Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0009
S. Goldman
{"title":"The Knowledge Problem in Mature Science","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"In the course of the nineteenth century, physical scientists became increasingly self-conscious of the need for a theory of how scientific knowledge was produced. Though many theories were proposed, none won a consensus. As explicitly stated by William Whewell, the core problem was the same for everyone: how to ground claims of knowledge of experience in a way that also justified claiming that the object of these claims was a reality independent of experience that caused experience. Everyone was acutely aware of the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent and of the logical gulf between induction and deduction. John Herschel, Whewell, John Stuart Mill, August Comte, Hermann Helmholtz, Pierre Duhem, and Ernst Mach were some who proposed theories of science. Of these, Mach alone decisively rejected reality as the objective of science. Meanwhile, the nonscientist J. B. Stallo argued for the fundamental role played by metaphysical concepts in modern science.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114770844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0004
S. Goldman
{"title":"Was Galileo Right and the Catholic Church Wrong?","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Galileo is an iconic founder of modern science, but his career and his contributions were far more complex than his reputation. He, too, championed a scientific method, but his thinking differed greatly from Bacon’s and Descartes’. Galileo’s method was based on Archimedes’ combination of experiment, mathematics, and deduction. This method allowed Galileo to claim certain knowledge of reality derived from mathematical accounts of natural phenomena. But he also claimed certain knowledge of reality derived directly from observation, as in his assertion that the Earth moved around the sun. While Galileo’s predictions were sometimes correct, he had no criterion for distinguishing between correct and incorrect inferences or for connecting his mathematical deductive reasoning about phenomena to the way they really were.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"34 15","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132939923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0001
S. Goldman
{"title":"Introduction: Why Science Wars?","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"While all definitions are stipulative by nature and reflect alternative usages, the meaning of the word “knowledge” is especially ambiguous. It carries profound consequences for what we mean by truth, reality, and rationality, but most importantly for our understanding of scientific knowledge claims. Rhetorically, knowledge trumps belief and opinion, but it is not clear that knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is essentially different from and superior to belief and opinion. As to the questions of what scientists know and how they know it, no answers have stood up to critical scrutiny in the history of modern science. Despite this uncertainty, modern science has claimed a hegemony in our society on the production of knowledge as superior to belief and opinion.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130974540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0010
S. Goldman
{"title":"Scientific Realism and the Romantic Reaction Against Reason","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"A so-called Romantic counterpoint to the proclamation of the hegemony of reason by Enlightenment thinkers blossomed in the nineteenth century in the form of philosophies that explicitly challenged the rationalist domination of Western philosophy and the truth claims of modern science. Thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson formulated philosophies in which reason played only a limited role either in understanding human affairs or in apprehending reality. For Kierkegaard, reality transcended reason, while for Schopenhauer, human will was the ultimate reality. For Nietzsche, will was the dominant feature of humanity, which guaranteed that reason could not achieve a synoptic understanding of experience, let alone apprehend reality: reasoning could at best achieve partial perspectives on human experience. Bergson offered the most developed alternative to reason, especially modern science-based reasoning, to penetrate experience to reality.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131577321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0012
S. Goldman
{"title":"Einstein Versus Bohr on Reality","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Ontology is integral to the two most fundamental scientific theories of the twentieth century: quantum theory and the special and general theories of relativity. Issues that drove the development of quantum theory include the reality of quanta, the simultaneous wave- and particle-like nature of matter and energy, determinism, probability and randomness, Schrodinger’s wave equation, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. So did the reality of the predictions about space, time, matter, energy, and the universe itself that were deduced from the special and general theories of relativity. Dirac’s prediction of antimatter based solely on the mathematics of his theory of the electron and Pauli’s prediction of the neutrino based on his belief in quantum mechanics are cases in point. Ontological interpretations of the uncertainty principle, of quantum vacuum energy fields, and of Schrodinger’s probability waves in the form of multiple universe theories further illustrate this point.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132935852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0005
S. Goldman
