Welcome and Introductions

Welcome, readers of philosophy of science. Please introduce yourself and share your interests in PoS, and/or some reading recommendations. To be fair, I'll start.

I am an IT technician with a BA's in philosophy and psychology. I spent a year and a half in Carnegie Mellon's Logic and Computation program before leaving for IT. My interests are primarily methodological, but range all over the PoS map.

Some (lighter) recommendations:
*William Poundstone's Labyrinths of Reason for an approachable review of modern epistemological conundrums relevant to PoS.
*Clark Glymour's Thinking Things Through for a tour through some of philosophy's greatest contributions to "logic, decision theory, computation, scientific method, and the mind".

Hey guys,

I'm a student (a senior, soooo close *sigh*) working towards a BS in Biology. My primary interest above all else is consciousness studies and from there extending into neurobiology, cognitive science and biology in general. Within Philosophy of Science my primary interests are methodology because its essential for good scientific inquiry and philosophy of mind in how it pertains to consciousness studies.

When it comes to PoS I'm as far from an expert as you can get, but I'm an interested student and an avid learner, and always looking for applications to cracking the problem of consciousness (from a biological standpoint).

Good idea for a group, johnnylogic! I got interested in the Philosophy of Mathematics as an undergrad. To have a better context for the field, I decided that I should bone up a little on the math itself, and discovered that I liked that too. Grad school was a toss up between math and philosophy (I also thought about CMU's Pure and Applied Logic program), but I ended up getting an MA in math, and am currently working on my Ph.D. in Biostatistics (I'm ABD). In between the two grad programs, I worked in clinical research in Psychiatry.

Most of the reading I've done in PoS has been in early 20th century Philosophy of Mathematics. These days I'm most interested in the intersections between PoS and probability / statistics. (I should say I'm a Bayesian at heart, but I use the frequentist voodoo on a daily basis, due to laziness and the difficulty of overcoming inertia in the medical journals.)

As for recommendations, I'll say Richard Jeffrey's Subjective Probability: The Real Thing and Maria Carla Galavotti's Philosophical Introduction to Probability. The first is an idiosyncratic and unusually readable introduction to Bayesian practice, and the second is a survey of philosophical views of probability, focusing on 20th century work.

Although I'm a science graduate (chemistry) with a few years industrial science (bio/chem) under my belt, I'm really a lay person when it comes to philosophy of science.

I'm interested in how 'science works' in theory and in practise, and the differences between the two. I'm also quite interested in how science is portrayed in the media - how scientific concepts get distorted, and what the underlying science actually is behind the headlines that make the news. I know enough science to understand it - if only I could find a source that would actually give it rather than opinions vaguely relating to it.

I'll read most posts, but probably not contribute too often.

I have no science background! My degree is in English/Classics. But I would like to follow your discussions and get reading recs from you.

All,

Welcome.

Yiggy,

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science was my first passion in philosophy (also, the subject of my sole published paper).

johnascott,

Personally, I find subjective Bayesianism a fishy way to describe science. Perhaps we can make our cases in a thread?

reading_fox,

I am interested in practice, too. I am IT at a geotechnical consulting firm, and normative PoS has little bearing on what we do. This worries me a bit.

Ditto about science and the media. Have you read The Republican War on Science?

phwtw,

I started as a math-phobic English major-- who knows where your interests might lead you!

It occurs to me that I have an unusually variegated background...

normative PoS has little bearing on what we do. This worries me a bit.

Why does this worry you?

LolaWalser,

So as to not hijack the introductions, I'll answer you in another thread.

I'm a retired lecturer in Computer Science who brings boundless ignorance to this subject.

I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shortly after it was published, and recall being intrigued by it, but did not have the mental energy to pursue the subject, being then entirely engrossed in trying to make the predictions of a certain brand of historical materialism come true.

And since then, whenever I have read a bit of Lakatos or Popper, or their opponents, or the debates about Kuhn's views that occasionally take place in the press, I have always felt that I should really understand this field well enough to have positions on the major issues that I could defend against a sophisticated opponent.

But I don't. (Except, of course, for rejecting post-modernism and all its works, God-between-us-and-evil.)

So I hope to hang around and follow the hopefully-enlightening debates of my betters, and learn something.

Doug1943,

Welcome-- "boundless ignorance" and all! Though, even knowing the rudiments of Kuhn, Lakatos or Popper easily qualifies as bounding ignorance of PoS. There are some intriguin connections between computer science and PoS, see Kelly's The Logic of Reliable Inquiry*, or Thagard's Computational Philosophy of Science for some perspectives on the subject.

