(Part 2) Best products from r/PhilosophyofScience

I was just asked this the other day by an incoming graduate student. It's really hard -- textbooks are a real hassle. For history, the best book I know, though it's limited in scope, is David Lindberg's The Beginnings of Western Science. It runs up through 1450. After that, you have trouble -- you have to start looking at individual figures or periods. H.F. Cohen's The Scientific Revolution is nice for its period. Then you get really fragmented. The Cambridge Studies in the History of Science series (1 2 3) is really nice for what it covers, if its topics interest you.

For PoS, again, textbooks are hard. I like the Curd and Cover anthology, it's got lots of primary readings with good explanatory material (dt already recommended that one, I see -- I didn't realize it because I've never referred to it by title...). Rosenberg's Routledge Introduction also seems pretty good, though I should warn that I've never read it, I'm going on brief skims and what I know of the author's other stuff (which is great).

Good luck! You can always come back here to ask questions!

I'm quite enjoying it! And, full disclosure, I'm a bit of an ADD type... I don't stay focused on one thing for too long. I like to get to the point of something in as few steps as possible. The book really plays in to that! It's a collection of about 150 1-4 page little essays from prominent thinkers. They all were simply asked "What is your favorite deep, beautiful, elegant theory?"

It comes from edge.org.

Edge puts out a new one every year (at least I think that's the frequency...).

Last year's was a great read as well! Same format as this year's, just a different question.

I recommend this essay for anybody who has a physics background and wants to get an appreciation of biology. I would also strongly encourage any reader of "What if Life?" to follow it up right away with "Mind and Matter" (they are usually packaged together). The philosophical contrast between the two is amazing, and seeing how Schrodinger held these two philosophies (one very reductionist and the other very holistic) together in his mind is an amazing experience. Reading those two essays was a very transformative event for me.

In Mind and Matter, Schrodinger also explores the connections to eastern religion (more accurately would be to say: Schopenhauer's conceptions and retelling of eastern religion) in a much more beautiful and insightful way than Capra's later mess of quantum mechanics and eastern mysticism. He achieves this by clearly making all connections at philosophical and metaphorical levels and never bringing in quantum mechanics (or any other Scientism) even though he is well versed in it.

>I am glad, as you are, that the social mores of science emphasize criticism and is our best attempt at a self-correcting/revising system, so no argument from me there!

Right, but I think perhaps where we might disagree is that you will still insist that scientists should only be trying to refute their theories whereas I don't see the evidence that this approach would help. Indeed, I think such a restriction might hurt science by driving away brilliant minds that are just as subject to confirmation bias as any other human. Jonathan Haidt said it brilliantly in a talk I watched recently (paraphrasing) "I know I can't get past my own confirmation bias so that's why I'm relying on you guys to point out what I've missed."

>I haven't read much Laudan, but I'll try to pick up one of his books over the holiday system. Do you have any suggestions?

Progress and its Problems is generally considered Laudan's classic work. Somebody wrote a scathing review on Amazon but unfortunately I don't remember the book well enough to know whether I would agree with it.

>I would rather learn that I am wrong than be confident that I am right.

But because of the theory ladenness of perception, you don't even know what you were wrong about. It could have been some aspect of the theory or it could have been an auxiliary assumption. My concern here is that critical rationalism does not give us a good reason to do science, given the tremendous costs scientific practice comes at, and that CR can't by its own logic assure us that we are, in any significant way "learning more about the world."

One way to suppose that we are learning about the world is that science helps us grow our store of background knowledge. To take a trivial example, we know that rats exist. This is a piece of knowledge we can draw on. Any epistemic theory that asks me to suppose that I really don't know that rats exist thereby undermines its own reasonableness. Can critical rationalism accept that science helps us increase our background knowledge (in addition to refuting hypotheses)?

>When one theory does not live up to expectations, it is removed from the set of all viable theories.

But without induction, why think this? So we didn't get the result the theory predicted today. Why think that we wouldn't get the result the theory predicted tomorrow, or the next day? My answer would be that we use something like induction and bet that the future is going to be like the past, but since CR rejects induction, I don't see how it can justify this move. Or to put it a different way, it looks to me like CR is kicking induction out the front door only to have it sneak in the back.

