Discussions in the History and Philosophy of Science Wk2 [members & +1s]

​Check out the description in the first event: https://lu.ma/philofscience

​​We had a wonderful discussion on Kuhn last week, touching some of our biggest themes: Does science progress? How is consensus achieved in scientific communities? Under what conditions do new scientific theories get created? 

​​We’re going to switch gears for our next session and read selections from Popper’s “Conjectures and Refutations”. He makes many arguments here, but we’ll be concerned with two important ones:

1. ​​What separates science from pseudoscience is the criterion of “falsifiability” i.e. scientific theories can be “proven wrong”. 

2. ​​Science proceeds deductively (from hypotheses), not inductively (from observations). A similar argument is also made by Kuhn.

​​For the reading, we’ll read sections 1 & 2 (pages 43-51), and parts of section 5 (pages 61-64). Each selection starts with a green highlight and ends with a red highlight. There’s no need to read past the red or before the green. 

​​However, I’ve included sections 3 and 4 for people interested in Wittgenstein and Hume, but they won’t figure heavily in our discussion.

​​As always, we’ll read together from 7:30-8:30, and discuss from 8:30-9:30. No need to read beforehand.