This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value (...) is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in (...) scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity-- and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically. Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. She is the coauthor of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 and the editor of Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is the author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time, How Experiments End, and Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics, and other books, and coeditor of The Architecture of Science. (shrink)

What has become generally known as the Berlin School of Logical Empiricism constitutes a philosophical movement that was erected on foundations laid by Albert Einstein. His revolutionary work in physics had a profound impact on philosophers interested in scientific issues, prominent among them Paul Oppenheim and Hans Reichenbach, the founding fathers of the school, who joined in viewing him as their hero among philosopher-scientists. Overall the membership of this school falls into three groups. The founding generation was linked by the (...) circumstance that both Grelling and Reichenbach were collaborators of Oppenheim; the middle generation by the fact that both Hempel and Helmer were students of Reichenbach's in Berlin; and the younger generation by the fact that all of its members were students and disciples either of Reichenbach's or of Hempel's in the USA. Three stages are at issue: an initial phase in Berlin, a transatlantic migration, and a continuation in the U.S.A.--principally in Pittsburgh. (shrink)

Available for the first time in 20 years, here are two important works from the 1920s by the best-known representative of the Vienna Circle.

Ichbin überzeugt, daß die Hauptwiderstände gegen unsere Auffassung daher rühren, daß der Unterschied zwischen der Falschheit und der Sinn|losigkeit eines Satzes nicht beachtet wird. Der Satz: ”Das Reden von einer metaphysischen Außenwelt ist sinnleer“ sagt nicht: ”Es gibt keine metaphysische Außenwelt“, sondern etwas toto coelo anderes. Der Empirist sagt dem Metaphysiker nicht: ”Deine Worte behaupten etwas Falsches“, sondern ”Deine Worte behaupten überhaupt nichts!“ Er widerspricht ihm nicht, sondern er sagt: ”Ich verstehe dich nicht“.

To explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question “why?” rather than only the question “what?”, is one of the foremost objectives of all rational inquiry; and especially, scientific research in its various branches strives to go beyond a mere description of its subject matter by providing an explanation of the phenomena it investigates. While there is rather general agreement about this chief objective of science, there exists considerable difference of opinion as to the function (...) and the essential characteristics of scientific explanation. In the present essay, an attempt will be made to shed some light on these issues by means of an elementary survey of the basic pattern of scientific explanation and a subsequent more rigorous analysis of the concept of law and of the logical structure of explanatory arguments. (shrink)

The fundamental tenet of modern empiricism is the view that all non-analytic knowledge is based on experience. Let us call this thesis the principle of empiricism. [1] Contemporary logical empiricism has added [2] to it the maxim that a sentence makes a cognitively meaningful assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, only if it is either (1) analytic or self-contradictory or (2) capable, at least in principle, of experiential test. According to this so-called empiricist criterion (...) of cognitive meaning, or of cognitive significance, many of the formulations of traditional metaphysics and large parts of epistemology are devoid of cognitive significance--however rich some of them may be in non-cognitive import by virtue of their emotive appeal or the moral inspiration they offer. Similarly certain doctrines which have been, at one time or another, formulated within empirical science or its border disciplines are so contrived as to be incapable of test by any conceivable evidence; they are therefore qualified as pseudo- [p. 42:] hypotheses, which assert nothing, and which therefore have no explanatory or predictive force whatever. This verdict applies, for example, to the neo-vitalist speculations about entelechies or vital forces, and to the "telefinalist hypothesis" propounded by Lecomte du Noüy. (shrink)

Is capitalism inherently predatory? Must there be winners and losers? Is public interest outdated and free-riding rational? Is consumer choice the same as self-determination? Must bargainers abandon the no-harm principle? Prisoners of Reason recalls that classical liberal capitalism exalted the no-harm principle. Although imperfect and exclusionary, modern liberalism recognized individual human dignity alongside individuals' responsibility to respect others. Neoliberalism, by contrast, views life as ceaseless struggle. Agents vie for scarce resources in antagonistic competition in which every individual seeks dominance. This (...) political theory is codified in non-cooperative game theory; the neoliberal citizen and consumer is the strategic rational actor. Rational choice justifies ends irrespective of means. Money becomes the medium of all value. Solidarity and good will are invalidated. Relationships are conducted on a quid pro quo basis. However, agents can freely opt out of this cynical race to the bottom by embracing a more expansive range of coherent action. (shrink)

This is a jewel among methods handbooks, bringing together a formidable collection of international contributors to comment on every aspect of the various central issues, complications, and controversies in the core methodological traditions. It is designed to meet the needs of those disciplinary and nondisciplinary problem-oriented social inquirers for a comprehensive overview of the methodological literature.