And since you said no textbooks, I wasn't sure how much technical stuff you'd be up for, but as a physics major, there isn't really anything you'd couldn't deal with. It's a fairly technical domain. Amazon seems to have quite a few titles, including something very cheap from the very short introduction series. I haven't seen any of them, but that sounds interesting. I haven't read anything lately on the subject. Honestly, the impression I got was that there really wasn't going to be much to find, but if you are interested, I wish you luck.

Well, neoclassical is mainstream. It's useful to understand, in part just to get an idea of why people arguing against neoclassical are doing so.

If you're interested in economics, I'd suggest...

• Makiw is easy to read for neoclassical (avoid the "Introduction to.. textbooks).
  
• New Institutional Economics (mainly just Ronald Coase's two most famous articles), because transaction costs are very interesting.
  
• Complexity... the Origin of Wealth is very easy to read.
  
• History of Economic thought (most important). The Origin of Wealth has a decent chapter on it, but a detailed study is very useful. This is a useful website
  
  The distinguising thing about Austrian Economics is its reliance on an axiomatic system (Praxeology), and the rejection of experimentation/hypothesis testing. While I said I don't see a rational reason to distinguish between methods in the other thread - well, let's just say I'm an empiricist at heart.

A summary?

Gravity is what we call the fact that massive objects (and energy, by extension) tend to follow geodesics in curved spacetime.

From a GR perspective, it's not a "thing" in the same way as electromagnitism, or the strong force, or the weak force. It's simply the tendency for massive objects to move in a straight line.

This is an analogy. It's designed to give intuition, but it's not at all rigorous. Again, if you want the rock solid explanation, you have to deal with differential geometry and tensor calculus and those field equations linked above.

It's not a perfect analogy. You would (rightfully) ask: "what about things that aren't already moving? why would something like gravity 'pulling' on them cause them to move, that's not them continuing to move in a straight line.", and you'd be right. But that's because the best I can do with out getting absurdly mathy is give you a mediocre analogy. If you want to know the real deal, you have to crack a book.

Also: I "referenced" that book because it's one of a few introductory General Relativity books that people who are in grad school for physics use. That means most professors who are actively involved in research use it. So your claim that "no one of any authority" would use it is absurd.

Here it is incase you're being sincere, something tells me you're not though:

https://www.amazon.com/Gravity-Introduction-Einsteins-General-Relativity/dp/0805386629/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=VCK5YK7ZV42TXM7CTYPZ&dpID=41ACB2FKGBL&preST=_SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=detail

I hate to say this but you do not have a very good understanding as to what "Math" actually is... Mathematical systems are based on axioms. Math itself is just the logic that defines a system (i.e. the system must be consistent, etc) and it is the mathematical logic that backs up the system. In other words, you were looking for something of the scientific method in mathematics... It's mathematical logic.

You can even change the axioms all you want but if the result leads you to contradictions, then it is inconsistent. Look at Gauss's work with non-euclidean systems for example. It is not that math is based on certain axioms but it does use axioms in the construction of systems.

To use you ethics example: It is one thing to say that such ethical axioms could exist (there are a lot of things that could exist) but coming up with a consistent set of ethical axioms (of sufficient size, etc, etc) or a mathematical ethical system, is a whole other ball of wax. While I can't prove that a consistent set of ethical axioms doesn't exist (enter problems of proving a negative here), the odds of such a systems existing is (very, very, very, ... ) low by my estimation.

No mathematician worth their salt would say that mathematics describes "the real world", physics (for the most part) does that. Mathematics is just applying a specific process to different systems (different sets of axioms) and working out the result (consistency, figuring out theories in that system, trying to find mappings to other systems, etc).

I'm not sure this explanation has helped... It's hard to explain these ideas without a wall of text. But if you are interested in philosophy of mathematics, GEB is a good book and A Profile of Mathematical Logic is a great book but a little dense.

> What is 'scientific anti-realism?'

This is from "Understanding Philosophy of Science" by James Ladyman. Hopefully it will give you the flavour of what it means. Thomas (admittedly, a bit of a patronising git) is explaining the anti-realist position.

Alice: So now you’re saying that science might give us knowledge up to a point but it only tells us about what we can
observe?

Thomas: Maybe so. It seems possible.

Alice: Yes, well, it’s possible that the table we are sitting at is a
figment of our imaginations or that it disappears when
nobody is looking at it but so what? You can’t prove anything beyond doubt but that doesn’t mean we don’t know
anything. If all you are saying is that I have as much right
to believe atoms are real as I do to believe the table is real
then I agree with you.

