Author Archives:

Expertise and participation

Posted on November 26, 2010

In his discussion of experts and democracy, Peter uses an article by Philip Kitcher to begin asking questions about the role of experts in democracies, particularly with regard to decision making. Kitcher’s review reports the belief that “genuine democratic participation … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, Science | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Instrumentalism in the Galileo Affair

Posted on November 16, 2010

In his unpublished notes from 1615, commenting on Cardinal Bellarmine’s Letter to Foscarini, the Carmelite Father, Galileo wrote as follows: It is of the highest prudence to believe that there is no demonstration of the mobility of the earth until … Continue reading →

Posted in Galileo, History and Philosophy of Science | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Scientific method and demarcation

Posted on November 12, 2010

In The Scientific Method, Mike Zajko sets out an argument that “no agreed-upon formulation of the scientific method exists” and that “it is more effective to consider science’s methods in terms of Hugh Gauch’s ‘general principles of scientific methodology’”, going … Continue reading →

Posted in History and Philosophy of Science | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Doubt and disunity

Posted on November 11, 2010

The question is: when does this incompleteness, coupled with a focus on anomalies for a given theory and an insistence that it may be wrong, become abuse – using our uncertainty to delay or undermine theories rather than developing alternatives? Continue reading →

Posted in Feyerabend, History and Philosophy of Science, Politics, Science | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Concepts and consequences

Posted on November 7, 2010

In Book IV of the Physics, Aristotle explored the concept of place in search of a rigorous understanding. Rejecting the possibilities of shape, matter and “some sort of extension between the bounding surfaces of the containing body” (221b), he arrived … Continue reading →

Posted in History and Philosophy of Science | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Feyerabend’s methodological argument for realism

Posted on November 2, 2010

This is a slightly amended discussion of a methodological argument for scientific realism due to Feyerabend, focusing on a difficulty that arose from considering Einstein’s study of Brownian motion and the transition from the phenomenological to kinetic theories of gases. … Continue reading →

Posted in Feyerabend, History and Philosophy of Science | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Some historiography of witchcraft

Posted on October 29, 2010

Early discussion of witchcraft amongst historians was based on the assumptions that the belief in witches and associated phenomena died out due to the advent of the scientific revolution and that the persecution of witches in the first place occurred … Continue reading →

Posted in Historiography | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Philosophy as remedy

Posted on October 25, 2010

This is a revised version of some comments I wrote a few years ago, when I observed that it is increasingly common to read opinion pieces that propose an increase in the study of philosophy, logic and science in schools as … Continue reading →

Posted in Feyerabend, Philosophy, Politics | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Cormac McCarthy and free will

Posted on October 22, 2010

In this entry I discuss the work of Cormac McCarthy and the degree to which it is concerned with the freedom of the will. My claim, such as it is, is that some of his works contain an extended examination … Continue reading →

Posted in Literature, Philosophy | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

On cranks and demarcation

Posted on October 18, 2010

It is generally acknowledged that attempts to demarcate science from non- or pseudoscience, based on a priori standards, have failed. Here I discuss a values-based approach, advocated by Feyerabend in his paper Realism and Instrumentalism, in which he wrote: The … Continue reading →

Posted in Feyerabend, History and Philosophy of Science | Tagged , , , , , | 15 Comments