Theory and Reality Quotes

“Longino argues that in order to be able to distinguish rationality from irrationality we should take the social group as our basic unit. Science is rational to the extent that it chooses theories from a diverse pool of options reflecting different points of view, and makes its choice via a critical dialogue that reaches consensus without coercion. Diversity in the ideas in the pool is facilitated by diversity in the backgrounds of those participating in the discussion. Epistemology becomes a field that tries to distinguish good community-level procedures from bad ones.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Most ambitiously, some feminist epistemologists have argued that even our fundamental concepts of reason, evidence, and truth are covertly sexist. Feminist epistemology also goes beyond criticism to make suggestions about reform-how to make science better at finding out about the world (if that goal is to be retained), and also how to make science more socially responsible.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Twentieth-century empiricism made an important mistake here. We can make sense of science only by treating much of it as an attempt to describe hidden structures that give rise to observable phenomena. This is a version of scientific realism, an idea that will be discussed later in this book. In science there are depths. There is not a simple and fixed distinction between two "layers" in nature-the empiricists were right to distrust this idea. Instead there are many layers, or rather a continuum between structures that are more accessible to us and structures that are less accessible. Genes are hidden from us in some ways, but not as hidden as electrons, which in turn are not as hidden as quarks. Although there are "depths" in science, what is deep at one time can come to the surface at later times, and there may be lots of ways of interacting with what is presently deep.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Many philosophers in the English-speaking world felt vindicated by the Sokal hoax. Although English-speaking philosophy had produced radical ideas about science, for the most part it had not accepted postmodernism and other French-influenced literary-philosophical movements.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“For example, at the very end of Leviathan, their discussion of "making" leads Shapin and Schaffer to express their overall conclusions in a way that involves a real confusion. They say: "It is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know" (1985, 344)• This is a classic
example of a false dichotomy. Neither we alone nor reality alone is "responsible" for human knowledge. The rough answer is that both are responsible for it; knowledge involves an interaction between the two. Even this formulation is imperfect; human knowledge is part of reality, not something separate from or outside it. But, speaking roughly, in order to understand knowledge, we need both a theory of human thought, language, and social interaction, and a theory of how these human capacities are connected to the world outside us.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Science constantly strives to reduce the number of things that we must accept as fundamental. We try to develop general explanatory schemata (explanatory schemes) that can be applied as widely as possible. This proposal certainly makes a lot of sense of how scientists operate. Indeed, it seems clear that what produces an Aha!" reaction is often the realization that some odd-looking phenomenon is really a case of something more general.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“For many philosophers,
causation is a suspicious metaphysical concept that we do best to avoid when trying to understand science. This suspicion is, again, common within the empiricist tradition. It derives from the work of Hume. The suspicion is directed especially at the idea of causation as a sort of hidden connection between things, unobservable but essential to the operation of the universe.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Abstract mathematical models might be thought of as attempts to use a general-purpose and precise framework to represent dependence relationships that might exist between the parts of real systems. A mathematical model will treat one variable as a function of others, which in turn are functions of others, and so on. In this way, a complicated network of dependence structures can be represented. And then, via a commentary, the dependence structure in the model can be treated as representing the dependence structure that might exist in a real system.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Recent discussions of how natural selection changes biological populations tend to be expressed in the form of mathematical models. These models are written down, of course. They are formulated using mathematical symbolism, and they have to be supplemented with a commentary telling us (for example) which phenomena in the real world are being represented by the model. But we should not expect an analysis of how mathematical models relate to the world to use the same concepts as an analysis of how hypotheses expressed in ordinary language relate to the world.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“For van Fraassen, when a theory passes a lot of tests and becomes well established, the right attitude to have toward the theory is to "accept" it, in a special sense. To accept a theory is to (z) believe (provisionally) that the theory is empirically adequate, and to (z) use the concepts the theory provides when thinking about further problems and when trying to extend and refine the theory.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Rather than saying that describing the real world is impossible, an instrumentalist will urge us not to worry about whether a theory is a true description of the world, or whether electrons "really, really exist." If a theory enables us to make good predictions, what more can we ask? If we have a theory that gives us the right answers with respect to what we can observe, we might occasionally find ourselves wondering if these right answers result from some deeper "match" between the theory and the world. But we can never expect to know the answer to this question, so what relevance does it have to science? Quite a few scientists have expressed instrumentalist views, especially in physics. The idea that we should ignore questions about the "real reality" of theoretical entities because these questions have no practical relevance is also linked to one strand of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy (Rorty 198z).”