Philosophy

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Tuesday, 01-24-12: Pseudoscience III

Assignments:

Problem Set 01 Assigned; Group Project Prospectus Due

Readings:

Synopsis:

Today I assigned the first of our problem sets.

Now, several students have commented that this course is rather challenging. Let me say first of all that I endorse that sentiment wholeheartedly. The readings are difficult, if not at times altogether opaque. There is a constant and uncomfortable feeling in working through this material of not quite grasping it.  For those who "just want the answer!" it can be particularly annoying.  Moreover, my experience is that work in the sciences strongly disposes students to just want the answer.

Philosophy, though, is at least as much about what we don't know as about what we do.  Philosophy, that is, can be outright distressing for those who are accustomed to working with carefully defined problems that have clear right answers and clear wrong answers which can, with sufficient effort, be solved finally and definitely. 

If you happen to feel that way, rest assured that it's normal; you're not the only one. Not by a longshot.

Is it worth it?

I think so.

We are considering the nature and history of science and technology--whether, in fact and indeed, science is the rational enterprise par excellence it is usually made out to be. Do we, that is, have the ability to grasp the objective nature of the universe?  Has the universe an objective nature in the first place?  And what can we do with that understanding if it is possible?

I think these are at once non-trivial and yet tremendously important questions to ask.

Comments on course evaluations from students who have stuck with the course suggest the same. They report almost without exception that this is one of the most challenging courses they've had, yet it has also been one of the most rewarding.

Please bear in mind that I am always available to meet outside of class and help talk you through the arguments. If you can't make my office hours, then by all means email me and we'll set up an appointment.

In the end, though, your understanding of the material is determined not by hearing me talk about it but by writing about it. Philosophy is like that. It's why the problem sets, for example, are so important. For it is only when you have to explain an issue yourself that you begin to truly master the issue for yourself.

As one of my students put it when she visited long after having graduated, "Berkich, I don't remember a word you said, but I remember every word I wrote."

Or as Wittgenstein put it, "Philosophy is an activity!"  It is, that is, something you do.  It is not something you can do passively listening.  You have to be engaged in it yourself.  Philosophy is in this respect unique among all disciplines:  To learn philosophy you have to do philosophy.  (And, one might hasten to add, doing philosophy is always and forever to learn philosophy.)  I would go so far as to say there are no students of philosophy.  There are only philosophers.

So, be patient. Don't expect every reading to go smoothly. Be prepared to feel intellectually woozy, disoriented, and, at times, abysmally lost.

Set aside about three hours a week outside of class to read and reflect on the authors, my notes and handouts, and these synopses. Set aside an additional three hours every week to work on each problem set, but not all at once. Nobody can think that hard that long. Spread it out a bit. Write drafts and revise. You'll get plenty of comments back from me, and hopefully they will help you get your footing with the material.

Remember that what's worth doing at all is worth doing well and what's easy is rarely worth doing. It's only when we're faced with a genuine challenge that we strengthen our skills and find out what we can do.

If you want to know more about how I think about teaching and learning philosophy, I invite you to visit this page on my website.

I'm not sure if, all that said, you're feeling encouraged or discouraged. I hope not the latter. But do let me know. We can talk about it.

Now, all that goes well beyond what we talked about in class today, but I felt it needed to be said.  Our specific efforts today were to locate Lakatos' position as best we could on the question of demarcation criteria.

To that end, we spent a good bit of time revisiting both Popper and Kuhn.  We closed today by considering Lakatos' notion of a scientific theory neither as interpreted formal language (Popper) nor as conceptual scheme or paradighm (Kuhn) but as a research program.

For more on Lakatos' notion of a research program, see my notes above.  Suffice it to say that a research program is rarely abandoned altogether as Popper's notion of a scientific theory under the threat of falsification would have it.  Rather, a research program is adjusted and amended as need be.  The important feature of a research program which distintuishes science from pseudoscience for Lakatos is the program's progressivity in terms of its capacity to predict novel facts.

What counts as a novel fact?  Lakatos does not have a general account to help us here. He merely points to a couple of examples of what he has in mind:

• Halley's prediction under Newton's research program of the time and place of the return of Halley's comet.
• Eddington's expedition to verify Einstein's prediction of starlight being bent by the Sun's gravitation.

So it seems a progressive research program has the capacity to predict surprises for us, and to do so with considerable precision.  That is not, unfortunately, much to go on.

Next time we turn to Thagard's account of demarcation criteria.