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 scope that leaves out vast hunks of the the universe. Turns out, according to Dave, that sitcom The Big Bang Theory beat me to the punch (click link to find out how).

So anyway, my reply to meserach is that t.A.T.u. and the Veronicas are in the universe, and as of yet physics, chemistry, biology, paleontology etc. have had nothing interesting to say about them or anything like them.* So it would seem that the hard sciences' ways of thinking about that part of the universe (the t.A.T.u.-Veronica's part) have no practical results whatsoever, in fact don't exist. It could be legitimate for meserach to claim that, e.g., physics does a better job of talking about electrons than music critics do of talking about t.A.T.u. and the Veronicas, but I don't know what to do with that information: I don't know if there would be any benefit if we could talk about t.A.T.u. and the Veronicas with the precision etc. that physicists talk about electrons, and even if there would be a benefit, I have no clue how to achieve that precision, or even what it would be.

This isn't a criticism of the sciences at all, but it accentuates the question I've been bringing up in my last couple of posts: just what is philosophy of science (or philosophy overall) for? What's it supposed to achieve?

*Well, I'm sure that the physical acoustics people could have something to say, but it probably couldn't be extended to most of the questions or ideas I'd have about t.A.T.u. or the Veronicas. And biological research into the brain may well have something to say about the appeal of music, at some point, but again I don't see where that would have an impact on anything I'd have to say about them, though of course I won't know until it happens.

Comments

[meserach.livejournal.com]

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.

The point of physics is engineering, just as the point of biology is stuff like medicine.

The point of a precision science of music would be to make better music! And your last paragraph does indeed hint at possible pathways as to how one could do so in the future.

But even a precision science of music criticism could help make better music - I'm sure most music critics would agree, or at least would hope, that in some way good music criticism would lead to better music being made.

What would a more "scientific" music criticism look like? Simply, attention to the production of theories, the making of predictions based on said theories, carrying out experiments based on said predictions, and then the modification of theory based on the results of experiment.

In short, music criticism that directly informs music practice.

I would contend that something very like this actually goes on already! You could even view genres as Kuhnian paradigms, perhaps....

[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?

I have a question for you: when I write something like, "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,'" why isn't your response something like, "Ah, I didn't know this; perhaps Kuhn's ideas about paradigms, and his reasons for introducing them, aren't what I'd previously thought, and are more interesting; I want to know more"?

[meserach.livejournal.com]

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 slightest, to my mind (I realize that this is a cryptic comment), so you don't have to argue in favor of facts or truth being independent of any and all theory in order to assert that there can be means for comparing paradigms and choosing the best one. But the answer to your question "What's the big deal?" is that it's a different deal. Which is to say that to speak of "means of" and "basis for" choosing are misleading if they imply a procedure for choosing between paradigms. And "choosing between paradigms" misses the point if what you mean is "Newtonian physics, fully formed" versus "Aristotelian physics." By the time you get to Newton's laws, any intellectuals who understand them and aren't committed to a literal interpretation of the Bible are going to more or less accept them (even if they think the laws are incomplete and need further explaining, as the Cartesians did). But this doesn't tell us how you get to Newton in the first place. And that's what, for me, is a big deal: an account of how in the sciences you get from old ideas to new. Think of Kuhn as like Darwin. Lots of intellectuals of Darwin's day believed in evolution, but what Darwin did was to come up with an explanation of how evolution happens. So what Kuhn is wanting to explain is how fruitful ideas develop before they bear the fruit we now know them for (so what early fruit they bore, as it were), and how this variety of ideas does result in the selection of good ones - new paradigms - in the way that it doesn't outside the hard sciences. I don't know much about Popper or the logical positivists who preceded him, but I don't think they were even asking these questions, maybe because they were philosophers but unlike Kuhn weren't also historians.

There are other big deals about Kuhn too, and what I've written here is too brief to make much sense, but I hope I'm whetting your appetite. If Kuhn's model is good, he's done what no one before him has done successfully, which is to create a working model for how culture develops, albeit only one area of culture, the hard sciences.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

What was at issue was primarily the status of infinity as a concept, a tool and a "thing": was it OK to be using it the way it was being used, when it had no real-world signified; if not, what could be done to "rescue" it. There were three schools as I recall: the foundationalist, the formalists and the intuitionists. The foundationalists wanted to rebuild all mathematics in terms of logic (which they considered unimpeachable); and set off to do so (and failed, between the work of Russell&Whitehead and Gödel it was discovered that not even arithmetic could be re-expressed in purely logical terms, iun sense the required).

The formalists (led by David Hilbert) said that it didn't matter: as long as mathematical systems were internally consistent, they were worthy of study.

The intuitionists (led by Brouwer) banished a variety types of types on infinity from a series of key proofs and built alternative tools to reach the proofs by other means.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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 word "primarily" is an exaggeration here. I haven't read Popper, but I'd had the impression that he was interested in induction and falsification for their own sake, not merely so that he could say, "Oh, what you guys are doing isn't science." My guess is that the emphasis on falsification made science seem very heroic, constantly challenging itself. Whereas for Kuhn, paradigms (in the broad sense) allow the practitioners of a science not to spend time testing basic assumptions but to take a whole shitload for granted, rather dogmatically, and to move the discipline along until the vessel cracks, at which point either the vessel repairs itself or alternative shitloads of assumptions are put forth and new paradigms are born.

Kuhn wasn't at all interested in either patrolling borders or breaking them down. I got the impression he thought the sciences could take care of themselves, and I think he was surprised by the impact Structure had (and thought a lot of the impact was based on misunderstanding). Structure presented a different view of how science worked (and how scientists worked), one different from empiricism, and, intertwined with this, developed a model for how sciences evolve.

I'd say that Structure gets rid of the ontological division between science and nonscience, so the criterion stops being "You're a science if you do things scientifically," i.e. use a particular method; but Structure actually increases the sense (or my sense) of sociological distance between the sciences and the nonsciences, since the latter can't simply start acting more "scientific"; they've got to get everybody on the same page, which turns out to be very difficult, since concepts and assumptions worth agreeing on prove hard to come by.

[meserach.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

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.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

Frank, have you read any of Ian Hacking's stuff - I get the vague feeling you'd get something out of it if not. He's very good (IMO) on making Foucault's ideas work. (well i could never stand Foucault's [translated] prose style, so it kind of got in the way of working out what the hell he was on about)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Hacking

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Here's something I ran across at work: this guy is using philosophy of science to talk about whether we should (or could) research and effectively implement geoengineering to combat climate change.