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Summary Philosophy of Science Lecture Notes 1-12
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- Universiteit Leiden (UL)
Philosophy of Science Lecture Notes 1-12
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Philosophy of Science NotesLecture 1
There are 3 groups of sciences:
1) Natural scin ences
2) Humanities
3) Social sciences
2 approaches to describe the world:
- Nomothetic
- Idiographic
1.Natural sciences
- Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy
- Interested in universals + underlying regularities -> phenomenon of free fall
- Abstracting away from the physics, painting a much broader account of free fall throughout
the universe.
- Zooming out from individual events to consider classes of events
Its ways of zooming out: mathematization, abstraction, idealization
- Physical knowledge is:
Uniform, simple, concise, contains of powerful formats
a. Laws of Nature
b. Scientific theories
c. Mathematical methods
Universal regularities
2. Humanities
- History, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies
- Historical particularity: every event and context is unique
- Identify periods (renaissance) but then ZOOM IN past these categories
- Draws in the context
- Mistrust of generalization and idealization of particulars: intimate knowledge, little or no use
of scientific laws
- Main output: interpretations, acts, texts, artworks, often embedded in theoretical
frameworks
- Empathy used in interpretations: Reconstruct the historical actor’s world of experiences and
meanings
- Conceptualizing differences
- Using concepts of nomothetic & idiographic approach
3. Social sciences
- Sociology, political science, economics, psychology
- Concerns with studying: human agents and institutions, forms of behaviour, rationality,
rituals, cultures
- Economics
a. Nomothetic disciplines
b. Predominantly mathematical investigation of underlying phenomena
, - Cultural anthropology, political theory
a. Idiographic disciplines.
b. Produce interpretations and describe meanings.
Nomothetic vs. idiographic approach
Nomothetic approach:
- Generalize: universalizing a general structure
- Explain outcomes as following from general rules and patterns
- Identifying regularities in the world
- Formulating generalizations and laws to describe these regularities
- Deriving explanations of observed outcomes from these generalizations + laws
- Typical of the natural sciences
- General features describe: general scientific laws
- Unity instead of diversity
+ -
- Identify similarities/structures in - Erase specificity of outcomes
diverse cases - Reductive, positivistic, mechanistic
- Yield general knowledge
- Yield economical knowledge
Idiographic approach
- Specify: to shy away from generalization
- Understand the meaning of unique, contingent and often subjective outcomes
- Tries to understand events
- Relishes the differences
+ -
- Reveals differences between - Blind to general patterns/factors
similar cases that constrain outcomes -> not
- Yield detailed, context-sensitive interested in general unity
knowledge underlying in those patterns
Lecture 2
Propositional knowledge: knowledge expressed in the form of statements
To have knowledge is identical to having justified true belief, if knowledge is justified true belief.
Epistemology: science that’s studies the system of knowledge
Three forms of knowledge:
1) Knowledge by acquaintance
When you know something or someone. Example: I know The Hague
Knowing you’re getting around with something.
2) ‘’How to’’ knowledge (skilled knowledge)
,Knowing how to ride a bicycle. Test knowledge: picked up by doing, trying rather than formalized
knowledge.
3 propositional knowledge
The formula ‘’I know that P’’ P = a proposition ‘’ I know that it is raining’’ that reinforces it status.
You are claiming to know that P is the following knowledge.
Propositional knowledge
- Most sophisticated of knowledge: knowledge of facts
- Important in science, logical reasoning, arguments
- Tested on it
- Anyone can claim to have propositional knowledge
Examples
- Knowledge of my bodily sensations
‘’ I know that I feel pain in my knee’’
- Empirical knowledge, that you experienced (also memory knowledge)
- Knowledge of objects that I can, but do not currently
- Knowledge of objects that I currently perceive
- Knowledge of past events that I have experienced
- Knowledge of past events outside my experience (historical events, dinosaurs)
- Knowledge of future events ( I know that night will fall)
- Knowledge of non-perceivable facts (discovering, build upon a couple of events ‘’I know that
photons have zero rest mass’’)
- Knowledge about mathematical facts
- Knowledge about conceptual relations ( I know that bachelors are unmarried men)
What is knowledge?
JTB account of knowledge: Knowledge is Justified True Belief
- Stems from in the dialogue theaetus from Plato
- The JTB account tells us what conditions must be fulfilled for ‘’A knows that P’’ to hold
A is a person; P is a proposition
JTB account of knowledge:
- A knows that P, validly, if and only if:
1) P is true
2) A believes that P
3) A is justified in believing that P
- If all conditions hold, then A knows that P
If one of 1> of these condition fail to hold, then this is not a case of knowledge
Conditions
Condition 1
- ‘’P is true’’
Condition 1 hinges on whether P is true, not whether we are aware that it is true.
- Purpose of the JTB account stipulate when ‘’A knows that P’’ .. not to make it easy for us to
gain knowledge and how we should do that
- Because of condition 1, saying that A knows that P entails that P is true
If P is untrue, no-one can know that P!
, Condition 2 and 3
- ‘’A believes that P’’
This establishes that knowledge is a mental state
You can’t know that P if you don’t believe that P. Believing that P is a necessary condition
- ‘’A is justified in believing that P’’
a. To be justified is to have good grounds for holding a belief
b. The grounds are weaker than certainty, but necessary to be stronger than chance
Empirical evidence is a good pointer for justification.
c. Purpose: to rule out lucky guesses as cases of knowledge
If there’s no ground/evidence/justification for the belief it’s a lucky guess
Functions of the JTB account
- The JTB account
a. Answers what is knowledge
b. Stipulates what circumstances have to obtain for ‘’A knows that P’’ to apply
c. Spells out how difficult it is to attain knowledge
d. Goes some way to telling us how to recognize cases of knowledge
- But the JTB account appeals to the concept ‘’truth’’ we turn to this now
How to use the concept of ‘’truth’’
How you should use the concept of truth. instructions
Truth is a property, and it can be pertained for propositions ‘’My name is Soraya, Today is Tuesday’’
- Truth is a property only of propositions
a… and of systems of propositions, such as scientific theories
truth is not a property of facts: facts just are or are not. -> ‘’facts are true’’ you can only say
that propositions are true or not true
- Other components of knowledge have success predicates of their own.
Examples: concepts are adequate, arguments are valid (those are no propositions so you
can’t say that it is true/untrue.)
What is truth?
- The ‘’correspondence theory’’ of truth offers an answer to this question
It says that truth amounts to correspondence to the facts
Is a matter of correspondence with the facts
Correspondence theory of truth
- Makes a connection between content of propositions and facts on the other hand
- A statement is true if an only if there is a fact corresponding to it
- Example
The statement ‘’snow is white’’ (content of the statement)is true if and only if snow is white
(fact).
- This is the most influential account of truth in philosophy
Bertrand Russel advocated it in the 1910s.
Bertrand Russel 1872-1970
- Public intellectual
- One of founders of analytic philosophy (explicating concepts)
- Went to prison for pacifism in ww1
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