Lecture Notes Week Four

Wylie, "Philosophical Interlude"

"Contextualism"

No “rules” found to link many statements of theories to sense data (or to observable objects or to observation statements).


Observation as “the least defeasible” basis for hypotheses and theories, but not certain.


“Liberalization” of positivism: from Ayer to Hempel

Empiricism and positivism

Hume's psychology; positivism's "rational reconstruction" (taken to be epistemology)

19th and 20th century developments:

 How to reconcile those aspects of theories of science dealing with "non-observables" and not arrived at by induction with empiricist accounts of discovery?

 Related: what distinguishes genuine knowledge from metaphysics, theology -- or distinguishes science from pseudo-science?

Contextualism: breaking with

    the notion that observations are theory-free, foundational to science;

    the notion that there is a bright line between the "cognitively meaningful" and "the nonsensical";

    the notion that logic and experience jointly determine the directions of scientific research and knowledge.

Wylie, “Thinking from Things”

Archaeology as particularly concerned with philosophical issues

Turn to analytic philosophy of science or identify and pursue internally?

Positivism I (“Traditional archaeology”?)

Positivism II (Hempel and “The New Archaeology”)

Holism (Quine and Duhem): It is systems of theories that entail predictions and that are on the line when hypotheses are “tested”

“recurrent field-defining debates” v. periods of hard won consensus (Kuhnian normal science)

Collingwood and philosophy of history (i.e., historical reasoning)

SSK

Bloor, Barnes, Knorr-Certina (Latour & Woolgar, anthropology of science, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts)

Sociology of knowledge can and should seek to explain the content and nature of scientific knowledge

“The Science Wars”

Norms of the philosophy of science prescribe and, by implication, circumscribe, the questions and considerations legitimately pursued and emphasized.  

Sometimes explicit: Laudan’s “arationality principle” (Progress and Its Problems)

explanatory principles incorporating social processes, beliefs, and values are to be utilized in theorizing about science only in cases in which the beliefs to be explained cannot be explained “in terms of their rational merits”.  

More often, such prescriptions and circumscriptions are implicit

Internal v. external

Knowledge as JTB

Non-cognitive values and social factors compromise inquiry

Individualism

Epistemology v. psychology (& sociology, etc.); only the former
is normative

Teleology v. causality
 
Redefine knowledge as “whatever people take to be knowledge”

Causal explanations for all knowledge

Impartial: methodological relativism (Lloyd’s theologian and anthropologist)

Symmetry: assume the same kinds of explanations for things taken to be true and false

Reflexivity

To discover law like generalizations about the causal processes

The “autonomy of knowledge”

“Let the psychologist tell us why we are deceived; but we can tell ourselves and him why we are not deceived” (Ryle representing the psychology/epistemology dichotomy)

Lakatos: methodology in the philosophy of science concerning what scientific practice should be and what aspects of it are rational (a “rational reconstruction” or “internal history”)

External history, seen as the purview of sociology or psychology, may be necessary, but won't concern “rational” factors

Argument from empiricism

Some causes – experience and logic – bring about rational beliefs; others – social factors – bring about irrational beliefs.

Then sociology of knowledge is “sociology of error” and psychology of knowledge deals with “real knowledge”

SSK: Multitude of factors, even individualistic factors, impact beliefs and knowledge

        More general arguments against individualism

        Knowledge is equated with culture, not with an individual’s experience

Argument from self-refutation:
    
If beliefs are caused or determined, and necessarily in part by society, then these beliefs are bound to be false.

If sociologists of knowledge maintain this, they must apply it to there own claims and, thus, their claims are undermined.

Assume that causation implies error, as do social factors, something SSK denies.

Argument from future knowledge:

There can't be laws of the sort SSK seeks, because that would mean we could predict future knowledge. But we cannot.

    Why not?

    To predict it would be to discover it?

SSK: There are trends not causes in the social world.

SSK: indeed, there are trends as well in the natural world; “law like” behavior (say of the planets) is itself the result of contingent factors and remains only as long as nothing disturbs it.

Naturalism (in the philosophical sense)


W.V. Quine's “Epistemology Naturalized”

Humean project: demonstrate that all synthetic statements (concerning matters of fact) can be traced or reduced to immediate sensory experience.

Abandon the “foundationalist” and “justificatory” projects of epistemology and the philosophy of science

Attempts to translate sentences about ordinary objects and scientific theoretical statements to “sense data language” are failures, largely because individual sentences do not have “empirical content” in isolation (holism)

So, too, are attempts at “rational reconstructions” via “made-up translations” (Carnap’s efforts)

Look to psychology (and evolutionary theory & linguistics) to see how humans actually come to know.

Not circular, if one abandons the project of attempting to “justify” science

Can “naturalized epistemology” or “naturalized philosophy of science” be normative or merely descriptive?

Quine's “Posits and Reality”

The evidence for any object – observable or not – is that theories that include it help to make sense of what we experience

Naturalistic realism: we are always (and must always be) working within some theory or other so that any “doubts” we have about the “reality” of the objects we posit or the reasonableness of the knowledge we hold are imminent – the result of taking some such things as true (small ‘t’)

Holism (“Quine/Duhem” or “Duhem/Quine” thesis):

Bodies of theory, rather than individual hypotheses, entail predictions and have empirical content

Faced with a recalcitrant experience, there is much leeway in terms of what to hold firm and what to reject

Quine: “our one serious inclusive theory” includes “common sense,” science, and (scientific) philosophy, and these are radically interdependent
 
Naturalism “Post” Quine:

Move to recognize social factors as part of the explanations for what people come to believe, accept as knowledge, and so forth (social epistemology, social phil of science, as well as SSK)

Do not assume that non-epistemic values cannot play a role, including a positive one, in inquiry

So extend the relevant sciences from, say, psychology to social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and so forth… but not the same way SSK and sociology/anthropology of science have (often) done