{"title":"Newton and Knowledge of the Universe","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Like Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo, Newton identified method as the key to discovering truths about the world, and like theirs, Newton’s method conflated induction and deduction in making claims about reality. Against Robert Hooke, Newton claimed that data spoke for themselves, as in his claim that his prism experiments directly proved that sunlight really was a combination of colors. In his theory of light, Newton claimed that his data allowed him to “deduce” that light was made up of corpuscles, against Christiaan Huygens’ claim that light was composed of spherical waves. In Newton’s mechanics, which became the cornerstone of modern mathematical physics, neither his definitions of space, time, matter, and motion nor his famous three laws of motion were deduced from experimental data. In his dismissal of Descartes’ method of reasoning and in his battles with Leibniz over the nature of reality, Newton was forced to confront the logical weakness of his ontological claims.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132504274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0011
S. Goldman
{"title":"Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"The pursuit of a definitive explanation of how scientists produce knowledge and what kinds of knowledge they produce became more urgent in the early twentieth century as science became increasingly important to society in the form of society-transforming technologies. As the century proceeded, philosophy of science emerged as a subdiscipline within philosophy, coordinate with the elusiveness of the goal of explaining science. By mid-century, philosophers, many trained in the physical sciences, had displaced scientists as the dominant figures in this effort. Henri Poincaré proposed a Mach-like relationalist theory of science, Bertrand Russell defended a logical atomism theory indebted to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Percy Bridgman defended a theory he called operationalism. Concurrently, William James and John Dewey developed the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce into an action- and belief-based explanation of science. But the dominant philosophy of science from the 1920s through the 1950s was logical positivism/empiricism.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127397386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0006
S. Goldman
{"title":"Science Influences Philosophy","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"The claims of the new natural philosophers that their methodical reasoning and newly invented instruments produced knowledge of reality had a profound effect on contemporary mainstream philosophers. Hobbes allied himself with the rationalist pursuers of certainty but rejected the ability of experimental philosophy to reveal certain truths about nature. Gassendi defended a probabilistic theory of knowledge, while Locke’s theory of knowledge accepted “moral,” or near, certainty as a limit to knowledge of reality. Berkeley reinterpreted the materialistic ontology underlying the new science, arguing the metaphysical character played in it by the concept matter. Hume formulated an openly skeptical theory of knowledge of the world, arguing the metaphysical character of the roles played by causality and induction in the new natural philosophy. Kant responded by creating a philosophy that restored certainty to knowledge, but its object was now experience, not a reality independent of the mind.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126554315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0017
S. Goldman
{"title":"The Science Wars Go Public","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"In the 1990s, the Science Wars moved from the academic world into the public arena, further widening the gulf between critics of science, who argued that science was a socially empowered belief system or ideology, and defenders of a more traditional view of scientific knowledge. The critics of science were alienated by scientists’ insistence on promoting scientific knowledge as archaeological-ontological rather than interpretational-epistemological. They became actively hostile to the practice of science as well as to the putative knowledge that scientists produced, denouncing both as ideological, patriarchal, sexist, racist, and pretenders to truth. The religious right responded with its own critique of science by arguing that creation science was just as legitimately science as evolutionary theory, but successive court decisions rejected this interpretation. The implications for how we are to understand the nature of scientific knowledge remain profound for formulating effective science-based public policies.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115055413","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science WarsPub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0003
S. Goldman
{"title":"Is There a Scientific Method?","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Modern science relies largely on method or, rather, on the claim that by employing a systematic, impersonal method, human reasoning can transcend the mind’s subjective experience of reality and discover the true, external causes of experience. In the early stages of modern science’s emergence out of medieval and Renaissance nature philosophy, Francis Bacon argued that this method was to be based on induction and experiment, without a priori mental input and with a minimum of mathematics. Rene Descartes argued that the required method was to be based on deduction, mathematics, and a priori and innate ideas, with a minimum of experiment. For Descartes, experiment served primarily as a check on deductive reasoning; for Bacon, experiment was a source of knowledge and constrained our inductive reasoning about empirical facts. Despite their differing styles, Descartes and Bacon together concretized the idea that a systematic method of reasoning could give us knowledge of the world.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122481981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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