Dunja
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Te problem of disagreements that arise due to different paradigms or 'schools of thought', which you mention, is an important problem as it concerns the possibility of so-called rational disagreements in science. This paper (published here) makes an attempt at providing a normative framework for such situations, suggesting that if scientists have at least some indications that the claims of their opponent is a result of a rational deliberation, they should epistemically tolerate their ideas, which means: they should treat them as potentially rational, their theory as potentially promising, and as a potential challenge to their own stance.
Of course, the main challenge for epistemic toleration is putting ourselves in the other... (read more)
Thanks a lot! :)
Hi all, I've posted a few comments, but never introduced myself: I'm an academic working in philosophy of science and social epistemology, mainly on methodological issues underlying scientific inquiry, scientific rationality, etc. I'm coming from the EA forum, but on Ben's invitation I dropped by here a few days ago and I am genuinely curious about the prospects of this forum, its overall functions and its possible interactions with the academic research. So I'm happy to read and chip in where I can contribute :)
Again: you are conflating the descriptive and the normative. You are all the time giving examples of how science went wrong. And that may have well been the case. What I am saying is that, there are tools to mitigate these problems. In order to challenge my points, you'd have to show that chriopractics did not appear even worthy of pursuit *in view of the criteria I mentioned above* and yet it should have been pursued (I am not familiar with this branch of science, btw, so I don't have enough knowledge to say anything concerning its current status). But even if you could do this, this would be an extremely odd... (read more)
Like I've mentioned, that's why there are indices of theory promise (see .e.g. this paper), which don't guarantee anything, but still make the assessment of some hypotheses more plausible than, say, research done within pseudo-medicine. These indices shouldn't be confused with how the scientific community actually reacts on novel theories since it is no news that sometimes scientists fail to employ the adequate criteria, reacting dogmatically (for some examples, see this case study from the history of earth sciences or this one from the history of medicine). So the fact that the scientific community fails to react in a warranted way to novel ideas doesn't imply that they couldn't do a better... (read more)
Right, which is why it's important to distinguish between a mere hunch and a "warranted hunch", the latter being based on certain indicators of promise (e.g. the idea has a potential of explaining novel phenomena, or explaining them better than the currently dominant theory, the inquiry is based on feasible methodology, etc.). These indicators of promise are in no way a guarantee that the idea will work out, but they allow us to distinguish between a sensible novel idea and junk science.
But to think that you cannot do better than chance at generating successful new hypotheses is obviously wrong.
It would be an uncharitable reading of Kuhn to interpret him in that way. He does speak of the performance of scientific theories in terms of different epistemic values, and already in SSR he does speak of a scientist having an initial hunch suggesting a given idea is promising.
From merely observing science's success, we can conclude that there has to be some kind of skill (Yudkowksy's take on this is here and here, among other places) that good scientists employ to do better than chance at picking what to work on.
There is actually a whole
One thing that went too far into relativism was Kuhn's insistence that there is no way to tell in advance which paradigm is going to be successful. His description of this is that you pick "teams" initially for all kinds of not-truth-tracking reasons, and you only figure out many years later whether your new paradigm will be winning or not.
This is a good point, though it's important to distinguish between assessing whether a paradigm is going to be successful (which may be impossible to say at the beginning of research) and assessing whether it is worthy of pursuit. The latter only means that for now, the paradigm seems promising, but of course,... (read more)
This is an interesting historical question, but I'd like to challenge your initial motivation ;) So the idea that sciences used to be pursued more effectively a century ago. Intuitively speaking, I don't see why this would be the case, so I'd first have to see some evidence (including the measure of effectiveness) for this claim. My impression is rather that due to immense fragmentation of today's science into sub-disciplines, there are more people working on particular problems who are effective in their own domains, while remaining largely unknown to the wider audience.
In fact, I would link a lower degree of interaction in the past science, in comparison to today's science (we have peer-review system, there are more conferences, there is an easier access to publications, etc.) with a lower degree of effectiveness. But of course, how exactly interaction and effectiveness/efficiency are related is an empirical question, so I'm open to be surprised :)
Hi all (and thanks Ben for starting this thread),
Our group (Philosophy & Ethics group, TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands) has a call for three PhD positions which might be of interest to some of you (the deadline is very soon though - March 10). All three positions are fully funded and for a period of 4 years. Please feel free to get in touch or send me a PM if you'd like some additional info on them!
PhD Position A: Norms of Explainable AI
PhD Position B: Cognitive Science of AI
PhD Position C: Philosophy of Science/Social epistemology