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Summary Detailed notes on all mandatory readings for Theory of Science

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Theory of science

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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)

Detailed notes on all required readings for the Theory of Science course. They can be a real pain, so this document should make your studying way easier. The writer scored an 8.5.

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Week 1:

The removal of Pluto from planets and homosexuality from psychiatric disorders

Introduction:

 The authors believe that Pluto should not have been classed a planet and that
homosexuality should not have been labelled a psychiatric disorder, and that the
decisions to rec-classify them were correct.
 Pluto’s existence and location was predicted by Lowell based on discrepancies
between observed and predicted orbit for Uranus. In their calculations, they plugged
in an incorrect size for Neptune’s mass.
 The inclusion of homosexuality in psychiatric taxonomies was initially related to the
scientifically discredited assumptions of degeneration theory – which began as a
theological concept but was naturalized following the introduction of
evolutionary theories at mid-century.
 A primary advocate of the view that homosexuality and masturbation were signs of
psychic decline was Richard Von Kraft-Ebing. An opponent of the medicalization of
homosexuality was Sigmund Freud. His theories replaced those of Richard for most
psychiatrists.
 A similarity between both cases was that many people became committed to the
classifications due to respect for tradition and the role that the classification played in
ongoing research programs.

The decision on Pluto: Not a planet

 The discovery of Eris precipitated the reclassification of Pluto

The decision on homosexuality: Not a psychiatric disorder

 In psychiatry, commitment to a tradition preceded the classification, primarily
because cultural, religious and legal prohibitions against homosexuality predated the
birth of modern psychiatry.
 2 considerations prompted psychiatrists to change their mind about homosexuality;
1. The protestors highlighted cases of social discrimination based on sexual
orientation that were justified by claims that homosexuality was a mental
disorder.
2. Information gained from personal encounter with homosexuals, especially gay
psychiatrists.
 Spitzer came to the conclusion that homosexuality was different from other disorders.
He observed that it was not accompanied by distress or social impairment.

Opposition after the decision:

 One of the interesting differences between the cases in astronomy and psychiatry is
that the official process for deciding an issue in psychiatry does not include a vote of
the membership. Most of the authority is ceded to committees of experts.

Solving classification problems by proposing definitions:

,  In the astronomy and homosexuality problems, they were brought to closure by a
proposed definition and agreement about how the definition was to be applied.
 This is more evident in the case of Pluto, where developing a definition was the
explicit problem. In the case of homosexuality, Spitzer’s compromise was also a
definition, namely that a psychiatric disorder involves distress, social occupational
dysfunction, or both.
 Once psychiatrists accepted the scientific data indicating that many cases of
homosexuality involve neither subjective distress nor dysfunction, and accepted
Spitzer’s definition of disorder, they were able to agree on disclassification in spite of
having different opinions about the desirability of variation in sexual orientation.
Couldn’t astronomers have decided
 An important difference between planetary astronomy and psychiatry is that,
objectively speaking, there are typically fewer consequences if astronomers decide to
leave a classificatory dilemma unsettled. Psychiatrists and psychologists do not
always have that luxury

Scientific authority:

 Psychiatrists held different background assumptions about the validity of clinical
experience versus empirical research. In each case, the groups in opposition were
composed of people from different research traditions.
 In astronomy it was the geophysicists versus the dynamicists while in psychiatry it
was practicing psychoanalysts versus research oriented academics.
 The role of procedure suggests that scientific authority does not lie with individual
scientists, but with scientific communities - specifically in the publicly available
writings produced by the communities over time

The role of the communities and experts:

 It is important to emphasize that rather than voting itself, what actually upset the
critics in the Pluto and homosexuality controversies was that their belief that the
wrong communities had been ceded authority. In astronomy, the geophysicists lost
out to the dynamicists. In psychiatry, the old guard psychoanalysts lost out to
younger, empirically-minded researchers.
 In both astronomy and psychiatry, it was agreed that committee members should have
knowledge and experience with respect to the classification issues under
consideration, but the kind of knowledge they should possess was subject to debate
 Even if psychiatry is to be considered an immature science, one shouldn’t conclude
that the complicated dynamics of developing psychiatric classifications are solely
contingent on either its immaturity or the unusual partisanship of its members.
 Any scientific discipline, no matter how well-developed, can be subject to such
complications as long as;
1. it relies on abstract constructs that classify a heterogeneous group as a single
kind,
2. the classification problems have psychological, social or economic
significance
3. the current classification does not satisfactorily account for all the data.

