Soft systems methodology and ‘soft’ philosophy of science

AMA Announcement: Monday 2/5 12PM ET - Anna Alexandrova on the philosophy of science and well-being

The newly founded European Philosophy of Science Association had its first conference in Madrid in November 2007. The conference was hosted by the Complutense University of Madrid and brought together over 300 philosophers of science from Europe and the rest of the world. The conference call for papers was launched in March 2007 and the response to it was beyond the expectations of the Steering Committee of EPSA. Over 400 abstracts were submitted in all kinds of areas in the philosophy of science. The 30-strong Programme Committee, consisting of renowned philosophers of science working in Europe and chaired by Mauro Dorato (Rome) and Miklos Redei (London), faced the difficult task of selecting 175 papers for presentation at the conference. Hard decisions had to be made within a very strong field of contributions and the result of the selection procedure was that the quality of papers presented in EPSA07 was invariably high. The conference was structured around five sections: General Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Natural Sciences, Philosophy of Social Sciences, Formal Methods in the Philosophy of Science, and Social and Historical Studies of the Philosophy of Science. Detailed information about the programme may be found at the conference website: http://www.ucm.es/info/epsa07. A numbir of papers have also been posted at the Pittsburgh Philosophy of Science Archive section devoted to the conference: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/confandvol/EPSA07. Here we provide a short review of the most relevant topics discussed. Within the first section (General Philosophy of Science), there were sessions devoted to nearly every topic actively pursued in philosophy of science today, such as causation, realism, confirmation, reductionism, structuralism, experiment and observation, prediction, models and representation, and simulation. The second section (Philosophy of Natural Sciences) concerned mainly philosophical aspects of physics and the biomedicai sciences. Most of the

