Pub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0002
S. Goldman
From its pre-Socratic beginnings, Western philosophy has been riven by a battle over the natures of knowledge and Being. On one side were Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and their intellectual descendants, the rationalist philosophers; on the other, the sophists, among them Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon and their intellectual descendants, the skeptical philosophers. For the former, knowledge is essentially different from opinion and belief because it is universal, necessary, and certain, revealing truths about a reality external to and independent of the mind. For the latter, knowledge is opinions and beliefs for which supporting reasons drawn from experience can be given and has ever-changing experience as its object, not an unchanging reality beyond experience. Modern science internalized both sides of this battle.
{"title":"Knowledge as a Problem","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"From its pre-Socratic beginnings, Western philosophy has been riven by a battle over the natures of knowledge and Being. On one side were Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and their intellectual descendants, the rationalist philosophers; on the other, the sophists, among them Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon and their intellectual descendants, the skeptical philosophers. For the former, knowledge is essentially different from opinion and belief because it is universal, necessary, and certain, revealing truths about a reality external to and independent of the mind. For the latter, knowledge is opinions and beliefs for which supporting reasons drawn from experience can be given and has ever-changing experience as its object, not an unchanging reality beyond experience. Modern science internalized both sides of this battle.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"111 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":"121241672","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}
From the 1970s on, the treatment of modern science as simultaneously an induction-based account of experience and a deduction-based account of reality became an increasingly contentious issue in the academic world. A great deal was at stake in how one answered the question of whether scientific knowledge was objective and validated by its correspondence with reality. Respect and privileged social status were accorded to science, not to mention public support for research. At the same time, however, scientists faced the more fundamental question of whether there existed a neutral arbiter of questions relating to truth, or at least truths about the world. Philosophers and social scientists lined up on both sides of this issue, either attacking scientific knowledge as a socially constructed belief system or defending it as objective and correlated with reality.
{"title":"Taking Sides","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1xz0d6.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1xz0d6.46","url":null,"abstract":"From the 1970s on, the treatment of modern science as simultaneously an induction-based account of experience and a deduction-based account of reality became an increasingly contentious issue in the academic world. A great deal was at stake in how one answered the question of whether scientific knowledge was objective and validated by its correspondence with reality. Respect and privileged social status were accorded to science, not to mention public support for research. At the same time, however, scientists faced the more fundamental question of whether there existed a neutral arbiter of questions relating to truth, or at least truths about the world. Philosophers and social scientists lined up on both sides of this issue, either attacking scientific knowledge as a socially constructed belief system or defending it as objective and correlated with reality.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"143 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":"134293539","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}
Pub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0013
S. Goldman
The relationships among mind, self, conscious thought, discursive reasoning, and social context became central issues in nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, sociology, and epistemology, with direct implications for the nature of scientific knowledge. Minds and selves can be conceptualized as expressions of interactions between an individual’s nervous system and their physical and social environment. Is conscious thought, and in particular discursive reasoning, under the control of the individual thinker, or does it reflect societal influences? Nineteenth-century experimental neurophysiology and psychology began to reveal the role that systemic features of the nervous system and the brain play in producing consciousness. Concurrently, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists were proposing roles for the unconscious, language, society, and innate gestalten in shaping and limiting conscious thought. These ideas converged in the theories of individual scientists.
{"title":"In Quest of the Thinker of Science","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"The relationships among mind, self, conscious thought, discursive reasoning, and social context became central issues in nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology, linguistics, sociology, and epistemology, with direct implications for the nature of scientific knowledge. Minds and selves can be conceptualized as expressions of interactions between an individual’s nervous system and their physical and social environment. Is conscious thought, and in particular discursive reasoning, under the control of the individual thinker, or does it reflect societal influences? Nineteenth-century experimental neurophysiology and psychology began to reveal the role that systemic features of the nervous system and the brain play in producing consciousness. Concurrently, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists were proposing roles for the unconscious, language, society, and innate gestalten in shaping and limiting conscious thought. These ideas converged in the theories of individual scientists.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"7 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":"114118383","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}
Pub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0007
S. Goldman
The idea of progress, the creation of the social sciences, and the cause of social reform became entangled with the power of reason-based natural science to reveal reality. This was coordinate with the spread of Newtonianism, an eclectic fusion of the physics of Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. Although that physics was deterministic, the creators of the social sciences—sociology, economics, political science, and psychology—supported platforms of reason-based reforms of society, challenging authority and tradition-based social institutions that empowered the Church, monarchy, and aristocracy. A number of dramatic events reinforced the idea that scientific reasoning revealed truths about reality, which seemed to confirm the connection between Newtonian physics and reality. Meanwhile, opposition to the hegemony of reason in human affairs emerged in the form of a nascent Romantic movement whose champions, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held that feeling and will, rather than reason, were central to human affairs.
