Scientific Method and Philosophy of Science

Philosophy of science these days seems largely concerned with questions of method, justification and reliability --- what do scientists do (and are they all doing the same thing? are they doing what they think they're doing?), and does it work, and if so why, and what exactly does it produce? There are other issues, too, like, do scientific theories really tell us about the world, or just give us tools for making predictions (and is there a difference there?). The whole reductionism/emergence squabble falls under this discipline, too. But (so far as an outsider can judge), method is where most of the debate is these days.

Of course, most scientists proceed in serene indifference to debates in methodology, and indeed all other aspects of the philosophy of science. What Medawar wrote thirty years ago and more is still true today:

If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem to be able to get on very well without it. Most scientists receive no tuition in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no better as scientists than those who have not. Of what other branch of learning can it be said that it gives its proficients no advantage; that it need not be taught or, if taught, need not be learned?

(Actually, has anyone done a controlled study of that point?) One of the things a good methodology should do is, therefore, either explain why scientists don't have to know it. (The alternative is to say why, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, most existing science is unsound. There are of course many books which allege this, but they do not trouble themselves with showing that their case for, say, reproductive biology being a load of sexist rubbish is stronger than the reproductive biologists' cases for their findings.) Now of course working scientists do employ lots of different methods, which are of varying quality. The same is true of all learned professions, and it is probably also true that most professionals (lawyers, architects, doctors) pay no heed to foundational debates about what they are doing. Instead methods seem to breed within the profession --- this technique is unreliable under these circumstances, that procedure works better than the old one, etc. --- without, as it were, the benefit of philosophical clergy. There is even a division of labor, with innovations in method tending to come from specialized segments of the profession, or even from another discipline --- experimenters often take new procedures from statisticians, who act as lay methodologists. (Poincaré someplace describes this as innovators saving their followers from the trouble of thinking.) That something like this can work is one of the triumphs of human collective cognition; it is also something that needs to be explained. (Explanations might open the way to improving the process; there is no reason to think it is currently optimal.)

Some or all of this may or may not have close connections to history of science, the social and cultural relations of science, and evolutionary epistemology. I would contend that there are certainly close ties to the sociology of science and machine learning, statistical inference and induction.

Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
Ronald N. Giere, Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach
Ian Hacking
- Representing and Intervening
- The Social Construction of What?
Philip Kitcher
- The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusion
- "On the Explanatory Role of Correspondence Truth" [Online draft]
Larry Laudan
- Science and Relativism [The best 20th-century philosophical dialogue I've found. (That is not as strong a recommendation as it should be.)]
- Science and Values [i.e. cognitive values]
- Beyond Positivism and Relativism
- Progress and Its Problems
Deborah Mayo, Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge [Review: We Have Ways of Making You Talk, or, Long Live Peircism-Popperism-Neyman-Pearson Thought!]
Peter Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought [collected in Pluto's Republic]
Henri Poincaré [One of the great mathematicians and physicists of all time, founder of dynamics in the modern sense. He wrote three classic, remarkably lucid books on the aims, methods and nature of science. The English translations have recently been reprinted in one volume, The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincaré. I think the individual works are still in print separately, though.]
- Science and Method
- Science and Hypothesis
- The Value of Science
Karl Popper
- The Logic of Scientific Discovery
- Conjectures and Refutations
Bertrand Russell
- The Analysis of Matter
- Human Knowledge
Wesley Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World
Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. 1: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts [How to make rational choices about conceptual problems without being able to make use of formal logic; alternatively and he argues equivalently, how the social organization of science keeps the intellectual structure on track.]
John M. Ziman, Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means

R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation
Agnes Arber, The Mind and the Eye [The last work of any importance produced by a classical Idealist; strange, interesting, and quite wrong]
Noretta Koertge, A House Built on Sand: Flaws in the Cultural Studies Account of Science [intro. by Alan Sokal]
Quine has a good deal to say on what is "vaguely denominated `scientific method' "
Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, "The Role of Models in Science", Philosophy of Science 12 (1945): 316--321 [JSTOR]
Max Scharnberg, The Myth of Paradigm-Shift, or, How to Lie with Methodology [Unfortunately the conceit of the title isn't really carried through, though the book where it is, is one the age itself demands.]

