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Knowing Science
Knowing Science
Alexander Bird
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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© Alexander Bird 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942402
ISBN 978–0–19–960665–8
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–260683–9
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Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website
referenced in this work.
For Sebastian, Benedict, and Ishbel,
and for Stephanie, Arthur, Ottilie, and Toby
PREFACE
1 The David Hume Tower has since been re-named. I had always felt that
having failed to give Hume the chair of moral philosophy, the University of
Edinburgh was adding insult to injury by naming a nondescript office block after
the great enlightenment thinker and one of the first people to live in the neo-
classical splendour of Edinburgh’s New Town—especially considering that the
university demolished some fine eighteenth-century houses to build that office
block. So perhaps Hume would not be too disappointed by the re-naming.
CONTENTS
3 Scientific progress
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Progress and the aim of science
3.2.1 The Pessimistic Induction
3.3 The functional-internalist approach to progress
3.3.1 Anti-realism and progress
3.4 The semantic approach to progress
3.4.1 Truth versus falsity
3.4.2 Verisimilitude and Gettier
3.4.3 Progress with approximate truth
3.5 The understanding approach
3.5.1 Progress without understanding
3.5.2 No progress without knowledge
3.6 Conclusion
4 Science as social knowing
4.1 Introduction
4.1.1 Social–social epistemology
4.1.2 Two approaches to social–social epistemology
4.1.3 The failure of summative reduction
4.1.4 Mutual knowing without social knowing
4.2 Two models of social cognition
4.2.1 The commitment model
4.2.2 The distributed model
4.2.3 Some differences between the two models
4.2.4 The commitment model and science
4.2.5 The distributed model and science
4.3 The failure of supervenience
4.4 The analogy approach and the social epistemic subject
4.4.1 Social analogues of individual cognitive states
4.4.2 The social epistemic subject
4.5 Conclusion
5 Evidence
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The concept of evidence characterized
5.3 All evidence supports knowledge-producing inferences
5.4 Evidence is anything supporting knowledge-producing
inferences
5.5 Evidence and knowledge
5.6 Is evidence non-inferential knowledge?
5.6.1 Loss of evidence: forgetting
5.6.2 Loss of evidence: undermining
5.6.3 Causal sensitivity
5.7 Evidence and science
5.8 Conclusion
6 Observation
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Empiricism, observation, and perception
6.2.1 Empricism’s ideal scientist
6.2.2 The empiricist conception of observation
6.3 Challenges to optimistic empiricism
6.3.1 Testimony and the social nature of science
6.3.2 Instruments
6.3.3 Conclusion
6.4 Empiricism and scepticism
6.4.1 Sceptical empiricism
6.4.2 Empiricism and the aim of science
6.5 Empiricism and epistemological internalism
6.6 The nature of observation
6.6.1 The functional essence of observation
6.6.2 The distinction between data and observations
6.6.3 Evidence without observation?
6.7 Empirical science without empiricism
6.7.1 The scientific revolution without empiricism
6.7.2 Science without perception
6.8 Social empiricism?
6.9 Conclusion
7 Abductive knowledge
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Inference to the Best Explanation