{"title":"Science and Social Reform in the Age of Reason","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The idea of progress, the creation of the social sciences, and the cause of social reform became entangled with the power of reason-based natural science to reveal reality. This was coordinate with the spread of Newtonianism, an eclectic fusion of the physics of Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. Although that physics was deterministic, the creators of the social sciences—sociology, economics, political science, and psychology—supported platforms of reason-based reforms of society, challenging authority and tradition-based social institutions that empowered the Church, monarchy, and aristocracy. A number of dramatic events reinforced the idea that scientific reasoning revealed truths about reality, which seemed to confirm the connection between Newtonian physics and reality. Meanwhile, opposition to the hegemony of reason in human affairs emerged in the form of a nascent Romantic movement whose champions, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held that feeling and will, rather than reason, were central to human affairs.","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":"130808936","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}
Pub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0015
S. Goldman
Kuhn’s monograph fed into the broad antiestablishment spirit of the 1960s and elicited polar-opposite responses, from the defense of objectivity and realism within scientific knowledge to an enthusiastic embrace of the view of scientific knowledge as ineluctably subjective interpretations of experience. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend aggressively attacked the rationality of scientific reasoning and eventually rationality itself. Kuhn’s new image of science fed into the emerging postmodernist critique of reason and truth as rhetorical devices wielded for political ends. Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” swept the humanities and social sciences, concluding that there could not be a single correct meaning of any text, including scientists’ “reading” of the “book” of nature. Concurrently, philosophers of science, among them Israel Scheffler, Imre Lakatos, and Karl Popper, began a counterattack against Kuhn, defending the rationality and objectivity of scientific knowledge and reason generally.
{"title":"The Opening Phase of the Science Wars","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Kuhn’s monograph fed into the broad antiestablishment spirit of the 1960s and elicited polar-opposite responses, from the defense of objectivity and realism within scientific knowledge to an enthusiastic embrace of the view of scientific knowledge as ineluctably subjective interpretations of experience. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend aggressively attacked the rationality of scientific reasoning and eventually rationality itself. Kuhn’s new image of science fed into the emerging postmodernist critique of reason and truth as rhetorical devices wielded for political ends. Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” swept the humanities and social sciences, concluding that there could not be a single correct meaning of any text, including scientists’ “reading” of the “book” of nature. Concurrently, philosophers of science, among them Israel Scheffler, Imre Lakatos, and Karl Popper, began a counterattack against Kuhn, defending the rationality and objectivity of scientific knowledge and reason generally.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"85 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":"130573917","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}
Pub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0008
S. Goldman
The linkage between epistemological and ontological claims, between calling a theory true because it correctly accounts for experimental data and claiming that therefore it is true of reality, became an issue in nineteenth-century physical science. In particular, Fourier’s mathematical theory of heat explicitly set aside the ontological question of what heat was in reality in favor of a mathematical account that correctly described and predicted how heat behaved. The founders of thermodynamics set aside the question of what matter really was, in favor of a mathematical theory that described how matter behaved in its interactions with energy. Maxwell proposed a mathematical theory of electromagnetic waves propagated through a space-filling aether, without identifying a physical structure for the aether or a causal mechanism for its action. Finally, the millennial acceptance of Euclidean geometry as a true account of space because of its deductive logical character was undermined by the creation of non-Euclidean geometries.
{"title":"What Is Science About?","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The linkage between epistemological and ontological claims, between calling a theory true because it correctly accounts for experimental data and claiming that therefore it is true of reality, became an issue in nineteenth-century physical science. In particular, Fourier’s mathematical theory of heat explicitly set aside the ontological question of what heat was in reality in favor of a mathematical account that correctly described and predicted how heat behaved. The founders of thermodynamics set aside the question of what matter really was, in favor of a mathematical theory that described how matter behaved in its interactions with energy. Maxwell proposed a mathematical theory of electromagnetic waves propagated through a space-filling aether, without identifying a physical structure for the aether or a causal mechanism for its action. Finally, the millennial acceptance of Euclidean geometry as a true account of space because of its deductive logical character was undermined by the creation of non-Euclidean geometries.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"47 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":"122080355","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}
Pub Date : 2021-10-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0014
S. Goldman
Thomas Kuhn subverted the image of science that had become entrenched by the mid-twentieth century, that science was a body of knowledge produced by logical reasoning about objective facts. Kuhn argued that a new approach to the history of science revealed that the process of discovery was integral to the practice of science and that nonlogical factors played a role in theory acceptance and theory change. Insofar as they entered into the reasoning leading to the formulation of a theory, facts were not objective but interpreted consistent with contingent assumptions on which the theory rested. Kuhn himself believed that scientific knowledge was about reality. His theory of how scientific knowledge was produced, however, strongly supported the view that scientific theories were contingent interpretations of experience.
{"title":"A New Image for Science","authors":"S. Goldman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197518625.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Thomas Kuhn subverted the image of science that had become entrenched by the mid-twentieth century, that science was a body of knowledge produced by logical reasoning about objective facts. Kuhn argued that a new approach to the history of science revealed that the process of discovery was integral to the practice of science and that nonlogical factors played a role in theory acceptance and theory change. Insofar as they entered into the reasoning leading to the formulation of a theory, facts were not objective but interpreted consistent with contingent assumptions on which the theory rested. Kuhn himself believed that scientific knowledge was about reality. His theory of how scientific knowledge was produced, however, strongly supported the view that scientific theories were contingent interpretations of experience.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"6 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":"116677923","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}
Pub Date : 2020-12-31DOI: 10.1515/9780822397977-010
{"title":"Making Transparencies: Seeing through the Science Wars","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9780822397977-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822397977-010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126241672","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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