Lecture 9 - Philosophy of Science Flashcards
On what do logical positivism and falsification still have a large impact today?
Psychology, specifically how we test things (which is problematic)
What school of thought made up the Vienna Circle and what was their goal?
Logical positivism, to “attack” on the traditional vague philosophy (metaphysics)
Around the beginning of the 20th century, the mind has been drawn into the domain of natural science (aka psychology), what does this mean for philosophy?
The linguistic turn; philosophy concerns itself with the clarification of language and the assessment of which sentences are meaningful
also called analytic philosophy
On who’s work was the verification principle based?
Wittgenstein
What is sense data?
Experiences gained through sensory perception
What should the structure of science look like according to logical positivists?
- Sense data
- Observational vocabulary (“The mass of this = X”), compared to sense data (verification)
- Theoretical vocabulary (“mass”), correspondence rules needed between theoretical and obervational (e.g., measurement theory)
- Regularities = some kind of law
What is necessary for logical positivist’s structure of science?
To severely limit the theoretical vocabulary (e.g., depression) to the observational vocabulary as the statements have to be necessarily verifiable (observationally)
What is the problem with the correspondence rules in logical positivist science structure?
That theoretical concepts are often much richer and not reducible to observations
In essence, most theoretical concepts are much too open and contain way too many behavioural options to reduce down to
Logical positivism makes a strict separation between observation and theory, why is this not possible?
Because observation is theory-laden (and not neutral like logical positivism assumes)
Especially if an instrument is used in observation, as you make assumptions about how the instrument works
What is underdetermination of theory of data? Why does this pose a problem for verifiability?
Theories are sometimes equivalent in their empirical consequences; because the distinction between these is often made on a theoretical level (e.g., which one is more parsimoneous)
Logical positivists want laws of science (e.g., causal relations) to be included, why can’t they?
Because of the induction problem; general statements are not verifiable through observation
What are problems with verifiability and elematary particles like atoms?
These are “unobservable entitities” (at least, with human perception- you can use instruments, but there are still many entities that are not observable as of now)
Also, they might become observable (e.g., microbes did not used to be), so are they non-scientific until they are observable?
Why does Popper think he solved the induction problem?
Because it doesn’t matter how the theory arises; one can deduce predictions from the theory and then test them
To what ancient school of thoughts can verification and falsification be compared?
Empiricism and rationalism, respectively
Explain the full cycle of the hypothetico-deductive model
Theory > deduced predictions (or hypotheses) > test predicitions > falsify theory or corrobarate theory (aka it becomes stronger, but never true with certainty) > rerun