Jeremy Aarons, Thinking Locally: A disunified methodology of science [Link]
Kólá Abímbólá, "A Critique of Methdological Naturalism", Science in Context 19 (2006): 191--213 [Taking issue with Larry Laudan's version of methodological naturalism]
Mario Alai, "A.I., Scientific Discovery and realism", Minds and Machines 14 (2004): 21--42
Davis Baird, Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments [blurb]
Eric Christian Barnes, The Paradox of Predictivism [blurb]
Ralph M. Blake, Curt J. Ducasse and Edward H. Madden, Theories of Scientific Method: The Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century
Max Born, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance
Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich, A Theory of Natural Philosophy, Put Forward and Explained by Roger Joseph Boscovich. With a Short Life of Boscovich. ["From the text of the first Venetian edition published under the personal superintendence of the author in 1763."]
Katherine A. Brading and Elaine Landry, "A minimal construal of scientific structrualism", phil-sci/2181
James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars
Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen, "There Is No Special Problem About Scientific Representation", phil-sci/2177
Rudolf Carnap, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science [Ed. Martin Gardner]
Anjan Chakravartty, A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable [Blurb]
Chang Liu, "Laws and Models in a Theory of Idealization," phil-sci/363
Pierre Duhem, Aim and Structure of Physical Theory
Earman (ed.), Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science [online]
A. Franklin
- The Neglect of Experiment
- Experiment, Right or Wrong
Steven French and Newton C. A. da Costa, Science and Partial Truth: A Unitary Approach to Models and Scientific Reasoning ["explore the consequences of adopting a 'pragmatic' notion of truth in the philosophy of science - accepting a theory as valid when it may only be partially true"]
Peter Galison
- How Experiments End
- Image and Logic
Hugh G. Gauch, Jr., Scientific Method in Practice [blurb]
Ronald N. Giere, Science without Laws
Peter Giza, "Automated Discovery Systems and Scientific Realism", Minds and Machines 12 (2002): 105--117
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
Susan Haack, Defending Science --- Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism
David Hull
- Science and Selection: Essays on Biological Evolution and Philosophy of Science
- Science as a Process
Jeffrey Ketland, "Empirical Adequacy and Ramsification", Phil-Sci/1465
Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge
Hilary Kornblith
- Inductive Inference and Its Natural Ground
- (ed.), Naturalizing Epistemology
Henry Kyburg, Science and Reason
Larry Laudan, Science and Hypothesis
Eric Martin and Daniel Osherson, Elements of Scientific Inquiry [Machine learning up the wazoo]
Abraham Meidan and Boris Levin, "Choosing from Competing Theories in Computerised Learning", Minds and Machines 12 (2002): 119--129 [What philosophy of science can learn from data mining]
Gualtiero Piccinini, "Epistemic divergence and the publicity of scientific methods", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 597--612
Henri Poincaré, Last Essays
Hans Reichenbach
- Experience and Prediction
- Modern Philosophy of Science
Robert Scott Root-Bernstein, Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge [Blurb]
Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically
Wesley Salmon, Reality and Rationality (ed. Phil Dowe and Merrilee Salmon)
Gerhard Schurz, "When Empirical Success Implies Theoretical Reference: A Structural Correspondence Theorem" [PDF preprint]
Elliott Sober, From a Biological Point of View
Miriam Solomon, Social Empiricism [Blurb]
P. Kyle Stanford, Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives
Michael Strevens, Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation [blurb]
Mark L. Taper and Subhash R. Lele (eds.), The Nature of Scientific Evidence: Statistical, Philosophical, and Empirical Considerations [Blurb]
Paul Thagard
- Computational Philosophy of Science
- Conceptual Revolutions
Bas C. Van Fraassen
- The Scientific Image
- "Structure: its shadow and substance," phil-sci/631
John Worrall, "A Bridge over Troubled Cultures. The Impact of Philosophy of Science in Britain," phil-sci/615
John H. Zammito, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour
John Ziman
- Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science
- Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science [Blurb]

Notebooks

Scientific Method and Philosophy of Science