Selected Readings from Classic Works in Philosophy of Science: Introduction

This class, as planned, was supposed to be me giving a general introductory lecture, but in fact it still mainly took the form of student discussion.

I didn’t prepare a script, so I’m just putting the PPT content directly here. The PPT itself is fairly brief, meant only as a reference for the students in class when they review later. When I feel like it, I’ll add some connective commentary in the margins:

What Is Philosophy of Science?

• SP or PS
  • Scientific Philosophy
  • Philosophy of Science
• “Scientific” philosophy
  • —unscientific philosophy (“metaphysics”)
• “Philosophy “about science”
  • —philosophy that discusses other objects (political philosophy, moral philosophy…)
  • —other disciplines that discuss science (sociology of science, history of science…)

What Is Philosophy?

What Is Science?

• Science = a certain kind of knowledge
  • Systematized knowledge, natural knowledge, empirical knowledge…
• Science = a certain system
  • A system of propositions, a system of methods, a system of beliefs…
• Science = a certain kind of activity
  • Communicative activity, experimental activity, power activity…

The Demarcation Problem

• The basic problem of philosophy of science—by what right is science science?
• Vulgar view: whether it is correct or not
• Logical positivism: whether it is empirical
• Falsificationism: falsifiability
• Historicism: paradigm
• Social constructivism: power and organization
• Postmodernism: anything goes

The demarcation problem has a long history

• wissenshaft——scientia——episteme
• The discovery of nature: the realm of immanence
• Plato: episteme vs. doxa (knowledge/opinion)
• Aristotle: episteme vs. techne (knowledge/skill)
  • “Dichotomy” and “discarding method”
• The early modern period: drawing a clear line from the Middle Ages
  • New instruments, new sciences… striving to be “innovative” in method, belief, organization, and so on. In particular, a self-consciousness about “method.”
• Late 19th to early 20th century: the success of science and the backwardness of philosophy

Does science have a distinctive method?

• The Arab world: emphasis on practical experience, mechanical devices, and mathematical calculation
• Bacon: inductive method; Descartes: universal mathematics
• Hume: launched a critique of induction, seeing no causality in past experience
• William Whewell: The History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), coined scientist (1833)
• Logical positivism: hypothetico-deductive method
• Empirical observation → induction → hypothesis → deduction → empirical prediction → confirmation
• Popper: conjectures and refutations
• Kuhn: paradigm

Does science have a unique language system?

• Aristotle: syllogism
• Euclid: axiomatic pedagogy
• Galileo, Newton: the mathematization of nature, the naturalization of mathematics…
• Leibniz’s dream: a universal symbolic language
• The rise of mathematical logic; conceptual script, formal languages
• The crisis in mathematics, disputes over the foundations of mathematics: logicism, formalism, intuitionism
• Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
• Logical positivism: the language of science (verifiability) and the language of metaphysics (emotion)
• Carnap: axiomatic systems + semantic rules, theoretical language/observation language;
• Theory-ladenness of observation; Quine: holism;

Is it only science that points to reality?

• Plato: the world of Forms
• The Middle Ages: nominalism
• Copernicus: whether mathematics is reality or a tool
• Corpuscularianism: primary qualities and secondary qualities
• Mach, Duhem, Poincaré, Bridgman: instrumentalism, conventionalism, operationalism…
• Logical positivism: anti-metaphysics (not talking about the ontological problems behind concepts)
• The second half of the 20th century: scientific realism

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.