Analytic Philosophy Of Science Research Articles

Kant’s Transcendentalism as Metaphysics of Possible Experience and its Realistic Interpretation in Analytical Philosophy

In the “Critique of Pure Reason” and subsequent “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics...”, “Metaphysical Principles of Natural Science”, “Opus Postumum” Kant develops one of the modes of his transcendentalism, the metaphysics of possible experience, whose task is to study the transcendental conditions for the possibility of our (cognition), which, according to Kant, has a priori character. P. Strawson calls this mode of metaphysics ‘ descriptive metaphysics ’ and connects it with the analyzing the ‘conceptual structure’ of our thinking about the world. The contemporary realistic trend (primarily within the framework of the analytical philosophical tradition) in the interpretation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy is associated with the modern theory of “two aspects” (80s of the 20th century), which replaced the classical theory of “two objects/worlds” (compare also with the opposition “ theory of appearance vs. theory of appearances ”). Within the framework of this theory, the Kantian ‘appearance’ receives an objectified status, it is not our mental representation, but corresponds (as its signs) to really existing things, or Kantian ‘objects of experience’. The article traces the formation of the historical and conceptual background of the ‘ metaphysics of experience ’ (H. Paton's original expression). Historically, the metaphysics of experience inherits the neo-Kantian approach to interpreting Kant's transcendentalism as a ‘theory of experience’ (H. Cohen, E. Cassirer), then it develops in logical positivism/empiricism (H. Reichenbach, R. Carnap; further in post-posivivism: the theory of I. Lakatos and T. Kuhn), analytical philosophy of science (W. Sellars, G. Buchdal, H. Putnam), and at present the metaphysics of experience is developing in a number of contemporary works of an analytical orientation (P. Strawson, K. Ameriks, L. Allais and etc.).

PALAMISM AND DISPOSITIONALISM: COMMENT ON RASLAU'S INTEGRATION OF ORTHODOX THEOLOGY WITH CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS OF SCIENCE

AbstractIn a recent volume ofZygon: Journal of Religion and Science, Flavius Raslau proposes a new and intriguing integration of Palamite theology with key currents of thought in analytic philosophy of science. The aim of this comment is to provide a concise summary and assessment of Raslau's proposal, along the way making suggestions as to how it might be profitably amended.

Beyond Hempel: Reframing the Debate about Scientific Explanation

AbstractI argue that Carl Hempel’s pioneering work on scientific explanation introduced an assumption that Hempel never motivated, namely, that explanation is an aim of science. Ever since, it has remained largely unquestioned in analytic philosophy of science. By expanding the historical scope of the debate on explanation to philosophers from the first half of the twentieth century, I show that the debate should include a critical reflection on Hempel’s assumption. This reflection includes two problems: how to motivate one’s position on the aims of scientific knowledge and how to decide which examples count as expressions of those aims.

Symbioautothanatosis: Science as Symbiont in the Work of Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and evolution of species, yet it is impossible to speak of symbiosis (cross-species association) unless species-boundaries have been posited in advance. Thus, a tension is legible throughout Margulis’s work between the drive to surpass the limits of species-definitions as they have been traditionally understood, and a need to maintain them in order that there can be “symbiosis” at all. Margulis criticized neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution in part because she saw symbiogenesis as debunking the theory that life was defined by individualistic competition. More recently, Myra Hird has suggested that the gift, such as it has been theorized by certain anthropologists and philosophers, could adequately figure symbiosis and the ethical relations founded on it. I turn to Derrida’s writing on the gift to suggest that, if a gift worthy of the name chances to happen, it necessarily exceeds scientific, theoretical, and philosophical knowledge.

Symbioautothanatosis: Science as Symbiont in the Work of Lynn Margulis

Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and evolution of species, yet it is impossible to speak of symbiosis (cross-species association) unless species-boundaries have been posited in advance. Thus, a tension is legible throughout Margulis’s work between the drive to surpass the limits of species-definitions as they have been traditionally understood, and a need to maintain them in order that there can be “symbiosis” at all. Margulis criticized neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution in part because she saw symbiogenesis as debunking the theory that life was defined by individualistic competition. More recently, Myra Hird has suggested that the gift, such as it has been theorized by certain anthropologists and philosophers, could adequately figure symbiosis and the ethical relations founded on it. I turn to Derrida’s writing on the gift to suggest that, if a gift worthy of the name chances to happen, it necessarily exceeds scientific, theoretical, and philosophical knowledge.

