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viernes, 15 de junio de 2012

Stephan Hartmann · Jan Sprenger The future of philosophy of science: introduction


Philosophy, perhaps more than any other academic discipline, likes to reflect
upon itself. Thus, it is no surprise that philosophers regularly ask questions
such as:What is the scope of philosophy, what are its important questions, and
what are the proper methods to address them? Asking these questions also
means to take stock and to enquire where the discipline is going.
This is an especially worthwhile activity in contemporary philosophy of
science as this field has been changing rapidly since its institutional consolidation
in the 1950s. For present purposes we may very roughly, but still
usefully, describe this change as having three phases. In the first phase, which
lasted until the mid 1960s, philosophy of science was dominated by Logical
Empiricism and formal approaches to philosophically analyzing science. The
second phase began in the late 1960s and lasted until the second half of the
1980s. It brought the naturalistic turn, a critique of the Logical Empiricist’s
picture of science as too far away from the actual practice of science, a focus
on the history and the social structure of science, a shift from theories as the
primary target of philosophical analysis to models and experimental practices,
and many detailed case studies.
While the Logical Empiricists gave us a grand general picture of science,
the naturalists’ working assumption has been that aiming at such a picture
underappreciates the complexity and diversity of real science. Moreover,
the naturalists moved normative questions into the background. In the third
phase, which began in the late 1980s, the dichotomy between normative
and descriptive approaches in philosophy of science still persists, but the
picture has become even more complex. So we can only list a number of
novel trends: Metaphysical questions, which were famously dismissed by the
Logical Empiricists, are gaining a considerable interest. Philosophies of the
special sciences are booming, and more and more subdisciplines are emerging.
Formal epistemologists are applying a variety of mathematical methods to
address normative questions in general philosophy of science. Social aspects
of science are systematically studied and mathematically modeled. Another
interesting development is the rise of experimental approaches to problems
from philosophy of science (e.g., causation) and its combination with formal
approaches.
This (incomplete) list shows that contemporary philosophers of science
address a large variety of topics. They also use many different methods, quite
similar to scientists who often use a combination of methods, or import a
method from another field to solve their problems. This is, to our mind, a
fruitful way of conducting “scientific philosophy”: a proper combination of
conceptual analysis, historical or contemporary case studies, formal modeling,
and experimental work that will lead to many new and exciting insights.
To find out whether our views were shared by our colleagues, and to
explore their expectations about the development of our discipline, we organized
two events at the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science
(TiLPS) in April 2010. The first event was a one-day workshop on “Scientific
Philosophy—Past and Future”; the second event was the three-day Sydney-
Tilburg conference “The Future of Philosophy of Science” with invited lectures
by Michael Friedman, ChristopherHitchcock, Hannes Leitgeb and Samir
Okasha. It is fair to say that the conference exceeded our expectations, and
that it was a full success. Not only because of the surprisingly high quality of
the papers and presentations, but also because of the cheerful atmosphere that
the participants brought to Tilburg, and because of the memorable volcano
eruption in Iceland that tied some guests involuntarily to the Netherlands,
leading to several fruitful collaborations.
The present special issue gathers five papers that were presented at the
conference. All of them address the conference topic from a different perspective,
and all of them represent a specific way of doing philosophy of science.
James Justus engages in a defense of Carnapian explication as a normative
account of concept determination for complex concepts in empirical science.
In support of his argument, Justus presents a case study from theoretical
biology. Sebastian Lutz defends artificial language philosophy—the view that
philosophical problems are best solved by the conventional prescription of a
new language—and explores the methodological implications of this position
for philosophy of science. Chris Hitchcock critically evaluates the status and
promise of philosophical experiments in philosophy of science and argues that
the expertise objection—the appeal to the privileged intuitions of professional
philosophers—is unsatisfactory in a number of ways. Markus Eronen blends
perspectives from philosophy of science and philosophy of mind: he argues
that adopting explanatory pluralism as well as the interventionist account of
causation—two positions that have recently become very popular—leads to
a novel, pluralistic variant of physicalism. Finally, William Bechtel expects
that mechanistic accounts of explanation must be expanded to incorporate
computational modeling, yielding dynamical mechanistic explanations.
We conclude with some words of thanks. First of all, to Mark Colyvan and
Paul Griffiths for co-organizing the conference. Second, to the Netherlands
Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and TiLPS for generous financial
support. Third, to the authors and referees of the papers in this special issue for
their intellectual devotion and their generous advice. Last but not least, thanks
to Carl Hoefer, the editor-in-chief of EJPS, for his invaluable assistance with
editorial decisions, and for his continuous encouragement and support.

1 comentario:

  1. Nobleza obliga: comparto algo de Filosofía de la Ciencia de European Journal for Philosophy of Science
    Volume 2 / 2012

    Lo dedico a mi amigo Filósofo Lisandro Prieto que está ten interesado en que profundice en Filosofía de la Ciencia.

    La próxima entrada sera sobre un artículo del lenguaje en Fil. de la Ciencia ! En eso andamos

    ResponderEliminar

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