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This paper contributes to two topics that have received insufficient attention in science and technology studies: the social dimensions of causal reasoning and how the knowledge-making site of expert testimony affects the production and reception of social scientific knowledge. It deals with how social scientists make causal claims when testifying as expert witnesses in trials where causal claims are relevant, using as a case study the so-called L’Aquila trial, in which experts were summoned by the parties to testify on the (...) |
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Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one (...) |
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For a long time, philosophers of science have expressed little interest in the so-called demarcation project that occupied the pioneers of their field, and most now concur that terms like “pseudoscience” cannot be defined in any meaningful way. However, recent years have witnessed a revival of philosophical interest in demarcation. In this paper, I argue that, though the demarcation problem of old leads to a dead-end, the concept of pseudoscience is not going away anytime soon, and deserves a fresh look. (...) |
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This paper concerns an epistemological objection against mathematical platonism, due to Hartry Field.The argument poses an explanatory challenge – the challenge to explain the reliability of our mathematical beliefs – which the platonist, it’s argued, cannot meet. Is the objection compelling? Philosophers disagree, but they also disagree on (and are sometimes very unclear about) how the objection should be understood. Here I distinguish some options, and highlight some gaps that need to be filled in on the potentially most compelling version (...) |
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This book is in honour of Professor Anna-Sofia Maurin on her 50th birthday. It consists of eighteen essays on metaphysical issues written by Swedish and international scholars. |
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The influence that philosophy of science has had on scientific practice is as controversial as it is undeniable, especially in the case of biology. The dynamic between philosophy and biology as disciplines has developed along two different lines that can be characterized as 'paternal', on the one hand, and more 'fraternal', on the other. The role Popperian principles of demarcation and falsifiability have played in both the systematics community as well as the ongoing evolution-creation debates illustrate these contrasting forms of (...) |
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In this paper, I describe an approach to the teaching of philosophy of science that draws normally reluctant students into controversial issues in the philosophy of science. I have found that the topic of creationism is a good vehicle for introducing students to the more difficult issues in philosophy of science. I explore the use of creationism as a case-study in the philosophy of science and detail my own experience in the creationism debate. |
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The question of how to distinguish between science and non-science, the so-called ‘demarcation problem’, is one of the most high-profile, perennial, and intractable issues in the philosophy of science. It is not merely a philosophical issue, however, since it has a significant bearing on practical policy questions and practical decisions. This essay develops a pragmatic approach to the demarcation problem: it argues that while there are some core principles that we can use in distinguishing between science and non-science, particular judgments (...) |
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We can judge whether some activities are scientific or religious, depending on how similar they are to exemplar scientific activities or to exemplar religious activities, even if we cannot specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for science and religion. The absence of the demarcation between science and religion does not justify the school policy of teaching the creationist hypothesis that God created the universe any more than it justifies the religious policy of teaching evolutionary theory, quantum mechanics, and the Big (...) |
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This paper discusses the judgment of Judge William Overton in McLean vs. Arkansas Board of Education (1982), and the subsequent philosophical literature that discusses this judgment. |
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This paper analyzes the remarkable popularity of William Paley’s argument from design among contemporary naturalists in biology and the philosophy of science. In philosophy of science Elliott Sober has argued that creationism should be excluded from the schools not because it is not science but because it is ‘less likely’ than evolution according to fairly standard confirmation theory. Creationism is said to have been a plausible scientific option as presented by Paley but no longer to be acceptable according to the (...) |
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Due to the logical relations between theism and intelligent design (id), there are two challenges to theism that also apply to id. In the falsifiability challenge, it is charged that theism is compatible with every observation statement and thus asserts nothing. I argue that the contentious assumptions of this challenge can be avoided without loss of precision by charging theism (and thus id) directly with the lack of observational assertions. In the translatability challenge, it is charged that theism can be (...) |
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Four arguments are examined in order to assess the state of the Intelligent Design debate. First, critics continually cite the fact that ID proponents have religious motivations. When used as criticism of ID arguments, this is an obvious ad hominem. Nonetheless, philosophers and scientists alike continue to wield such arguments for their rhetorical value. Second, in his expert testimony in the Dover trial, philosopher Robert Pennock used repudiated claims in order to brand ID as a kind of pseudoscience. His arguments (...) |
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A common objection to a pragmatist perspective on scientific expertise is that, while there is a well-known pragmatist theory of inquiry, which was formulated first by Peirce, then refined by Dewey and others, this theory cannot provide a clear-cut account of scientific expertise. In this paper, after addressing this objection in the second section, I claim that, on the contrary, pragmatism offers robust tools to think scientific expertise. In Sections 3 to 7, I present five important insights that one can (...) |
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This dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is a defense of an artificial language methodology in philosophy and a historical and systematic defense of the logical empiricists' application of an artificial language methodology to scientific theories. These defenses provide a justification for the presumptions of a host of criteria of empirical significance, which I analyze, compare, and develop in part II. On the basis of this analysis, in part III I use a variety of criteria to evaluate the scientific (...) |
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