Two great interviews with Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, two philosophers of science.
CBC Ideas - Interview with Simon Schaffer on Leviathan and the Air Pump
If you like these interviews, visit CBC Ideas - How to think about science although I must say that some shows are better than others.
Also for anyone who is interested in the history and philosophy of science and is ready to go beyond Kuhn and Popper, I highly recommend Leviathan and the Air Pump. It gives a great overview of how Boyle and the Royal Society laid the ground work for experimentalism and it provides a great case study of how scientific theories are generated by social interactions.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Theory: A word that gets used a lot in discussing science, or attacking it.
Theories are only verified hypotheses, verified by more or less numerous facts. Those verified by the most facts are the best, but even then they are never final, never to be absolutely believed. [Claude Bernard, 1865,…
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) was a professor at the London School of Economics and among the most influential philsophers of science of the 20th century. Among his other projects, Popper dealt with the question of what is, and what is not, science.
Popper proposed that what separates…
Lately there has been a rediscovery on the blogia of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures - which initially was the divide between those who understood the Second Law of Thermodynamics and those who don't, but is now, it appears, between those who know math and those who don't, and the respective attitudes.…
In this post, I want to propose my own view, or rather the views I have come to accept, about the nature of science.
[Part 1; Part 2]
There are three major phases in the philosophical view of science. The first was around in the nineteenth century - science is the use of inductive logic based…