PHILOSHOPY OF SCIENCE

A Contemporary Introduction

Alex Rosenberg
Abstrak
The first edition of this work began with the outrageous ambition of providing a worthy successor to
Carl G. Hempels splendid Philosophy of Natural Science, first published in 1966 and never yet
improved upon. Brownings Andrea Del Sarto tells us, Ah, but a mans reach should exceed his
grasp, or whats a heaven for.

My second ambition was more attainable. It was to show that the problems of the philosophy of
science are among the fundamental problems of philosophy, and that these problems emerge in our
attempt to understand the nature of science.

The success of the first edition has encouraged me to make a further effort to approach the clarity if
not the concision of Carl Hempels exposition. The first editions reception among students and the
general reader has also encouraged me to think that the second of my two objectives is actually
attainable. My eventual recognition of the fact that the problems of the philosophy of science are
just versions of the basic problems of epistemology and metaphysics is the result of three decades of
education by the likes of Peter Achinstein, Nick Rescher, Adolph Grunbaum, Richard Braithwaite,
John Earman, David Hull, Michael Ruse, Bas van Fraassen, Elliot Sober, Philip Kitcher, Lindley Darden,
Dan Hausman, Carl Hoefer, Marc Lange, Paul Churchland, Pat Churchland, Nancy Cartwright, Jarrett
Leplin, Arthur Fine, Paul Teller, Jan Cover, Paul Thompson, John Beatty, Ken Waters, Larry Hardin,
Richard Boyd, Richard Jeffrey, Tom Kuhn, Don Campbell, David Lewis, John Watkins, John Mackie,
Wesley Salmon, Merilee Salmon, Bill Newton-Smith, John Worrall, Joe Pitt, Peter Kosso, Larry
Wright, Helen Longino, Elizabeth Anderson, Allison Wyle, Robert Brandon, Yuri Balashov, John
Robertson, Harold Kincaid, just to name a few dozen.

In writing the first edition of this book, I had had detailed comments from Martin Curd, Neven
Sesardic, Jarrett Leplin, Carl Hoefer, and extraordinary help from Marc Lange. When I finished that
edition I realized that I had not produced a book that did full justice to all their advice and
admonition. Though in the second edition I may have more nearly approached a result that repays
their help, I am under no illusion that further improvement is impossible.

I must also thank a number of anonymous referees and several philosophers who have written
published reviews of the first edition, all of whose criticisms and suggestions I have considered and
mostly adopted in this new edition. Additionally, I have made a few changes in the text that reflect
observations and corrections of its Chinese translator, Huang Jingji. I owe adebt as well to students
(my own, including especially Samir Okasha, Frederic Bouchard, Stefan Linquist, Marion Hourdequin
and Tamler Sommers) and those teachers in classes which have adopted the text, and written to me
about its lacunae.

A companion anthology to this textbook has been prepared by Yuri Balashov and the present author:
Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings. It was designed after the first edition of this work
was already in print, with an eye to providing a sourcebook of original papers coordinated with the
textbook. The guides to further reading at the end of each chapter include specific suggestions from
this anthology as well as from a number of others and from the broader scholarly literature. Aiding
and abetting Yuri Balashov in the preparation of this companion anthology was a singular pleasure
as well as an educational experience which forced me to think carefully about how a second edition
of the textbook might improve on the first one. I am in Yuri Balashovs debt as much as I am obliged
to any of the others mentioned hitherto.

Geneva,
Switzerlad

August
2004
Contents

1. Why philosophy of science?

Overview

The relationship between science and philosophy

Scientific questions and questions about science

Modern science as philosophy

Science and western civilization

Summary

Study questions

Suggested reading

Overview

Philosophy of science is a difficult subject to define in large part because philosophy is difficult to
define. But on at least one controversial definition of philosophy, the relation between the sciences
physical, biological, social and behavioral and philosophy are so close that philosophy of science
must be a central concern of both philosophers and scientists. On this definition, philosophy deals
initially with the questions which the sciences cannot yet or perhaps can never answer, and with the
further questions of why the sciences cannot answer these questions.