7.3 Inference to the Only Explanation
7.3.1 Holmesian inference
7.3.2 Determinism
7.3.3 Falsification
7.3.4 Selection
7.4 The Semmelweis case again
7.5 Defending Inference to the Only Explanation
7.5.1 Defending Falsification—the Duhem–Quine thesis refuted
7.5.2 Defending Selection—rejecting underdetermination
7.5.3 The qualitative thesis of underdetermination
7.5.4 The quantitative thesis of underdetermination
7.5.5 Conclusion
7.6 IBE and exemplars
7.6.1 Three objections to IBE
7.6.2 Exemplars and loveliness
7.7 Conclusion
9 Metascientific knowledge?
9.1 Introduction
9.2 The No Miracles Argument Mark 1
9.2.1 NMA as an inference to the best explanation
9.2.2 Does the truth of a theory explain its success?
9.2.3 No meta-argument from success
9.2.4 What is the target of the NMA?
9.3 The Pessimistic Induction
9.3.1 Science as a fallible oracle
9.3.2 Underconsideration and scientific method
9.3.3 Conclusion—no global Pessimistic Induction
9.4 The No Miracles Argument Mark 2
9.4.1 The explanationist defence of scientific realism
9.4.2 An aside on foreground and background theories
9.4.3 Evaluation of the NMA Mark 2
9.4.4 Conclusion
9.5 Local metascientific knowledge
9.6 Conclusion
References
Index
1
INTRODUCTION: SCIENCE AND THE PURSUIT OF
KNOWLEDGE
1.1.2 Empiricism
Aristotle’s claim about the desire to know comes from the following
passage in his Metaphysics:
All men [people] by nature desire to know. An indication of
this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from
their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all
others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action,
but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer
sight to almost everything else. The reason is that this, most
of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many
differences between things. ( Translation from Lear 1988: 1).
Aristotle’s evidence for what he reports in his biological works comes
from the senses, primarily sight. As a zoologist he was a careful and
acute observer. He made important contributions to comparative
anatomy as a result of dissections on a wide range of animals.
Ptolemy encouraged anatomy in Alexandria, permitting human
dissections (which was very unusual in the ancient world). As a
result Herophilos was able to describe in detail the various
components of the eye, the nervous system, and the difference
between the veins and the arteries, among a wide range of other
anatomical phenomena. Galen built on Herophilos’s work, adding to
it by making a vast number of his own observations, particularly
from the dissection of monkeys.
This process corrected many prior errors. Having dissected hens’
eggs to discern the order of the development of the organs in an
embryo, Aristotle thought that the heart was the first and was
therefore the most important organ, and so the seat of thought and
emotion. In fact what he was observing was instead the spinal cord,
and it was Herophilos who demonstrated that the brain was
responsible for intellectual and emotional activity. The process also
introduced new errors: Galen mistakenly said that the human
mandible has two bones and that the sternum has seven parts, the
result of making observations on dogs and apes not on humans.
These errors became ossified as a result of the medievals’ failure to
attempt to corroborate or to develop Galen’s work. Error was
transmitted alongside knowledge when learning was received
primarily through books and lectures rather than acquired through
personal experience. Not until Andreas Vesalius, determined to carry
out his own dissections, cut open a human cadaver in 1641 to see
for himself, was it discovered that the human mandible is a single
bone and that the sternum has only three parts. Aristotle’s belief in
the spontaneous generation of insects was finally refuted only by
Francesco Redi’s experimental observations published in 1668.5
When the errors of Aristotle and Galen among many other
falsehoods were discovered and corrected by employing the senses,
it was natural for some philosophers to endow sense-perception with
an essential role in science, and indeed in thought and knowledge
more generally. It is tempting to see the empiricism of Hobbes and
Locke as the unofficial philosophy of the scientific revolution and by
extension of science in general. Empiricism in its simplest form holds
that sense-experience is (i) the origin or foundation of all
knowledge, and (ii) the origin or foundation of all concepts. In the
hands of Mill, and then allied to the positivism of Comte, empiricism
developed as a philosophy of science in particular, reaching its most
sophisticated forms in the logical empiricism/positivism of the early
twentieth century (I articulate some of these developments in a little
more detail in Chapter 6.) While the most extreme forms of
empiricism have long been abandoned by philosophers of science, a
moderate but nonetheless significant strand of empiricism remains
as a standard component of many philosophies of science:
observation is the foundation of scientific knowledge—evidence is
observational in nature—and observation is primarily a matter of
sense-perception.
This gives us the second key theme of this book: empiricism. Or,
more precisely, the rejection of empiricism. Not all evidence is
observational. And not all observation is perceptual. While
empiricism might have been a useful philosophy for science when
most scientific observation was perceptual, and when there was little
solid underlying theory, it is nonetheless a fundamentally flawed
philosophy. This is true not only of the more overt empiricism of
anti-realists such as van Fraassen but also of the covert empiricism
of most realists.
[XXVIII] Genauere Notizen habe ich von unserer Art darüber nicht
zur Verfügung. Bei einer Puppe von Chironomus plumosus, aus
der die Mücke, während ich dies niederschrieb, ausschlüpfte,
dauerte der Akt vom ersten Platzen der Haut bis zum ersten
Auffliegen der Mücke nicht ganz 20 Sekunden!
[XXX] Ob das auch für einzelne Arten von Tanypus gilt, muss ich
dahingestellt sein lassen.
