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Philosophy of Science - Summary, Tilburg University (7,5)

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Philosophy of Science

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Tilburg University (UVT)

A summary of the course Philosophy of Science. The summary consists of the lectures given by the two professors. If you have any questions, you can message me :)

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Lecture 1
What is philosophy of science?
= this philosophical (critical) reflection on what science is, does, and how it generates knowledge

Why philosophy of science for psychologists?
 Psychology is a science
o Knowledge – why?
o Skills
 Is psychology a science?
 Is it justified that science has the monopoly on acquiring knowledge?
o Character
 Building of character

Better psychologists, better scientists, better citizens

Understanding society  advancing society

Epistemology
 = theory of knowledge
 Philosophy of science began with epistemology
 Epistemology asks three questions
o What is knowledge
o How can we justify that knowledge
o What is the source of knowledge
 Traditionally there are two views
o Rationalism = real knowledge is derive from the ratio, reason
o Empiricism = real knowledge comes from sensory experience

Is it possible to have real knowledge?
 Rationalism and empiricism say yes

What are we certain of?

Skepticism
 Socrates in the market square
 Ask difficult questions
o Always question about if you really know something  no
 Skepticism = perhaps the conclusion must even bet that we do not know anything at all and
never will
 Socrates is convicted

Rationalism
 General claim: real knowledge stems from our reason (= ration)
 Associated claim: there is innate knowledge (= nativism)
 Different views on rationalism
o Plato, Descartes etc.

Plato
 The source of knowledge is our reason
 To learn is to remember (= anamnesis)

,  There is no new knowledge – you do not learn anything
 Why did he claim this?
o Reincarnation
o Plato believed that before you were born, you had all real knowledge and you lost
that knowledge when you were born
 Using your ratio to recall the knowledge
 Plato made distinction: Episteme vs doxa
o Episteme = knowledge of how the things are
o Doxa = opinion about how the things are
 Plato: knowledge = justified and true belief
o Justification – You can explain how you know it is true
 Plato responds to Heraclitus
o Panta rhei = everything is a constant flux
o If in our world (= the world we perceive with our senses) everything changes
constantly, then nothing is
o And that means we can only acquire doxa, not episteme
o And that would amount to skepticism but Plato did not want that
 Plato’s allegory of the cave
o Ideas/forms exist apart from us in a world of ideas/forms
o Those ideas do not change
o The soul is akin to those ideas
o Acquiring knowledge is to remember these ideas – anamnesis
 Meno – book
o How do you double the surface of this square? Asking Meno the slave
o First Meno 4 doubles the surface
o Zeus (Plato) then makes another square which is double the surface and Meno say
now I remember how to double the surface - anamnesis
o This is obviously unacceptable: Socrates puts the slave of Meno words in the mouth
o This kind of rationalism is very extreme
o Descartes had a weaker version

Empiricism
 General claim: empiricists believe that the source of knowledge is the experience gained
through sensory perception
 This is a common sense view: if you want to know how something is, you have to look
 The general claim thus is that you gain knowledge from the experiences you have
 Greek: empeira
 Latin: experienta
 Associated claim: if all knowledge comes from experience via perception, there is no innate
knowledge
 There is a difference between empiricist and empirical
o ‘empiricist’ refers to empiricism, the opposite of rationalist
o ‘empirical’ refers to scientific method, which uses observational of experimental data
to infer conclusion about the world
 Empirical evidence is gained through observations or experiments
 Empirical is the opposite of purely hypothetical

,Aristotle
 Rejected Plato’s two-world theory – there is only one world and that is the one we can
perceive with our sense
 This also implies a rejection of innate ideas: man is a tabula rosa (= a blank wax tablet)
 Peripatetic principle
o Aristotle is the founder of the lyceum, where he taught while walking
o Hence Aquinas later called the empiricist principle peripatetic principle:
 Nil est in intellectu quod non prius in sensu fuerit
 Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses
 The key to Aristotle’s epistemology is indeed sensory perception
 In this sense we can rightly call Aristotle an empiricist
 But he does have some rationalist elements in his ‘empiricist’ epistemology
 Universal concepts
o According to Plato the general idea chair is an entity existing in the world of ideas
o Aristotle rejects this
o Aristotle accepts only the existence of concrete, individual things (the individual
chair)
o How then do we arrive at a universal, abstract concept (thus the concept ‘chair’ that
applies to all individual chairs)?
 Induction
o Aristotle called the empirical procedure by which we move from the concrete to the
universal induction
o Take an abstract, general statement like ‘all humans are mortal’
o What you perceive are just real people, and you can establish that they are mortal
o Induction is concluding based on observation of some cases (but not all)
o Problem
 Are you sure that all humans are mortal?
 No: on the basis of observation alone one cannot tell that the abstract
general proposition ‘all humans are mortal’ is true – it’s just a correlation
 Yet Aristotle did believe that ‘all humans are mortal’ was necessarily true
 Aristotle’s solution
o Induction is therefore only a first step
o There is need for a second step: through our unfailing intellectual capacity of the
mind (nous) we can understand that abstractions like ‘all humans are mortal’ are
necessary truths
o This is intuitive induction (= understanding)
o But that is a rationalistic element in his epistemology
o When Aristotle had found a general statement, he was not very critical towards that
statement
o That is understandable: he thought he had established via intuitive induction that the
statement was true

The role of Aristotle in the late middle ages
 In the middle ages, the catholic church had a lot of power
 Issues relating to knowledge and reality were resolved either by quoting the bible or by
quoting Aristotle
 Two paths to the truth
o Revelation
o To use your good sense (and if anyone did, that was surely the pagan Aristotle)
 Thomas Aquinas
o Aquinas tried to unite Christian teaching with the pagan ideas of Aristotle

, o Example:
 Aristotle had a theory about matter and form
 Matter is potentially something
 The shape makes something that actual thing
 This is a process of creation and decay
o Aquinas argued that god has put this process of creation and decay in motion
o Aristotle’s unmoved mover (= the first cause)
 implication of the coupling of Aristotle to the bible
o one could not just simply disagree with Aristotle
o for what Aristotle had said was the truth that was in the bible
o so attacking Aristotle implied attacking the Bible
 experiments
o in modern science we perform experiments to learn about the natural world
o Aristotle did no experiments because he thought that they would not teach us
anything about the natural world
 Why did Aristotle hold these views?
o Aristotle wanted to acquire knowledge about the natural world
o He already had a classification of plant and animals
o He used the method of observation
o By manipulation we make the world go against the natural ways of things and as such
we do not learn anything about the natural world
 In the middle ages both philosophy and science (there was no difference back then) came
more or less to a halt

Lecture 2
Francis Bacon’s new method
 Bacon had no problem with questioning the Aristotelian worldview
 Against Aristotle, Bacon argued that we should use experiments to learn about the natural
world
 The new method
o We need to abandon our epistemic prejudices
 People have persistent epistemological biases
 Bacon speaks of idols or false conceptions
 These stand in the way of acquiring knowledge
 So we need to be wary not to use these prejudices
 It involves the following idols
 Idols of the tribe
o Prejudices we have as humans
o We tend to make typical human mistakes
o Bacon
 Seeing order and regularity where there is none
 The search for confirmation and ignoring refutations
of what you believe
 We see the sun go down (but that is not what
happens)
 Sailors that trust in the power of prayer
 Idols of the cave
o Prejudices that we have because we belong to a particular
group

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