Reflection on the way contemporary scientific findings and theories influence philosophy shows
each is indispensable for understanding the other. Indeed, this chapter claims, and subsequent
chapters argue, that philosophy is a fundamental prerequisite for understanding the history,
sociology and other studies of science, its methods, achievements and prospects. Classical
philosophical problems like those of free will versus determinism, or whether the mind is a part of
the body, or whether there is room for purpose, intelligence and meaning in a purely material
universe, are made urgent by and shaped by scientific discoveries and theories.

Science as a distinctive enterprise is arguably the unique contribution of western thought to all the
worlds other cultures which it has touched. As such, understanding science is crucial to our
understanding of our civilization as a whole.
 2. Explanation, causation and laws
Logical positivism attempted to develop a philosophy of science by combining the resources of
modern mathematical logic with an empiricist epistemology and a close study of the methods
employed in the natural sciences, especially the physical sciences. Most contemporary debates in
the philosophy of science have their origin in the work of these philosophers. Logical positivists were
first of all empiricists; they held that the only beliefs about the world that could qualify as knowledge
were ones justified by experience. In this they shared a tradition that went back at least to the
seventeenth-century philosophers Locke, Berkeley and Hume, the British empiricists. Such an
epistemology apparently suits scientific research particularly well. After all, observation, data-
collection, and most of all controlled experiment have the central role in scientific method. Science
therefore needs an epistemology that makes experimentation and observation central to the
determination of its findings. We shall discuss further in Chapter 5 empiricisms place as the
official epistemology of science.

The positivists gave this theory of knowledge a linguistic formulation about what could be
meaningfully said. Since a statement we know to be true can only be shown to be true by
experience, every meaningful statement (that is every one that is either true or false) makes a claim
about what experiences to expect (implicitly or explicitly) and the true ones are ones whose claims
about experience are borne out. Thus, the logical positivists empiricism was expressed as a claim
about meaning; the principle of verifiability that every meaningful (i.e. true or false) statement
about the world is one that can be verified (or at least tested) by experience. To this empiricism the
positivists added a reliance on advances in mathematical logic which they hoped would enable them
to show that mathematics did not present a problem for empiricism.
Bibliography
Achinstein, Peter (1967) Concepts of Science, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Achinstein, Peter (1983) The Nature of Explanation, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Achinstein, Peter (1988) The Illocutionary Theory of Explanation, in Joseph Pitt (ed.)Theories of
Explanation, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Achinstein, Peter (2003) The Book of Evidence, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Allen, C., Bekoff, M. and Lauder, G. (1998) Natures Purposes, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Anderson, E. (1995) Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and Defense, Hypatia, vol. 10, 50
84.
Ayer, A.J. (1961) What is a Law of Nature?, in The Concept of a Person, London, Macmillan.
Balashov, Y. and Rosenberg, A. (2004) Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings, London,
Routledge.
Barnes, Barry (1974) Scientific Knowledge and Social Theory, London, Routledge.
Barnes, Barry, Bloor, David and Henry, John (1996) Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Beauchamp, Tom L. and Rosenberg, Alex (1981) Hume and the Problem of Causation, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
Berkeley, George (1710) Principles of Human Knowledge.
Bloor, David (1974) Knowledge and Social Imagery, London, Routledge.
Boyd, R., Gaspar, P. and Trout, J.D. (1991) The Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
Braithwaite, Richard B. (1953) Scientific Explanation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Burtt, Edwin A. (1926) Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, London, Routledge.
Butterfield, Herbert (1965) The Origins of Modern Science, New York, Free Press.
Carnap, Rudolph (1952) The Continuum of Inductive Methods, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Cartwright, Nancy (1983) How the Laws of Physics Lie, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Churchland, Paul and Hooker, Clifford (eds) (1985) Images of Science: Essays on Realism and
Empiricism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Cohen, I. Bernard (1985) The Birth of a New Physics, New York, W.W. Norton.
Conant, James B. (1957) Harvard Case Histories in the Experimental Sciences, Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press.
Curd, Martin and Cover, Jan. A. (1997) Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, New York, W.W.
Norton.
Darwin, Charles (1979) On the Origin of Species, New York, Avenel.