No philosopher of science has influenced yours truly’s thinking more than Roy Bhaskar. At a time when scientific relativism continues to advance, it is vital to uphold his insistence that science must not be reduced to mere discourse. Science is possible because a reality exists independently of our theories. Our theories must engage with this […]
Theory of Science & Methodology
Yours truly has been offering a crash course on causality to fellow researchers at Malmö University over the past couple of years. The course PowerPoint is available here: What is causality? Many contemporary research questions in the social sciences are fundamentally concerned with issues of causality. What lies behind rising unemployment? What effects do ‘charter […]
The model is not . . . how one determines the soundness or otherwise of a mathematical proof; it is, rather, how one determines the reasonableness or otherwise of entries in a crossword puzzle. . . . The crossword model permits pervasive mutual support, rather than, like the model of a mathematical proof, encouraging an […]
Why bother with the theories? Because science seeks to understand the world and to explain the experimental facts, and you need theories to do that. Theories are not just heuristic aids, “useful instruments that aid the growth of experimental knowledge,” as Chalmers accuses Mayo of thinking … What is the point of doing experiments? It […]
At a general level, you might say that the stage that comes after the stage of social observation should be dominated by speculation. To use a term such as speculation may seem odd and old-fashioned, and it is true that speculation is rarely used in today’s social science. But speculation does have a place in … … Continue reading
Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) offers a compelling and robust framework for understanding how scientific knowledge advances. Moving beyond the traditional dichotomy between deduction and induction, IBE is not merely one instrument among many in the scientist’s toolkit, but a fundamental engine of scientific reasoning itself. Its significance lies in its capacity to model […]
Among the soft obscurantists some aim at truth, but do not respect the norms for arriving at truth, such as focusing on causality, acting as devil’s advocate, and generating falsifiable hypotheses. Others do not aim at truth, and often scorn the very idea that there is such a thing. By assumption, these non-respecters of truth … … Continue reading
As I have argued, explanations are not deductive proofs in any particularly interesting sense. Although they can always be presented in the form of deductive proofs, doing so seems not to capturing anything essential, or especially useful, and usually requires completing an incomplete explanation. Thinking of explanations as proofs tends to confuse causation with logical […]
When in mathematics the unknown becomes the unknown quantity in an equation, it is made into something long familiar before any value has been assigned. Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically; even what cannot be assimilated, the insoluble and irrational, is fenced in by mathematical theorems. In the preemptive […]
At the juncture of Roy Bhaskar’s refounding of critical realism philosophy of science, postmodernism had spread like a virus across academia with its seductive attack on grand theories or “metanarratives.” Neoliberal policies took advantage of the subsequently lowered intellectual immune systems and “identity politics” squabbling to impose its anti-working class “meta” economic model upon global […]