Summary: In this article Hesse defends the idea that scientific theories are hypothetico-deductive in form. She examines this hypothetico-deductive method by considering some examples from nineteenth-century mathematical physics. By means of these examples she brings out two points about scientific hypothesis. The first is that mathematical formalisms, when used as hypotheses in the description of physical phenomena, may function like the mechanical models of an earlier stage in physics, without having in themselves any mechanical or other physical interpret. The second point is that most physicists do not regard models as literal descriptions of nature, but as standing in a relation of analogy to nature.
Models and analogies in science
Summary: In this book Hesse argues, contra Duhem, that models and analogies are integral to understanding scientific practice in general and scientific advancement in particular, especially how the domain of a scientific theory is extended and how theories generate genuinely novel predictions. Hesse thinks that, in order help us to understand a new system or phenomenon, we will often create an analogical model that compares this new system or phenomenon with a more familiar system or phenomenon. Hesse distinguishes different types of analogies according to the kinds of similarity relations in which two objects enter: Positive analogies, negative analogies, and neutral analogies. The crux of the argument is that the recognition of similarities of meaning between paired terms and the recognition of similar causal relations within two analogies plays an essential role in theoretical explanation and prediction in science.
Resisting reality: Social Construction and Social Critique
Publisher’s Note: Contemporary theorists use the term “social construction” with the aim of exposing how what’s purportedly “natural” is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. In these previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory to explore and develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice.
Although the central essays of the book focus on a critical social realism about gender and race, these accounts function as case studies for a broader critical social realism.
The Structure of scientific inference
Publisher’s Note: A danger of a heavily formalist approach to the structure of science is that it may lose sight of the concrete actualities on which scientific inference is exercised. On the other hand, and excessively descriptive and relativist approach fails to achieve a general systematization of models of inference. This book tries to steer a middle course between these extremes. Hesse first discusses some epistemological problems bequeathed by positivists analyses of science and also considers the problem of inductive justification of theories in relation to evidence. Following Keynes and Carnap she argues that the axioms of probability constitute the best postulate system for a logic of confirmation.
Tainted: How Philosophy of Science can expose bad science
Abstract: Lawyers often work pro bono to liberate death-row inmates from flawed legal verdicts that otherwise would kill them. This is the first book on practical philosophy of science, how to practically evaluate scientific findings with life-and-death consequences. Showing how to uncover scores of scientific flaws – typically used by special interests who try to justify their pollution – this book aims to liberate many potential victims of environmentally induced disease and death.It shows how citizens can help uncover flawed science and thus liberate people from science-related societal harms such as pesticides, waste dumps, and nuclear power. It shows how flawed biology, economics, hydrogeology, physics, statistics, and toxicology are misused in ways that make life-and-death differences for humans. It thus analyzes science at the heart of contemporary controversies – from cell phones, climate change, and contraceptives, to plastic food containers and radioactive waste facilities. It illustrates how to evaluate these scientific findings, instead of merely describing what they are. Practical evaluation of science is important because, at least in the United States, 75 percent of all science is funded by special interests, to achieve specific practical goals, such as developing pharmaceuticals or showing some pollutant causes no harm. Of the remaining 25 percent of US science funding, more than half addresses military goals. This means that less than one-eighth of US science funding is for basic science; roughly seven-eighths is done by special interests, for practical projects from which they hope to profit. The problem, however, is that often this flawed, special-interest science harms the public.
Philosophical expertise and scientific expertise
Abstract: The “expertise defense” is the claim that philosophers have special expertise that allows them to resist the biases suggested by the findings of experimental philosophers. Typically, this defense is backed up by an analogy with expertise in science or other academic fields. Recently, however, studies have begun to suggest that philosophers’ intuitions may be just as subject to inappropriate variation as those of the folk. Should we conclude that the expertise defense has been debunked? In this paper, the author argues that the analogy with science still motivates a default assumption of philosophical expertise; however, the expertise so motivated is not expertise in intuition, and its existence would not suffice to answer the experimentalist challenge. She suggests that there are deep parallels between the current methodological crisis in philosophy and the decline of introspection-based methods in psychology in the early twentieth century. The comparison can give us insight into the possible future evolution of philosophical methodology.
The Social dimensions of scientific knowledge
Summary: Attention to the social dimensions of scientific knowledge is a relatively recent focus of philosophers of science. While some earlier philosophers made contributions to the topic that are still of relevance today, modern interest was stimulated by historians and sociologists of science such as Thomas Kuhn and the growing role played by the sciences in society and, by extension, in the lives of its citizens. There are two main vectors of interest: internal relations within scientific communities, and relations between science and society. This article covers literature in both categories. It starts with work that functions as historical backdrop to current work. As a subfield within philosophy of science, this area is too recent to have dedicated journals and has only a few anthologies. Nevertheless, there are resources in both categories. The remainder of the article lists work in specific subareas.
Dispositions
Summary: This is a perfect overview article that serves as a general introduction to the topic of dispositions. It is composed of six sections that review the main philosophical approaches to the most important questions: Analysis of disposition ascription, the dispositional/categorical distinction, dispositions and categorical bases, the intrinsicness of dispositions and the causal efficacy of dispositions.
Do time travelers suffer from paradoxes?
Abstract: In this paper I give consideration to some apparent impossibilities for the time travelers to the past. After criticizing the views of D. Lewis and K. Vihvelin, I will show in what sense they are really impossible.
Hume on Causation
Hume on Causation is the first major work dedicated to Hume’s views on causation in over fifteen years, and it argues that Hume does not subscribe to any of these three views. It places Hume’s interest in causation within the context of his theory of the mind and his theory of causal reasoning, arguing that Hume’s conception of causation derives from his conception of the nature of the inference from causes to effects.