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBrooke Abounader is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She studies the role of representational inaccuracy in scientific modeling.Anna Akasoy, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute at Oxford, specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of the medieval Muslim West, contacts between the Islamic world and other cultures, and the role of Islamic history and culture in modern political debates in Western Europe.Garland E. Allen is Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He has a special interest in the history of genetics (and eugenics), evolution, and embryology and their interactions in the first half of the twentieth century.Casper Andersen is an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main area of research is history of science, technology, and empires. His publications include the monograph British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (2011), and he is coediting the forthcoming five-volume collection British Governance and Administration in Africa, 1880–1940 (2013).Warwick Anderson is Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Johns Hopkins, 2008) and coeditor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Postcolonial Sovereignties (Duke, 2011). His current research explores the global history of scientific investigations of race mixing in the twentieth century.Peder Anker is an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in the Environmental Studies Program at New York University. His works include Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), and From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). See www.pederanker.com.Ross Bassett is Associate Professor of History at North Carolina State University. He is working on a history of Indians who studied at MIT.Jakob Bek-Thomsen has a postdoctoral position at the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. He has recently finished his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Nicolaus Steno and the Making of an Early Modern Career: Nature, Knowledge, and Networks at the Court of the Medici, 1657–1672.” He is currently working on the emergence of finance and its connections with natural philosophy and religion in the early modern period.Jim Bennett is Director of the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. His research interests lie in the history of instruments, of practical mathematics, and of astronomy.Marvin Bolt, Director of the Webster Institute at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, is authoring the Adler's Optical Instruments catalogue. He served on the editorial team of the Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, studies the Herschel family, and researches the history of the telescope, early seventeenth-century examples in particular.Christian Bonah is Professor for the History of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He has worked on comparative history of medical education, the history of medicaments, and the history of human experimentation. Recent work includes research on risk perception and management in drug scandals as well as studies on medical films.Sonja Brentjes is currently a researcher in a “project of excellence” sponsored by the Junta of Andalusia at the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and History of Science of the University of Seville. She publishes on three major topics: Arabic and Persian versions of Euclid's Elements, the mathematical sciences at madrasas in Islamic societies before 1700, and cross-cultural exchange of knowledge in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean.Thomas Broman is Professor and Chair of the Department of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research interests include eighteenth-century science and medicine, and he is currently writing a survey of science in the Enlightenment.Massimo Bucciantini is Professor of History of Science at the University of Siena. He is coeditor, with Michele Camerota, of Galilaeana: Journal of Galileo Studies. His publications include Galileo e Keplero (Einaudi, 2003; Les Belles Lettres, 2008), Italo Calvino e la scienza (Donzelli, 2007), and Auschwitz Experiment (Einaudi, 2011).Andrew J. Butrica, a former Chercheur Associé at the Centre de Recherches en Histoire des Sciences et Techniques in Paris, has published extensively on space history and has earned the Leopold Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the Robinson Prize of the National Council on Public History.Stefano Caroti is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Parma. His research interests include late medieval philosophy, particularly late scholastic debates on natural philosophy at the University of Paris.Chu Pingyi is a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He has published widely on appropriations of Jesuit science and natural philosophy by their Chinese readers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China.J. T. H. Connor is John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. He is currently coeditor of the McGill-Queen's University Press History of Health, Medicine, and Society series. His latest book, a collection of essays coedited with Stephan Curtis entitled Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000, was published in 2011 by Pickering & Chatto in the Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine series.Scott DeGregorio is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan–Dearborn. He specializes in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Latin literature, with a special focus on the Bible and its interpretation. He has published widely on the writings of Bede, most recently editing The Cambridge Companion to Bede.Michael Dettelbach has published widely on Alexander von Humboldt and is generally interested in science and culture in the revolutionary and Romantic eras. He directs Corporate and Foundation Relations at Boston University.Nadja Durbach is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England and Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. She is now working on a book about beef, citizenship, and identity in modern Britain.David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor, Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Imperial College London. His most recent book is Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2011; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her publications include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (California, 1994), and she has a long-standing interest in the relations between knowledge and faith in the age of Galileo.Maurice A. Finocchiaro is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His latest books are The Essential Galileo (Hackett, 2008) and Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 280) (Springer, 2010). He is now working on the Routledge Guidebook to Galileo's Dialogue.Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press, 2008).Stephen Gaukroger is Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Among his recent publications are The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210 to 1685 (Oxford University Press, 2005), and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 to 1760 (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is now at work on the third volume in this series: The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1750 to 1825.Thomas F. Glick is Professor of History at Boston University. His two research fields are medieval technology (irrigation systems, water mills) and modern science (Darwin, Freud, and Einstein).Susana Gómez is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a specialist in seventeenth-century Italian science, with particular interests in atomism and experimental science. Much of her current work concerns issues about the representation of nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Frederick Gregory is Emeritus Professor of History of Science at the University of Florida. His research has dealt with the history of science and religion and with German science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is currently engaged in writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Moravian physicist-philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries.David E. Hahm is Professor Emeritus of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Origins of Stoic Cosmology and articles on Greek and Roman intellectual and cultural history, especially Hellenistic philosophy and historiography.Minghui Hu served as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2003 to 2005. He joined the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2005 and is now completing his book manuscript Cosmopolitan Confucians: The Passage to Modern Chinese Thought.Jeffrey Allan Johnson, Professor of History at Villanova University, has published mainly on the social and institutional history of chemical science and technology in modern Germany. Recently he was guest editor for Ambix, 2011, 58(2), a special issue on “Chemistry in the Aftermath of World Wars.”Jessica Keating is a Solmsen Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is writing a book entitled The Machinations of German Court Culture: Early Modern Automata.Peter C. Kjærgaard is Professor of Evolutionary Studies at Aarhus University. He has published widely in the history