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Seminar Courses at StanfordThe History of Scientific Methods, Pythagoras to Popper How do scientists know what they know—or claim to know? It’s an important question, not just for scientists themselves, but for any of us who drive on bridges without fear, subject ourselves to doctor’s prescriptions, or must decide whether grade-school teachers should teach evolution or intelligent design. Science and its products pervade our personal, political, institutional, and cultural lives. We need to know where it comes from and whether it is reliable. How do scientists know what they know? Well, we might say, they use the “scientific method.” But, alas, there are now and have long been vigorous disagreements over exactly what a proper scientific method is. Scientific debates often come down to disagreements over method, and the results of the debates can be deadly. Millions of people have died from crackpot science, teachers have been condemned for teaching science developed with unauthorized methods, and scientists have been jailed and put to death for using particular methods. To learn about how scientists know what they know, we will look at this interplay between science and scientific methods from Ancient Greece to modern times. We will face an age-old question whether scientists must be content to accurately describe what they observe or can also be justified in claiming to know how things really are. We will examine conflicts between independent judgment and religious dogma. We will meet Pythagoras, Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Ockham, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Heisenberg, and others. We will meet great scientists, great philosophers of method, and some who were both. When we finish, you will have an understanding of the different ways scientists have tried to understand nature and the implications of those attempts—both for them and for us. Moral Foundations of Capitalism
American capitalism, at least as originally promulgated, presumed a moral foundation of selfish individualism. Critics of such a morality have consequently denigrated capitalism. But others have tried to defend it either by appealing to an alternate foundation or by defending the morality of selfish individualism. In this course, we will explore three such groups of defenders: free-market economists who have defended capitalism on social, economic, or collective grounds; theologians and conservatives who have defended capitalism using a religious or altruist foundation; and Ayn Rand, who has proposed to defend the morality of selfishness. Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Science The nineteenth century was the center of what has been called the Second Scientific Revolution. John Dalton revolutionized chemistry with his atomic theory, Adolphe Quetelet social sciences with his development of statistics, Charles Darwin life sciences with his theory of natural selection, Louis Pasteur medicine with his germ theory. Whole sciences of electricity, electromagnetism and thermodynamics were built up virtually from scratch. The foundations were laid for relativity and quantum mechanics. With all this there was also a revolution—or rather several overlapping revolutions—in the philosophy of science. The century opened with a virtually universal belief in a Newtonian world of deterministic laws and in the method of inductive inquiry developed by Francis Bacon. By the end of the century, statistically oriented science was replacing deterministic and Bacon’s inductive method was mocked.In this course we will explore this revolutionary shift in the philosophy of science, giving particular attention to the complete reversal in admiration for Bacon’s inductive method. How did it happen that by the end of the century philosophers of science were saying that the method all those revolutionary scientists said they used was in fact worthless?
Students’ Evaluations
ScholarshipMy research is on the history of the philosophy of science, especially the history of the concept of induction from Socrates to Popper, with Francis Bacon seemingly always at the center. Jacopo Zabarella, De Methodis and De Regressu Big current project. A collated Latin edition and original English translation for Harvard University Press’s I Tatti Renaissance Library. Manuscript should be finished in late 2010. (Want to read the draft?) Whence the Uniformity Principle
Where did we get the idea that every induction includes some uniformity principle as a presumed premise? The idea is not in Socrates, Aristotle, or Cicero; it is not in medieval writings, Arabic or Latin; it is not in the Scholastics or the Renaissance Humanists; it is not in Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Thomas Reid, or William Whewell; in fact, it is not even per se in David Hume. It is definitely in John Stuart Mill, but Mill claims to have gotten it from someone else. It turns out we got the idea from Richard Whately (1787-1863), Oxford professor, author of Elements of Logic (1826), and later bishop of Dublin. This paper recounts the relevant background and then how the idea originated, spread, and became in the second half of the nineteenth century a canonical part of our understanding of induction. A presentation given at the eight congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, June 2010. Bacon’s Idols and Harvey’s Eggs
In the introduction to De Generatione Animalium, William Harvey used distinctly Baconian tropes and vocabulary; in the transition from the first part of the book to the second, he said he was following a key part of Bacon’s method; in surviving marginalia, he cited one of Bacon’s works for elaboration of his own views on scientific method. The mistaken belief that Harvey and Bacon advocated opposing methods has two sources—an over-reading of a biographical note by John Aubrey and a misunderstanding of Bacon’s method and Harvey’s Aristotelianism. Addressing the first is a small matter of correcting a misreading of the historical record. Addressing the second, however, is much more important—important for our understanding of a crucial transition in early modern philosophy of science. A presentation given at the eight congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, June 2010. Louis Groarke, An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating . . . Groarke is surely right that Aristotle believed the cognitive hierarchy he described in Posterior Analytics B 19 is central to, and not antithetical to, validating the syllogism described in Prior Analytics B 23. But did Aristotle really believe induction ultimately relies on what Groarke calls “a stroke or leap of understanding,” “immediate illumination,” “moment of immediate cognition,” “a direct insight,” “moment of illumination,” and so on? . . . Overall, what Groarke says here is provocative and inviting, even if not definitive. A book review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Jacopo Zabarella’s Real Influence on Early Modern Science
