What Is There For GPOS To Do? A Rorschach Test

Eric’s latest is a little breathless, and I believe that I have made my position clear. So let me just summarize a view, hoping that I am not simply exposing myself to another crosscheck from the Ghentish enforcer.

Here is my general view. (I apologize for my lack of historical erudition, and the resulting lack of nuance in the next few paragraphs.) Way back when, in the 1940s say, there were two major differences between General Philosophy of Science (GPOS) and General Epistemology (GE). The first of these was that GPOS was worried about the relationship between theory and observation (T/O). The second was that GPOS tended to be technical: logical empiricism meant something like what the name suggests. GEists such as the Rodericks–Chisholm and Firth–and Moore didn’t concern themselves with T/O and used ordinary discourse.

It seems to me that GPOS has ceded territory on both fronts.

Formal methods now operate in a wider realm, and have been taken over by formal epistemology, which (like logical empiricist GPOS) is content-general. On T/O, the story is more complex. On the one hand, GPOS was reckoned to have made little progress in the area: every tentative push forward was met by a ferocious counter-assault from Harvard or UCLA. And after Kuhn exploded his little bomb–within the Encyclopaedia, no less–people just seemed to lose heart. T/O was taken over by 4S and HPS folks, and the context of justification simply exited with scarcely a whimper. (I should say I have never understood why the discovery/justification distinction was found wanting.)

At the same time, there were genuine advances. But they came from outside the acknowledged sphere of GPOS, and were pridefully ignored within. Putnam, a well-credentialed GPOSer for some rather worthy work on reduction, came up with Twin Earth, externalism, and realism. Pollock discovered prima facie justification. Somebody–I am not sure who–rediscovered abduction. Kripke made modalism fashionable; Fine pushed grounding. Bayes and ranking theory are making waves in formal epistemology. All of a sudden, GPOS iss looking a bit out of the swim. It discovered likelihood–very useful. But really: Is there a great deal more?  I should concede here that there has been some brilliant stuff recently about measurement, models, idealization, etc., but these have yielded no synoptic perspective on the nature of science to replace that of logical empiricism. (By the way: Who says there is no progress in philosophy? How many of the above were around in the mid-20^th century?)

Now, Eric thinks that GE trades in “toy-examples”. True. But here I would make two points. First, toy-examples work in content-general philosophizing. Twin Earth is a toy, but surely something very valuable came out of it. Secondly, real examples are very specific. I don’t want to deny that it is tremendously useful to look in detail at, say, the concept of temperature. But this is inevitably going to be Philosophy of Physics, and heroic efforts would need to be made to extract something of value for GPOS, especially if that something isn’t just something you could get out of a toy example. Eric doesn’t disagree, I think, though his emphasis is different:

A naturalistic GPOS can draw on empirical work (history, sociology, or case-studies) on scientific practice, or rely on work done in philosophy of a particular science (PoX), while recognizing much of the autonomy of PoX [some other time more about the relationship between GPOS and PoX].

But, as the closing parenthesis makes clear, the above leaves it the contribution of GPOS slightly mysterious.

I’ll clear up a couple of misreadings, now, and then stop. Eric writes:

Mohan thinks it is irrelevant that when it comes to measurement or (more generally) data-gathering science is rapidly mechanizing: "resist parochial scientific judgements about the fundamentality of data provided by machines."

Right, I do think it is irrelevant. It may seem relevant because a science like neuroanatomy may take fMRI data to be fundamental, while from a broader perspective we may see that they are not fundamental. (And, by the way, I meant “parochial” to characterize the narrow perspective of a special science such as neuroanatomy: I didn’t mean to be singling out some small geographical or cultural centre for abuse.)

Finally: “Mohan, enjoys his fair share of name-calling (I think we are supposed to shudder when "we think of Popper, think of Feyerabend").” Again, Popper and Feyerabend were invoked as harbouring sceptical concerns. I don’t particularly shudder when I encounter sceptics; actually, I am rather fond of them. Why sceptical? Well, because Popper was so bothered by the problem of induction, and Feyerabend with the inadequacy of general methods.