A New Problem-Solving Paradigm for Philosophy of Science

A paradigm instructs in how to do research successfully. Analytic philosophy of science, currently dominant, models paradigmatic rational science as a system of logical inferences. It is, however, an abundantly inadequate paradigm. This paper presents an alternative paradigm: science as an organized collection of problem solving processes. This position is backed, on the one side, by a cognitive model of problem solving process applicable to all problem solving circumstances and, on the other, by a non-formal conception of rationality that provides a wider enriched notion of rational research process than is available to the analytic paradigm. The result is a very different way of looking at science and of doing history and philosophy of science. The position is developed sufficiently to display its nature and merits.

The ideal of objectivity and the public role of the historian: some lessons from the Historikerstreit and the History Wars

In this paper, I attempt to offer some new insights into an age-old question: what is the public usefulness of history and historians? More specifically, I discuss the role of the ideal of the disinterested and objective historian in two different and very important public historical debates: the German Historikerstreit and the Australian History Wars. My analysis is not so much aimed at analysing the outcome of these debates, but rather at the way these debates were held, and the specific ways in which the participants argued with each other. I combine a rhetorical analysis of these debates with a method from analytic philosophy of science to arrive at the following conclusion: both the Historikerstreit and the History Wars were haunted by a misguided ideal of historical objectivity that in the end had a negative influence on the quality of these debates. Finally, I also suggest an alternative view on the public role of the historian, which is based on Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between agonistic and antagonistic pluralism.

Is There a Cultural Barrier Between Historical Epistemology and Analytic Philosophy of Science?

One of the difficulties facing the philosopher of science today is the divide between historical epistemology and analytic philosophy of science. For over half a century these two traditions have followed independent and divergent paths. Historical epistemology, which originated in France in the early twentieth century, has recently been reformulated by a number of scholars such as Lorraine Daston, Ian Hacking, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. Elaborating novel historical methods, they seek to provide answers to major questions in the field. In the light of this situation, my article examines the cultural barrier that explains the uneasy relationship between the two traditions. This barrier hinges on a number of factors—institutional, political and social—that are bound up with the philosophical issues in question. By resorting both to historical study and logical analysis, the new historical epistemology incites us to move beyond a rather sterile antagonism.

“Mr. Hooke’s Reflecting Box”: Modeling the Projected Image in the Early Royal Society

From the early 1660s through the late 1690s, Robert Hooke conducted experiments with the camera obscura and other methods of optical projection, demonstrating how they could be used expressly for the purpose of painting. Then described as “Mr. Hooke’s reflecting box,” the camera obscura is well known in studies of early modern art and visuality, where it has figured as a “model.” Drawing upon recent work in analytic philosophy of science, this essay uses Hooke’s projected-image experiments to rethink the meanings of the camera obscura’s modeling and their broader implications for artistic practice in the long eighteenth century.

Normativity without normativism

Stephen Turner’s book Explaining the Normative (Polity, Oxford, 2010) constitutes a powerful onslaught against one of the main intellectual havens where the thesis of something like a transcendental foundation for rationality is still alive and flourishing. During the two last centuries, naturalism has been conquering one territory after another, but there was a portion of philosophical land where it seemed that ordinary scientific research would necessarily be insufficient to offer us an account of what happened there. This thesis has often been expressed as the ‘irreducibility of normativity’ (see Parfit 2011 for a recent exposition), and Turner’s book aims at showing that the arguments supporting this thesis are not defensible. I am absolutely sympathetic to the claim that the normative is just an ordinary citizen of the natural world, though probably more complex than other vulgar things like neutron stars, hurricanes or lizards, but my own impression reading the book has been that Turner tries perhaps to go a little bit farther than where I would be happy to take company with him, and I shall try here to explain the slight differences I see in our ways of understanding the question, albeit running the risk of misinterpreting some of his claims of course. I have to make a confession to begin with. A large part of my own work in analytical philosophy of science has been inspired by the idea that, besides analysing the ‘internal’ structure and dynamics of ‘purely epistemic states’ (i.e., what makes of something a theory, or a case of empirical confirmation, or a case of approximation to the truth, etc.), it was convenient to look at ‘scientific objects’ as the result of the decisions of human agents (i.e., scientists), and those decisions would not only be guided by ‘epistemic interest’, but also by ‘social’ ones. Most of the work done in the sociology of scientific knowledge in the last quarter of the past century tended to interpret the ‘epistemic’ and the ‘social’ as not only different, but usually conflicting aspects and forces within the possible motivations of scientists, with an increasingly smaller space left to the former as we approached the more radical, relativistic brands within the discipline. Looking for some approach in which the ‘epistemic’ and the ‘social’ could be conceived as coherent, complementary, and even interdependent elements of the process of scientific research, I came across Robert Brandom’s breathtaking theoretical fabric as disclosed in his book Making it Explicit, and found in his notions of commitment, entitlement and scorekeeping a particularly apt methodological tool to represent the dynamics of scientific research in terms of a ‘conversation’ governed by a system of inferential rules. These are rules that

REDUKCINIS EMPIRIZMAS – METODOLOGIJA AR EPISTEMOLOGIJA?

