According to Brian Leiter, Israel Scheffler died on February 16th at the age of ninety. A very sad event. Scheffler was not a philosopher who cared much about trends. When all around him were scratching their heads about Thomas Kuhn, he wrote a pretty trenchant rejection, Science and Subjectivity (which also took on people like Feyerabend and Hanson). And his fine (but perhaps slightly too didactic) book, The Anatomy of Inquiry ,was perhaps the last good book written on the epistemology of science from an analytic perspective. His passing reminds me that there are issues about which the philosophizing of the mid-twentieth century was simple and right, and far superior to what superseded it.
12 responses to “In memoriam: Israel Scheffler”
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“the last good book written on the epistemology of science from an analytic perspective”
I guess I must not know what you mean by “from an analytic perpective.”LikeLike
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I guess not!
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I guess I don’t know what Mohan means by “good” and “epistemology of science”… but now I’m just being snarky. Maybe, Mohan, you can do a follow up post about this part of your claim (why there are no good books in the epistemology of science (from an analytic perspective) since 1969. Too much specialization? too much on the special sciences? or what?
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Speaking of epistemologies, especially as they relate to Quantum Reality and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or more precisely the coming into being of different perceptual strait-jackets and how they supercede previously dominant ways of seeing/being, please check out this reference – section 3 is particularly interesting
http://www.dabase.org/Reality_Itself_Is_Not_In_The_Middle.htmLikeLike
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Actually,
my first few posts for NewAPPS were about the perilous state of general philosophy of science. My contention then (and now) is that it never took the way out of the Kuhnian impasse offered by the realism that came to dominate metaphysics, and gradually got marginalized in HPS departments.LikeLike
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Ok, I’ll try again:
The scientific image.
Representing and intervening.
Bayes or Bust.
Science as social knowledge.
Theory and Reality.
I’m sure all the above (and many others–that’s not even meant to be a list of favorites, necessarily) are GOOD. I’m pretty sure they are all on “the epistemology of science.” Are they not from an analytic perspective?
I do share your concerns in the linked post that generally philosophy of science is underappreciated in hiring situations, but NO good books in the last 40 years?LikeLike
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I haven’t read John Earman’s book, and I have only passing knowledge of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s (though I wonder how much it adds to Scheffler’s work).
Of the other three (as well as How the Laws of Physics Lie), I wouldn’t say they aren’t good books. Indeed, they are terrific books. But I think that all three at least participate in, if not contribute to, what I take to be the grand malaise of general philosophy of science—an unwillingness to develop metaphysical and linguistic ideas to illuminate traditional problems in general philosophy of science. Take Ian. “If you can spray it, it’s real,” is a real insight. It puts positrons into the same category of theory-neutral identification as Putnam and Kripke carved out for water. Yet, Ian discounts this connection because “we can’t point to electrons.” (Can’t we spray them?) The real problem here is the unwillingness seriously to discuss Putnam’s early realism from anything but a positivist perspective, thus undermining that perspective.(Perhaps, Putnam suffered from the same flaw.)
For me, the besetting sin of much of this work is that it does not come seriously to grips with analytic metaphysics, and do not take the discovery/justification dichotomy seriously enough. To me, that makes them unsatisfying, however full of pungent insight they may be. That’s my indictment of them as works of analytic philosophy.
I am not saying Scheffler came to grips with the advance of realism. But at least he fought the trend to take general philosophy of science down the rabbit-hole of context-of-discovery or anti-realist accommodations of Kuhn/Feyerabend. (Obviously, this requires more argumentation than I can provide here, but it was the basis of my on-going back and forth with Eric Schliesser, before he left the blog.)LikeLike
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Mohan,
Are you familiar with Azzouni’s Knowledge and Reference in Empirical Science? If so, is that the kind project you have in mind?LikeLike
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I don’t know Azzouni’s book, but thanks for bringing this work to my attention. (Is it very much discussed in this context?) I took a quick look on Google Books, and there is a lot of interesting material there.
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Alas, not. Azzouni, in general, is not discussed as much as he should be, I think. (But then I would say that, given that I was a student of his.)
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Eric Schliesser seems to think highly of Jody Azzouni, though he says that he doesn’t figure much into central discussions:(see comment 7, and 35) http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/the-20-most-important-philosophers-of-the-modern-era.html
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Is that the comment thread in which Mark Lance said that if philosophers were educated in math, they would not think Frege so great? Hmm . . .
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