Study Notes

PhilSci - Tutorials

10 min read

PhilSci: Tutorials

Overview

Luka Vinck runs the tutorials and posts his slides after each one. They are mostly discussion prompts rather than content, which makes them more useful than they look: they are the TA telling you which questions he thinks are worth an hour of a room’s time, and they are shaped almost exactly like exam questions.

This note collects every tutorial question, with an answer, because you are not in the room to hear one. It also holds the authoritative course plan, which comes from tutorial 1 and is more complete than anything else on Canvas.

Week 3’s tutorial on 17 September is the one with graded attendance. Turn up with a project idea. That is the entire ask.

Course plan

From tutorial 1, slide 5. This is the most complete schedule published anywhere in the course.

WeekTopicProject milestone
1Logical Empiricism
2Kuhn on Scientific Practice
3The Duhem-Quine ThesisWriting workshop. Come prepared with a project idea
4Explanation and UnderstandingProject proposal due Friday 25 September
5Scientific Realism 1Feedback
6Scientific Realism 2
7Laws of NaturePresentations, plus first draft and slides due Sunday 18 October
8Exam
Final project due 31 October

Two things this adds that were not in the vault before: week 7 is Laws of Nature, and the presentations happen in that same week 7 session rather than on a separate date.

The project

  • A philosophical research paper on one of the course topics.
  • Start from an existing discussion in the contemporary philosophical literature. Not from scratch.
  • Groups of 1 to 3 people. Roughly 4000 to 7000 words per person, all inclusive, so a group is more coordination for the same amount of your own writing.

Luka’s suggested way in: read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for a course topic, look at the example papers on Canvas, then look at recent papers in Synthese, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, or Erkenntnis.

Tutorial 1, 3 September: What is Science, and Logical Empiricism

Framing

Philosophy of science asks: what is science, what is good science, why and how does science work, and what does science teach us about nature. It sits across epistemology (what can we know), metaphysics and ontology (what is there), and, Luka adds, politics (what counts as truth).

The questions, answered

What were the central ideas of early logical positivism? Which ideas from the philosophy of language inspired it? How did these underpin its philosophy of science?

Meaningful factual claims are those that can in principle be verified by observation, and logic and mathematics are analytic, true by form and empty of factual content. The inspiration is Frege’s first-order logic, Russell and Whitehead’s logicism, and Wittgenstein on the relation between language and the world. Together these underpin a philosophy of science whose job is to clarify the language of science rather than compete with it: philosophy analyses, science discovers. Full detail in PhilSci-L01 - Introduction and Logical Empiricism.

What is science according to the logical positivists?

The body of statements that are either empirically verifiable or analytically true, expressed in a language whose theoretical terms are connected to observation. Anything else is not false but meaningless.

What was Carnap’s critique of metaphysics? Which central idea does he use? Do you agree?

Carnap argues metaphysical statements are pseudo-statements: they look like assertions and have no method of verification, so they say nothing. The idea he uses is the verifiability criterion of meaning. The standard objection, worth having ready, is that the criterion is self-undermining, since it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable itself.

How was the early programme challenged, internally and externally?

Internally by the difficulty of stating the verification criterion precisely, the problem of theoretical terms, and Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction (PhilSci-L03 - Under-determination). Externally by Popper substituting falsifiability for verifiability, and later by Kuhn’s historical turn (PhilSci-L02 - Kuhn on Scientific Practice).

How did later logical empiricism differ from early logical positivism?

It softened. Verification gave way to weaker confirmation, the demand that theoretical terms reduce to observation was relaxed, and the syntactic conception of theories gave way to the semantic one, on which a theory is a class of models rather than an axiomatised language.

Popper: what makes a theory scientific? How does falsifiability relate to verificationism? Which is more accurate?

Falsifiability, and the mark of pseudo-science is that it explains everything and forbids nothing. The relation to verificationism is the point worth being precise about, because it is a common exam trap: they are different criteria doing different jobs. Verificationism is a theory of meaning, so unverifiable statements are meaningless. Falsifiability is a criterion of demarcation, and Popper is explicit that unfalsifiable statements can be perfectly meaningful, just not scientific. Metaphysics, for Popper, is meaningful and sometimes fruitful. Full treatment in PhilSci-L01b - Popper and Lakatos.

Tutorial 2, 10 September: Science as a Socio-Historical Practice

Covers Kuhn on revolutions, Lakatos on demarcation, and Longino on values and objectivity.

Kuhn

The cycle on Luka’s slide: normal science within a paradigm, stubborn anomalies, crisis or extraordinary science, revolution and a new paradigm.

