The Sooty Empiric

A recent conversation with some friends  has me thinking about roles we can fruitfully play as philosophers of science. I just thought I'd write up on a blog post my thoughts on something that came out of that, which is a role we sometimes play that I feel is not often enough highlighted. In philosophy we learn about tools and methods of critical thinking and argument construction and evaluation. For instance, a standard part of philosophical training is going through some basic logic. You should learn therein what it takes for an argument to be valid, and, going in the other direction, how one can demonstrate the invalidity of an argument by constructing counter-models. (If this doesn't mean anything to you, I will be going through an example later in this post!) That is just part of basic philosopher training. If you go into philosophy of science you will further specialise, perhaps learning about experimental technique, statistical methods, or theories of confirmation ...

I've just come back from the Formal Epistemology Workshop! It was a lovely conference, and I highly recommend it to up and coming formal epistemology folk who want to get a sense of what's going on across the field. I was struck by the diversity of projects, and also by the interesting fact that multiple people said something like ``I feel like I am the least-formal formal-epistemologist here.'' So! I invented a taxonomy of projects in Formal Philosophy, which I'll present here with examples then comment on below. About -- some formal system that touches upon matters of prior philosophical interest is either itself the object of study, or some feature of it or result therein is, or it is useful for stating/reformulating a prior philosophical problem. One does not reason within the system, but rather one either reflects on it, or some aspect of it, or draws out morals from it and reflects upon how they bear upon another problem. Examples of work of this sort: Be...