An Introduction to Philosophy of Science

A Book Review of Theory and Reality by Peter Godfrey-Smith

I read the book “Other Minds” by Peter Godfrey a few years ago, which I really enjoyed. And lately, I started getting interested in the philosophy of science and decided to do some reading on it. I actually found and ordered this book without recognizing the author, and it was only when the book was on my shelf that it hit me that I had read him before.

The book begins by trying to sketch what science is and how it works. It presents the most basic 3 ideas that have been argued. The first is empiricism, claiming that all knowledge comes from experience and science is the systematic study of experience. The second view is a mathematical one, and science is the understanding of the world through mathematical tools. Finally, the third view is that science is based on its social structure. It is the organization of science that makes it successful. The author explores each one, giving it a foundation for the following chapters.

It starts by exploring the history of logical positivism. It was argued that there is nothing “hidden” about the reality that science attempts to describe. The goal should be prediction alone. It was empiricism taken to its extreme. While it made science seem appealingly simple and rationally grounded, it led to all types of problems, and trying to solve such problems was the key arena of modern philosophy of science.

The first big name in the philosophy of science was Karl Popper. He is still widely known today, and his idea of falsification was hugely influential. In Popper’s view of science, there was no such thing as confirming a theory. All we could do was try to refute it, and that’s it. The second big name was Thomas Kuhn, who claimed that science is not an ever-increasing accumulation of knowledge but rather functions by paradigms and revolutions. It popularized a historical and sociological approach to science which has stayed ever since.

These two names are likely ones you know if you are close to the field of either science or philosophy. But that was only the start, and the 20th century continued developing countless rebuttals and theories. Lakatos, Laudan, Feyerabend, Merton, and others are mentioned, often trying to pull the field away from what they perceive is a wrong approach to science. While epistemology remained a significant problem, more social aspects took an important role. How science is actually organized within a field by research programs, how science is moved by incentives of prestige, the balance of competition and cooperation, how open science should be to competing theories, and so forth.

The latter part of the book comes back to more fundamental problems. The place of the “unobservable” within science, an optimistic or pessimistic scientific realism, laws of nature, the problem of causality, the need for explanations, Bayesian probability, and many others.

The last chapter is Godfrey’s own approach to the philosophy of science. It tries to combine empiricism, naturalism, and scientific realism. It explores its benefits, the conflict between them, and how he resolves them.

I liked reading the book, although I can’t say it was the most enjoyable thing I’ve read lately. It occupies a weird in-between world of not being so technical and in-depth to be categorized as a textbook, but it’s also well beyond a basic overview for the layman. While the book is marketed as sort of the best of both worlds, I felt like I got the worse of both worlds. A very superficial analysis of many of the problems that plague the field, but at the same time, it seems to go into more detail than needed for a simple introduction.

The first part of the book was a bit difficult to read for me, and the other parts got a bit tedious. I’m glad that I didn’t go for a longer book. While I find many aspects of the philosophy of science appealing, reading this made me also realize that many are not that interesting. At times there were arguments that I couldn’t quite understand, but I also didn’t bother to put the effort to try to understand, because I felt like it would make no difference.

I don’t think it is a bad book, but I was expecting it to be a little more enjoyable. It mostly rests on the nature of the field, however, and not on Godfrey’s writing. If you want to dive into the philosophy of science, this will provide both a good historical background and some of the problems that it tries to tackle. But I would recommend reading a shorter introduction, to make sure that this is something that you would like. Especially if your view of philosophy of science rests heavily on Popper or Kuhn, which was my case. After knowing tons of other philosophers covered in this book, they nevertheless remained the most interesting. So most of the new stuff I learned was the boring part.

If you want to dive directly into this book, make sure you’re fine with this in-between approach the author took. You will cover a lot more than a simple introduction, but also not enough to fully grasp all the nuance. If you want something shorter and more concise, Okasha has written an introduction for Oxford’s “very short introduction” series and might be a good resource if you want to get a simpler overview of the field.

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Tiago V.F.