Dear all, The HPS Philosophy Workshop provides a friendly and supportive setting for graduate students and postdocs to get feedback on their work-in-progress from their peers. Texts are circulated in advance and discussed over tea and biscuits in HPS Seminar Room 1 on alternate Wednesdays, 5-6pm.
We continue this Wednesday with Rune Nyrup (MPhil student in HPS) on "More Models, More Problem (for Scientific Perspectivism)?". The abstract is below; please contact me if you'd like a PDF of the paper. Best wishes, Vashka -- Scientific Perspectivism is a position in the philosophy of science recently developed by Ronald Giere. Its central thesis is that the strongest claim one can legitimately make on the basis of a succesful scientific model concerns how the world looks from the theoretical perspective of that model. This is meant to provide a middle position between the excesses of constructivism and relativism, on the one hand, and the kind of realism which wants to draw strong metaphysical conclusions from science, on the other. He is thus another attempt in the long line of philosophers trying to banish metaphysics from science. He does this by distinguishing between specific claims about the similarity of models to part of the world, which are truth-evaluate but always perspective-relative, and merely pragmatic commitments to using particular perspectives. In this essay I argue that Giere's account fails to fulfill this ambition of keeping metaphysics out of science. I argue that the pragmatist motivation he gives for his view undermines the central distinction between representational models and merely pragmatic commitments to perspectives. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
