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Philosophy of Science Book, Articles and Lecture Summary
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Summaries to week 1-2 of Philosophy of Science. Contains notes to the book chapters, articles and lectures
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Philosophy of Science and Methodology SummaryWeek 1
Lecture 1 Content:
1. Book: Introduction: Between Skepticism and Scientism (pp. 11 - 14)
- According to scientism, science is vastly superior to all other attempts at securing knowledge:
its laws provide certainty.
- Epoch in which we live is indeed an age of certainty
- Will we ever know anything at all with absolute certainty?
- What we Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of
Certainty, scientists and philosophers confess what they take to be true without having proof
for it.
- There is a lot that we do not know, and most likely will never know. Rather than a perfect mirror,
the mind might be a more like a ‘crooked mirror’ or ‘an enchanted glass, full of superstition and
imposture.
- Our rational and sensory capacities are far from perfect. We are prone to making mistakes.
- These skeptics - or post-modernists and relativists as they are now called - have attacked
science for monopolising truth.
- Contemporary science is the product of failed ideologies deeply rooted in the Scienti c
Revolution and the Enlightenment.
- Science is much closer to myth than a scienti c philosophy to admit.
- A carnival of approaches should be allowed.
- Anything goes!
- We explore, in a historical vein, the philosophy of science in general with a special emphasis on
the sciences of economics, psychology and sociology.
- What are the sources of knowledge?
- What is science and how does it di er from non-science?
- If one thing is certain by the end of Part II, it is that this is not the age of certainty.
- Is there really no dividing line between scienti c and non-scienti c approaches to reality.
- This naturalistic position starts from the premises that reality is complex, that exploring humans
are fallible and that this complexity and fallibility stand in our way in our quest for certainty. And
yet we will reject the postmodernists’ case and argue that the methods of science provide the
best way to x our ‘webs of beliefs’.
- The future lies, we argue, in integrating various perspectives, models, theories, and concepts.
2. Additional Text: Watt, J. H. & van den Berg, S. (2002). The Nature and Utility of Scienti c
Theory. In Research Methods for Communication Science (pp.1-10).
- Curiosity = human consciousness.
- We wonder about the way that things work and we speculate about the causes of interesting
events.
- In many cases, our observations of events have provided the evidence that forms the basis of
our explanations.
Naive Science and Theory
- Since we are not acting with awareness of the rules of science, we’ll call our activities naive
science.
- As naive scientists, we try to understand some interesting situation in a way that will predict or
explain its operation. This understanding is a kind of theory.
- We’ll use the term to mean a simpli ed explanation of reality
A theory is a set of interrelated constructs (concepts), de nitions, and propositions that present a
systematic view of phenomena by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of
explaining and predicting the phenomena.
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, - First of all, the purpose of theory is to explain and predict events. If we can predict an event, we
may be able to avoid the danger it poses, or to pro t from its occurrence.
- Controlling it.
- A theory achieves prediction and explanation by stating relationships between concepts which
are de ned as variables.
- So what are concepts or constructs? They are the mental image of the thing which varies.
- “Fire” is the concept, while “Size of Fire” is the variable based on the concept.
- Humans, as naive scientists, just naturally try to explain and predict ordinary events in their
world. We are uncomfortable with unexplained phenomena, and we have a very basic drive to
explain things
- Causal relationship: it’s a speci c condition of a variable
- But humans are also often somewhat sloppy in their reasoning, and sometimes create incor-
rect naive theories.
- To overcome this, the scienti c method has evolved as a highly formalized, systematic and
controlled version of the innate human activity of collecting and summarizing information into
naive theories.
Naive Inquiry Versus Scienti c Method
The main thing which di erentiates between science and naive inquiry is the awareness that our
observations and reasoning are error-prone, and that we must employ strategies that help us
guard against committing error. Kerlinger (1986) emphasizes ve points on which science and na-
ive inquiry di er. These points, which are summarized below, o er striking illustrations of the
di erences between formalized, systematic, and controlled inquiry (“science”) and naive inquiry.
The Development of Theories
A theory presents us with an explanation of a phenomenon: it consists minimally of a concept
considered to be a cause, a concept considered to be an e ect, and a statement about how and
why the two should be related. More formally, a theory is a set of two or more concepts
interrelated by one or more hypothetical or theoretical propositions. A theory represents a
statement about what might logically be happening.
- The scientist will systematically select all the concepts which can be reasonably thought to be
possible causes of a phenomenon.
- Eliminate from the theory all other concepts considered to be irrelevant.
- Until the total set of available concepts has been reduced to those that are determined by the
scientist to be relevant to the problem.
- The scientist relies on the previous work of others to justify using the concepts.
- Previous researchers may have overlooked the “real” cause.
- The naive scientist, on the other hand, does not go through this process of systematically re-
viewing the work of others, and of considering alternative concepts. Rather, guided by his
biases or convictions, he may select a concept as a cause simply because he nds it to be
appealing. Similarly, a naive scientist may latch onto a concept as being a possible cause
simply because she would like it to be the cause, not necessarily because there is a logical
reason for it to be so.
- The di erence is this: the naive scientist will probably consider her personal observations to be
su cient to construct her completed theory. For the true scientist, however, personal
observations are only a preliminary step in the process of scienti c investigation.
- The naive scientist selects concepts based on their appeal rather than their relevance.
The Testing of Theories
- All of us tend to select certain evidence because it is consistent with our preconceptions, and
to ignore other evidence because it is not. This is basic human psychology, but it is also bad
science, and we must guard against it.
- He insists on obtaining objective evidence before making judgments about the probable truth
or falsehood of the theory. Objective means that the evidence can be collected by any other
person (the evidence is reproducible).
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