Philosophy of science

My interest in philosophy of science is more form philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind etc.

Obviously the standard texts are those by Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, though to be honest I've never got a huge amount from the primary texts.

I got a lot more from philosophically or conceptually-minded biologists like Massimo Pigliucci, Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould and so on, in terms of how science is actually practiced and operates.

I always get a bit of a giggle when scientists like Peter Atkins and Lewis Wolpert express utter contempt for the philosophy of science, even Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking have been on it's back recently too

I personally think Popper's Conjectures and Refutations is really worth a read. In this text he is explicitly attacking early 20th century orthodox Marxism. Though I think he is largely attacking a strawman and I don't agree with all of it, you can still garner some useful food for thought from it. Thomas Kuhn is really good (science as an always developing set of ideas contingent on certain paradigms and scientific revolutions. Some people throw the baby out with the bath water on this one and assume Kuhn is calling for some Pomo shit. I think it is fairer to say he is asking for scientists to recognise a certain amount of historical rootness and humility to their endeavour), but i have never seen an example of someone taking that in an explicitly Marxist direction. Feyerabend is a fun read, but in the end there isn't a lot I got out of it.

If your looking to go down the social science root, then they will all have their own specific methodologies with drawbacks and benefits. I myself have done a lot of reading in the area of sociology/social science methodology. I think it is well worth reading non-marxist methodologies, you never know, might learn something . (Pierre Bourdieu writes some really interesting [if dense] stuff on his sociological method in his Invitation to Reflexive Sociology also check out his introduction to The Weight of the World (actually check out this whole book. A massive tomb of varied workers enquiries, and various interviews and studies into the lives of the oppressed in France).

Of course it is worth remembering there is always a lot of overlap between the social sciences. Most good works will contain elements of all (something that the HE funding bodies call 'inter-disciplinary' and 'multi-disciplinary' - good buzz words, but i am fucked if I know the difference). It seems to me it really depends on what your question is. Do you want to look at specific phenomena? In which case your questions are going to give you some indication into what methodology you want to spend time reading. If you are just interested in the philosophy of science, go to a philosophy department .

Bruno Latour - Science in Action.

If you want to study Marx stay away from Economics.

I wouldn't say, stay away but it's not helpful in the least...

Unless you critically approach it and take what you deem fruitful. There's been a fair few figures in the German scene who have done so, but I consider this "synthesis" of sorts (mainly with Keynesian and Post-Keynesian approaches) to be beyond the scope of introductory literature and courses (economics is my major and well, let me just say that besides foundations of statistics, and the odd bit of math, the courses border on professional bullshitting).

Economics as taught in college and university is basically just ideological algebra with a vengeance. And well, once you read the seminal works in the field you basically have everything you need to criticize it if you want. Most modern approaches to economics build up on the good old ideological frameworks and add some "spice" though economics is a field where remarkably little progress is made at all. Most (if not all) arguments laid out by old man Marx still hold true.

Jura knows a lot about philosophy of science, and I think about analytical philosophy in general.

Paging Dr. Capital, paging Dr. Capital...

Has anyone read Steven Shapin, historian/sociologist of science? I always come across references to his Never Pure... and the book with Simon Schaeffer, Leviathan & The Air Pump.

I have to say, one of the clearest and most honest discussions of methodological issues within science and how it relates to a knowledge of nature is from about page 40-100 (can't remember exact pages, but something like that) in Sokal & Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures. It's very readable, balanced, committed to science, but cognisant of it social-embeddedness.

Great book. I haven't read all of it yet, but the chapters I've read have been really interesting.

Sound, it's on my 'must read some day eventually' list.

I'm doing a PhD. in philosophy of science and writing a "thesis on Marx" (or I should be!). It's partly a coincidence: I was never into PoS while studying philosophy (quite the contrary), but it's sort of my supervisor's field and he offered me to write on Marx under him. I had a lot of catching up to do in the first year and eventually began to enjoy it in the process.

