Why Russell Was Not an Epistemic Structural Realist

Literally speaking, "Philosophy of biology" is a rather old expression. William Whewell coined it in 1840, at the very time he introduced the expression "philosophy of science". Whewell was fond of creating neologisms, like Auguste Comte, his French counterpart in the field of the philosophical reflection about science. Historians of science know that a few years earlier, in 1834, Whewell had generated a small scandal when he proposed the word "scientist" as a general term by which "the students of the knowledge of the material world" could describe themselves, and distinguish themselves from artists. The term "philosopher", Whewell argued, was too wide. A new generic term, more or less equivalent to the French term "savant", was needed in order to prevent the disintegration of science that seemed to flow from its specialization in modern times.1 When Whewell first introduced the terms "philosophy of science" and "philosophy of biology" in his 1840 Philosophy of the inductive sciences, the latter term was merely a special branch of "philosophy of science". The expression "philosophy of science" itself had two justifications: firstly, this phrase expressed the idea that "science" remained cognitively coherent enough to justify a critical enquiry into its methodological unity and its foundation; secondly, the phrase "philosophy of science" was required in order to distinguish a properly "philosophical" enquiry from a "historical" approach to science. Although Whewell's 1840 Philosophy of the inductive sciences 2 had approximately the same chapter structure as his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences 3 (that is, a series of chapters successively devoted to the concept of science in general, and although there was considerable overlap between the contents of the two books, then to particular sciences), its theoretical purpose was different. Clearly, Whewell was not willing to confuse the genres of history and philosophy as Auguste Comte had done in his 1830 Cours de philosophie positive.4 Note also that the word "biology" was still extremely rare in English when Whewell used it in 1840. In fact, Whewell's 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences does not make use of the word "biology": Whewell successively examines "botany", "zoology", "physiology" and "comparative antomy" as special branches of "analytico-classificatory science", then discusses palaeontology as a special case of the "palaeo-etiological sciences". Three years later, in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Whewell does use "biology" as a generic term for all the sciences dealing with life. The various sciences which were separately examined in the previous book are now collectively considered. Furthermore, the main philosophical problem raised by biology is its dual nature: biology is both nomological and a historical science. Modern philosophers of biology are generally unaware of the story of the origins of the expression "philosophy of biology", but Whewell's dual theoretical nature of biology is still a major concern for modern "philosophy of biology".

The conceptual dichotomy of Erklaren and Verstehen (explaining vs. understanding) has a revealing dual status. On the one hand, it has something of an antiquated air to it, as we loosely associate its origins with the work of Wilhelm Dilthey and other nineteenth-century German philosophers who are not widely read any more, at least not within contemporary Anglo-American history and philosophy of the human sciences. At the same time, however, remnants of the dichotomy still come up in various guises and in various areas of contemporary philosophy and philosophy of science. One example is the long-standing debate over the logical status of action explanations (“reasons vs. causes”) in philosophy of mind (Davidson 1980), and associated issues of “teleological explanations” and the explanatory status of laws of nature in the philosophy of the human sciences (Dray 1957; Hempel 1965; von Wright 1971). Another is the question of whether the subject matter of the social sciences requires a special type of interpretative, hermeneutic, or perhaps even empathetic, “access” (Collingwood 1946; Winch 1964; Taylor [1971] 1985). More recently, there has been renewed interest in the question of how to explicate our capacity to interpret another person’s actions (see the recent suggestion that the “theory-theory” vs. “simulation theory” distinction is similar to some aspects of the Erklaren/Verstehen distinction) (Kogler and Stueber 2000). And within mainstream analytical philosophy of the social sciences, one of the central topics has long been the question of whether social facts/events can be reduced to the explanations of the actions of individuals (e.g., Kincaid 1997), raising questions about the units at which explanatory and/or interpretive efforts ought to be directed. (“individualism” vs. “holism”). This question can be traced back to early twentieth-century debates in economics and other emerging social sciences (Udehn 2001).

In the past few years, there has been an increasing tendency in the application of formal and experimentalmethods to tackle philosophical issues.Weverymuch approve of this trend,whichweviewas part and parcel of the recent renewal of “scientific philosophy”: In our mind, the aim of a scientifically oriented philosophy is to adopt formal and experimental methods to address philosophical questions. A distinguishing feature of contemporary scientific philosophy is that the use of formal and experimental methods is not confined to areas such as the philosophy of science, of mathematics, or of physics. Quite the contrary: This research program applies its broad toolkit of formal and experimental practices to a very large range of philosophical areas. For instance, in the philosophy of cognitive science, the development ofmathematicalmodels of concepts representation has proved to be an innovative way to compare normative theories against empirical results. In the philosophy of economics, agent-based models have been used to explore the notion of causality used in economics. More generally, different areas of philosophy—from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of cognitive science, and from ethics to the philosophy of economics—have become increasingly scientific and characterized by a highly interdisciplinary approach. In tandem with this methodological turn, the dispute about whether philosophy should appeal to formal or experimental methods has made a comeback: Experimental philosophers defend the use of empirical methods as a means of exploring