Why does Kuhn argue that “cumulative acquisition of novelty is not only rare in fact but improbable in principle” (p. 89)? Do you agree?

Because normal science is puzzle-solving inside a paradigm, and a paradigm determines what counts as a legitimate problem and a legitimate solution. Genuine novelty is by definition what the paradigm does not anticipate, so it can only appear as an anomaly, which is a failure rather than a contribution. Novelty therefore arrives by rupture, not accumulation.

Why are arguments in paradigm debates necessarily circular?

Each side argues from within its own paradigm, and paradigms supply the standards by which arguments are judged. So each can only defend its position using criteria the other does not accept. Kuhn’s comparison on the slide: “Like the choice between competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life” (p. 88).

Why are subsequent paradigms incommensurable, and do you agree?

Because they differ in problems, standards and the meanings of their terms, so there is no neutral vocabulary in which to state a fair comparison. The standard pushback: incommensurability is often overstated, since scientists in practice do communicate across paradigm boundaries and do cite empirical successes both sides recognise.

What is the necessity of scientific revolutions?

They are necessary because normal science cannot correct its own foundations. Anomalies accumulate until the paradigm’s puzzle-solving capacity is exhausted, and only a change of paradigm can restore it. Revolution is the mechanism by which science changes its mind at all.

Lakatos

The demarcation problem is not solved by Popper or Kuhn.

Luka’s slide states Lakatos’s charge directly. Popper is naive, because scientists do not in fact abandon a theory the moment it meets a contrary fact. Kuhn makes science irrational, because on his account change of paradigm is a change in commitment with no rational criterion, and so no demarcation is possible at all. Lakatos’s answer is to shift the unit of appraisal from the theory to the research programme.

What makes a research programme scientific? How does Lakatos nuance Popper and modify Kuhn?

A programme is scientific when it is progressive, meaning it predicts novel facts, some of which are corroborated. It is degenerating when it only accommodates facts already known. He nuances Popper by appraising a series of theories over time rather than a single theory against a single test, which makes room for the tenacity scientists actually show. He modifies Kuhn by keeping the historical unit while restoring a rational criterion for choosing between programmes. Detail in PhilSci-L01b - Popper and Lakatos.

Do you agree that scientific value is an “objective” property of a theory?

The case for: progressiveness is assessed against the public record of predictions and corroborations, not anyone’s opinion. The case against: judging a programme progressive requires deciding how long to wait before calling it degenerating, and Lakatos gives no principled cut-off, so the verdict is only available with hindsight.

Longino

Her position on the slide: the objective character of science is a consequence of its being a social enterprise. Objectivity is a property of a community’s practice, dependent on the depth and scope of transformative interrogation, and it does not differ in kind for non-empirical sciences, contra the logical empiricists.

What produces scientific knowledge, and how can it be objective? What are the necessary conditions?

Not the individual, but the community subjecting individual work to criticism. Knowledge is what survives transformative interrogation. See PhilSci-L02 - Kuhn on Scientific Practice for the four conditions in full.

The distinction the lecturer went out of his way to make

De Haro posted an announcement on 8 September specifically to correct a question asked in class. Longino’s contextual empiricism is a theory of scientific objectivity and epistemic methodology. It is not an ethical theory, and it does not answer whether a piece of research is permissible.

Ethical permissibility is the business of consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, care ethics and theories of justice, which ask about harms and benefits, rights and consent, and fair distribution of risk. Longino is at most indirectly relevant, in that she encourages scrutiny of the assumptions built into research and of whose perspectives are included in criticism.

A lecturer writing an unprompted announcement to correct a confusion is telling you where he thinks the confusion lies. Do not conflate these two in the exam.

Key Takeaways

Exam Focus

The tutorial questions are shaped like exam questions because the TA is drawing on the same material. Two of these map directly onto the mock exam:

  • Q4 asks why Kuhn compares revolutions to Gestalt switches. The tutorial’s circularity and incommensurability questions are the same territory.
  • Q5 asks what Longino means by the social character of objective knowledge, how something becomes scientific knowledge, and for examples of social mechanisms. The tutorial 2 Longino questions are that question in three parts.

The Popper-versus-verificationism question from tutorial 1 is the one most likely to catch you out, because the intuitive answer (“they are two versions of the same idea”) is wrong. Verificationism is about meaning, falsifiability is about demarcation, and Popper thinks unfalsifiable claims can be perfectly meaningful.

For 17 September

Graded attendance, worth 10% of the paper grade and 3% of the course grade. Bring a project idea. Not a finished proposal, an idea you can defend for two minutes. The two that fit your existing work: Duhem-Quine underdetermination applied to LLM benchmark evaluation, or explanation and understanding applied to explainable AI.

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