Thomas: Slow down. When you claim to
know there’s a table there, you aren’t claiming to know
about ultimate reality or the hidden nature of things, just
about how things seem.

Alice: Well, I am claiming that the table exists even when I am
not looking at it and that it is the same table you see, and
that it will still be here if we go away for a minute and
then come back and . . .

Thomas: Yes, but at least sometimes we can observe the table. The
point about atoms and the like is that they are purely
theoretical. For all we know there could be quite different
things causing what we see.

Alice: You might as well say that it just looks as if I am sitting
here but I’m not really.

Thomas: I don’t think it’s the same thing, and anyway, as far as
science is concerned, all that matters when it comes down
to it is getting the predictions right for what we observe.
Lots of different theories that disagree about what the
unobservable world is like could still agree in what they
predict about the results of experiments.

Note: I don't think Taleb is the kind of anti-realist who would question the existence of the table but he probably questions the existence of quarks and any properties physicists infer from their existence which go beyond what has been observed and measured.

The social branch of network science studies this kind of thing and would have some good uses for the data set, I'm sure.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=social+contact+network&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=

http://barabasilab.com/pubs-socialnets.php

http://barabasilab.com/pubs-humandynamics.php

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/pubs.html

With respect to looking for happiness, you might look for studies on sentiment analysis and the spreading of emotion in social networks. I know people have looked at how positive and negative emotion traverses the graph of twitter followers and retweets.

There's a small lifetime's worth of reading in those links. If you want a fairly comprehensive introduction that balances well between theory and examples, check out Mark Newman's book.

I'm afraid I don't have much to add looking to the other comments here, but I was reminded of this relevant XKCD comic.

Many here appear to be suggesting that 'dissection' is a characteristic of science, but it is important to keep in mind that division of this sort should be seen against the background of a greater human trend. As the comic implies, the 'fractal' nature of human subcultures (the 'scientific community' or 'communities' being such subcultures) becomes more apparent the more one becomes involved with them - the closer one looks so to speak.

I wish I had more specific sources for you, but all that comes to mind are Kuhn's discussions of incommensurability, translation, and 'normal science' in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, as well as Lakatos' work from that same volume, and those works are fairly dated by now (though still provocative!)

I highly recommend "Theory and Reality" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Another great text is "What is This Thing Called Science?" by A.F. Chalmers. As a book with primary readings my favorite thus far is "Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues" edited by Martin Curd and J.A. Cover. The Curd & Cover book is a tad expensive, but it is worth every penny. There are about 50 primary texts with commentary, and introductions to each main section.

Some other books that may be of help and/or of interest after a basic foundation is set are: "Philosophy of Biology" by Elliot Sober; "Quantum Reality" by Nick Herbert; "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn; "Sex and Death" by Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths; "Progress and It's Problems" by Larry Laudan; "The Empirical Stance" by Bas C. Van Fraassen; and "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy" by Hans Reichenbach. I welcome others to suggest more or to critique the ones I chose to highlight as too difficult or not worth the time.

Edit: Formatting and a comma.

I enjoyed Consciousness: Reflections of a Romantic Reductionist (http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Confessions-Reductionist-Christof-Koch/dp/0262017490/ref=la_B001IZVC1C_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343766764&sr=1-1) by Christof Koch. It was a thoughtful and pretty quick book, it was interesting, personal, and scientific all at the same time.

Maybe What is this thing called Science? I don't think it really covers the history of science in any great detail (depending on what you mean) but it is a pretty good intro to phil of science that's not too difficult to read.

The article is "interesting", to say the least; however, I do not know enough about the details of Einstein's relativity theory to know if Mettenheim's objections are sound.

Hopefully the article will spark debate on the subject, but I wonder if the little lawyer has stumbled on inconsistencies in Einstein that no scientist has yet discovered. It would be remarkable. It would be revolutionary. It would strain credulity.

But then again, so was the work of the lowly patent clerk.

That reminds me: as someone that enjoys a bit of interesting fiction every now and then (having just devoured Eunoia by Christian Bök this afternoon), I recommend Einstein's Dreams.

So, I'll bite (sigh)...

Start here: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Thought-Science-versus-Movement/dp/0307277224

This book lays out some introductory material that explains why ID isn't a viable hypothesis. It was written in 2005, but is still valuable.

Then, watch this documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/intelligent-design-trial.html

It's an exploration of a court case involving ID proponents that reveals the true motives of the ID "movement."

Aside from that, ID isn't being pursued seriously within the scientific community.