/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13426932]

I am a mathematician/physicist.
I am interested in the philosophy of science.
Where would be good to start?

[Anonymous No.13426933]

>I am interested in the philosophy of science.
You're obviously not a mathematician/physicist lmao. Stop pretending.

[Anonymous No.13426944]

>>13426932
the Greeks: Anaximander, Democritus, Aristotle
>>13426933
brainlet

[Anonymous No.13426958]

>>13426944
>recommends the greeks for a resource to understand philosophy of science
>calls me a brainlet
O.K.

[Anonymous No.13426964]

>>13426944
Realistically I'm not going to spend my time trying to read Greek philosophers.
I was hoping for a more modern summary of some of the big ideas of the field.

[Anonymous No.13426980]

>>13426958
>>13426964
you are both missing the point entirely

[Anonymous No.13426993]

Not the Greeks that’s for sure

[Anonymous No.13426994]

>>13426964
you might want to check out Descartes

[Anonymous No.13427014]

>>13426980
What's with that Bill Nye quote? Not only does it not fit with the quotes in the image, the man it is attributed to believes there are more than 2 genders so his scientific credibility is dubious at best.

[Anonymous No.13427097]

>>13426932
Why don't you check out a good introduction on the topic? (I never read pic related, but its the only one I found in a 2min search - there's another one by Carnap, but knowing him, I'm pretty sure it's at leased a little bit biased, which doesn't mean you shouldn't read it, you just shouldn't read it as your first introduction to the theme.)

Read it. Decide which themes you're most interested in. Check the references. Read them. Rinse, repeat.

[Anonymous No.13427109]

>>13427014
it directly disagrees with the Schrodinger quote beside him

[Anonymous No.13427116]

>>13427097
> *at least
lol

[Anonymous No.13427117]

>>13427014
Bill Nye isn't a scientist but at the same time gender isn't a scientific concept, it's socially constructed. Biologists aren't concerned with gender.

[Anonymous No.13427454]

>>13426932
Mario Bunge

[Anonymous No.13428681]

>>13427097
one of these should be fine to start
some major authors 1900-1960 would be Russell, Hempel, Duhem, Lakatos, Popper, Feyerabend, Kuhn. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an essential read.

[Anonymous No.13428703]

>>13426932
Just so you know, there's philosophy of specific sciences (example: philosophy of physics) which gets more into specific science stuff and then asks philosophical questions, and then there's broader philosophy of science which is more interested with questions such as the observables/unobservables divide, talk about what exactly laws or causation amount to, instrumentalism vs. realism views about science, evaluating "pessimistic induction" (the idea that if science was always wrong in the past, why should it be right now), asking whether science is about verification or falsification, that sort of thing. If you find that stuff interesting, some good names would be Duhem, Kuhn, van Fraassen, Putnam, Hempel, Popper. I would start by maybe reading articles on SEP on things that interest you first.

[Anonymous No.13428728]

>>13428703
specific philosophy of __ aren't terribly numerous and deep in the literature though. there's a good amount of philosophy of physics, mathematics, and a little bit of biology out there, but most others are fairly underexplored.

[Anonymous No.13428764]

>>13428728
Sounds likely. Of the specialized philosophies-of-a-specific-science I only really know philosophy of mathematics stuff, but I'm aware that there's philosophy of physics and it ends up being about relativity/quantum given what modern metaphysicians have to say. Not a bad intersection.

[Anonymous No.13428799]

>>13428764
I understand quantum physics was the major topic in philosophy of physics in the 1980s but I'd be surprised if that's still the case. one would hope that the rut theoretical physics currently seems to be in is provoking interesting work in phil-phys and some dialogue with physicists.

[Anonymous No.13428911]

>>13427117
>gender isn't a scientific concept
This is sociological newspeak. Sex and gender were synonymous until very recently.

[Anonymous No.13428914]

>>13426932
Science: A. Chalmers - What is this thing called science?, Dewitt - Worldviews, Losee - Philosophy of Science a historical introduction.
- https://fuckyeahlogical.tumblr.com/post/128964910533/analytic-philosophy-reading-list-for-the-self

[Anonymous No.13428925]

>>13426932
philosophy of science sounds cool and serious because its related to science and science is cool and applicable.

Don't fall for this. Just remember that this is a social fad and science is a minor sub-interest in philosophy.

[Anonymous No.13428933]

>>13426980
good post.

>>13427014
> nitpick's the most insignificant part of the post.

Its suggesting that Bill Nye can't take an philosophical ideas seriously. He is the 12 year old neckbeard who hears about Descartes and immediately thinks the science is solved.

[Anonymous No.13428938]

>>13428911
I mean it's been the consensus for at least 50 years, I don't know why this is such an important hill to die on.

[Anonymous No.13428944]

Popper is sobering especially with a stem background

[Anonymous No.13428945]

>>13426932

[Anonymous No.13428963]

>>13428945
Feyerabend will spook him.

