This undergraduate textbook introduces some fundamental issues in philosophy of science for students of philosophy and science students. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 deals with knowledge and values. Chap. 1 presents the classical conception of knowledge as initiated by the ancient Greeks and elaborated during the development of science, introducing the central concepts of truth, belief and justification. Aspects of the quest for objectivity are taken up in the following two chapters. Moral issues are broached in (...) Chap. 4, which discusses some aspects of the use and abuse of science, taking up the responsibilities of scientists in properly conducting their business and decision-makers in their concerns with the import of science for society. Part 2 contrasts the view of scientific progress as the rejecting of old hypotheses and theories and replacing them with new ones, represented by Karl Popper, with the conception of progress as accumulating knowledge, saving as much as possible from older theories, represented by Pierre Duhem. A concluding chapter defends the natural attitude of taking the theories of modern science to be literally true, i.e. realism, in the face of arguments drawn partly from the history of scientific progress in criticism of this stance. (shrink)

The “story behind the story” of the genesis of this book is an involved and fascinating one. In May the Sven and Dagmar Salén Foundation decided to give a grant to Ulf Lagerqvist to permit publication of his manuscript titled The Bewildered Nobel Committee by the World Scientific Publishing Company . This decision was based on a thorough review by Torbjörn Norin, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Royal School of Technology in Stockholm and a member of the (...) board of the foundation. Unfortunately, Lagerqvist, a Professor of Biochemistry and Chairman of Medical and Physiological Chemistry at Gothenburg University, Sweden , member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, influential researcher on the metabolism of the components of the nucleic acids in the rapidly developing field of molecular biology, and an outstanding writer popularizing the history of science since his retirement , di .. (shrink)

If the decades of the forties through the sixties were dominated by discussion of Hempel's “covering law“ explication of explanation, that of the seventies was preoccupied with Salmon's “statistical relevance” conception, which emerged as the principal alternative to Hempel's enormously influential account. Readers of Wesley C. Salmon's Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, therefore, ought to find it refreshing to discover that its author has not remained content with a facile defense of his previous investigations; (...) on the contrary, Salmon offers an original account of different kinds of explications, advances additional criticisms of various alternative theories, and elaborates a novel “two-tiered“ analysis of explanation that tacitly depends upon a “two-tiered” account of homogeneity. Indeed, if the considerations that follow are correct, Salmon has not merely refined his statistical relevance account but has actually abandoned it in favor of a “causal/mechanistic“ construction. This striking development suggests that the theory of explanation is likely to remain as lively an arena of debate in the eighties as it has been in the past. (shrink)

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur—the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.Artificial intelligence has been a deceiving discipline: AI addresses those tasks that, if performed by humans, would require intelligence, but have been solved without featuring any genuine intelligence. This delusion has come, in return, with algorithmic techniques that can reliably solve many of these tasks, from game playing to pattern recognition. AI applications are a success.However, AI has not solved “what makes [us] clever, the puzzle (...) of intelligence”. Those that expect that this book brings the answer will have their hopes deceived. This book is about what does not make us clever, a restatement of Fodor’s “The mind doesn’t work that way” . Partridge swings between condescending scepticism and bitter negativism with most of what AI has become, and reaches fierce disparagement of the technological singularity visionaries.The main message of the book is that science is stil .. (shrink)

A comparative world map of scientific misconduct reveals that countries with the most rapid growth in scientific publications also have the highest retraction rate. To avoid polluting the scientific record further, these nations must urgently commit to enforcing research integrity among their academic communities.

To learn about real world phenomena, scientists have traditionally used models with clearly interpretable elements. However, modern machine learning (ML) models, while powerful predictors, lack this direct elementwise interpretability (e.g. neural network weights). Interpretable machine learning (IML) offers a solution by analyzing models holistically to derive interpretations. Yet, current IML research is focused on auditing ML models rather than leveraging them for scientific inference. Our work bridges this gap, presenting a framework for designing IML methods—termed ’property descriptors’—that illuminate (...) not just the model, but also the phenomenon it represents. We demonstrate that property descriptors, grounded in statistical learning theory, can effectively reveal relevant properties of the joint probability distribution of the observational data. We identify existing IML methods suited for scientific inference and provide a guide for developing new descriptors with quantified epistemic uncertainty. Our framework empowers scientists to harness ML models for inference, and provides directions for future IML research to support scientific understanding. (shrink)

The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation--the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically out-dated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception. Professor Salmon's theory furnishes (...) a robust argument for scientific realism akin to the argument that convinced twentieth-century physical scientists of the existence of atoms and molecules. To do justice to such notions as irreducibly statistical laws and statistical explanation, he offers a novel account of physical randomness. The transition from the "reviewed view" of scientific explanation to the causal/mechanical model requires fundamental rethinking of basic explanatory concepts. (shrink)