Šiame darbe nagrinėjami redukcinio empirizmo filosofijos bruožai ir jo reikšmė šiuolaikinės analitinės mokslo filosofijos ginčams. Redukciniu empirizmu vadinama pirmiausia loginio pozityvizmo mokslo filosofija, kuria siekiama parodyti, kaip teoriniai terminai gali būti redukuojami į stebėjimo terminus ir eliminuojami iš mokslo kalbos žodyno.Paprastai laikomasi nuomonės, kad redukcinio empirizmo filosofija yra semantinio mokslinio antirealizmo forma ir yra nesėkminga dėl pačios teorinių terminų redukcijos į stebėjimo terminus idėjos ydų, pavyzdžiui, netinkamo Bertrand’o Russello loginio formalizmo arba paslėptų verifikacionistinių prielaidų. Šiame darbe ginsiu tezę, kad redukcinio empirizmo, kaip ankstyvojo loginio pozityvizmo programos dalies, nesėkmes lemia ne pats sumanymas redukuoti teorinius terminus į stebėjimo terminus, bet paslėpta nuostata, jog sėkminga redukcija iš karto numato empiristinę epistemologiją. Tai yra įrodinėsiu, kad reikia griežtai atskirti du dalykus – redukciją, kuri gali būti filosofijos metodas, tinkamas ir realizmui, ir empirizmui, bei empirizmą, kuris nebūtinai turi remtis redukcijos metodu.

Mechanisms, continental approaches, trials, and evolutionary medicine: New work in the philosophy of medicine

Mechanisms, continental approaches, trials, and evolutionary medicine: New work in the philosophy of medicine

Deconstruction, Science, and the Logic of Enquiry

In this essay I set out to place Derrida's work – especially his earlier (pre-1980) books and essays – in the context of related or contrasting developments in analytic philosophy of science over the past half-century. Along the way I challenge the various misconceptions that have grown up around that work, not only amongst its routine detractors in the analytic camp but also amongst some of its less philosophically informed disciples. In particular I focus on the interlinked issues of realism versus anti-realism and the scope and limits of classical (bivalent) logic, both of which receive a detailed, rigorous and sustained treatment in his deconstructive readings of Husserl, Austin and others. Contrary to Derrida's reputation as a exponent of anti-realism in its far-gone ‘textualist’ form and as one who merely plays perverse though ingenious games with logic I show that those readings presuppose both a basically realist conception of their subject-matter and a strong commitment to the protocols of bivalent logic. These he applies with the utmost care and precision right up to the point – unreachable except by way of that procedure – where they encounter certain problems or anomalies that cannot be resolved except by switching to a different (non-bivalent, deviant, paraconsistent, ‘supplementary’, or ‘parergonal’) logic. Philosophy of science in the analytic mainstream might benefit greatly from a closer acquaintance with Derrida's thinking on these topics, as it might from a knowledge of his likewise rigorous thinking-through of the antinomy between structure and genesis as it bears upon issues in the history of scientific thought.

A philosophical account of interventions and causal representation in nursing research

Background Representing is about theories and theory formation. Philosophy of science has a long-standing interest in representing. At least since Ian Hacking's modern classic Representing and Intervening (1983) analytical philosophers have struggled to combine that interest with a study of the roles of intervention studies. With few exceptions this focus of philosophy of science has been on physics and other natural sciences. In particular, there have been few attempts to analyse the use of the notion of intervention in other disciplines where intervention studies are important, such as in nursing research. One unintended consequence of this is that the relations between representing and intervening tend to be less understood outside the natural sciences. Objectives and design This article highlights a number of possible topics on which nursing science and analytic philosophy of science can fruitfully interact. The basic idea is simple. Building on a characterisation of interventions in terms of (i) what is intervened on and (ii) with respect to what, we suggest that interventions in nursing research typically are a blend of varieties belonging to the three dimensions of agency, epistemology, and ontology. The details of the blend determine the relation of the particular intervention study to traditional representational categories such as inductivism and hypothetico-deductive method, and have a bearing on its explanatory power and other more theory independent features of research as well. The framework we suggest should be relevant for nurse researchers who want to adopt a more general and analytically entrenched perspective on representing and intervening than the methodological boundaries in nursing research typically allow.

Naturalism and cognitive turn in the philosophy of science

Article represents an overview of modern naturalistic trends in analytical philosophy of science. The author analyzes the reasons for the appeal to naturalism and sets out the main ideas of naturalistic philosophy of science concepts.