In the late middle ages, chemistry was the science and technology closest to philosophy, the material realization of the method of analysis and synthesis. No longer. Contemporary philosophy is concerned with many sciences—physics, psychology, biology, linguistics, economics—but chemistry is not among them. Why not? Every discipline has particular problems with some philosophical coloring. Those in quantum theory are famous; those in psychology seem endless; those in biology and economics seem more sparse and esoteric. If, for whatever reason, one’s concern is the conceptual or theoretical problems of a particular science, there is no substitute for that science, and chemistry is just one among others. Certain sciences naturally touch on substantive areas of traditional philosophical concern: quantum theory on metaphysics, for example, psychology on the philosophy of mind, and economics and statistics on theories of rationality. In these cases, there is a special interest in particular sciences because they may reform prior philosophical theories or recast philosophical issues or, conversely, because philosophy may inform these subjects in fundamental ways. That is not true, in any obvious way, of chemistry. So what good, then, what special value, does chemistry offer contemporary philosophy of science? Typically philosophical problems, even problems in philosophy of science, are not confined to a particular science. For general problems—problems about representation, inference, discovery, explanation, realism, intertheoretic and interdisciplinary relations, and so on—what is needed are scientific illustrations that go to the heart of the matter without requiring specialized technical knowledge of the reader. The science needed for most philosophy is familiar, not esoteric, right in the middle of things, mature and diverse enough to illustrate a variety of fundamental issues. Almost uniquely, chemistry fits the description. In philosophy of science, too often an effort gains in weight and seriousness merely because it requires mastery of an intricate and arcane subject, regardless of the philosophical interest of what it says. Yet, surely, there is something contrived, even phony, in illustrating a philosophical point with a discussion of the top quark if the point could be shown as well with a discussion of the ideal gas law.

Hegel’s philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) is impossible to separate from the rest of his system, in which nature is shown as a reflection of the idea (Idee) as presented in the logic (in the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften). The system composed by logic, nature, and spirit, represents a dialectical relation in which logic as the universal, nature as the particular, and spirit as the singular, mediate through one another and develop as immanent and constitutive parts of the system as a whole. Yet, the goal of the philosophy of nature is not unrelated to a philosophy of science in the contemporary sense. The latter aims to solve (among other problems) the problem of dualism between the conceptual scheme/the world and the demarcation of science (and knowledge), where the crucial difference is that the Hegelian philosophy of nature benefits from having an answer to these in the form of the absolute idea (die absolute Idee). In a contemporary sense, the constitution of these problematics would follow an abductive reasoning where the Hegelian idea (Idee) would solve these crucial problems for philosophy of science. The following paper will attempt to provide some guiding points for such a project and suggest the assumptions necessary for its development, with the sole purpose of underscoring the similarities and differences between the Hegelian philosophy of nature and a contemporary philosophy of science.

A major controversy in contemporary philosophy of science concerns the possibility and desirability of its ‘naturalization.’ In this paper I review the philosophical controversy concerning naturalism, and investigate the role it might play in the science classroom. I argue that science students can benefit from explicit study of this controversy, and from explicit consideration of the extent to which philosophy of science can be studied naturalistically. More specifically, I suggest that such consideration can enhance students' understanding of the nature of ‘natural’ science, of the nature and importance of philosophy of science, and of the relationship between the two — and that these benefits accrue to science education whichever philosophical view concerning naturalization proves to be correct. My hope is that the paper demonstrates the benefits to be gained from explicit consideration in the science classroom of an important issue in the philosophy of science.

The emphasis on the limitations of objectivity, in specific guises and networks, has been a continuing theme of contemporary analytic philosophy for the past few decades. The popular sport of baiting feminist philosophers — into pointing to what's left out of objective knowledge, or into describing what methods, exactly, they would offer to replace the powerful “objective” methods grounding scientific knowledge — embodies a blatant double standard which has the effect of constantly putting feminist epistemologists on the defensive, on the fringes, on the run. This strategy can only work if ‘objectivity’ is transparent, simple, stable, and clear in its meaning. It most certainly is not. In fact, taking ‘objectivity’ as a sort of beautiful primitive, self-evident in its value, and all-powerful in its revelatory power, requires careless philosophy, and the best workers in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science have made reworked definitions of ‘objectivity’ absolutely central to their own projects. In fact, classic feminist concerns with exploring the impact of sex and gender on knowledge, understanding, and other relations between human beings and the rest of the world fall squarely within the sort of human and social settings thatare already considered central in most current analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science. I argue that the burden of proof is clearly on those who wish toreject the centrality and relevance of sex and gender to our most fundamental philosophical work on knowledge and reality.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to answer the question is it possible to speak about some kind of Kantian turn in the transition from the traditional philosophy of science to the contemporary one. Second, and more important, to describe the main points of the new philosophy of science just through the discussion of above question. The author is of the opinion that it is possible to speak about Kantian turn in the new philosophy of science (the philosophy which underlines the role of an a priori and conventional conceptual framework), but he also indicates certain important differences between Kantian original position and the new philosophy of science.