What is this thing called science?

,Chapter 1: Science as knowledge derived from the facts of experience

A widely held commonsense view of science:

 science is to be based on what we can see, hear and touch rather than on personal
opinions
 It is claimed that science was born in the 17th century
 Two schools of thought that involve attempts to formalize what I have called a
common view of science, that scientific knowledge is derived from the fact, are the
empiricists and the positivists.
 The British empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held that all
knowledge should be derived from ideas implanted in the mind by way of sense
perception. The positivists had a somewhat broader and less psychologically
orientated view of what facts amount to, but shared the view of the empiricists that
knowledge should be derived from the facts of experience.
 The logical positivists took up the positivism that had been introduced by Auguste
Comte in the nineteenth century and attempted to formalize it, paying close attention
to the logical form of the relationship between scientific knowledge and the facts.
 Empiricism and positivism share the common view that scientific knowledge
should in some way be derived from the facts arrived at by observation.
 There are two other rather distinct issues involved in the claim that science is derived
from the facts;
1. One concerns the nature of these facts and how scientists are meant to have access
to them.
2. The second concerns how the laws and theories that constitute our knowledge are
derived from the facts once they have been obtained.

Seeing is believing:

 An identical combination of light rays will strike the eyes of each observer, will be
focused on their normal retinas by their normal eye lenses and give rise to similar
images. Similar information will then travel to the brain of each observer via their
normal optic nerves, resulting in the two observers seeing the same thing. In
subsequent sections we will see why this kind of picture is seriously misleading.

Visual experiences not determined solely by the object viewed:

 What observers see, the subjective experiences that they undergo, when viewing an
object or scene is not determined solely by the images on their retinas but depends
also on the experience, knowledge and expectations of the observer.
 The experienced and skilled observer does not have perceptual experiences identical
to those of the untrained novice when the two confront the same situation. This
clashes with a literal understanding of the claim that perceptions are given in a
straightforward way via the senses.

Observable facts expressed as statements:

,  As well as distinguishing facts, understood as statements, from the states of affairs
described by those statements, it is also clearly necessary to distinguish statements of
facts from the perceptions that might occasion the acceptance of those statements as
facts.
 Given that the facts that might constitute a suitable basis for science must be in the
form of statements, the claim that facts are given in a straightforward way via the
senses begins to look quite misconceived.
 It would seem that it is a mistake to presume that we must first observe the facts about
apples before deriving knowledge about them from those facts, because the
appropriate facts, formulated as statements, presuppose quite a lot of knowledge about
apples.
 Thus, the recording of observable facts requires more than the reception of the
stimuli, in the form of light rays, that impinge on the eye. It requires the knowledge of
the appropriate conceptual scheme and how to apply it.

Why should facts precede theory?

 Facts must be established prior to the derivation of scientific knowledge from them.
First establish the facts and then build your theory to fit them.
 Knowledge is necessary for the formulation of significant observation statements but
which of the statements so formulated are borne out by observation and which are not.
Consequently, the idea that knowledge should be based on facts that are confirmed by
observation is not undermined by the recognition that the formulation of the
statements describing those facts are knowledge-dependent.

What is this thing called Science?

Chapter 5: Introducing falsificationism

 Karl Popper was the most forceful advocate of an alternative to inductivism –
falsificationism.
 Falsificationists admit that observation is guided by and presupposes theory. They
also abandon any claim that theories can be established as true or probably true in the
light of observational evidence.

A logical point in favor of falsificationism:

 According to falsificationism, some theories can be show to be false by an appeal to
the results of observation and experiment.
 The falsity of universal statements can be deduced from suitable singular statements –
they exploit this to the fullest.

Falsifiability as a criterion for theories:

 The falsificationist sees science as a set of hypotheses that are proposed with the aim
of accurately describing or accounting for the behaviour of some aspect of the world.
 If a hypothesis is to form a part of science, it must be falsifiable.

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