I've always felt that scientific realism is almost self-evidently true. Scientific theories and hypotheses put forward ideas that go beyond the evidence of direct experience. They postulate the existence of entities and forces that cannot be directly observed but whose effects can be teased out through the assumptions we have made about their characteristics. And …
Structural realism and social realities?
The topic of realism has come up frequently here -- causal realism, critical realism, scientific realism. Each of these realisms comes out of somewhat different fields of questions and assumptions. Within mainstream philosophy of science there is another realism that has been debated in the past twenty years, referred to as structural realism. The view …
Ian Hacking on chance as worldview
Ian Hacking was one of the more innovative and adventurous philosophers to take up the philosophy of science as their field of inquiry. The Taming of Chance (1990) is a genuinely fascinating treatment of the subject of the emergence of the idea of populations of events rather than discrete individuals. Together with The Emergence of Probability: A …
Expert knowledge
We often want the judgment of "experts" as we make important decisions in life, health, and business. But what exactly is an expert? One aspect of the idea is the possession of a large fund of specialized knowledge. A civil engineer specializing in bridge design is an expert in part because he or she has …
Economic observations
Oskar Morgenstern was one of the founders of mathematical game theory, as co-author with John von Neumann in 1944 of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. He was also the author in 1950 (revised in 1963) of a book that should be of substantial interest to philosophers of the social sciences. The book was called …
Nelson Goodman on psychology
Nelson Goodman is best known within philosophy as an iconoclast within the logical empiricist tradition. He published Fact, Fiction and Forecast in 1954, offering a "new riddle of induction." Goodman was deeply interested in the arts and he argued that artistic expression is on a par with other forms of assertion and representation -- for …
Quine’s indeterminacies
W.V.O. Quine's writings were key to the development of American philosophy in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. His landmark works ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism," "Ontological Relativity," and Word and Object, for example) provided a very appealing combination of plain speaking, seriousness, and import. Quine's voice certainly stands out among all American philosophers of his period. …
Hacking on Kuhn
The fourth edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions appeared in 2012, fifty years after its original appearance in 1962. This edition contains a very good introduction by Ian Hacking, himself a distinguished philosopher and philosopher of science. So it is very interesting to retread Kuhn's classic book with the commentary and intellectual frame …
Rationale for the philosophy of social science
The philosophy of social science is one of the smaller sub-disciplines of philosophy, and many universities have only a single course in the subject. In contrast to larger fields such as ethics or epistemology, the philosophy of social science involves a much smaller part of the intellectual spectrum and audience within the field of philosophy. …
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Why does social science matter?
What is the good of social science knowledge? In the natural sciences the answer is often pretty simple and pragmatic: natural science knowledge allows us to predict and control aspects of the natural environment. Physics underlays engineering. That's not always true, and it's not the only reason we value research and theory in physics, chemistry, …
Understanding Society 