If we are to solve the central problems in the philosophy of science, Paul Churchland argues, we must draw heavily on the resources of the emerging sciences of the mind/brain. In "A Neurocomputational Perspective, "Churchland illustrates the fertility of the concepts and data drawn from the study of the brain and from the study of artificial networks that model the brain. These concepts bring an unexpected coherence to scattered issues in the philosophy of science, new solutions to old philosophical problems, and new possibilities of science itself. "A Neurocomputational Perspective "collects the most influential of Churchland's recent essays in the philosophy of mind, and introduces a number of ground breaking new essays in the philosophy of science. The essays in part 1 form a systematic treatment of the major problems in the philosophy of mind, as seen from the perspective of the philosophy of science and also from the perspective of computational neuroscience and connectionist AI. The nature of mental representations, of sensory qualia, of psychological explanation and of human self understanding all receive significant new treatment, and Churchland reaffirms his well known position that our "folk psychology" must eventually be reduced, perhaps to a mature cognitive neurobiology, or else be displaced by some new framework that does cohere with emerging theories of brain function. In part 2, Churchland provides a coherent and unified alternative conception, in neurocomputational terms of the many issues central to the philosophy of science. These include the nature of theories, the theory-ladenness of perception, the nature of conceptual unification and theoretical simplicity, thenature of paradigms, the kinematics and dynamics of conceptual change, the nature of abductive inference, and the nature of explanatory understanding. Collectively these present a new conception of science. Paul M. Churchland is Professor of Philosophy and member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California at San Diego. A Bradford Book.

Simplicity was recently described in the philosophy of science as “perhaps the most controversial theoretical virtue” (Schindler 2018). It has been also argued that contrary to the standard view, simplicity is not merely a pragmatic virtue but also an epistemic one. Virtue epistemologists are also interested in epistemic virtues, but simplicity is usually absent in their discussions. This paper adduces several contemporary approaches to simplicity showing that in philosophy and in psychology it can be considered either as a virtue or as a vice. The paper then refers to the thought of Thomas Aquinas as an example of a premodern understanding of the virtue simplicity and suggests that his notion of simplicity as a virtue might be developed today within virtue epistemology into an interesting complement to this “perhaps the most controversial theoretical virtue” (Schindler 2018) known from contemporary philosophy.

This is a book about facts that don’t have explanations, or what philosophers call brute facts. Such facts appear in our explanations, they inform many people’s views about the structure of the world, and are part of philosophical views in metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Yet, despite the very large literature on explanation, the question of bruteness has been left largely unexamined. The chapters in this collection aim to address this gap in the literature by exploring questions related to brute facts such as the following: How can we draw a distinction between facts that can reasonably be thought of as brute and facts for which further explanation is possible? Can we explain something and gain understanding by appealing to brute facts? Is naturalism inconsistent with the existence of (non-physical) brute facts? Can modal facts be brute facts? Are emergent facts brute? Thinking about these matters systematically directs one to related considerations that are at the heart of major debates in contemporary philosophy concerning modality, naturalism, consciousness, reduction, and explanation. With contributors who include senior and junior faculty members from different backgrounds and holding a number of different views, this book aims to begin a debate and to further engage the reader in these questions.

Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book that philosophers love to hate. With over a million copies sold it is one of the most popular books in twentieth century philosophy, yet most work in philosophy of science has been aimed at dismissing or at least modifying Kuhn. On the other hand, and much to Kuhn’s own horror, ‘‘social studies of science’’ have embraced Kuhn’s alleged skeptical consequences. In the 1990’s these opposing views between realists and constructivists collided in a disciplinewide debate called the ‘‘Science Wars’’. After the turn of the century, however, interest in Kuhn’s ideas seems to have waned. The topics got old and perhaps philosophers just grew tired of looking back. With no synthesis in sight, the relative calm suggests they agreed to disagree, leaving the discipline in a state of fragmentation. Now that the new century is well under way, the 50th anniversary of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a good occasion to look ahead and ask what the role of Kuhn’s legacy can be in twenty first century philosophy of science. This issue of Topoi addresses this question with a mix of tradition and innovation. It brings together contributions by senior scholars who have themselves, like Kuhn, helped shape twentieth century philosophy of science, and young academics on whom the burden falls of shaping that of the 21th. Their contributions fall into two groups, those looking to refine Kuhn’s ideas and those ready to implement them. Hanne Andersen extends Kuhn’s ‘‘Essential Tension’’ between tradition and innovation within mono-disciplinary science with a complementary tension between intellectual dependence and critical scrutiny versus epistemic dependence and trust in interdisciplinary science. Dunja Seselja and Christian Straber develop Kuhn’s account of theory choice based on the evaluation of pursuit worthiness. They argue that dropping the account of epistemic semantic monism inherent in Kuhn’s ideas will yield richer notions of persuasion, interpretation and pluralism. William Rehg provides an interpretation of Kuhn’s ideas in terms of collective intentionality and argues this allows to save Kuhn’s conception of normal and revolutionary science without having to rely on meaning holism and incommensurability. Howard Sankey proposes to sharpen Kuhn’s account by adding to Kuhn’s later rejection of methodological incommensurability a particularist and naturalist conception of epistemic normativity in order to take away the sceptical basis for epistemic relativism. Jerry Doppelt asks what form of realism is still possible given Kuhn’s characterization of the process of theory change. In response to this challenge he develops and defends a ‘best current theory’ realism. While Ronald Giere argues that Kuhn’s later position is in line with his own account of perspectival realism. Visions for the future implementation of Kuhn’s ideas are developed in different directions. Some articles see Kuhn’s future as offering a new paradigm for philosophy of science, others see it as a bridge between philosophy and other fields or as a tool with applications to specific philosophical problems. Joseph Rouse calls attention to a number of less commonly recognized aspects of Kuhn’s work. Some of them indicate that Kuhn was an important precursor to subsequent philosophical developments. But Rouse also looks ahead and cites three overlooked themes that hold opportunities for future research, insisting that the Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science still has to R. De Langhe (&) Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS), Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands e-mail: rogierdelanghe@gmail.com

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1967, Vol 12(2), 95. Reviews the book, Philosophy of Natural Science by Carl G. Hempel (see record 1966-11595-000). This book offers an introduction to some of the central topics in the contemporary methodology and philosophy of n

The article undertakes the problem of a Wittgensteinian background of Toulmin’s model of argument. While appreciating the original character of the investigations set out by Toulmin in The Uses of Argument, Wittgenstein’s ideas taken to be forerunners of both Toulmin’s philosophical method and the particular elements of the model of substantial argument are traced backward, to Toulmin’s earlier books: The Philosophy of Science (Toulmin, The philosophy of science. An introduction, Hutchinson University Library, London, 1953) and An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (Toulmin, An examination of the place of reason in ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1950). The technique of pinpointing the constituents of that model in the books preceding The Uses of Argument is superposing the layout of Toulmin’s model on the crucial arguments concerning the earlier books: the scientific one based on Newtonian optics and the moral one concerning keeping promises. Such a procedure allows identifying backing for warrants and argument fields with the methods of representation in The Philosophy of Science and with modes of reasoning in An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics. The former is traced to passages 6.3 ff of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, while the latter—to the concept of word-games (the later Wittgenstein’s language games). The claim regarding Wittgenstein’s background is that in Toulmin’s view of Wittgenstein, some parts of Tractatus concerning representing are in line with Wittgenstein’s later reflections on language games; as well as that the overall method of The Uses of Argument goes along with Wittgenstein’s therapeutic approach to philosophical problems that have to be placed in the context of their ordinary use.

It is quite widely believed that something like a consensus in North American philosophy of sciencel existed in the period roughly covering 1930 to 1960. I choose 1930 because it dates the beginning of publication of the journal Erkenntnis (edited initially by Reichenbach and Carnap), and opens a decade of something like editorial control over major work in philosophy of science and related fields. Think in this connection of the two series, “Schriften Zur Wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung” (edited by Philipp Frank and Moritz Schlick), and “Einheitswissenschaft” (edited initially by Otto Neurath, Carnap, Frank, and Hans Hahn). The first of a number of major conferences in analytic philosophy of science was held in Paris in 1935. In 1938 the publication of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science began, under the initiative of Neurath, Carnap and Charles Morris as associate editors. I note with interest that the founder editor of Philosophy of Science, William Malisoff, was also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Encyclopedia. Philosophy of Science began publication in January 1934; the lead article, “On the Character of Philosophical Problems”, is a Malisoff’s translation of Carnap’s essay originally written in German. All of the developments just outlined took place within what we now regard as the discipline of analytic philosophy.KeywordsAnalytic PhilosophyScientific RevolutionRelativity PhysicLogical EmpiricismInternational EncyclopediaThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.