of modern science, including books on Wittgenstein and the sciences, the history of universities, and the history of science in Denmark. His current research focuses on the history and popular understanding of human evolution.David Knight has taught history of science at Durham University in England since 1964 and is a past President of the British Society for the History of Science. He published The Making of Modern Science in 2009 (Polity) and is writing a book on the Scientific Revolution.Bernard Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society's flagship journal, Isis. His most recent publications include Victorian Popularizers of Science, Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain, and Science in the Marketplace (coedited with Aileen Fyfe). He is also general editor of a monograph series titled “Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” published by Pickering & Chatto. He is currently working on a biography of John Tyndall and is one of the editors of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, an international collaborative effort to obtain, digitalize, transcribe, and publish all surviving letters to and from Tyndall.Pamela O. Long is a historian of late medieval/early modern history of science and technology. She is the coeditor and coauthor of The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript (MIT Press, 2009). Her books include Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Oregon State University Press, 2011). She is at work on a history of engineering and knowledge in late sixteenth-century Rome.Morris Low is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of Queensland, where he is Acting Head of the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies. He coedited a special issue of Historia Scientiarum (2011, 21[1]), and his recent books include Japan on Display (2006).Christine MacLeod is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988).Paolo Mancosu is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main areas of interest are mathematical logic and history and philosophy of mathematics and logic. His current work is focused on the philosophy of mathematical practice. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2008) and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (2009).Hannah Marcus is a doctoral student studying history and the history of science at Stanford University. She is interested in the relationship between intellectual and religious culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.David Meskill is an assistant professor of history at Dowling College on Long Island. His book Optimizing the German Workforce: Labor Administration from Bismarck to the Economic Miracle was published by Berghahn Books in 2010.John Pickstone is Wellcome Research Professor in the University of Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. His publications include Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Manchester University Press, 2000) and The Modern Biological and Earth Sciences, Volume 6 of the Cambridge History of Science (edited with Peter Bowler) (Cambridge University Press, 2009).Matthias Rieger is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Sociology, Leibniz University, Hannover, and the author of Helmholtz Musicus: Die Objektivierung der Musik im 19. Jahrhundert durch Helmholtz' Lehre von den Tonempfindungen (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006).Joy Rohde is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her research focuses on Cold War social science and politics. She is completing a book, under contract with Cornell University Press, titled The Social Scientists' War: Knowledge, Statecraft, and Democracy in the Era of Containment.William G. Rothstein is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of several books on American medical history, most recently Public Health and the Risk Factor (2003).Lisa T. Sarasohn is Professor of History at Oregon State University. Her latest publication is The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution (Johns Hopkins, 2010). She is working on a cultural history of insects in early modern England.Arne Schirrmacher teaches history of science at the Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently on leave at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the modern mathematical sciences, in particular quantum theory, the history of scientific socialization within student groups in Germany since 1850, and science communication in twentieth-century Europe.Petra G. Schmidl specialized in premodern astronomy in Islamic societies. Since 2009, she has worked as a research assistant at the University of Bonn. With Eva Orthmann and Mo˙hammad Karīmī Zanjānī A˙sl, she is investigating the Dustūr al-Munajjimīn as a source for the history of the Ismāʿīliyya and their astronomical and astrological concepts.Charlotte Schubert is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leipzig. Her publications include Anacharsis der Weise: Nomade, Skythe, Grieche (2010), Der hippokratische Eid (2005), Hippokrates (coedited, 2006), and Frauenmedizin in der Antike (coedited, 1999).Vera Schwach is a historian and senior researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research, and Higher Education (NIFU). She has published analyses in science policy and has written extensively on the history of marine science, especially on fisheries biology and the management of sea fisheries in the Nordic countries and in Europe.Jonathan Seitz is an assistant teaching professor of history at Drexel University. He is particularly interested in vernacular ideas about nature and the supernatural in early modern Europe. His book, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.Helaine Selin is Science Librarian and Faculty Associate in the School of Natural Sciences at Hampshire College. Her work includes editing The Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (Springer, 2008) and the series Science Across Cultures. Happiness Across Cultures is due out in Spring 2012.Efram Sera-Shriar received his Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Leeds. He is now working as a research associate on the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, organized by Montana State University and York University in Toronto.Asif A. Siddiqi is an associate professor of history at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He is now writing a book on the effects of the Stalinist purges on Soviet science and technology.Mark G. Spencer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University. His book, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2005), was issued in a paperback edition in 2010. He is also current President of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society.Matthew Stanley is an associate professor at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He is the author of Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago, 2007), and he is now completing a manuscript on the history of science and religion in the Victorian period.John Steele is Associate Professor of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University. His recent publications include A Brief Introduction to Astronomy in the Middle East (Saqi Books, 2008) and Ancient Astronomical Observations and the Study of the Moon's Motion (1691–1757) (Springer, 2012). He is currently working on an edition and commentary of a newly discovered astrological compendium from Babylon.Larry Stewart is Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is editing a book on the uses of humans in experiment and writing a study of experiment in the Enlightenment and the first industrial revolution.Bert Theunissen is Professor of the History of Science at the Institute for History and Foundations of Science, affiliated with the Descartes Centre for the History of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current work focuses on the history of animal breeding, particularly on the interactions between scientific and practical workers in livestock breeding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For his publications see http://www.descartescentre.com.Carsten Timmermann is a lecturer at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research and teaching focus on issues in the history of modern medicine and biology, including chronic disease, cancer research, and pharmaceuticals.The Rev. Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., became the eighth President of Fairfield University in 2004. A historian by discipline, he is the author of numerous articles as well as the books Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 1985) and Varieties of Ultramontanism (Catholic University Press, 1998). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.Michael Worboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. He specializes in the history of infectious diseases as well as the application of research in clinical practices. He has recently started new work on dog breeding, feeding, training, and welfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His publications include Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000 (with Neil Pemberton), and Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 103, Number 2June 2012 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666369 © 2012 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Notes on Contributors