Kuhn’s account of scientific change is characterized by an internal tension between a naturalist vein, which is compatible with the revolutionary perspective on the historical development of science, and an aprioristic or Kantian vein which wants to secure that science is not an irrational enterprise. Kuhn himself never achieved to resolve the tension or even to deal with the terms of the problem. Michael Friedman, quite recently, provided an account which aspires to reconcile the revolutionary and the aprioristic elements (...) of the Kuhnian historiography by placing the latter in the neo-Kantian philosophical framework. In this paper, I suggest that Friedman manages to provide a convincing description of the structuration of scientific knowledge and, further, to present science as a rational enterprise. I argue that despite these virtues Friedman’s account faces a major problem with regard to the context of transcendental idealism which he is not willing to abandon. I also argue that discarding transcendental idealism in the way the philosophical perspective of John McDowell does, we can dispose of the flaws of Friedman’s account while retaining its virtues. (shrink)

The scientific world-outlook is something quite different from natural science. The word “science” in its legitimate modern usage represents both a kind of knowledge and the method of obtaining that knowledge. By “science” we may mean an objective body of facts and relationships concerning the physical world and arrived at by the scientific method of observation and reasoning—preferably quantitative observation and mathematical reasoning: thus we may say that the law of constant proportions is a part of (...) the science of chemistry. But we may also use the word science to denote that scientific method which I have just mentioned: thus I may say that science is the key to the investigation of nature—or that some inaccurate or biased piece of work is unscientific. Science, in either of these senses, does not contain any world-outlook, for it is quite impersonal. Thus science in the first sense consists of certain statements and relationships e.g.—that sulphur is yellow, that Jupiter has eight satellites, that all solutions of acids in water conduct electricity; while the scientific method indicates the manner in which from the data of our sense-impressions we can infer statements and conclusions, such as the above, which will be found to represent the phenomena correctly. But a scientific world-outlook means something different, because it is a world -outlook, the attitude of a man or woman towards the whole of that of which he or she is conscious. (shrink)

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself. In Articulating the World, Joseph Rouse argues that (...) the most pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it. (shrink)

Beginning with relativity and quantum theory, the deterministic view that has dominated and shaped Western culture for more than 2,500 years has begun to unravel, leading to the emergence of a new paradigm. This new paradigm effectively reformulates the project of science, conceiving of existence as an interpenetrating web of coevolving, cocreative relationships. By exploring Kabbalah and the new scientific paradigm within the context of shared evolutionary principles, I seek to demonstrate a viable alternative to the prevailing deterministic worldview. (...) By going beyond the limits of determinism and re–visioning existence as an evolutionary, emergent phenomenon, we can establish a new basis for an authentic dialogue between science and religion. (shrink)

“God created, Linnaeus organized.” This remark Linnaeus liked to say captures the common idea that the proper task of scientists in classification is to discover and systematize features of the world without being committed to individual perspectives, values, and interests. However, it is rarely the case that scientists passively read nature or carve nature at its joints. My thesis investigates how scientific classification is laden with values and explores its implication. I hope to temper the influence of the (...) ideal of value-free science on the discussion of natural kinds. Contrary to the blossoming scholarship in the values and science literature, there has been little discussion about the role of values in scientific classification. Defined as groupings that correspond to real divisions in nature, natural kinds are considered to exist independently from human values and interests. I demonstrate how the assumptions behind scientific classification endorse the idea of value-free science. Using case studies, I argue that incorporating social, moral, and political values can lead to the epistemic improvement of the category. If values are ineliminable from science, then the question arises, what or whose values, in what ways, can legitimately influence science? I critically examine recently developed criteria for proper uses of values in science. I advocate evaluating values in terms of epistemic benefits. The task of assessing epistemic benefits requires scrutinizing a research program’s social and historical context. Finally, the last part of this dissertation explores how values uniquely influence natural kind terms via social entrenchment. Many philosophers identify projectibility as a defining feature of natural kinds. I look at whether social and cultural practices influence projectibility. I investigate whether these practices affect which kind terms get socially entrenched. I argue that the projectibility of natural kind terms substantially depends on our norms and values. (shrink)

This work explores issues with the eliminativist formulation of ontic structural realism. An ontology that totally eliminates objects is found lacking by arguing, first, that the theoretical frameworks used to support the best arguments against an object-oriented ontology (quantum mechanics, relativity theory, quantum field theory) can be seen in every case as physical models of empty worlds, and therefore do not represent all the information that comes from science, and in particular from fundamental physics, which also includes information about local (...) interactions between objects. Secondly, by giving a critical assessment of the role of symmetries in these fundamental physical theories; and, lastly, by warning about unfounded metaphysical assumptions. An argument is made for a moderate form of structural realism instead, one in which objects play the fundamental role of representing symmetries and bearing their conserved charges, and of participating in the network of interactions observed in the world. (shrink)