Away MAVE

The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Resources

Useful web sites

for Husserl try starting here http://sweb.uky.edu/~rsand1/Husserl/

For Francis Bacon try here http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/bacon/

For Galileo try here http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Resources/netsources.html

or here http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/museo/4/ for an interesting site with a tour around the museum in Florence

http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~tkpw/ is useful site on Karl Popper

There is a web resource on Marcuse at http://herbertmarcuse.com/index2.htm

And for Habermas this one is good http://www.helsinki.fi/~amkauppi/hablinks.html

Supplements to web notes

Block 1. Three Conceptions of science

In the 20th century there have been many approaches to the question of 'what is science'. They can be placed into 3 broad groups:

Positivism Realism Conventionalism.

We could do some useful work firming up our understanding of these different approaches. To do this I am relying heavily on part one of Keat and Urry's Social Theory of Science (reading 2 is chapter 9 of the same book).

An outline of the positivist's position

"For the positivist, science is an attempt to gain predictive and explanatory knowledge of the external world. To do this, one must construct theories, which consist of highly general statements, expressing the regular relationships that are found to exist in the world. These general statements, or laws, enable us both to predict and explain the phenomena that we discover by means of systematic observation and experiment. To explain something is to show that it is an instance of these regularities; and we can make predictions only on the same basis. Statements expressing these regularities, if true, are only contingently so; their truth is not a matter of logical necessity and cannot be known by a priori means. Instead, such statements must be objectively tested by means of experiment and observation, which are the only source of sure and certain empirical knowledge."

An outline of the realist's position

"The realist shares with the positivist a conception of science as an empirically based, rational and objective enterprise, the purpose of which is to provide us with true explanatory and predictive knowledge of nature. But for the realist there is an important difference between explanation and prediction. And it is explanation that must be pursued as the primary objective of science. To explain phenomena is not merely to show that they are instances of well-established regularities. Instead we must discover the necessary connections between phenomena, by acquiring knowledge of the underlying structures and mechanisms at work. Often this will mean postulating the existence of types of unobservable entities and processes that are unfamiliar to us: but it is only by doing this that we get beyond the 'mere appearances' of things to their natures and essences. Thus for the realist, a scientific theory is a description of structures and mechanisms which causally generate the observable phenomena, a description which enables us to explain them."

An outline of the conventionalist's position

"This is a very broad umbrella for many positions adopted for different reasons, but what is common ground for them all is a rejection of the shared parts of both positivism and realism - that it is an empirically based, rational and objective enterprise. They may reject some or all of these for different reasons, e.g., they may reject the firm distinction between theory and observation or they may reject the whole notion of an external reality. What they share is the idea that the adoption of any particular theory is a matter of convention. So they are united in rejecting the idea that science can provide true descriptions and explanations of external reality."

The idea is explained very clearly by Kolakowski:

The fundamental idea of conventionalism may be stated as follows: certain scientific propositions, erroneously taken for descriptions of the world based on the recording and generalisation of experiments, are in fact artificial creations, and we regard them as true not because we are compelled to do so for empirical reasons, but because they are convenient, useful or even because they have aesthetic appeal. … The data of experience always leave scope for more than one explanatory hypothesis, and which one is to be chosen cannot be determined by experience. (Positivist Philosophy 1972: 158).