Webster University - St. Louis Missouri
Department of Philosophy





Assignment: In what ways does the history of science matter in philosophy of science? (Or, if you disagree with your grader, why does the history of science matter not at all in the philosophy of science?) And, in what ways is the history of science irrelevant to the philosophy of science (since surely there are some)?





Seminar: Philosophy of Science
Lead by: Bruce Umbaugh
Spring Semester 1997





Prepared by: Angela Althen


April 1997

In discussing what makes for good science, the philosopher of science is forced to look at how science actually works. One must study cases in which science succeeds in order to be able to tell scientists how they should do their jobs. Time and time again, a lack of understanding of the history and development of science has lead to pitfalls in the philosophy of science. Infact, in seeing how we have mistaken ourselves on how science actually works, we have seen where we need to take our philosophy of science. The philosophy of science wraps itself around its subject matter and changes and grows with the development of its subject matter. In this way, the history of science matters in the philosophy of science. The philosophy of science must go over and over again what have been successful endeavors in science to give prescriptive norms.
      We might even take this descriptive vs. normative distinction one step further. We can look at the way in which the philosophy of science has worked in order to see where it must go. As we review the mistakes and achievements of philosophers, we can see that whether or not they paid attention to the history of science plays an important role in whether or not they have developed good accounts of science.
      One of the former pursuits of the philosophy of science was to demarcate what scientific knowledge is. The goal was to distinguish scientific knowledge from other types of knowledge or from that which is not considered knowledge at all. The main difficulty, however, in the demarcation approach is that it hardly keeps straight with the evolution of science. As soon as new discoveries are made or theories are developed, older theories can no longer be considered scientific knowledge. The the history of science was irrelevant to the demarcation process. Yet, intuitively we sense that the philosophy of science must concem itself with the evolution of scientific thought. Demarcation neglects this development entirely, therefore it has been (and should have been) dropped as an approach in the philosophy of science.
      A good account of science seems to require an account of observation. We have learned this from the logical positivists and verificationists of the 50's and 60's. In logical positivism, only that which can immediately be percieved is considered real. All that counted as knowledge in their epistemology were basic atomic sensations. Verificationists took this extreme empiricism a step further and called all things, which could not be immediately

percieved, nonsense or meaningless propositions. Yet, their only account of observation was to say, "Just look!" Any theories of observation or extrapolations from what was observed were considered meaningless. We realize now, however, that we need theories in order to get observations. Scientists need theories to lead them to certain observations and not just any observations. From these observations, we build up our conception of the world and the way it works. The need for an account of observation arises from our judgement of how good science has worked in the past. A new account of observation must take the history of science and its development into consideration.
      Philosophy of science also calls for an account of experiments. Ian Hacking makes a strong plea for more attention to experiment in the philosophy of science, and rightly so. Unfortunately, many contemporary philosophers of science neglect this portion of their work. Attempts have been made though, in times as far back as the days of John Stuart Mill and John Herschel. Each of these men introduced a series of general inductive laws or cannons to be followed used in the design of experiments. Herschel assumed a constant conjunction of cause and effect and thus tried to describe the proportionality between cause and effect. The absence of the effect meant the absence of the cause. The reversal of cause lead to the reversal of the effect, and so forth. Mill came up with his own cannons of induction. He described various methods in which one might find causes and effects. In the method of agreement, for example, when two or more circumstances occur with one common phenomenon, it is the "cause" or the "effect" of this instance. Or in the method of difference, if an instance in which a phenomenon occurs arises, and another instance occurs in which it does not, (the two instances being otherwise in every way the same), the first instance is the cause or the effect or an indespensible part of the cause of the phenomenon.
      In both of the above examples, serious problems arise when one tries to apply their theories. For one, both Herschel and Mill assume that scientists have much more control over each particular circumstance in an experiment than they actually do. Thus Mill's method of difference and Herschel's proposition that the absence of the effect means the absence of the cause expect too much of the scientist. After all, no two circumstances differ only in one way. And we cannot ever possibly consider every circumstance surrounding an event. Next, these methods are inappropriate for our experience. That is, they assume that we regularly attain an

