Discussions in the History and Philosophy of Science Wk3 [members & +1s]

​We'll move our meeting from Feb 14th to Feb 21st since people will be out for Valentine's Day.

​For Wk3, we'll read selections from Shapin and Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air Pump. In the previous weeks, we read selections from Popper's Conjectures and Refutations and Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

​Note, we'll read together for the first hour and then discuss for the second hour - no pre-reading is required. The reading will be sent out before the meeting on Feb 21st.

​** General Description **

​Creating scientific knowledge seems like the process of discovering an already-present set of facts about the world around us. But studying the history and philosophy of science reveals a more complicated picture full of institutional tensions, revolutionary hypotheses, individual feuds, and changing cultural notions of what constitutes trustworthy knowledge. We may be at the brink of one of these turning points given recent developments in AI.

​Some interesting - and increasingly relevant - questions I'd like us to think about are: What makes a good theory? Is there a tension between prediction and understanding? What is the relationship between theory and data? Under what conditions should a theory be rejected? Are fields of knowledge (say, Biology and Physics) reducible to each other? What constitutes pseudoscience?