Chasing Reality deals with the controversies over the reality of the external world. Distinguished philosopher Mario Bunge offers an extended defence of realism, a critique of various forms of contemporary anti-realism, and a sketch of his own version of realism, namely hylorealism. Bunge examines the main varieties of antirealism - Berkeley's, Hume's, and Kant's; positivism, phenomenology, and constructivism - and argues that all of these in fact hinder scientific research. Bunge's realist contention is that genuine explanations in the sciences appeal (...) to causal laws and mechanisms that are not directly observable, rather than simply to empirical generalisations. Genuine science, in his view, is objective even when it deals with subjective phenomena such as feelings of fear. This work defends a realist view of universals, kinds, possibilities, and dispositions, while rejecting contemporary accounts of these that are couched in terms of modal logic and 'possible worlds.'. (shrink)

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays address anthropology, area studies, economics, history, the philosophy (...) of science, political science and political theory, and sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II. Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory. Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method. All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice. Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running from the past through the present and pointing toward possible futures. Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Michael Burawoy, Andrew Collier , Michael Dutton, Geoff Eley, Anthony Elliott, Stephen Engelmann, Sandra Harding, Emily Hauptmann, Webb Keane, Tony Lawson, Sophia Mihic, Philip Mirowski, Timothy Mitchell, William H. Sewell Jr., Margaret R. Somers, George Steinmetz, Elizabeth Wingrove. (shrink)

The more than 40 readings in this anthology cover the most important developments of the past six decades, charting the rise and decline of logical positivism ...

Preface. Almost fifty years ago, in 1948, when I was an undergraduate at Queens College in New York and a student of Carl G. Hempel's, I received from his hands an offprint of his now-classic but then just-published paper “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”, written in collaboration with Paul Oppenheim and then just published in Philosophy of Science.1 This paper greatly impressed me—and I was not alone. We have here one of those unusual publications that sets the agenda for (...) a whole generation of investigators. It set in train an enormous body of discussions and publications which shaped the course of deliberations about scientific explanation over the next decades—an effort to which my own work also made some contributions. However my present aim is not to consider what came out of the Hempel-Oppenheim paper but what went into it. I want, in sum, to consider the prehistory of that era of scientific explanation studies—and to look more closely at the background ramifications of this paper that launched a thousand others. (shrink)

1. The problem. The concept of confirmation of an hypothesis by empirical evidence is of fundamental importance in the methodology of empirical science. For, first of all, a sentence cannot even be considered as expressing an empirical hypothesis at all unless it is theoretically capable of confirmation or disconfirmation, i.e. unless the kind of evidence can be characterized whose occurrence would confirm, or disconfirm, the sentence in question. And secondly, the acceptance or rejection of a sentence which does represent an (...) empirical hypothesis is determined, in scientific procedure, by the degree to which it is confirmed by relevant evidence. (shrink)

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political projects. (...) In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

This book discusses how rational choice theory grew out of RAND's work for the US Air Force. It concentrates on the work of William J. Riker, Kenneth J. Arrow, James M. Buchanan, Russel Hardin, and John Rawls. It argues that within the context of the US Cold War with its intensive anti-communist and anti-collectivist sentiment, the foundations of capitalist democracy were grounded in the hyper individualist theory of non-cooperative games.

Faced with anti-foundationalist revisionism on part of recent Vienna Circle scholarship, veterans of the struggle against the so-called dogmas of logical empiricism could be forgiven were they to fail to recognize their old adversaries. Clearly everything depends on how the logical empiricists are read: their record does not speak for itself. That already in their day the logical empiricists faced the declaredly friendly fire that nearly sealed their fate suggests, however, that the reconstructive explication and contextualization required be exceedingly subtle. (...) For if that fire really missed its target, then what was missed was something that escaped notice from close quarter. Perhaps no one of the logical empiricists places more challenging demands of this sort on their historiographers than the longest-surviving senior member of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap. (shrink)

This work presents analysis of the evolution and development of the social sciences. It reconsiders how knowledge actually changes and advances. Challenging the accepted belief that social sciences are in a perpetual state of progress, this work contends that there is a core set of principles.

Six essays by noted philosophers of science include the following topics: explanation in science and in history; philosophy and the scientific image of man; ...

Scientific Philosophy: Origins and Development is the first Yearbook of the Vienna Circle Institute, which was founded in October 1991. The book contains original contributions to an international symposium which was the first public event to be organised by the Institute: `Vienna--Berlin--Prague: The Rise of Scientific Philosophy: The Centenaries of Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach and Edgar Zilsel.' The first section of the book - `Scientific Philosophy - Origins and Developments' reveals the extent of scientific communication in the inter-War years between (...) these great metropolitan centres, as well as presenting systematic investigations into the relevance of the heritage of the Vienna Circle to contemporary research and philosophy. This section offers a new paradigm for scientific philosophy, one which contrasts with the historiographical received view of logical empiricism. Support for this re-evaluation is offered in the second section, which contains, for the first time in English translation, Gustav Bergmann's recollections of the Vienna Circle, and an historical study of political economist Wilhelm Neurath, Otto Neurath's father. The third section gives a report on current computer-based research which documents the relevance of Otto Neurath's `Vienna method of pictorial statistics', or `Isotypes'. A review section describes new publications on Neurath and the Vienna Circle, as well anthologies relevant to Viennese philosophy and its history, setting them in their wider cultural and political perspective. Finally, a description is given of the Vienna Circle Institute and its activities since its foundation, as well as of its plans for the future. (shrink)

A reconstruction of the creation of game theory in the twentieth century by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.

This field review discusses several recently published books that are concerned with historical, cultural, philosophical, or sociological aspects of the social sciences and humanities, past and present. It investigates similarities and differences between the various perspectives and approaches, and analyzes how these are informed by different visions of the field of SSH studies. In concluding, the review discusses three recurrent themes that will presumably move in the focus of debate in the near future: the debate on positivism in SSH and (...) its “epistemological others;” the impact of the Cold War on the gestalt of the SSH; and, finally, the adequacy of science, technology, and society approaches to describe techniques and practices in the SSH. (shrink)