It's an interesting field, but due to its origins, it focused for a long time mostly on natural science (more precisely, physics), using (what now seems) a very restrictive approach founded on modern logic and a radically phenomenalistic epistemology. Even though this project ultimately failed, its legacy is still there today (to the detriment of the field IMHO). But fortunately the later developments, as others here have noted, tried to loosen up at least some of the restrictions, shift the focus towards the social context of science, relax the prejudice against social science (as science), and shake off the strict phenomenalism. Today, philosophy of science is a huge and pretty broad field with subfields and quite a lot of input coming from particular sciences like biology or economics.

The good thing about PoS that you can't avoid being in touch with one or more other disciplines. If you do philosophy of social science, you usually get to read stuff on either economics or sociology. Most of that will be stuff dealing with the fundaments of these disciplines, so you even learn about things that most economists or sociologists don't have much time for.

On the other hand, for historical reasons mentioned above, philosophy of science is clearly dominated by approaches typical of analytic philosophy, which everyone (except analytic philosophers) thinks is boring, dry and largely pointless. So instead of, for example, analyzing a particular scientific theory and looking at the philosophical issues it leads to, many people doing PoS end up writing on the new riddle of induction or something like that (i.e. a problem relevant within the restricted framework of empiricism and logic I mentioned above). I guess a lot of that also depends on where you study and who supervises your work.

Anyway, a good, not so long semi-historical introduction to some of the main issues is Godfrey-Smith's Theory and Reality (the first thing I read while catching up IIRC), though there are many, many others (Chalmers' What Is This Thing Called Science? springs to mind).

As far as Marx is concerned, his impact on the field has been minimal, marginal and mostly implicit. Therefore he receives little recognition even in mainstream philosophy of social science (although some proponents of, e.g., critical realism, will openly admit to being heirs to Marx's approach). But at least where I am people from and around the field will give you a weird first look (at least) if you say you work in PoS on Marx. However, there are interesting works on Marx written by people with background in philosophy of science. One of them was mentioned above, Murray's Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge. Another is Sayer's Marx's Method, and there are more. (Daniel Little, who is a well-known philosopher of social science, wrote a book called The Scientific Marx, but I don't think it's very good.)

I find it interesting to look at Marx's work on political economy from the point of view of contemporary philosophy of (social) science, for two reasons. First of all, much of the secondary literature on Marx (even in what I think are the good parts of it) is quite hermetic, making Marx hardly intelligible and relevant to the outside world. People often routinely throw words like "law", "deduction", "category", "dialectics" etc. around without really explaining (and sometimes even knowing...) what they mean and how their meaning relates to their common usage in other areas. Philosophy of science (with her sister logic) can be seen as a useful tool to clear things up. And I think it can make Marx more interesting to some people or even more understandable to the Average Person. To me that seems like a good thing. (Let met just add that I don't think communism won't happen unless we all start seeing Marx this way. It's just a personal career choice based on a hobby on my part, not some political decision or anything.)

And the other way around, I think Marx has much to offer to philosophy of social science and to social science itself. Some of the major controversies and issues in PoS, like the classical structure vs. agency problem, the question of idealizations in universal laws, the distinction between natural and social science, even the good old mind-body problem have (I think) a rational solution in Marx and probably could have been avoided or shortened if Marx had received more recognition in the field. (Again, I don't see this as part of my political activity. I simply view social science and its methodology as a generally worthwhile enterprise and would like to make a contribution if possible.)

Anyway, I don't know if this is useful at all. If you have any questions I'll be happy to try and answer.

I'm not at home right now, but if you want PDFs of Godfrey-Smith and Chalmers, message me, I can send them to you.

Generally speaking, modern philosophy of science has always been a domain of analytic philosophy, due to its origins in the Vienna Circle. (That's not to say that there was no philosophy of science before logical positivism, but that's what quickly became almost a synonym of PoS). And I guess it's like that all over the world, even in Europe, including Eastern Europe (where positivism, dressed in dialectical materialist terminology, was tolerated, to a certain extent, pre-1989, in departments of logic and "methodology of science"). I think the Latour stuff goes under the "science studies" label and most philosophers of science scoff at it (as well as at Foucault's The Order of Things or most of feminist epistemology). I'm not familiar with Latour at all; however, Godfrey-Smith discusses his approach in the book I mentioned.

