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