Gürol Irzik

New Directions for Nature of Science Research

The idea of family resemblance, when applied to science, can provide a powerful account of the nature of science (NOS). In this chapter we develop such an account by taking into consideration the consensus on NOS that emerged in the science education literature in the last decade or so. According to the family resemblance approach, the nature of science can be systematically and comprehensively characterised in terms of a number of science categories which exhibit strong similarities and overlaps amongst diverse scientific disciplines. We then discuss the virtues of this approach and make some suggestions as to how one can go about teaching it in the classroom.

Carnap and Kuhn: Arch enemies or close allies?

We compare Carnaps and Kuhns views on science. Although there are important differences between them, the similarities are striking. The basis for the latter is a pragmatically oriented semantic conventionalist picture of science, which suggests that the view that post-positivist philosophy of science constitutes a radical revolution which has no interesting affinities with logical positivism must be seriously mistaken.

Causal Modeling: New Directions for Statistical Explanation

Causal modeling methods such as path analysis, used in the social and natural sciences, are also highly relevant to philosophical problems of probabilistic causation and statistical explanation. We show how these methods can be effectively used (1) to improve and extend Salmons S-R basis for statistical explanation, and (2) to repair Cartwrights resolution of Simpsons paradox, clarifying the relationship between statistical and causal claims.

Commercialization of Science in a Neoliberal World

In a well-known passage of The Great Transformation Karl Polanyi wrote: But labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. In other words, according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities. Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them are produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious.1 Polanyi showed in detail that the self-regulating market economy that emerged in the nineteenth century was organized around the commodity fiction of labor, land, and money, which were the essential factors of production for industrial capitalism. Without that fiction, industrial capitalism could not have come about. He also argued that commodification of land, labor, and money would destroy the livelihood, society, and environment of human beings, as we know them.

Philosophy of Science and Radical Intellectual Islam in Turkey

Teaching philosophy of science is not merely a self-subsistent epistemological activity, but at the same time a political one. At least, this is what I am going to argue. As I see it, the intertwining of epistemological and political dimensions in philosophy of science is contingent, not logical. That is, I believe that while it is not possible to derive political views from epistemological assumptions logically, it is nevertheless often the case that the two get allied in interesting ways in different contexts. This is particularly conspicuous in the case of Turkey due to historical reasons and is closely related to Islamists’ changing attitudes toward the process of Westernization. In section 2, I briefly describe the historical context of Westernization from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to the formation of Turkish Republic.

Why Should Philosophers of Science Pay Attention to the Commercialization of Academic Science

Certain segments of academic science such as biomedicine, genetics and pharmacology are being rapidly commercialized especially in the U.S. In this article, I outline the developments that led to this phenomenon and argue that it has a number of negative effects on various aspects of science, such as the choice of scientific problems and the direction of scientific research, the discovery-invention distinction, social norms and the function of science. Since these issues are the standard purview of the philosophy of science, I urge philosophers of science to pay more attention to the commercialization of academic science.

Incredulity towards Lyotard: A critique of a postmodernist account of science and knowledge

Abstract Philosophers of science have paid little attention, positive or negative, to Lyotard’s book The postmodern condition, even though it has been popular in other fields. We set out some of the reasons for this neglect. Lyotard thought that sciences could be justified by non-scientific narratives (a position he later abandoned). We show why this is unacceptable, and why many of Lyotard’s characterisations of science are either implausible or are narrowly positivist. One of Lyotard’s themes is that the nature of knowledge has changed and thereby so has society itself. However much of what Lyotard says muddles epistemological matters about the definition of ‘knowledge’ with sociological claims about how information circulates in modern society. We distinguish two kinds of legitimation of science: epistemic and socio-political. In proclaiming ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ Lyotard has nothing to say about how epistemic and methodological principles are to be justified (legitimated). He also gives a bad argument as to why there can be no epistemic legitimation, which is based on an act/content confusion, and a confusion between making an agreement and the content of what is agreed to. As for socio-political legitimation, Lyotard’s discussion remains at the abstract level of science as a whole rather than at the level of the particular applications of sciences. Moreover his positive points can be accepted without taking on board any of his postmodernist account of science. Finally we argue that Lyotard’s account of paralogy, which is meant to provide a ‘postmodern’ style of justification, is a failure.

Causal Modeling and the Statistical Analysis of Causation

Recent philosophical studies of probabilistic causation and statistical explanation have opened up the possibility of unifying philosophical approaches with causal modeling as practiced in the social and biological sciences. This unification rests upon the statistical tools employed, the principle of common cause, the irreducibility of causation to statistics, and the idea of causal process as a suitable framework for understanding causal relationships. These four areas of contact are discussed with emphasis on the relevant aspects of causal modeling.

Popper's Piecemeal Engineering: What is Good for Science is not always Good for Society*

In The Poverty of Historicism, Popper develops a view which he calls piecemeal engineering (PE), as an alternative to holism. Although the controversy between holism-historicism and piecemealism has received much attention, I believe that the underlying nature of PE has not been fully explored. In this paper, I aim to give a precise formulation of the method and discuss its strengths and weaknesses in its own right. For this purpose, it is necessary to draw the consequences that follow from it, to question its plausibility in certain cases, and point out the essential conditions that have to be fulfilled for the applicability of the method. The method of PE can be summarised in Poppers own words as follows:

Carnap and Kuhn: A Belated Encounter

To many people, the name Rudolf Carnap means, above all, a naive, foundationalist empiricism in epistemology, verifiability theory of meaning in semantics and an eliminative approach to metaphysics, confirmationism in scientific methodology, accumulationism in matters of growth of science, and finally a dry, formalistic style of philosophizing which preoccupied itself with the logical analysis and rational reconstruction of the language of science.