A presentation given at the History of Science Society Annual Meeting, November 2009. Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon
This work intentionally joins Stephen A. McKnight’s The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought in arguing that Sir Francis Bacon was more deeply religious than he is conventionally thought to have been. Though the book is full of interesting suggestions, a lack of breadth, rigor, and precision will leave many readers unconvinced. . . . Those who know the corpus and secondary literature enough to read critically will find here provocative suggestions and intriguing leads. Others will need to be cautious about the book’s arguments and conclusions. A book review in Technology and Culture 50, July 2009. Bacon’s Idols and Harvey’s Eggs • Flyer (PDF) A presentation given at Case Western Reserve University, October 2009. Jacopo Zabarella: The Last of the Renaissance Aristotelians and His Influence on Early Modern Science
A presentation given at Northern California Renaissance Conference, May 2009. Whately’s Revolution • Abstract (PDF) • Presentation (ppsx) A presentation given at the conference “Induction: Historical and Contemporary Approaches,” University of Ghent, July 2008. “Freeing Aristotelian Epagôgê from Prior Analytics II 23”
Interpretations of Aristotelian epagôgê (induction) have swung widely, and the largest factor in the variation has been the role played by Prior Analytics II 23. From Boethius in the sixth century to the medieval rediscovery of Aristotelian texts in the twelfth, this one short chapter was nearly all that was known of Aristotelian induction and was taken as saying that induction is a kind of deduction made valid by a complete enumeration of particulars. Scholastic logicians from Aquinas to Zabarella, though they had access to the full corpus, continued to treat Prior Analytics II 23 as the definitive text and to read it the same way. They overlooked or dismissed seemingly contradictory statements elsewhere in the corpus. Renaissance humanists, who gave the Topics and Rhetoric more attention, found there an image of induction more like Socrates's search for definitions than Aristotle’s treatment of the syllogism. Francis Bacon’s influential work on induction early in the seventeenth century contributed to a further minimizing of Prior Analytics II 23. Efforts early in the nineteenth century to revive Scholastic logic included a project to reconcile induction as practiced by Baconian natural philosophers and induction as understood by the earlier logicians. Prior Analytics II 23 again became central, but discrepancies with the rest of the corpus still thwarted attempts to form a single, cohesive view of Aristotelian induction. Sir David Ross influentially held that Aristotle was simply confused about the matter. More recent research has sought a unified, cohesive view behind a veil of disparity. A minority has suggested Prior Analytics II 23 has been misread, but this minority has failed to offer a fully persuasive replacement and with it a cohesive cross-corpus interpretation of Aristotelian epagôgê. This essay adopts the minority suggestion while attempting to correct its shortcomings. A close and careful parsing of Prior Analytics II 23 will suggest how the chapter should be read, and a view of Aristotelian epagôgê that is unconstrained by the prior misreadings of Prior Analytics II 23 will be attempted. No evidence will be found that Aristotle was confused. He will be seen to hold that induction is simply the compare-and-contrast method practiced by Socrates, a process that if done properly leads to a mental conviction as trustworthy as the conclusion of a demonstrative deduction. An article in Apeiron, December, 2007, pp. 345–74. Stephen A. McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s In this well-structured monograph, Stephen A. McKnight seeks to correct the view that Francis Bacon's use of religious motifs and tropes is “manipulative,” “cynical,” and “disingenuous,” a view McKnight considers the “prevailing” one. To accomplish his goal, McKnight subjects several of Bacon’s works to a close reading. He concludes that the “pervasiveness of religious motifs, scriptural references, and biblical doctrines” in Bacon’s writings “establish the central role religion plays in Bacon’s thought”. McKnight holds that Bacon's religiosity is not disingenuous, but sincere. . . . . In documenting religious motifs in several of Bacon’s writings, this book is a valuable success. In characterizing Bacon's religious beliefs and how they influenced the rest of his thought, it is much less convincing. A book review in Technology and Culture, 48, July 2007. Myths in the History of Induction • Presentation (ppsx) A presentation given at St. John’s University, Queens, NY, October 2007. Regula Socratis: The Rediscovery of Ancient Induction in Early My dissertation of 2006. A revisionist account of how philosophical induction was conceived in the ancient world and how that conception was transmitted, altered, and then rediscovered. I show how philosophers of late antiquity and then the medieval period came step-by-step to seriously misunderstand Aristotle’s view of induction and how that mistake was reversed by humanists in the Renaissance and then especially by Francis Bacon. I show, naturally enough then, that in early modern science, Baconians were Aristotelians and Aristotelians were Baconians. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum • Wiki site (www) An edition constructed for wikisource.org. Includes Latin original and multiple translations. “Induction and Concept-Formation in Francis Bacon and William A paper about the relationship between concept formation and induction in Bacon and Whewell. This includes what I think is the world’s best 2000-word introduction to Whewellian induction. Presented at Concepts Workshop, Department of HPS, Pittsburgh, May 2004. PersonalGrew up near Cleveland, Ohio. Got BSEE, MSEE, and MBA (all in 5 years!) at Case Western Reserve University. One patent. Moved to Boston to work for a computer company. Fell in love with a woman who said “I’m moving back to California. You coming with me or not?” Joined a Silicon Valley start-up founded by John Hennessey, now Stanford’s president. Married the woman. In ’97 got MLA from Stanford. Founded a software company with Steve Blank and two other guys. Did well. Several software patents. IPO in ’99. Moved to London. Returned. Got PhD in history of science from Stanford in ’06. Visited twice at Pitt. Now research, write, and teach part-time in Stanford’s History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program and Ethics in Society Program. Live in Saratoga, CA (part-time in Manhattan). Still in love with the same woman. |