Philosophy of Science - Part I

Philosophy of Science

**WARNING: The following review of materials for a course in the philosophy of science is necessarily long and exhaustive, replete with the confusing jargon of both the fields of philosophy and science, as well as the unique jargon that emerges when the concepts of each field of study is unleashed upon the other. It will require patience and time to wade through these waters, but for those interested in this essential inquiry, the reward will be well worth the effort—S.I.P. Blogger. 

“Getting the Course” [Just skip the first 3 paragraphs if you only want to see material review.]

Around this time last year, my brother was looking for some intellectually challenging audio material to listen to during his daily commute, which is an hour and a half one-way. We’ve both been frequent listeners to audio books of non-fiction and literature; however, our true commute-driven audio passion has been for university lectures, particularly those produced by The Teaching Company under the titular series The Great Courses. I have reviewed other courses in this series frequently on this blog. Ironically, I discovered The Teaching Company and their excellent lectures in my last semester prior to graduating with my Bachelor of Arts degree.

Of course, I quickly introduced the lectures to my brother and we have been loyal customers ever since. At the time, The Teaching Company was the only source of recorded lectures readily available. These days, there are numerous sources of such lectures: The Modern Scholar, iTunes U, podcasts, and individual university offerings such as MIT’s Open Courseware—just to name a few. I mention all of this only to explain to you that neither of us is an amateur when it comes to consumption of recorded academic lectures and coursework. So, when my brother was looking for something challenging last year, we did some research and comparison and finally settled on The Great Courses’ Philosophy of Science. The outline indicated that the course addressed topics we had both encountered but not understood or studied in previous settings: logical positivism, the problem of demarcation, Karl Popper, axioms, a theory of everything, etc.

After getting the CDs, I waited about a week and then asked him how the course was going. Now, not to bloat his ego, but we’re talking about someone who has an IQ in the 160 range and a nearly eidetic memory. “It’s rough, man,” he responded. “I hate to say it, but I’m just going to have to quit it. It’s just too abstract and complex—I find it hard to follow.” So, he did quit it. The first time either of us had shied away from a course. I was thoroughly intimidated. The course just sat around for the next year. Then, finally, about a month ago, I decided it was time to slay this beast. “Good luck, man,” said my brother, when I told him of my intention.

“Experiencing the Course”

On 8/3/2014 I completed The Great Courses series on Philosophy of Science which was presented by Professor Jeffrey L. Kasser, PhD. He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. His undergraduate degree is from Rice University and his doctoral study was completed at the University of Michigan. My completion where my brother failed was, however, a far cry from a celebratory occasion. Understanding the philosophy of science requires one to move in a circular (perhaps elliptical?) orbit around the same pertinent questions that have plagued the study from at lwawt 

At first, the 18 hours might sound slim for a full course on the philosophy of science. I can assure you it is not.

With the production style of The Teaching Company, ideas come quickly and elaboration even quicker. These lectures are planned and efficient. If you went to a university where the standard sixteen week course was 3 classes of 50 minute lectures per week, with alternating Fridays, then you remember very easily that this does not translate into the following relationship: (50 min x 3 days) + (50 min x 2 days) / 2 = a mean average of 125 minutes per week x 16 wks = 2000 min / 60 min/hr = 33.3 hours of instruction. That is quite a fantasy. I attended three state schools and five private colleges during my extended academic career and always found the same thing: At least the first 10 minutes were concerned with review of the previous lecture material. Another 15 minutes were typically used for answering student questions throughout the lecture or at the end of the course as well as various administrative matters (announcements, anecdotes, etc.) Finally, there were almost always two entire class sessions devoted to review of the midterm and final exams and two for the actual conduct of those exams.

All of this means that the typical classroom student loses (let’s be conservative) around 20 minutes of lecture/instruction time for each class—bringing the actual time down to 30 minutes per class session. Then, we must account for the total of 4 completely lost classes concerned with examinations (100 + 100 = 200). Thus, we arrive at the following calculation of actual time devoted to lecture/instruction in a typical 3 semester hour credit course: (30 min x 3 days + 30 min x 2 days)/2 wks = a mean average of 75 minutes per week x 16 wks = 1200 min – 200 min (the 4 days devoted to exams) = 1000 min / 60 min/hr = 16.7 or approximately 17 hours of lecture/instruction time in the typical course. This explains why we all had to study so hard and make outside office appointments with professors to review critical course concepts.

