koganbot | What is philosophy of science supposed to achieve?

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.

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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.

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...

with 'pure utility' criteria like this how do you view the theoretical science (it is still science) that has yet to pay off?

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.

Now THIS interests me as a reason for the paradigm idea!

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.

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

What is philosophy of science supposed to achieve?

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