Inconsistency and plausible reasoning in an analysis of German affricates: A case study in the philosophy of linguistics

The paper puts forward a metatheoretical approach which is capable of accounting for the emergence and resolution of contradictions in linguistic theories. After the main tenets of this approach have been introduced, the authors illustrate them by carrying out a detailed case study on the argumentation structure of an analysis of German affricates. In the final section general conclusions are drawn that go beyond the particular case study and reveal hidden aspects of theory construction in linguistics. The main finding is that linguistic theories work in a way fundamentally different both from what the analytical philosophy of science and practicing linguists themselves assume.

Comments and Critique

The ArgumentIn this rejoinder to Gyorgy Markus (Science in Context1:5–51), I argue that although there are nonphilosophical hermeneutical studies of communication among scientists (a “weak” hermeneutics) from which much can be learned about scientific practices, there is also the philosophical genre of a hermeneutics of natural science (a “strong” hermeneutics), with which this paper is concerned. The former is the nonphilosophical use of hermeneutics in the study of texts and historical sources; the latter is a philosophy pursued within a working canon of philosophical works defined principally by the writings of Heidegger and Husserl. There is also a hermeneutically sensitive analytic philosophy of science, such as in the work of Kuhn, Toulmin, and Elkana. These genres are distinguished by their literary canons and their basic phenomenologies or critical experiential givens; each genre comprises an exemplary phenomenology as understood with the help of a characteristic fundamental literary canon.I argue that analytic philosophy is pursued within a canon that makes it difficult to raise hermeneutical questions about natural science, and that it assumes a generally positivistic phenomenology. I argue that hermeneutical phenomenology currently defines itself in dialectical opposition to “science” as understood (positivistically) by analytic philosophy, and has failed to exploit the opportunity of making its own positive contribution to the philosophy of science by examining for itself the phenomenology of laboratory work, especially data production, and the transformation of the language of theory into a descriptive language of scientific phenomena. A “strong” hermeneutical philosophy of natural science, then, challenges both analytic philosophy and the existing tradition of hermeneutical phenomenology.

Methode oder Dogma?

Some leading ideas of the constructivist protophysics are discussed on the basis of P. Janich's Protophysik der Zeit. After having reviewed the contents of the second edition Janich's claim that analytical philosophy of science is purely affirmative and not critical towards science in its historical appearence is refuted. In the next section the principles of constructivist methodology of physics are criticised, and the claim is refuted that prescriptions for measurement cannot without circularity be shown to be invalid by experimental results. In the last section we discuss Janich's foundation of time measurement in a mathematical frame similar to that for extensive systems. Thus the relation between Janich's and the ordinary account is cleared up.

Wie arbeitet die analytische Wissenschaftstheorie?

In the last decade analytical philosophy of science has been considered by many people as a descriptive activity. In part I of this paper we show that philosophy of science has been designed as normative “logical analysis” by Reichenbach and Carnap before world war II. Thus the identification “analytical = descriptive” is historically unjustified. In part II we discuss three tasks of analytical philosophy of science, the logical reconstruction of concepts, theories, and methods. While the first is mainly descriptive, the third mainly normative, the second may be both, depending on the intended goal.

Taking Evolution Seriously

The climate of epistemological opinion is rapidly changing in the direc tion of an increasing concern with the substantive results of the empirical sciences of man, such as psychology and biology. This change is of a com paratively recent date: as late as in 1964, Chauncey Wright's seminal speculations on the biology of knowledge-processes were shrugged off by one commentator as nineteenth-century impedimenta and paraphernalia.1 Today, such a judgement seems strangely out of date. Our knowledge of man as an animal has been broadened and deepened, both by the dramatic ad vances of molecular biology and by the recent appearance of the 'sociobiology' represented by Edward O. Wilson. To the philosopher, the question inevitably arises of how far this knowledge extends and, in par ticular, to what extent it can account for peculiarly human intellectual phenomena, such as the growth of scientific knowledge. The study of man as an animal and the study of man as a knower can no longer be simply assumed to be two distinct and separate departments of thought. From this perspective, attention naturally focuses on Donald T. Campbell's attempt at bringing together evolutionary biology, cognitive psy chology, and analytical philosophy of science in the cooperative research programme which he has labelled 'evolutionary epistemology'. This paper will be devoted to a discussion of Campbell's research programme, as it is set forth in his two papers 'Evolutionary Epistemology' and 'Unjustified Varia tion and Selective Retention in Scientific Discovery'.2 The discussion will be largely critical, but the purpose of the criticism is not destructive. My discus sion is motivated throughout by a conviction as to the importance of Campbell's undertaking, a wholehearted sympathy with his goals, and a profound admiration for his impressive achievements in transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries. My criticisms are not intended as criticisms of evolutionary epistemology understood as the attempt to bring evolutionary theory to bear on epistemological problems; rather, they are in tended as a modest contribution to just this end. They are offered, therefore, in a spirit of cooperation, not of controversy.