https://cspo.org/legacy/library/110104F2FV_lib_SarewitzEnvSciPo.pdf

How science makes environmental controversies worse

/pdf/explanation-a-mechanist-alternative-3nfmm4i1c9.pdf

Explanation: a mechanist alternative.

A National Research Council report, Scientific Research in Education, has elicited considerable criticism from the education research community, but this criticism has not focused on a key assumption of the report—its Humean, regularity conception of causality. It is argued that this conception, which also underlies other arguments for “scientifically-based research,” is narrow and philosophically outdated, and leads to a misrepresentation of the nature and value of qualitative research for causal explanation. An alternative, realist approach to causality is presented that supports the scientific legitimacy of using qualitative research for causal investigation, reframes the arguments for experimental methods in educational research, and can support a more productive collaboration between qualitative and quantitative researchers.

Causal Explanation, Qualitative Research, and Scientific Inquiry in Education

Representing and Intervening

Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language‐like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms “law” and “theory,” I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, hypotheses, and generalizations. I argue that scientists use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations.

/pdf/how-models-are-used-to-represent-reality-5dxqzepi2c.pdf

How Models Are Used to Represent Reality


 Epistemic stances are collections of attitudes, values, aims, and policies relevant to assessing evidence, eventuating in belief or agnosticism regarding the output of scientific investigations. If in some cases conflicting stances promoting scientific realism and antirealism, respectively, are rationally permissible, this would seem to undermine the possibility of resolving certain debates between realists and antirealists. In this paper I reply to two concerns about this conception of stances, to the effect that: (1) a stance underlying realism is, in fact, rationally obligatory for realists, given certain natural assumptions; and (2) this sort of permissivism would validate pseudoscience and science denialism.

Resolving Debates about Scientific Realism: The Challenge from Stances

Explanation, inference, testimony, and truth: Essays dedicated to the memory of Peter Lipton

The preeminent question of the metaphysics of classification is that of whether the world is itself naturally subdivided into kinds of things. Are kinds out there, so to speak, or are they rather artefacts of convention, existing only insofar as classificatory practices are brought to bear by creatures such as ourselves? In this paper, I examine this question from the point of view of the sciences, and more specifically, from the perspec tive of the most fulsome view of the epistemic credentials of the sciences regarding what's 'out there': scientific realism. As I hope to show, ap proaching the metaphysics of classification from the perspective of scientific realism has important consequences for one's very understanding of the perspective itself. Thus, by considering the nature of kinds from this per spective, I aim to shed light not only on the metaphysics of classification, but also on the nature of realism with respect to scientific knowledge. Scientific realism (simply 'realism', henceforth, unless otherwise indicated) is the view that our best scientific theories are true, or approx imately true, or to put it in terms other than truth, that they describe well, or to some significant degree of success, the ontology of parts of the world. There are explicit caveats built into this coarse definition ('best' theories, 'approximate' truth, 'significant degrees' of success), and I will make no attempt to expound these particular qualifications here. A further clarification of the definition, however, furnishes a central motivation for what follows. Realism is often explicated in terms of three sorts of com mitment: a metaphysical commitment to the existence of a mind-inde pendent reality; a semantic commitment to interpret scientific claims literally (or as it is often put, "at face value"); and an epistemological commitment to regard these claims as furnishing knowledge of both ob servable and unobservable entities and processes. After the demise of

Scientific Realism and Ontological Relativity

Metaphysics between the Sciences and Philosophies of Science

The philosophy of science has produced numerous accounts of how scientific facts are generated, from very specific facilitators of belief, such as neo-Kantian constitutive principles, to global frameworks, such as Kuhnian paradigms. I consider a recent addition to this canon: van Fraassen’s notion of an epistemic stance—a collection of attitudes and policies governing the generation of factual beliefs—and his commitment to voluntarism in this context: the idea that contrary stances and sets of beliefs are rationally permissible. I argue that while scientific inquiry inevitably favours a high degree of consensus in our choices of stance, there is no parallel constraint in the case of philosophical inquiry, such as that concerned with how scientific knowledge should be interpreted. This leads, in the latter case, to a fundamental and apparently irresolvable mystery at the heart of stance voluntarism, regarding the grounds for choosing basic epistemic stances.

A puzzle about voluntarism about rational epistemic stances

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