Customer Reviews

Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

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This is an excellent book of mantras for pushover students who seek initiation into the theocracy that is modern philosophy of science. It begins with a chapter of bogus history, intended to establish that the logical empiricists are God's Chosen People.

While "it is often urged that the great period of modern philosophy---from Descartes through Immanuel Kant---consists in an extended reflection on the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries," "Developments in contemporary philosophy of science have been prompted and guided by another set of revolutionary developments in science and mathematics occurring toward the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries." "The first comprehensive answer to these newly-asked questions is often referred to as 'logical empiricism,'" whose "strength and widespread influence should ... be understood and appreciated," by "looking more closely at the situation in which the first of the logical empiricists, Ernst Mach, found himself." (pp. 3-4).

What unbelievable nonsense! Mach of course developed his theory *before* the great revolutions; indeed, the two aspects of the "situation" in which Mach "found himself" discussed by our authors---atomism and the inadequacy of mechanistic-deterministic as a comprehensive world-view---had both been around for hundreds of years. Mach in fact presented his theory in books on the history of science, that is, in "an extended reflection on the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries," to use our authors' characterisation of the supposed opposite of Mach's approach. How on earth the scientific revolutions of the 20th century are supposed to have influenced logical empiricism when they eventually came about our authors do not say. In fact it is hard to imagine any philosophy of science more oblivious to the concept of scientific revolutions than that of logical empiricism. And let us not forget that Einstein was driven by his revolution to *abandon* his previously held Machian ideas.

But none of this matters. The purpose of this chapter is to instil in students that thou shalt have one and only one Faith, and that is logical empiricism. Hence the fictional story about the Flood of the 20th century that left only logical empiricists to populate the world and address "newly-asked questions." It also follows from this Genesis story that all later philosophers must be mere mutations of the blessed logical empiricists who survived on the Ark. For example, there are "those historically sophisticated philosophers of science who question the logical empiricist understanding of empirical meaningfulness and ... the relation between facts and theories" (p. 7). But our authors are pious enough to resist this temptation of the devil, by chanting the Gospel truth that "The principal difficulty with the historicist view is a sweeping relativism that is ultimately incoherent" (p. 107). This view is reinforced by uncritically worshipping before "Davidson's important and complex paper" (p. 106) on conceptual schemes. Of course it is not to be spoken of that the diabolical "historicists" have long since refuted this naive argument.