[Anonymous No.13428970]

>>13428963
That's why I want him to read it.

[Anonymous No.13429315]

>>13428728
Is Water H2O is the only book I know of that I think is philosophy of chemistry.

[Anonymous No.13429330]

>>13426932
"preoccupation with questions about methods tends to distract us from prosecuting the methods themselves. We run as a rule, worse, not better, if we think a lot about our feet. So let us ... not speak of it all but just do it."
-Gilbert Ryle
Don't do it anon

[Anonymous No.13429359]

>>13426932
Popper, Knuth, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Mary Hesse, Hume, Nelson Goodman, Pierce, Machamer, Darden, and Craver, though I'm not really sure where you should start

[Anonymous No.13429371]

>>13429359
>Pierce
Pierce what tho? Can you specify what book of him?

[Anonymous No.13429445]

>>13426980
That Dawkins quote doesn't seem that bad actually. Especially the first one, which is wholly positive as far as I can tell. Arguably the second quote contradicts the sentiment of the first one. However, it sounds to me like he's saying it's absolutely valuable to question common sense (much like any scientist ought to I'd add), and the second statement is simply an acknowledgment of practicality - eg. you can be paralyzed to indecision if you deeply consider every possibility all the time, which is dangerous especially when misinformation comes into play.

Actually, looking in to it, the context of the second quote is in reference to general quackery, paranormal stuff, and [probably, knowing him] religion. Not an attack on philosophy. Another quote from the same talk:
>It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

Bill Nye's quote isn't so ridiculous either, it only looks bad when placed beside a better, more insightful one.

NDT and Krauss do look like morons here though.

[Anonymous No.13429668]

>>13428938
It matters because you made a claim about science. You can't just redefine language as you see fit and then call it science, or non-science, as though there were any scientific credibility to your claim.

[Anonymous No.13429706]

>>13429668
language is an objective fact, its in constant flux and is always changing. if sex and gender were the same thing, there wouldnt be two different words for it. similarity does mean synonymous

[Anonymous No.13429776]

>>13429706
>if sex and gender were the same thing, there wouldnt be two different words for it.
*cries in netherlands and holland*

[Anonymous No.13429786]

>>13429706
>if sex and gender were the same thing, there wouldnt be two different words for it
In German there aren't...

[Anonymous No.13429800]

>>13429668
I didn't redefine anything, you mong. You literally you want to upturn decades of academic research because you want to score some political anti-tranny points. You have become a parody of what you think you believe.

[Anonymous No.13429883]

>>13429776

[Anonymous No.13429977]

>>13429800
I'm not anti trans. I'm not even against amending the language to be more inclusive to trans people. But social constructionism isn't science.

[Anonymous No.13430850]

>>13429776
I imagine it's true in a bunch of non-English languages. It's true in Spanish, there's just one word and it's the word for biological sex. I've seen some Spanish people try to introduce the word for genus as the new word for gender (as in gender identity) in Spanish because there is no existing word.

[Anonymous No.13430981]

>>13426932
Great bait.

[Anonymous No.13431064]

E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle
Pierre Duhem, To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo
William James, Pragmatism
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas and Science and the Modern World
Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind and The New Scientific Spirit
Wilfred Sellars, various things
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty, and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (and anything else you're interested in, aside from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, unless you have a specific interest in reading that)
Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions and The Essential Tension
Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method and various other books, especially For and Against Method (his debate with Lakatos)
W.O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism
John H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (this is a good, short touchstone for postpositivist philosophy of science)
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity
Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance and The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability

Good philosophy of science = good history of science, usually. If you can handle continental philosophy, it's worth knowing hermeneutic phenomenology.

[Anonymous No.13431314]

>>13426932
>interested in
>haven't started
this doesn't make any sense. if you were interested in it you'd have read something on it by now

[Anonymous No.13432010]

>>13429977
duh, I already told you gender isn't a scientific concept. money is a social construction you retard, so why aren't you trying to have three millennia of economics overturned? money isn't a scientific concept

[Anonymous No.13432138]

>>13429371
>Pierce
Sorry I meant Peirce, and well he wrote lots of essays so you could try getting something like: "Charles S. Peirce, Selected Writings" or "Illustartions of the Logic of Science" or maybe some secondary source like "Pierce's theory of scientific discovery"

[Anonymous No.13432736]

>>13432138
>>13431064
Also I'll add Duehm and Quine to my list, like the anon with the big list of books (though a bit too general imo, and for Quine it should be "Word and Object" not "Two Dogmas of Empricism" insofar as philosophy of science goes), also I don't think history of science is enough, you would do better including cognitive science too and perhaps computational approaches to the subject.

[Anonymous No.13432746]

>>13428914
Thanks!
I've ordered the Chalmers book.

>>13431314
You're right, it's very early days.

[Anonymous No.13432760]

>>13428914
The Linnebo book looks interesting too.