Philosophy 2130: Philosophy of Science
November 6, 2003
Term Paper
Topics
Write a 5-6 page paper on one of the following topics. (You may choose and formulate a topic of your own, but you must clear it with one of us, via email, beforehand.) The papers are due DECEMBER 11th. You should hand them to Ping Lau in the Philosophy Department’s main office, MB 312.
1. Thought–experiments are conducted not in the laboratory but in the mind. Therefore (apparently) a successful thought-experiment delivers not empirical knowledge but a priori truths. But how can the latter be scientific? One way out of this problem would be to argue that scientific laws, the laws of nature, are relations between independently existing abstract entities. This is what J.R. Brown does in his book The Laboratory of the Mind (see p.76). Is Brown’s view plausible?
Reading: Chapter 4 of Brown’s book. You may also find the first two chapters interesting and helpful. The book is in the ebrary, 530.01 B8. It contains some references that you may wish to follow up.
2. Proponents of `Intelligent Design’ do not make such extravagant claims as the `New Age’ creationists that Kitcher attacks in his book Abusing Science. But is there nevertheless a fundamental incompatibility between Evolutionary Theory and Intelligent Design?
Reading: You should take as your starting point the short article by Mary Wakefield mentioned in Lecture 11. There is a large amount of material on Intelligent Design on the Web.
3. Can the Problem of Induction be solved? If so, how? If not, what are the consequences for our conception of scientific practice?
Reading: The article by Salmon. There are several useful websites that
contain discussions of the Problem.
Here’s a link to one: http://www.princeton.edu/~grosen/puc/phi203/induction.html.
There
are also plenty of articles and books on the topic at the library.
4. Hempel’s account
of scientific explanation raises the question of what distinguishes
accidentally true generalizations from non-accidental “laws of nature”. Is there a good account of the distinction to
be had? Does a good account of scientific
explanation require that we have a good account of laws?
Reading: The article by Hempel. There is a very good article on laws in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laws-of-nature/ The article also contains a useful bibliography
for further reading.
5. Who do you think is right, the taxonomic Essentialists or the Nominalists? Supply reasons and evidence for your position.
Readings: uiEreshefsky,
M. (ed.) (1992) The Units of Evolution: Essays on the Nature of Species,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (A collection
of classic papers on the species’ problem.)
Kripke, S. (1972) ‘Naming and Necessity’, in
D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds) Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht:
Reidel, pp. 253-355; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Oxford
University Press, 1980. (Kripke’s views on natural kinds and natural-kind terms
are developed from his more general views about how names refer. Lecture III
presents his views on natural kinds, but begins with a helpful summary of the
conclusions reached in the preceding lectures.)
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, chs. 3 and 6
Putnam, H. (1975) Mind, Language, and Reality:
Philosophical Papers volume II,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chapters 8, and 10-12 are
relevant and best read in that order.)
Sober, E. (1988)
Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, Inference, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. (A philosophical evaluation
of cladistic methods for reconstructing the past.)
“Natural Kinds,” and “Taxonomy” in Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (online Library database)