[XXXI] Dieser Blutstrom wird leicht bei ungünstiger Lage der
Larve auf dem Objektträger unterbrochen und entgeht dann dem
Beobachter. Auch mir war er früher entgangen; erst jüngst, als ich
durch eine Äusserung von Hrn. W e l t n e r , der Larven von
Chironomus auf dem Boden tiefer Seen gefunden hatte, zu
erneuter Beobachtung veranlasst wurde, nahm ich denselben
wahr.
Schmetterlinge[3].
Die Schmetterlinge selbst sind ebenso und aus gleichem Grunde
von dem Leben im Wasser ausgeschlossen[XXXVI], wie die Fliegen;
von den Larven und Puppen dagegen leben einige auch aus dieser
Insektengruppe im Wasser.
Netzflügler[4].
Während in den drei obigen Ordnungen diejenigen Kerfe, die
entweder im entwickelten Zustande oder als Larve im Wasser leben,
einen kleinen oder selbst verschwindenden Teil ihrer
Gruppengenossen ausmachen, ändert sich das plötzlich bei den
Netzflüglern in auffälliger Weise. Die entwickelten Tiere meiden zwar
wie die Fliegen und Schmetterlinge das Wasser, aber unter den
Larven lebt die Mehrzahl der freilich nicht artenreichen Ordnung im
Wasser, und zwar stellt die Gruppe der Köcherfliegen (Phryganiden)
die Hauptmasse derselben. Welcher Art ein Gewässer auch immer
sein mag, ob stark fliessend oder stehend, ob pflanzenreich oder
pflanzenarm, ob mit Sand- oder Schlammboden: fast immer wird
man Larven dieser Gruppe darin finden und oft in sehr auffälliger
Menge. Durch einen eigentümlichen Zug in ihrer Lebensweise
machen sie sich auch dem Laien auffällig. Die meisten von ihnen
kitten sich nämlich aus diesem oder jenem Stoff ein köcher- oder
röhrenförmiges Schutzgehäuse, welches sie mit sich
herumschleppen und in das sie sich bei Beunruhigung sogleich
zurückziehen. Sie nehmen dazu feinem Sand, gröbere Kieskörner,
Schneckenhäuser mit oder ohne Bewohner, Gras und breitere
Pflanzenblätter, abgebissene Stücke von Pflanzenstengeln, oder alte
Holzstücke etc., und legen diese Teile der Länge nach oder der
Quere nach (Fig. 8, 16 u. 17) oder in spiraliger Anordnung an
einander. Wegen ihrer Auffälligkeit haben sie auch vom Volke
besondere Namen erhalten: Sprottwürmer oder Sprocken heissen
sie z. B. in einzelnen Teilen der Mark.
Fig. 8.
15 Limnophilus rhombicus — 16 Larvengehäuse von vorn — 17 von oben — 18
Puppe von der Bauchseite. 16 und 17 nach Pictet, 15 und 18 nach der Natur.
Ob ein aufgefundenes Tier zu den Phryganiden-Larven gehört
oder nicht, darüber wird auch beim Anfänger selten ein Zweifel sein.
In den bei weitem meisten Fällen wird man die gewöhnliche
Larvenform (Fig. 8, 15) vor sich haben, die durch den Besitz des
Gehäuses und von drei Brustbeinpaaren, durch die stärkere
Chitinisierung des ganzen Kopfes und mehr oder minder
ausgedehnter Teile der Brust, sowie endlich durch die fadenförmigen
Tracheenkiemen und die beiden Endhaken des zarten Hinterleibes
gekennzeichnet ist[XL]. So leicht nun die Zugehörigkeit einer Larve zu
unserer Gruppe festzustellen ist, so schwierig und umständlich ist
anderseits die Unterscheidung der zahlreichen Gattungen, von den
Arten ganz zu schweigen. Ich werde also im folgenden ganz davon
Abstand nehmen und nur an einem Vertreter der Gruppe — es möge
die Larve von Limnophilus rhombicus[XLI] dazu dienen — die
biologischen Verhältnisse und die damit in Beziehung stehenden
morphologischen Eigenschaften zu schildern versuchen.
Mangelt den Larven auch das Gehäuse, so heften sie doch mit
Hilfe der Spinnmasse an Blättern einzelne Gegenstände derart fest,