Under the influence of postempiricism, the philosophy of science has changed enormously in recent years. New Philosophy of Social Science provides a clear and useful overview of the new synthesis that has taken place. Bohman argues for a theoretical and methodological pluralism grounded in an account of the nature of the objects of social theory, which are necessarily indeterminate and open ended: the new, postempiricist philosophy of social science must find rigor within indeterminacy. Bohman's position, that you can start from actual practices in the social sciences, accept the fact that they will always contain indeterminacy and ambiguity, and yet be able to construct viable norms, is buttressed by a number of case studies. These include examples drawn from rational choice theory, ethnomethodology, and the theory of communicative action. In the process, Bohman describes the status of such issues as causality, rules, interpretation, holism, and social criticism. The argument is not tied to a specific theoretical point of view, although it takes the program of the Frankfurt School as an indication of the path toward a proper philosophy of the social sciences.James Bohman is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at St. Louis University.

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Successful intervention when managing change is affected by technical, social and personal factors. Whilst the technical aspects of intervention are well covered by methodologies and the social aspects of values are beginning to be covered, the way distorted communications affect change management at the personal and social levels is still at issue (Flood and Jackson, 1991, p. 189). Many intervention approaches are primarily technical and are consequently too mechanistic to deal with distorted communications arising out of different worldviews, for example, hard systems methodologies. Structured Systems Analysis and Design Methodology is a typical hard information systems methodology which concentrates on mainly technical aspects and treats information as having meaning only within very limited contexts. Soft systems methodologies, for example, Checkland’s Soft Systems Methodology (Checkland, 1981) although incorporating values arising out of different worldviews, does not consider whether the participants, or culture in which they operate, adversely affect the communication process (Flood and Jackson, 1991, p. 188). One problem with both of these approaches is that the content of communications is favoured over the process of communications, with the result that the former maybe derived unequally because the participants possess unequal power. There is no theory within the approaches governing whether the communication process is rationally driven and this allows the charge to be made that non rational factors can distort the communication process. It is suggested here that a more effective approach can be obtained by using management approaches with other methodologies in a complementary manner. Such methodologies should inform participants about the limitations of their own communication and be able to allow adjustment prior to using harder methodologies.

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FRIEDRICH STADLER, Editorial: On the Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science Part I (Team E) THOMAS UEBEL, Some Remarks on Current History of Analytical Philosophy of Science THOMAS MORMANN, History of Philosophy of Science as Philosophy of Science by Other Means? Comment on Thomas Uebel CRISTINA CHIMISSO, Aspects of Current History of Philosophy of Science in the French Tradition ANASTASIOS BRENNER, Reflections on Chimisso: French Philosophy of Science and the Historical Method MICHAEL HEIDELBERGER, Aspects of Current History of 19th Century Philosophy of Science MASSIMO FERRARI, Well, and Pragmatism? Comment on Michael Heidelberger's Paper Part II (Team A) VINCENZO CRUPI AND STEPHAN HARTMANN, Formal and Empirical Methods in Philosophy of Science VINCENT F. HENDRICKS, The Bane of Two Truths THOMAS MULLER, Formal Methods in the Philosophy of Natural Science FRANZ DIETRICH AND CHRISTIAN LIST, The Problem of Constrained Judgment Aggregation GABRIELLA PIGOZZI, Aggregation Problems and Models: What Comes first? Part III (Team B) MARCEL WEBER, in a Physical World: The Place of the CLAUDE DEBRU, Comments on Marcel Weber's Life in a Physical World: The Place of the Sciences THOMAS REYDON, How Special are the Sciences? A View from the Natural Kinds Debate MILES MACLEOD, The Epistemology-only Approach to Natural Kinds: A Reply to Thomas Reydon MEHMET ELGIN, Reductionism in Biology: An Example of Biochemistry RAFFAELLA CAMPANER, Reductionist and Antireductionist Stances in the Health Part IV (Team C) WENCESLAO J. GONZALEZ, and Problems in Philosophy of Social and Cultural Sciences: A European ARTO SIITONEN, State of the Art. A Commentary on Wenceslao J. Gonzalez's Contribution, Trends and Problems in Philosophy of Social and Cultural Sciences: A European Perspective MATTI SINTONEN, Scientific Realism, the New Mechanical Philosophers, and the Friends of Modelling DANIEL ANDLER, IsNaturalism the Unsurpassable Philosophy for the of Man in the 21st ANTONIO ZILHAO, What Does it Mean to Be a Naturalist in the Human and Social Sciences? A Comment on Daniel Andler's Is Naturalism the Unsurpassable Philosophy for the of Man in the Twenty-first Century? Part V (Team D) DENNIS DIEKS, Reichenbach and the Conventionality of Distant Simultaneity in MAURO DORATO, On Various Senses of Conventional and their Interrelation in the Philosophy of Physics: Simultaneity as a Case Study ROMAN FRIGG AND CARL HOEFER, Determinism and Chance from a Humean LASZLO E. SZABO, What remains of Probability? HOLGER LYRE, Humean Perspectives on Structural Realism F. A. MULLER, The Characterisation of Structure: Definition versus Axiomatisation Index of Names

