Lecture Notes Week 5


Wylie, pp. 9-15

2 shifts in phil of science that involve making more use of science: philosophy of special sciences and naturalism

Naturalism calls for attention to insights of psychology and cognitive science, and there is far more attention to social and historical studies of science

Strong naturalism: abandon philosophical methods in favor of “scientific methods” in undertaking epistemology of science

Accd'g to Wylie, philosophical methods (conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium (Rawls), or intuitionism) are not unique to philosophy but crucial to good scientific practice

2 shifts as transforming the enterprise of phil of science

    abandonment of the “unity of science” thesis (methodological, metaphysical and/or epistemic)
    attention to detailed study of specific sciences or specialties

In the work to naturalize and “socialize” the philosophy of science, a role for non-cognitive factors increasingly recognized, and for some there is convergence with the focus of SSK on the “social determinants of inquiry”; for others, the convergence is limited to the recognition of the role of facts, and they don't agree with the strong constructivism of early SSK

Shifts in SSK: Its current state reflects that detailed attention to the sciences shows that neither purely sociological nor purely philosophical approaches are sufficient

A recognition of the “multiplicity, patchiness and heterogeneity of scientific practices” and the strong degree of stability

Wylie uses Hacking as an example of a normative as well as descriptive approach that embraces aspects of naturalism


Analytic metaarchaeology

    Evolution in philosophical approaches to archaeology: from approaches making use of standard phil of science (Hempel and deductivist models of confirmation and explanation) to calls within archaeology for an “internal” phil of archaeology

    These things in turn lead to new philosophical questions that emerged from the particulars of archaeological practice themselves

Some adopt a systems-analysis approach rather than covering law model of explanation: the development of formal models that capture the interrelationships and structure of a cultural system (or cultural: environmental system)

Questions:
    Does explanatory understanding require more? How and why do the elements of a culture interact the way they do?

    How to identify causal and statistical factors that “make a difference”?

    Realism?

    Pragmatism?

Wylie, balance of the Introduction

Overview of the chapter's discussion of developments and debates concerning phil of archaeology 1970s-present:

The New Archaeology and processualism (1970s)

    Associated with positivist (or post-positivist) phil of science: Hempel

    Naturalism in the social science sense (as described by Rosenberg): search for laws and explanations (deductive relationship between hypotheses and their implications) and a firm empirical base

    Processualism: to discover and explain the cultural processes that are responsible for the forms of life and trajectories of development documented by cultural historians.

    Cultural systems and processes as “law-governed” phenomena at all levels: technologies, forms of subsistence, material culture, social relations

    Positivism in a relatively liberal sense: unconcerned that their explanations invoked “un-observables”

Anti-scientism and “post-processualism” (1980s and 1990s)

    Reject positivist or post-positivist phil of science

    Make use of SSK and to some extent Kuhn

    Anti-naturalist: emphasizing interpretation and intelligibility over law-based explanations

    Theory-ladenness of observation

    The need for humanistic approaches in which the ideational and intentional dimensions of participants are assumed to be necessary to interpretations of aspects of material culture

    Even though they also maintained that such dimensions were inscrutable or inferentially distant these might be

Kuhn on scientific revolutions

Parallels with political revolutions:

    Circularity of arguments for each paradigm

    No super-institutional framework to adjudicate between competing paradigms

    Competing paradigms, like arguments in political revolutions, are “incommensurable”

    So “political recourse” fails in the case of political revolutions, and neither logic nor data can settle things in the case of scientific revolutions.    
    Techniques of persuasion and sense of crisis carry the day.

Examples:

    Newtonian physics/relativity

    Ptolemaic/Copernican astronomy

    Design/Natural selection

Revolutions as changes in world view

    Appeal to theory-ladenness of observation, prohibitions and inclusions dictated by paradigms

    Like but more importantly unlike subjects of gestalt experiences

    Examples: changes in the sky post-Copernican revolution; evidence of extinctions and of jury-rigging post Darwin