In the past entry we introduced Plato’s model of the degrees of knowledge , ‘the simile of the line’, according to which the primordial difference between ‘science’ and ‘mere opinion’ is not so much about the ‘methods’ employed to reach one or the other (as will be assumed in modern times), but about the nature […]
If the preceding post of this series turned out being a little bit disappointing because of the clumsiness and sophistry of the anonymous author of the leaflet we know as On the (medical) science (the first preserved complete work which discusses the nature of a ‘science’, or, in this case, téchnē ), we reach today […]
I would like to think that the first work devoted to something that we might call ‘the problem of scientific method’ was written by Democritus (around 460-370 BC), the author the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle were constructed against , and whose ideas were so revolutionary that it seems that nobody in the last […]
Since this will be a series of entries about something as weird as the ‘prehistory’ of philosophy of science, I think readers deserve a little explanation about what I do exactly mean by that. ‘Philosophy of science’, to begin with, is a topic that took its current status as an autonomous academic field (I mean […]
As we saw in the previous entry, the fundamental role of our beliefs consists in telling us what consequences will most probably our actions have, given the current circumstances . Any influence from any factor that leads to systematic biases in those predictions will be detrimental for the very same reason why we want to […]
Ideology is a concept that has always made me feel a bit perplexed. I have thought a lot about this question in the last weeks, when comparing the reactions and suggestions of different people about the shocking events the world is now involved into. Why do people have so much disparate ideas about the facts […]
In the previous entry, I presented some critical thesis by historian Ylva Hasselberg regarding the applicability of economic theoretic tools to the study of the social construction of scientific knowledge. To those claims, I think we can respond with the following arguments. In the first place, we have to make a clear and emphatic distinction […]
As readers of this blog will surely know, the economics of scientific knowledge is a topic on which I have worked extensively, and also written here not a few entries. Now I want to tackle a common objection to that field in itself: the idea that studying science “as if it were a market” commits […]
In the first entry of this series, I briefly explained Christian List’s attempt to vindicate the ontological and scientific reality of intentional action as a real emergent phenomenon. In a nutshell, intentional, deliberate and often ‘rational’ action is not a fiction (as some skeptics like Alex Rosenberg have defended ), but a totally legitimate inhabitant […]
Christian List, a German professor in the London School of Economics, is one of the most prolific and intelligent authors in the new generation of philosophers of social science. He has authored and co-authored a formidable number of extremely interesting papers in areas like social choice, formal epistemology, judgment aggregation, deliberative democracy or political philosophy […]