edinburgh university press philosophy of science a-z mar 2007

Philosophy of Science A–Z Stathis Psillos An alphabetically arranged guide to the philosophy of science. While philosophy of science has always been an integral part of philosophy, since the beginning of the twentieth century it has developed its own structure and its fair share of technical vocabulary and problems. Philosophy of Science A–Z gives concise, accurate and illuminating accounts of key positions, concepts, arguments and figures in the philosophy of science. It aids understanding of current debates, explains their historical development and connects them with broader philosophical issues. It presupposes little prior knowledge of philosophy of science and is equally useful to the beginner, the more advanced student and the general reader. Stathis Psillos is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Athens, Greece. His book Causation and Explanation (Acumen, 2002) has received the British Society for the Philosophy of Science Presidents’ Award. He is also the author of Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (Routledge, 1999) and the editor (with Martin Curd) of the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science (forthcoming). Co v er design: River Design, Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 22 George Squar e , Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk ISBN 978 0 7486 2033 3 Stathis Psillos barcode Edinburgh Stathis Psillos PHILOSOPHY A–Z SERIES GENERAL EDITOR: OLIVER LEAMAN These thorough, authoritative yet concise alphabetical guides introduce the central concepts of the various branches of philosophy.Written by established philosophers, they cover both traditional and contemporary terminology. Features • Dedicated coverage of particular topics within philosophy • Coverage of key terms and major figures • Cross-references to related terms. Philosophy of Science A–Z Philosophy of Science A–Z P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A–Z i P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 Volumes available in the Philosophy A–Z Series Christian Philosophy A–Z, Daniel J. Hill and Randal D. Rauser Epistemology A–Z, Martijn Blaauw and Duncan Pritchard Ethics A–Z, Jonathan A. Jacobs Feminist Philosophy A–Z, Nancy McHugh Indian Philosophy A–Z, Christopher Bartley Jewish Philosophy A–Z, Aaron W. Hughes Philosophy of Language A–Z, Alessandra Tanesini Philosophy of Mind A–Z, Marina Rakova Philosophy of Religion A–Z, Patrick Quinn Forthcoming volumes Aesthetics A–Z, Fran Guter Chinese Philosophy A–Z,BoMou Islamic Philosophy A–Z, Peter Groff Political Philosophy A–Z, Jon Pike ii P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 Philosophy of Science A–Z Stathis Psillos Edinburgh University Press iii P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 To my students C  Stathis Psillos, 2007 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by TechBooks India, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2214 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 2033 3 (paperback) The right of Stathis Psillos to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund. iv P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 Contents Series Editor’s Preface vii Introduction and Acknowledgements ix Note on Notation xiii Philosophy of Science A–Z 1 Bibliography 266 v P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 vi P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 Series Editor’s Preface Science is often seen as consisting of facts and theories, but precisely how the facts relate to the theories, and what is a fact and what is a theory have long been the subject matter of philosophy. Throughout its history scientists have raised the- oretical questions that fall broadly within the purview of the philosopher, and indeed from quite early on it was not always easy to distinguish between philosophers and scientists. There has been a huge expansion of science in modern times, and the rapid development of new theories and methodologies has led to an equally rapid expansion of theoretical and especially philosophical techniques for making sense of what is taking place. One notable feature of this is the increasingly techni- cal and specialized nature of philosophy of science in recent years. As one might expect, philosophers have been obliged to replicate to a degree the complexity of science in order to de- scribe it from a conceptual point of view. It is the aim of Stathis Psillos in this book to explain the key terms of the vocabulary of contemporary philosophy of science. Readers should be able to use the book as with others in the series, to help them orient themselves through the subject, and every effort has been made to represent clearly and concisely its main features. Oliver Leaman vii P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 viii P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 Introduction and Acknowledgements Philosophy of science emerged as a distinctive part of philos- ophy in the twentieth century. Its birthplace was continental Europe, where the neat Kantian scheme of synthetic a priori principles that were supposed to be necessary for the very pos- sibility of experience (and of science, in general) clashed with the revolutionary changes within the sciences and mathemat- ics at the turn of the twentieth century. The systematic study of the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of sci- ence acquired great urgency and found its formative moment in the philosophical work of a group of radical and innovative thinkers – the logical positivists – that gathered around Moritz Schlick in Vienna in the 1920s. The central target of philosophy of science is to under- stand science as cognitive activity. Some of the central ques- tions that have arisen and thoroughly been discussed are the following. What is the aim and method of science? What makes science a rational activity? What rules, if any, govern theory-change in science? How does evidence relate to the- ory? How do scientific theories relate to the world? How are concepts formed and how are they related to observation? What is the structure and content of major scientific concepts, such as causation, explanation, laws of nature, confirma- tion, theory, experiment, model, reduction and so on? These kinds of questions were originally addressed within a formal ix [...]... INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS logico-mathematical framework Philosophy of science was taken to be a largely a priori conceptual enterprise aiming to reconstruct the language of science The naturalist turn of the 1960s challenged the privileged and foundational status of philosophy – philosophy of science was taken to be continuous with the sciences in its method and its scope The questions above did... findings of the empirical sciences, as well as the history and practice of science, were allowed to have a bearing on, perhaps even to determine, the answers to standard philosophical questions about science In the 1980s, philosophers of science started to look more systematically into the micro-structure of individual sciences The philosophies of the individual sciences have recently acquired a kind of. .. ) Philosophy of Science A–Z A A priori/a posteriori: There seem to be two ways in which the truth of a statement can be known or justified: independently of experience or on the basis of experience Statements whose truth is knowable independently of (or prior to) experience are a priori, whereas statements whose truth is knowable on the basis of experience are a posteriori On a stronger reading of. .. Fictionalism, mathematical; Frege; Mill; Models; Reality Further reading: Hale (1987) 6 PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A–Z Abstraction: The removal, in thought, of some characteristics or features or properties of an object or a system that are not relevant to the aspects of its behaviour under study In current philosophy of science, abstraction is distinguished from idealisation in that the latter involves approximation... Essays in the Philosophy 8 PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A–Z of Science (1991) and The Book of Evidence (2001) In his early work he defended a pragmatic approach to explanation He has also argued that the type of reasoning that leads to and justifies beliefs about unobservable entities is based on a mixture of explanatory considerations and some ‘independent warrant’ for the truth of the explanatory hypothesis,... centre-stage It is supposed to be a canon of rationality that agents should update their degrees of belief by conditionalising on evidence The penalty for not doing this is liability to a Dutch-book strategy: the agent can 20 PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A–Z be offered a set of bets over time such that (1) each of them taken individually will seem fair to her at the time when it is offered; but (2) taken collectively,... synthetic are those statements that are true in virtue of extralinguistic facts Though the distinction was present before Kant, he was the first to codify it Kant offered two criteria of analyticity According to the first, a subject-predicate PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A–Z 11 statement is analytic if the (meaning of the) predicate is contained in the (meaning of the) subject According to the second (broader) criterion,... criterion of analyticity They took it that analytic truths are factually empty since they have no empirical content They tied analyticity with necessity by means of their linguistic doctrine of necessity: analytic truths (and only them) are necessary Quine challenged the very possibility of 12 PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A–Z the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements He noted that the explication of. .. understanding, which characterises scientific explanation and scientific knowledge, 14 PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A–Z is tied to finding the causes of the phenomena Though both types of understanding proceed via deductive syllogism, only the latter is characteristic of science because only the latter is tied to the knowledge of causes Aristotle observed that, besides being demonstrative, explanatory arguments... characteristics of the nature under investigation His talk of forms is reminiscent of the Aristotelian substantial forms Indeed, Bacon’s was a view in transition between the Aristotelian and a more modern conception of laws of nature For he also claimed that the form of a nature is the law(s) it obeys Bacon did favour active experimentation and showed PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A–Z 17 great respect for alchemists because . Philosophy of Science A–Z Stathis Psillos An alphabetically arranged guide to the philosophy of science. While philosophy of science has always been an integral part of philosophy, . A–Z,BoMou Islamic Philosophy A–Z, Peter Groff Political Philosophy A–Z, Jon Pike ii P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007 15:21 Philosophy of Science A–Z Stathis Psillos Edinburgh University Press iii P1:. within philosophy • Coverage of key terms and major figures • Cross-references to related terms. Philosophy of Science A–Z Philosophy of Science A–Z P1: QXN EUBK028-Psillos.cls-Sabon March 1, 2007