Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Science and Its Conceptual...

Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations ... | Peter Godfrey-Smith | Great explanations of Popper and Kuhn!

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Theory and Reality...

	Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations ... Peter Godfrey-Smith University Of Chicago Press, 2003 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science.

Intended for undergraduates and general readers with no prior background in philosophy, Theory and Reality covers logical positivism; the problems of induction and confirmation; Karl Popper's theory of science; Thomas Kuhn and "scientific revolutions"; the views of Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend; and challenges to the field from sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. The book then looks in more detail at some specific problems and theories, including scientific realism, the theory-ladeness of observation, scientific explanation, and Bayesianism. Finally, Godfrey-Smith defends a form of philosophical naturalism as the best way to solve the main problems in the field.

Throughout the text he points out connections between philosophical debates and wider discussions about science in recent decades, such as the infamous "science wars." Examples and asides engage the beginning student; a glossary of terms explains key concepts; and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. However, this is a textbook that doesn't feel like a textbook because it captures the historical drama of changes in how science has been conceived over the last one hundred years.

Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates in language that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow.

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Excellant Introduction

I found Godfrey-Smith's 'Reality and Theory' to be an excellant introduction to philosophy of science. It requires a certain basic understanding of science and a familiarity with common notions of philosophy but is nonetheless appropriate for students and those who are simply interested in reading about the philosophy of science. I am developing a curriculum for an introductory course in the history and philosophy of science and plan to use this title as one of the texts for the course.

Great explanations of Popper and Kuhn!

This book offers a great explanation of many aspects related to theory and philosophy of science. Explains Popper and Kuhn in readable and understandable terms. I agree with a previous reviewer who stated that this book, "... explains Popper better than Popper." I am considering making it required reading in my theory building course. Great book and great price!

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What Is Science

For an introduction to the philosophy of science, and all its different schools of thought and its most influential thinkers, you probably can't do much better than this book. Godfrey-Smith's writing and presentation are mostly clear and accessible to the interested layperson, and he ably introduces dense concepts without the wooden and pedantic prose that ruins so many modern philosophical tracts. However, readability is still an issue here, with a very apparent pattern. Each chapter is very readable and helpful at the start, but then becomes more confusing as Godfrey-Smith delves into increasingly esoteric and tangential sub-topics related to the chapter's main topic. He also has the tendency to describe a topic by introducing it briefly then spending more time discussing counter-theories and critiques, making the reader wonder what exactly is being covered and why (e.g. "Leviathan and Latour" in Chapter Eight). And finally, Godfrey-Smith is a working philosopher of science himself, and is generally unable to avoid giving his opinions in each chapter or section, falling into the philosopher's trap of criticizing one's colleagues for not having all the answers while refusing to admit the same about one's own theories. Meanwhile, the final chapter is made up mostly of Godfrey-Smith's attempt at a unified theory. Thus, this book is not necessarily the impartial introduction that it claims to be. But aside from those variously troublesome flaws, this is still a fine foundational text for the thinking student. [~doomsdayer520~]

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An (almost) excellent introduction to Philosophy of Science

This is by far the most convincing Introduction to Philosophy of Science that I've come across so far. As most previous reviewers agree, it is both deep and accessible, it makes a serious (not merely 'pro forma') attempt at being balanced and giving non-standard science studies a fair run for its money (unlike other books I have reviewed in the past). What's more, it even conveys a sense of the history of the debates that have shaped philosophy of science, while at the same time making the historical discussions relevant to the systematic interest of the philosophical argument. In this regard, it is much more of an introduction to philosophy of science than, for example, Losee's 'Historical Introduction to Philosophy of Science'. There are some minor problems, though, which means the book doesn't quite deserve five stars: first, the order of the chapters is somewhat idiosyncratic -- some crucial topics, such as scientific explanation, appear only on the last few pages of the book. Second, the discussion is sometimes too brief, especially when it comes to classic problems (e.g. D-N model of explanation); the author should have sacrificed one chapter (do we really need separate chapters on 'Feminism & Science' and 'The Challenge from SSK', and on 'Naturalistic Philosophy of Science' and 'Naturalism and the Social Structure of Science'?), thereby making room for a more complete discussion of standard material. Well, let's hope there will be second edition.

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Clear, informative, accessible

I teach philosophy of science to both undergraduates and graduate students, and this book could serve as an excellent introduction to the topic for either audience, though for certain reasons it is better suited to the undergraduate audience than the graduate audience. The principal virtue of the book is its narrative form: it is basically a history of the philosophy of science in the 20th century (with some background information regarding the 18th and 19th centuries) told in a straightforward and elementary way. It is perfect for students who are not philosophy majors or whose acquaintance with the broad outlines of the history of science is rather thin. This sort of book could possibly be of use to graduate students coming into a program with no previous experience in the area.

The first nine chapters present the fundamentals: the rise and fall of positivism, the sociology of science (including discussions of Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan, Feyerabend, and the feminist critique of science), the demarcation problem, the problems of induction and confirmation, you name it. Chapters 10-15 begin to move away from the basics in order to present Godfrey-Smith's own peculiar version of scientific realism in the form of an extended argument for procedural naturalism. While this section of the book will be of particular interest to students in that graduate class I mentioned, the ones in the undergrad class might find it a little difficult to connect the material here to what has gone before. My own practice with undergraduates has been to ground my lectures roughly on the information presented in the text, but to take the opportunity to expand on certain topics that are only briefly mentioned (Hempel's deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, the problem of theoretical entities, the semantic vs. syntactic view of theories, etc.).

I find that this book has certain advantages over other texts I have used, particularly anthologies. The well known Cover and Curd text (Norton) is an excellent resource and particularly useful in graduate courses, but the undergraduates where I teach find the primary sources to be inaccessible, in spite of the introductory and other explanatory materials included in that text. The same was also true for my students when I switched to the Pittsburgh text (Salmon et al.). Godfrey-Smith's text has been much more popular with the students, even though I myself would prefer to read primary materials. Well, you can't have everything.

Some have objected that the text either omits or else elides over certain issues that are popular with students. For example, there is little in here dealing with normativity in science, other than typical issues of epistemic values and the problem of objectivity (so-called "contextual values"), and one reviewer notes that there is nothing about the debate over "intelligent design" in this text. Regarding the former I think that my own strategy of supplementing the text with a variety of examples in lectures works very well; regarding the latter I can only say that I find the lack of discussion of intelligent design to be among the book's virtues. As far as I can see the whole issue of creationism vs. science is of very little interest, contributing only to the discussion of the demarcation problem, and even there contributing very little worth spending much time on. It has been remarked that this issue is of interest in the United States but not so much in Europe and other areas. Richard Dawkins was once asked about this in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air", and he explained it by saying "That's because in England we don't have quite so many, let's see, how can I put this delicately...ignoramuses trying to teach science." Well, that's not how I would have put it, but I can't say as how I disagree all that much with the sentiment.

Overall, then, I would say that this book does a very good job indeed of slicing out a domain of discourse for itself and explaining it to the student in an accessible and readable fashion. With the right sort of attitude one ought to find even the final section (chapters 10-15) extremely interesting if rather idiosyncratic. The book thus has the virtue of teaching not only by means of a concise overview of the principal topics, but also by means of example: a philosopher of science teaching the philosophy of science by actually doing some original philosophy of science.

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reviews: page 1, 2

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