I am Anna Alexandrova, philosopher of science working on well-being and economics, and author of 'A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being'. AMA!

It can be challenging to introduce the philosophy of social science (PoS) to students in the social sciences. Noting the lack of literature providing guidance to the prospective PoS teacher, this paper outlines several pieces of advice on how to engage social science undergraduates in the subject. This advice centres on showing the relevance of the PoS in academia and beyond, reducing complexity and presenting only a few contending PoS perspectives. It is also proposed to use textbooks with caution or avoiding them altogether, illustrating how PoS assumptions are embedded in contemporary social research and showing the connection between the PoS on one hand and research questions, methods, and theory on the other. Finally, the importance of showing students how they can make use of the PoS in their own work and teaching the subject in a ‘hands on’ manner is emphasized.

One reason the Unity of Science Movement thrived in 1930s America was that most intellectuals at the time were socialist. Agreeing that comprehensive scientific planning required a comprehensive, or unified, science, most of these intellectuals automatically respected Neurath and the Unity of Science Movement as ideological allies. The need for social action demands that social science be unencumbered by doctrines which have no active, operative significance. Twenty years later, at the end of the 1950s, American philosophy of science was quite a different business. Politics had nothing to do with philosophy of science, and the Unity of Science Movement was effectively dead. Philosophy of social science, in other words, was the closest professional philosophy of science could get to social philosophy, but it still did not get there. Philosophy of science was about structural, semantic and pragmatic features of scientific theories, which in turn had nothing to do with debates or theories concerning 'the worth of some social arrangements'.

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Philosophy, Science, and History is an anthology, consisting mostly of excerpts from important texts in philosophy of science. Some of these texts were written in the tradition of philosophy of science as a discipline. However, most of them come from older times when there was not much of a separation between science and philosophy and reflecting about science was a way of doing science—the tradition known as natural philosophy. The book contains a total of 29 chapters, the first of which is a general introduction, and the remaining 28 are grouped in two parts, each with a brief summary presenting the themes discussed. The first part, ‘‘Approaches to the History and Philosophy of Science’’, aims at presenting classical twentieth-century approaches to philosophy of science. It contains an introduction by the editor and texts by George Santayana, Carl Hempel, Hans Reichenbach, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Martin Rudwick, and Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer. It focuses on philosophical reflections about science in the debate between the logical and methodological, and the historical and sociological approaches. The second part draws attention to earlier periods of philosophy and history of science; it is divided into three sections (A, B, and C), each devoted to a different debate, and each containing an introduction by the editor. Section A is entitled ‘‘Hypotheses in Scientific Discovery’’, bringing texts by John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Pierre Duhem, and Norwood Russell Hanson; its theme is the relation between scientific hypotheses and inductive reasoning, in such a way that Hanson’s text appears as the peak of the tradition of investigation on the processes that lead to the formulation of scientific theories. Section B discusses ‘‘Force in Natural Philosophy’’, presenting texts by Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, Emilie du Châtelet, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Those texts raise numerous discussions, but the Editor’s Introduction to this section directs the reader through the matters of force and causality in classical physics. And in section C one finds some important features of the debate between catastrophism and uniformitarianism in geology and its