rejects disturbance or interference models. Talk of attributes must be understood as manifestations of the experimental process. According to the second Copenhagen Interpretation purported by John Wheeler, reality is actually created by observation. In choosing what attributes to look for, we determine what attributes a thing has. In another theory maintained by David Bohm, the world is an undivided whole. He concentrates here on EPR, the phenomena that an action on one particle may have an effect on it's somehow entangled yet distanced "pair." Some eight varied interpretations have arisen, in fact, in response to phenomena such as the "action at a distance" in EPR or the elusiveness of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
      With the introduction of quantum phenomena we are forced to redefine our postulation of scientific knowledge. We must reconsider what constitutes knowledge and thus what qualifies for belief, justification of beliefs, and theory. We must not only search for new explanations, but also for a base of new explanations, but also with new bases of rationality for our explanations. We must not only question our old theories, but our entire rationale, our system of thought. Here, philosophy of science clings desperately to the movements in the development of the history of science. The history of science seems to provoke, shape and mold the philosophy thereof.
      A final short discussion on statistics and probability might round off the description of what form an account of theory or explanation should entail. As classical probabilities were slowly replaced by statistical probabilities, science, itself (and thus also the philosophy of science) changed. For, probabilities was, for a long time, not a study that could be separated from its respective field of application. The rise of the discussion of probability in Biology, for example, changed the future and goals of this science as well as changing the face of probability itself. Certain modern controversies, concerning vitalism, mechanism, teleology, essentialism and levels of organization and explanation have changed the face and direction of Biology as well as the development of statistical theory. Similarly, the young science of psychology has been greatly influenced by probability studies in the last fifty years. Let us look closer at the example to see how these developments have affected the wider realm of philosophy of science as a whole.
      With the development of statistics by the 1950's, psychologists recognized the need to

incorporate probability factors in their experiment design. Psychologists were instructed in a hybrid theory of inferential statistics. This seemed enough to promote the use of random sampling and significance tests, for example. Not until much later, though, did the function of statistics change from its role as a tool to the roll as a model for the way humans think.
      Thinking of the mind as an intuitive statistician has turned cognitive psychology on its head. Since the 60's and 70's, psychologists have been more concerned with the understanding of how the brain does and does not calculate in terms of probabilities. With simple balls-and-urns tests, people's calculations seemed very similar to Bayesian statistics. Only a moderate conservatism in their probability calculation seemed to occur, but the model of the mind as an intuitive statistician seemed to prove true. More complicated experiments have shown, however, a common neglect of certain types of important information, such as "base-rates." Trying to understand this phenomena and working to give explanations of what people consider in the place of base-rates became the primary concern of cognitive psychology. All former experimentation and theory, on Gestalt theory, for example, seems irrelevant in the current program of cognitive psychology.
      The about-face experienced in psychology has brought scientists and philosophers to rediscuss what knowledge of probabilities can contribute to the world of science. Philosophers must reconsider how to justify and explain beliefs; they must redefine their rational basis for choice of theory or for change from one theory to another. ~n this, philosophers are called to redefine their picture of rationality, itself.
      Telling the descriptive story of the development of philosophy of science in recent years helps us to understand what our basic goals in this field should be. Likewise, in its job of writing out prescriptive norms for science, philosophy of science must concern itself with the descriptive history of science. Philosophy of science is intricately bound up with every move and change in the development of the history of science. It is even difficult to picture any cases in which the history of scienc could be irrelevant to the philosophy of science. Even in new pursuits to possibly bring feminist critique or environmental concerns into scientific practice, one must look back at where science has been to understand how to guide it into new territory. After all, it is the philosophy of science, and thus the history of scientific achievements is matters most in this field..