As regards using philosophy of science as a tool to better understand Marx, a nice piece of work was a recent article in German (I can't provide the reference right now but can look it up later) that dealt with the section on the value-form using standard relational logic (which is usually taught in Logic 101). Strictly speaking, Marx's usage of the equality sign (i.e. "10 coats = 1 yard of linen") is confused and from my (limited) experience in reading groups it leads to problems. Marx also says that the left-hand side in the "equation", the "relative form", plays a different role than the right-hand side, the "equivalent form", which is not true of regular equations like "1+1=3-1" – in other words, the relation "is worth" or "expresses its value in" as Marx uses it is irreflexive, unlike the mathematical relation "equals". I think some critiques of Marxian value theory were even based on the fact that the expression of value is not really an equation. Using relational logic, these subtle details (for which I think there was not even a vocabulary when Marx was writing) can be brought to the fore. (The analysis I have in mind also shows how the properties of the relation – reflexivity, transtivity, symmetry etc. – change from the simple to the general form of value.)

The example above is more a matter of explication (and not that far from philology), rather than input for contemporary empirical research. But I think the latter can be done as well. Sven Ellmers, a German author who is a philosopher by training (although not formally a philosopher of science), has written a very helpful little book on Marx's two concepts of class, one based in historico-political writings like the 18th Brumaire, the other (under)developed in the critique of political economy (the manuscripts of Vol. 3 of Capital famously end with a fragment on classes). He argues that the two concepts were often confused by all sorts of Marxists and critics of Marx, and shows why it's wrong-headed to try to look, in a sociology-of-class style, for direct empirical counterparts of the "classes" from Capital.

As regards my thesis, I'd be happy to share it with anyone when it's done, but I'm writing it in Slovak!

That's my experience of how philosophers approach 'science studies' or STS and their like. I haven't read much of the science studies lot (Latour, Harry Collins, Barry Barnes (though I know he's written with Shapin, who philosophers do seem to have time for)) but there strikes me as being not that much interaction between the two disciplines except for some obligatory references.

Philosophers of science (Dennett, Kitcher, Sober, Ruse - I confess again to being mostly interested in the intersection with biology and psychology) rarely lend much weight to the science-studies crowd and are far more likely to be engaged with the scientific literature directly (esp Dennett) than the sociological work on it. It makes sense with Dennett, who is the most 'scientistic' of the philosophers of science (and I say he is one loosely because he writes so much about conceptual issues in biology, but not on scientific methdology per-se).

The last sociologist of science I read was Ullica Segerstrale last year and she struck me as not being particularly 'sociological' at all, but more like a science writer sympathetic to the 'consensus' in science - and that is not my impression of science studies generally,

References to some of the papers and books I mentioned:

- Sven Ellmers: Die formanalytische Klassentheorie von Karl Marx. Ein Beitrag zur 'neuen Marx-Lektüre'. Universitätsverlag Rhein-Ruhr, Duisburg 2007, 128 pages. (The first two chapters contain a very readable summary of Marx's value theory from the German "new reading of Marx" POV, as well as interesting critical remarks on Habermas, Heinrich etc. I'd highly recommend this book, I think it's on par with Heinrich's intro to the three volumes in terms of clarity.)

- paper analyzing the value-form using relational logic:

Dennis Kirchhoff – Alexander C. Reutlinger: Vorarbeiten zu einer relationslogischen Rekonstruktion der marxschen "Wertformanalyse". In: Jan Hoff – Alexis Petrioli – Ingo Stützle – Frieder Otto Wolf (eds.): Das Kapial neu lesen. Beiträge zur radikalen Philosophie. Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster 2006. pp. 200–227.

Sasan Fayazmanesh does something similar in his Money and Exchange (Routledge 2006), not only with Marx but with other value theories as well (Aristotle, Smith, marginal utility theories), but from a position that is less sympathetic to Marx, largely because he ascribes some sort of a logico-historical method to Marx. I'd recommend this as well (the author is clearly well read in philosophy of science).

- Chalmers & Godfrey-Smith in PDF: http://www59.zippyshare.com/v/45775963/file.html or http://depositfiles.com/files/0hkni8g4r (zipfile, 14 MB)