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The future of philosophy of science: armchair philosophers need not apply

Steven French and Juha Saatsi (eds): The continuum companion to the philosophy of science. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011, xii+452pp, $190 HB

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Notes

  1. One churlish complaint: the print in the Companion is too small for comfortable reading (I wear trifocals). In James Hawthorne’s article, for example, this reviewer had difficulty in distinguishing the “i” and “j” subscripts. Also, the commas and single quotation marks look exactly like primes. Note: there are no primes in Hawthorne’s essay.

  2. In his essay, Howard makes other criticisms of Reichenbach, arguing, for example, that his distinction between the descriptive, critical, and advisory tasks of philosophy of science was designed to confine the role of scientists (and philosophers) to advising governments and policy makers solely about means and not the social and political ends that they serve. Howard comments that, while advocacy of this sort of disengagement may be psychologically understandable for Reichenbach, writing in 1938 in exile from Nazi Germany, it did not serve the United States well in the cold war era. Presumably, Howard did not have Edward Teller in mind.

  3. The two quotations, which appear at the beginning of Howard’s essay, are from Norwood Russell Hanson (1962).

References

  • Paul K. Feyerabend. 1970. Philosophy of science: A subject with a great past. In Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, ed. Roger H. Steuwer, Volume 5, 172–183. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Norwood Russell Hanson. 1962. The irrelevance of history of science to philosophy of science. Journal of Philosophy 59: 774–786.

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  • Weisberg, Jonathan. 2009. Locating IBE in the Bayesian framework. Synthese 167: 125–143.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, 100 North University Street, West Lafayette, IN, 47907-2098, USA

    Martin Curd

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Curd, M. The future of philosophy of science: armchair philosophers need not apply. Metascience 22, 159–164 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-012-9677-y

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