From: mtaranto@shearson.com (Mark Taranto)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Readings in Philosophy of Science (WasRe: Once I put this book down, I could not pick it up again.
Date: 9 Oct 92 20:13:31 GMT



cb@tamarack13.timbuk (Chris Brewster) writes:
 
> Mark Taranto:
>   > >As for Kuhn -- the book is THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION.  It
>   > >isn't that Kuhn repeats himself -- it is that he uses the same word
>   > >(paradigm) to mean many different things.  I don't think much of him,
>   > >either.  I would hope that people who are put off by Kuhn do not think
>   > >him representative of the Philosophy of Science in general.  I've
>   > >liked much of what I've read in the field, other than Kuhn.
 
> Meg Worley:
>   Are you begging to be asked what you've read in the field you liked?  Very
>   well, I beg you:  Tell us what your nominees for fine books on the subject
>   are (and cheering words on Churchland's *Neurocomputational Nonsense* are
>   particularly sought).
 
> My nomination is Karl Popper: Logic of Scientific Discovery, the Open
> Universe.  This guy is good.
 
I spent a lot of time in the mid '70s studying the Philosophy of Science,
the Philosophy of Mathematics, Logic and the Philosophy of Logic.  Sadly,
I have not kept up with what has been happening lately.
 
This might appear simplistic, but the Philosophy of Science can be split
into three areas:
 
        The study of how science is done.
 
        The study of why science is done.
 
        The study of the implications of scientific discovery.
 
Kuhn seems most concerned with the HOW.  I agree with some of what has been
said about the importance of his work.  But I have two problems with him.
The first is that much of what he has to say which is good is obscured by the
fact that he is a horrible writer.  The second is more fundamental, and
has to do with the nature of scientific discovery.  I just don't buy his
argument that Science is a series of revolutions where one theory completely
overthrows another.  Sure there is something to it, but there is also something
to the idea that scientific discovery is evolutionary in nature.
 
It makes nice copy, for example, to say that Einstein came along & completely
threw over the Newtonian structure (or paradigm -- as Kuhn would call it),
replacing it with a new one.  But the fact is that slight problems had been
noticed before.  The jump to relativity wasn't completely evolutionary, but
the time was ripe for Einstein, and the jump was not the revolutionary one
which Kuhn would have us believe.
 
I recently posted something from HOWARDS END about the search for truth:
 
        No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything.
        It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm,
        and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the
        outset is to ensure sterility.
 
Kuhn wants to put truth at the extreme.  Still -- there is much that can
be gained from Kuhn.
 
Who would I suggest instead?  Chris thinks Popper, and I agree that he
is better, and worth reading.  So is Quine, or the people who formed
The Minnesota Center for the Study of the Philosophy of Science (Grover
and Feigl).
 
But I would go for Norwood Hanson.  Not only are his ideas about how science
is done reasonable, but he is also a damn good writer.
 
It is also interesting to go back and read the words of the people who really
did the important work in science, to see what they say about how it is
done.  Newton's introduction to THE PRINCIPIA is interesting, as is Einstein's
account in THE EVOLUTION OF PHYSICS (written with L. Infeld).
 
Some of this spills over into the Philosophy of Mathematics, the Philosophy
of Logic and the Philosophy of Language (and all of it springe from
epistomology).
 
The people in these fields who might be of interest include Bertrand Russell,
Frege, Godel, Kripke, Wittgenstein, Nelson Goodman . . . .
 
Some people are impressed with Strawson and Ayer.  While each did good work,
there are major flaws in Strawson's well known paper on Russell's "On Denoting"
(I think it is called "On Referring").  Ayers LANGUAGE, TRUTH, AND LOGIC struck
me as a book where he relies on proof by definition.  For example, he spends
a lot of time trying to show that metaphysics is dead.  He does this by
defining metaphysics in a narrow way.  I wasn't won over.
 
Mark