook on it and Ellul's The Technological Society. >>25386516>>25387602Giving you some (You)s simply because these posts are excellent.
bump
>>25386441any honest philosopher who lived to see 20th century wil agree "modern science" is dogfood
>>25386520Does Leibniz hold up still?
lol imagine needing science to know that electronics work
>>25390278Maybe if you can figure that out you can also figure out why the batteries in your dildo aren't working
Kuhn and Ian Hacking