The course consists of 36 different thirty-minute lectures, each of which builds upon the last and is available as a set of DVDs, audio-only CD packages (our medium of choice), or audio download. Each lecture addresses a different aspect of the philosophy of science. Lecture titles include the following:

1)      Science and Philosophy, 2) Popper and the Problem of Demarcation, 3) Further Thoughts on Demarcation, 4) Einstein, Measurement, and Meaning, 5) Classical Empiricism, 6) Logical Positivism and Verifiability, 7) Logical Positivism, Science, and Meaning, 8) Holism, 9) Discovery and Justification, 10) Induction as Illegitimate, 11) Some Solutions and a New Riddle, 12) Instances and Consequences, 13) Kuhn and the Challenge of History, 14) Revolutions and Rationality, 15) Assessment of Kuhn, 16) For and Against Method, 17)     Sociology, Postmodernism, and Science Wars, 18) (How) Does Science Explain? 19) Putting the Cause Back in "Because,” 20) Probability, Pragmatics, and Unification, 21) Laws and Regularities, 22) Laws and Necessity, 23) Reduction and Progress, 24) Reduction and Physicalism, 25) New Views of Meaning and Reference, 26) Scientific Realism, 27) Success, Experience, and Explanation, 28) Realism and Naturalism, 29) Values and Objectivity, 30) Probability, 31) Bayesianism, 32) Problems with Bayesianism, 33) Entropy and Explanation, 34) Species and Reality, 35) The Elimination of Persons? and 36) Philosophy and Science.

I included this long list for a quite obvious reason: Simply looking at the titles of lectures in the course provides quite a bit of information about what you can expect as you progress through the 18 hours of philosophical and scientific material.

The first thing that stands out is that the title of the first and last lectures in the series are very similar, simply transposed. What you can deduce from this is that philosophy not only influences scientific practice but the relationship is “give and take” with science having a strong influence on developments in philosophy as well. Another glance at the titles will reveal some of the major names involved in the development of a philosophy of science: Popper, Einstein, and Kuhn. Finally, by looking at the last several lecture titles we can reasonably predict that probability, and particularly, Beysian probability figure prominently in the later trends of thinking in philosophy of science.

We often place an intrinsic faith in science seen in our acceptance and integration of technology into our daily lives. Yet we also know that science is sometimes done poorly and its theories proven to be accepted erroneously. So it’s good to think about science—how it relates to our society, culture, as well as to us individually. A course in the philosophy of science attempts to use the tools of philosophy to reflect on these things.

Furthermore, philosophy can be used to evaluate the assumptions upon which science is based. Should we accept as axiomatic the assertion that there is a material world and furthermore that we can know, that is, predict its behavior based on historical observations) anything about it?  Many scientists would obviously argue that we should and we can, based primarily on the value judgment that doing so has proven useful—that it’s pragmatic—based on the outcomes of scientific advancement.

In their recent book The Grand Design, physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow (2011) argued that philosophy of science is dead. Indeed, Dr. Kasser allows that most of the philosophy of science was done prior to the 20^th century and what remains today is largely semantics. However, a truly curious and skeptical mind should be cautious about accepting statements like Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s.

Yes, our materialist perspective has proven very useful in examining our little corner of the universe, and yes, it is the best explanation we have now. Yet, failing to keep an open mind about the possibility that we are wrong (and there is always, always the possibility that we are wrong) can lead to the kind of dogmatism in science that has been so vehemently criticized in religion. The first time this really hit home for me was (no, not when I was watching The Matrix) several years ago when I happened upon Dr. Nick Bostrom’s (2003) paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”Bostrom’s thesis is presented so clearly in the paper abstract, there could be no better summary:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

Note that the definition of posthuman is somewhat contentious. Bosterom generally refers to posthumanity in terms that it has developed the capability to exceed material and energy constraints due to technology. While this topic is a slight digression from the main focus at hand, the point I wish to make I that philosophy still has plenty to say about science and technology and their applications.

“Philosophers & Philosophy in Science”

Chances are, if you’ve ever had a course or series of courses in research methods, you will have had at least some exposure to our first prominent philosopher of science: Karl Popper. (Please resist the urge to call him John Popper, the singer/songwriter and supernatural harmonica player for Blues Traveller. Karl Popper was a teacher at the London School of Economics and he was originally from the lively intellectual city of Vienna. Popper’s unique insight was the concept of falsifiability. Inductive reasoning presented a difficulty in that no matter how many confirmatory observations a scientist makes, he or she can never prove something to be universally true, such as all ravens are black. However, according to Popper our hypothesis can be falsified. One observation of a white raven falsifies the hypothesis: All ravens are black.

This was also Popper’s answer to the demarcation problem—we’re doing science if and only if our hypotheses are falsifiable. This helps us to further distance genuine scientific inquiry from pseudoscience. Unfortunately finding this distinction continues to be a problem for those in the general public—such as people who buy “magnetic energy bracelets.”

In the concluding post, Philosophy of Science II, I will look at the following topics and how they relate to our basis of the philosophy of science: Einstein, Classical Empiricism, Logical Positivism (such as A. J. Ayer’s), Holism, Hume and Induction, Kuhn’s historical perspective, sociology of science, postmodernism, laws, reduction and physicalism, scientific realism, probability, Bayesianism, and entropy.