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]

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.