Perhaps you can start a thread on best introductions to PoS, and/or The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

* Full disclosure: I was a student of Kelly's at CMU, and am a partisan.

I am a retired IT professional with an interest in methodology, really more for social science than biological or physical science. I am interested in the difficulties comprehending quantum mechanics, the direction of time, and the varied theories of cosmology. I am not very knowledgeable or well read in these subjects, and I hope to learn from my betters, and get some reading recommendations.

Fabulous idea for a group -- professionally, i'm another ITer with a "boundless ignorance" (thx Doug) coupled with a keen interest in the topic.

It's great to see all this interest in the subject!

johnnylogic, I'll be delighted to debate Bayesianism in another thread. I'll marshall my subjective forces and make an inaugural post in the next couple days.

almigwin and NativeRoses,

Welcome fellow Iters.

johnascott,

Great. I'll have do some refresher reading on the subject.

I am working on a PhD in philosophy.

I'm pretty much interested in the big questions: What is there? How do we know it's there? What do we do about it once we know? That said, I'm particularly interested in the philosophy of mathematics as it relates to core issues in metaphysics and epistemology.

Many of my views are currently out-of-vogue (though not wholly unconventional within the history of philosophy). Hopefully they'll manage to get some people ticked off.

I have worked in IT for a number of years. My specialty has been integration and as a result I am drawn to (and have started a group for) consilience (the unity of knowledge). I am a dualist, a temporal idealist (material realist) and very interested in pancomputationalism. I'm also interested in the application of modeling to problems of philosophy but have not been able to find much information on this.

Hello all, I am degreed as an applied scientist (horticulture) and am about to receive a masters of history garden history and landscape studies in less than a month (counting days, absolutely!) My interest in POS is wide ranging. A book that I am reading at the moment is A Philosophy of Gardens by David E. Cooper. Cooper goes beyond questions of aesthetics (another topic that interests me greatly) to the primal connections between man/nature/and art.

If you all do not mind the participation of an applied scientist and historian, I would like to join the discussion.

Well let's see. I am a cognitive psychologist. I profess at a university in New England. I teach History and Systems of Psychology. PoS has always intrigued me. Some days I like to write brief sentences.

Just come across your group and find some of your views interesting, though I tend to avoid too much terminology. I've always had a very poor memory in several sectors but it is balanced with natural logical thinking; for instance I was lousy at literature when it came to quoting poetry recently read but always excelled at Maths as I was skilled at mental arithmetic.
I enjoy answering the door on a Sunday morning to Jehovah's witnesses and such groups as I'm sure I've turned some agnostic.
I find a lot of books on philosophy and psychology are like the bible; you can't always believe what you read!

Why would you ever believe everything that you read?

Why would you believe anything that you read!

Wishful thinking?

I am an amateur in PoS. I've never taken a Philosophy course. I was drawn to Philosophy through writings of Milton Babbitt, a contemporary composer and music theorist. (I'm a musician/professor of music.) I began reading Nelson Goodman, and was deeply impressed. From Goodman, I was led to WVO Quine, whose introductory "The Web of Belief" is permanently on my re-read shelf. Just looking over the posts, I've found 4 books that I've just ordered. My exploration of this foreign but fascinating field has been desultory. I don't know that I'll have a lot to add, but lurking will be to my benefit.

I'm not extremely well-read in PoS, but interested nonetheless. I have earned my living as a chemist and have witnessed active misuse of "science." I am particularly interested in cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology, although my fiance is quite deep into the philosophy of physics and so conversations (and eventually readings) may be increasingly leading in that direction.

Lately my focus has been on the history of the philosophy of science, so I recently finished reading Novum Organum and have nearly finished An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I find that in reading chronologically I get more out of my philosophy texts, a better sense of exactly what each author was arguing against, that I wouldn't get if I just jumped in with the modern stuff, and I'm in no hurry to master the topic. I got a bit of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper in college, so I'm not completely wet behind the ears in the more modern classics.

Popular works are OK by me if they at least contain points to ponder. I did pick up A Philosophy of Science for Personality Theory the other day; although quite dated and a bit basic, it looks interesting. I also confess an interest in how metaphor might be basic to scientific reasoning, a la Douglas Hofstadter and George Lakoff.

After that long introduction...I'll probably lurk more than post. But I look forward to learning from you all.

