Re: Independent and Dependent Variables

[Christopher D. Green]

Paul Okami wrote: I admit to not having read the collection to which you refer.  However, I'm wary when I hear "long-discredited" with no further comment (although I have done this myself).  For example, social constructionists and followers of Kuhn repeatedly refer to logical positivism, Popperian philosophy of science etc., as "long discredited" when it in no way is long-discredited. Well, it's not worth getting into an "is-to":"is-not" on this topic, but rest assured that logical positivism is as dead as a doornail, and has been since around 1970. (Can you name a single prominent philosopher of science who would use this prhase to describe him- or herself?) And the murder wasn't committed by Kuhn, but rather (more or less) by the logical positivists themselves. That isn't to say that everyone's gone Kuhnian (or postmodern, or any other term usually (mis-)used by experimental psychologists merely as an _expression_ of derision). There are lots of philosophers of science who hail from (what we used to call) the "analytic" tradition. They all recognize the shortcomings of logical positivism and reject some or another important part of it. For all that, there has been an interesting reassessment of logical positivism in recent years by people such as Michael Friedman (Indiana) and Alan Richardson (UBC). One of the most intersting parts of this literature is that it turns out, contrary to what almost everyone on both sides of the aisle thought, that there is a fair bit of continuity between the late work of Rudolf Carnap (esp. truth being assessable only within a specified formal language) and Kuhn (incomensurability of paradigms). Carnap, in fact, greatly praised Kuhn's early work. Popper is a somewhat more complicated story. He has been viewed for deacades as something of a "one-trick-pony," falsificationism being the trick. It isn't so much that falsifiability is wrong as being grossly limited. Most science (esp. psychology) is based on probabilities, not on one-instance falsifications. The entire statistical apparatus of experimental psychology stands opposed to Popper's stark falsification (though one still hears the very psychologists who adhere to null-hypothesis testing evoking Popper as their model -- very odd indeed!). One should recall that it was Popper's one-time student, Imre Lakatos, who said: "After reading Meehl (1967) and Lykken (1968) one wonders whether the function of statistical techniques in the social sciences is not primarily to provide a machinery for producing phony corroborations and thereby a semblance of 'scientific' progress where, in fact,  there is nothing but an increase in pseudo-intellectual garbage .... Thus the methodology of scientific research programmes might help us in devising laws for stemming this intellectual pollution which may destroy our cultural environment even earlier than industrial and traffic pollution destroys our physical environment." (From "Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes") Bayesians (a decided minority within the philosophy of science community) have, in some respects, taken up where the logical positivists and Popper left off. Strangely, there has been a constant rumor since the 1970s within methodological psychological circles that Baeysian statistics "are coming," but most psychologists have never really taken up the challenge. For those interested, there is an excellent little textbook on the topic by Gudmend R. Iverson (_Bayesian Statistical Inference_, Sage, 1984), and an excellent large textbook on the topic by Colin Howson and P. Urbach (_Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach_. Open Court, Chicago, 1993.) As with the Logical Positivists, there has been something of a reassessment of Popper of late, led mainly by sociologist Stephen Fuller (Warwick). Fuller re-integrates Popper's largely forgotten social-political philosophy with his philosophy of science to argue that his and Kuhn's place in the public psyche should be reversed -- Popper the radical, Kuhn the cold-war conservative. The book is called _Kuhn vs. Popper_ (Icon, 2003) and is quite readable. Fuller's previous book, a biography of Kuhn, caused quite a senseation as well (see Vol. 18, no. 1 (2004) of the journal _Social Epistemology_). There is also a recent biography of Popper that is part of this "reassessment," though I can't recall the author's name at present.  Is there some way you can briefly summarize the ways in which Mill and those whom he influenced had it all wrong, so I may ammend my beliefs according to the new consensus view of causality of which I seem to be shockingly ignorant? I'm not a specialist in this field, though I did read quite a bit on it a few years back. There is no One New View of causation. There has been a great deal of work in a large number of directions over the past 30 or 40 years. One of the main developments has been the reintroduction of modality (the logic of necessity and possibility) into the theory of causation. A fairly crude approach to modality (esp. necessity) was a part of the theory of causation prior to Hume. The problems there still remain. The recent turn to modality, however, has been much more sophisticated and nuanced than its medieval predecessor (in no small part becaue of the new approach to formal modal logic introduced by people such as Saul Kripke in the 1950s).  One of the influential developments for the theory of causation was J. L. Mackie's "INUS" conditions (an acronym for a cause being an Insufficient but Necessary part of an Unnecessary but Sufficient condition -- see _The Cement of the Universe_, Oxford, 1974). So, e.g., flipping a switch is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a light bulb coming on. The switch is part of a larger sufficient but unnecessary (because some other system could have cause the light to come on) electrical structure (power, wiring, etc.). David Lewis and Saul Kripke are both giants of the literature on modality and both wrote famously on causation. Lewis' work on the importance of counterfactuals in causation is particularly important. Some of the most interesting work in the past decade has been by Stephen Yablo. There are some important figures who have resisted the trend toward modality and continue on within (loosely speaking) a Humean framework, Wesley Salmon's work is in this category (_Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World_, Princeton, 1984). I think traditional psychological traditionalists will be able to take little solace from his approach to the topic, however. Regards,  -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164 fax: 416-736-5814 http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ============================ . --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]