PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: How Do We Learn About the World In The Face of Uncertainty and Error? (Questions to Ask) FLOW CHART overview of Philosophy of Science movements 1930-today. (from D. Mayo 6334 slides)

1. D. Mayo
PHILOSOPHY:
Understand and Justify Human Knowledge About the World
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE:
How Do We Learn About the World In The Face of Uncertainty and Error?
 Is there a scientific method?
 How do we obtain good evidence?
 How do we make reliable inferences from evidence?
 What makes an inquiry “scientific” or rational?
 Is there scientific progress?
Problems with answers from logic empiricist philosophers of science:
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Is there a scientific method?
The “logics” for science are oversimple, open to paradoxes
Standard canons are violated in actual science
Scientific methods change with changing aims, values, technologies, societies
How do we obtain good evidence?
 empirical data are uncertain, finite, probabilistic
 data are not just “given”, they have to be interpreted introducing biases, theory-ladenness, value-ladenness
(scientific, social, ethical, economic)
How do we make reliable inferences from evidence?
 Inductivist: cannot justify “induction”
 logics of induction failed
 Falsificationist: deduction won’t teach anything new; cannot pinpoint blame for a failed prediction
What makes an inquiry “scientific” or rational?
 None of the philosophical attempts to erect a demarcation for science seem to work.
Is there scientific progress?
 no account of cumulative growth of knowledge
 old “paradigms” are swept away by new ones which are “incommensurable” with the old

2. D. Mayo
PHILOSOPHY:
Understand and Justify Human Knowledge About the World
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE:
How Do We Learn About the World In The Face of Uncertainty and
Error?
LOGICAL EMPIRICIST ATTEMPTS: 1930-60
“Armchair Philosophy of Science”
Inductive Logics: C(h,e)
Logic of Falsification
Carnap
Popper
Problems, Paradoxes
“Historicism in Philosophy
of Science”
KUHN (1962)
CRISIS IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
POST-POSITIVISM
STS/ HPS
pessimistic
optimistic
New Models of Rationality
“naturalistic turn”
Relativism
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THEORY CHANGE
PostAdequate Theories of
modernism MOVEMENT-1970s, 80s
Induction, Testing, &
Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan
anarchy
“Rational Reconstruction” Decision-Making
dadaism
BAYESIANS
irrationality
Inference as updating degrees of
social
belief
constructivism Sc
New Experimentalist Turn 1980s,1990s
Error Statistical Philosophy:
Mayo 1996?