I focused on HPS at university, finally earning a degree in Russian literature. My interests lie in science's place as a field of discourse during both the Imperial and Soviet periods of Russian History.

Does prescriptive philosophy of science work (Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair; Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science)?

How do scientistic portrayal's in Russian literature affect the status of scientific discourse in general (Chernyshevsky, What is to be done?; Turgenev, Father's and Sons; Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Chekhov, Stories)

What is to be said about the integration of science and the intelligentsia (Kropotkin, Bakunin)?

Oh, and I like reading books by Steve Fuller, Larry Laudan, and Bruno Latour.

I'm cross-trained in philosophy (BA, MA) & psychiatry (MD), & have tried to keep up w/ the PoS field. What would you (or others) recommend as a good overview of the philosophical issues about causality from the viewpoints of statistics (i.e. looking back in time through data) and probability (i.e. looking ahead in time)?

Thanks!

#27: It might be too technical to serve as an overview, but I'd recommend taking a look at Judea Pearl's Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference. Some of it is free online at his website: http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/index.html

As a side note, I understand the distinction you're trying to draw between retrospective and prospective causal conclusions, but the use of "statistics" and "probability" to reflect that difference is nonstandard. Usually one would talk about "explanatory" vs. "predictive," or something like that, instead.

As another side note, I just realized I never got around to starting the Bayesian thread promised around a year ago. How embarrassing!

I am on the last half of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As a casual observer of science, his work seems to have more application than that of Karl Popper and the popular Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Although falsification is appealing and sounds scientific from a philosophical viewpoint, it seems that few scientists really work this way.

As an observer, I'm interested to know what many of you think of the current state of scientific theory, in particular, quantum mechanics and string theories.

Also, I'm curious to know your thoughts on recent work in emergent properties and fractal or other scaling.

I studied physics in college and graduate school, leaving with a Master's degree. I then worked about twenty years in the semiconductor industry, developing software to analyze and optimize circuit designs.

I took one class in college in philosophy of science. Mostly I found it deathly boring but then we covered Structure of Scientific Revolutions and that got me a bit lit up.

In graduate school I audited a philosophy class on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. That was great fun, really - learning about Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen and such things. Ah, I remember that the philosophy professor teaching that class went over one afternoon to the physics building to give a colloquium talk - maybe 100 people in the room or so. He asked for a show of hands on a few questions. Basically, no more than a few physicists in the room had given any more than cursory thought to the difficult issues of interpretation.

Some time back I read a good chunk of Bruno Latour's Science in Action and liked that a lot.

Philosophy of science interests me greatly when I dabbled in it as a philosophy undergrad. I've studied Francis Bacon who attempted to formalize scientific method in the Renaissance. Today when we think of science, we likely picture researchers using hypothesis testing as advocated by this early English philosopher. Yet science does not proceed often this way at all. In fact,it is a jumble of methods with some being more popular than others depending on the scientific field one studies. My interests lie heavily in the thought of Willard Quine and Karl Popper, along with Thomas Kuhn who raised the issue regarding the "culture of science" and how things get done.

Started college in physics and chemistry. Quickly found that, unlike the reading I had done as a teenager, actually college coursework didn't deal at all with the ideas that lay behind this science. (I was young and naive.) The ideal thing might have been to then double major in a science and philosophy. Instead, I engaged in a grand peregrination through history, philosophy, linguistics, and a couple of graduate degrees in education, one focusing on the history of higher education and the second in political theory of education. Then I bailed on academia and now work for the government.

Found my way to general philosophy of science via Charles Peirce and philosophy of physics by way of Alfred North Whitehead. Currently, I'm finding Tim Maudlin, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time a (just, barely) accessible introduction to this topic that I'd recommend, especially if your college math and physics is a tad fresher than mine (but even if it's not).

Hello all. I am a programmer and author who has been driven for a long while now by epistemology and philosophy of science. What started me on this way in the first place was astronomy and existentialism, which led me into increasingly questioning the limits of knowledge (that of ourselves and of the universe). Although science is incredible and fascinating, it is definitely not the end-all-be-all of knowledge, nor is all of what presents itself as science to be trusted. I believe that science must always be approached in a very skeptical manner, and I think that in general being simultaneously an enthusiast and a skeptic of science is what vitalizes the philosophy of science.

The best books in the philosophy of science that I have read are definitely Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science, The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin, and A Kierkegaard Anthology (due to Kierkegaard's ever-present theme of subjectivity vs objectivity).