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“In recent years the tension between realism and empiricism has often been debated under the topic of the "underdetermination of theory by evidence." Empiricists argue that there will always be a range of alternative theories compatible with all our actual evidence, and maybe a range of alternative theories compatible with all our possible evidence. So we never have good empirical grounds for choosing one of these theories over others and regarding it as representing how the world really is.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“But the concepts of truth and falsity are only easy to apply in cases where a representation is in the form of language. In addition to linguistic representations, science often uses mathematical models, and other kinds of models, to describe phenomena. A scientific claim might also be expressed using a diagram. So I use the term "accurate representation" in a broad way to include true linguistic descriptions, pictures and diagrams that resemble reality in the way they are supposed to, models that have the right structural similarity to aspects of the world, and so on.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“The position defended in this book is a version of scientific realism. A scientific realist thinks it does make sense to say that science aims at describing the real structure of the world we live in. Does the scientific realist think that science succeeds in this aim? That is a more complicated issue.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“The power of science is seen in the cumulative and coordinated nature of scientific work; each generation in science builds on the work of workers who came before, and each generation organizes its energies via collaboration and public discussion. This social organization permits the scientific strategy to function at the level of social groups; the dialogue between the speculative voice and the critical voice can literally be a dialogue, rather than something internalized in the mind-set of the individual scientist. These social groups can include some individuals who are not especially open-minded-who are very wedded to their own ideas-provided that the group as a whole retains flexibility and responsiveness to evidence.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Hull also argues that the reason why fraud in science is so much more serious a crime than theft, even in cases where public well-being is not affected, has to do with these sorts of factors. In a case of theft or plagiarism, the only person harmed is the one stolen from. But when a case of fraud is discovered, all the scientists who used the fraudulent work will find their work on that topic deemed unreliable, and their work will not be used.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Is science a fundamentally cooperative enterprise, or is it a fundamentally competitive one in which scientists are out for personal advancement? According to Hull (and also Merton), science runs on a combination of cooperation and competition. Neither is fundamental, and the special features of science are due to an interaction between the two. This interaction arises from the reward system found in science and the context in which the reward system operates.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Science works by taking theoretical ideas and trying to find ways to expose them to observation. The scientific strategy is to construe ideas, to embed them in surrounding conceptual frameworks, and to develop them, in such a way that this exposure is possible even in the case of the most general and ambitious hypotheses about the universe.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Reliable senses shared across all normal humans can be expected to deliver consensus. But it is also possible that we could have wide agreement without reliability; we might all be deluded in the same way. Some philosophers have thought that color vision is like this. Colors are not really "out there" in the world, even if we all experience them that way.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“There could, in principle, be an institution that looked like what we call "science" but in which there was no genuine responsiveness to the world. Experiments would be no more than expensive "PR" exercises, and theories
would change via a process of negotiation between factions. How do we know that our own science is not like this?”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“In philosophical discussions of decision-making, an action is said to be instrumentally rational if it is a good way of achieving the goal that the agent is pursuing, whatever that goal might be. When assessing actions according to their instrumental rationality, we do not worry about where the goals come from or whether they are appropriate goals. We just ask whether the action is likely to achieve the outcome that the agent desires.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“Postmodernism is part of a recent tradition in the humanities that opposes the idea that language should be analyzed as a system used to represent, or "stand for;" objects and situations in the world. This anti-representationalist view of language influenced a lot of literary theory, as well as other humanistic disciplines, in the latter part of the twentieth century. Postmodernism is a spectacular outgrowth of that line of thought.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“The terminology "analytic-synthetic" was introduced by Kant. Although the distinction itself looks uncontroversial, it can be made to do real philosophical work. Here is one crucial piece of work the logical positivists saw for it: they claimed that all of mathematics and logic is analytic. This made it possible for them to deal with mathematical knowledge within an empiricist framework. For logical positivism, mathematical propositions do not describe the world; they merely record our conventional decision to use symbols in a particular way. Synthetic claims about the world can be expressed using mathematical language, such as when it is claimed that there are nine planets in the solar system. But proofs and investigations within mathematics itself are analytic.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

“But Toulmin and Goodfield's Fabric of the Heavens (1962.), an old book recently reprinted, is my favorite.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science