Science Technology And Society

Assignment 2 Solutions

Govind Shukla (201301088)

August 26, 2016

1. Question 1 Solution
Hume presents us with a dilemma that if we try to justify induction by means of a
deductively valid argument with a prerequisite that we can show to be true (without using
induction), then our conclusion will be too weak. If we try to use an inductive argument
then we have to show that it is reliable. Any attempt to do that leads to the same dilemma
all over again.
As an example, when we are hungry and we are about to bite a hot crusty baguette. But a
friend suddenly stops us and says "Dont do it. That piece of bread will poison you". This is
an absurd of course (people use the adverb of course if and only if they have no argument).
But, we would probably reply that "Bread that smells this good has not poisoned me in the
past, so it will not poison me now". We tend to count such arguments as inductively strong.
Moreover, the premise is known to be true. However, no inductively strong argument
guarantees the truth of its conclusion. It is possible that this piece will poison you even
though bread has not poisoned you in the past. So, we weaken our conclusion, and say "It is
highly probable that this piece of bread will not poison us". As a statement of psychological
conviction, it is true. But it is not rationally justifiable in objective sense. One way to
defend the reliability of this argument is to appeal the presupposition that nature is
uniform. But nature is not uniform in all respects.
Following arguments can be given to counter Humes arguments on induction :

The Universe is orderly Hume raise the question of morality. Evidence would
suggest that the world is far from being harmonious e.g. suffering, disease, pain and
illness. This raises the question as to why a benevolent God would allow such things
to take place. Furthermore, recent evidence would suggest that the universe is not a
mechanical as Newton would have us believe. Hume argues that there is no obvious
sense in talking about the universe as being orderly.

Order is the result of design Hume believed that our knowledge of causes and
effects is based upon our experience. We know a builder has built a house because
we have seen many houses being built. The same cannot be said about the universe.
In this way the universe is unique.

Design presupposes intelligence Hume looks at the complexity of a ship. He

notes that in the construction of a ship many shipwrights are employed. Hume
point out that the same could be said about the universe i.e. many creator gods or
demons...etc. For Hume, the Teleological Argument does not necessarily lead to the
classical Christian definition of God.

As The Universe is so complex in design, there must be a complex intelli-

gence Hume postulates as to whether or not this universe is actually complex.
We have got nothing to compare it to. In the past people thought slide rules were
complex, today in comparison to a modern computer they are very simple.

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2. Question 2 Solution
Samir Okasha address many questions in his book. One of the questions he addressed
Why did Kuhns ideas cause such a storm? . He address this because along with Kuhn
descriptive claim about the history of science.
The charge of relativism against Kuhn usually stems from his idea of the incommensu-
rability of scientific paradigms. Because Kuhn thinks that major scientific revolutions
involve shifts to entirely novel ways of understanding even familiar scientific concepts (and
because he thinks that both observational and theoretical terms only make sense within
the context of a given paradigm), hes sometimes taken as rejecting the idea of scientific
progress entirely; people interpret incommensurability as meaning that science just jumps
from paradigm to paradigm, with there being no sensible way to judge one paradigm as
better than any other. Were that correct, it would be a short jump from there to the idea
that the notion of any kind of objective reality is incoherentif existence claims only make
sense within the context of a paradigm and theres no way to claim that a given paradigm
is better than another, then its tempting to think that questions like "what exists?" have
no right answer in general, and can only be evaluated from within a paradigm.
But thats not the right way to read Kuhn. People sometimes quote him as saying "no
sense can be made of the notion of reality," but thats an incomplete quotation. The full
sentence (from The Road Since Structure) is "No sense can be made of the notion of reality
as it has ordinarily functioned in the philosophy of science" (emphasis mine). This might
not seem like a big omission, but the two sentences express really different ideas. Part
of the reason that Kuhn is so frequently misinterpreted is that understanding him well
involves understanding the context in which he was writing, and what he was trying to do.
He was making extremely specific criticisms of extremely specific ideas in the philosophy
of science (most significantly, he was responding to logical positivism). As such, much of
what he said was directed at positions and figures within the philosophy of science, and
shouldnt be taken as making general metaphysical claims. Theres a world of difference
between saying "there is no such thing as reality" and saying "the way that philosophers of
science have been using reality lately has a lot of problems." Kuhns popularly understood
as endorsing the former when he really only endorsed the latter.
In addition to that, I dont think its right to say that incommensurability means we have
to jettison the idea of scientific progress. Kuhn thought that paradigm shifts happen,
remember, when the number of anomalous experimental results reaches a critical mass,
and observations can no longer be either ignored or shoe-horned into the standard the-
oretical framework. When that happens, science undergoes a kind of "theory crisis," in
which scientists search for a new way of fitting together theory and observations, and
a new way of understanding familiar concepts. The crisis ends when a new coherent
paradigmone which is able to incorporate the previously anomalous observations into a
consistent theoretical frameworkis established.
When the story is presented this way, the way in which paradigm shifts are instances of
progress is a lot more clear. An old paradigm is discarded in favor of a new one largely
because the new paradigm is better suited to explaining the data than the old one was.

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Science makes progress in virtue of the fact that each paradigm explains all the phenomena
that the old one did and more phenomena too. Thats definitely progress, but its progress
of a very particular kind.
Specifically, its not necessarily progress toward "truth." Thats the sense in which Kuhn
can (correctly) be read as an anti-realist. Paradigm incommensurability does imply that
truth claims cant be assessed across paradigms, but thats not really a problem since
Kuhn doesnt think that science aims at collecting true statements. This was one of his
major departures from logical positvism, which took the goal of science to be collecting true
statements that described the world. Kuhn, in contrast, saw the goal of science as being
generating empirically adequate theories that help us explain and predict the phenomena
we observe. For Kuhn, scientific progress consists in an increase in our ability to solve prob-
lems that we want to solve, and being able to "group" observations into sets of "relevantly
similar" phenomena is central to this notion of progress. A paradigm shift happens we we
radically reevaluate the criteria by which we count observations as "relevantly similar,"
which then leads to new opportunities for theoretical innovation.
In this sense, Kuhn can be seen a setting the stage for the later development of the se-
mantic view of scientific theories by Suppe, Suppes (sic), van Fraassen, and others. On the
semantic view, scientific theories are seen as collections of mathematical models which are
exploited to make various classes of predictions, rather than collections of syntactically-
delineated truth-functional statements about the world. Models (by definition) arent the
kinds of things that can be true or false; rather, theyre evaluated in terms of "fit," or in
terms of how useful they are in making the kinds of predictions were interested in. This
doesnt suggest that one model might not be better than another one for a given purpose,
though. Just as with Kuhn, scientific progress in the semantic theory consists in designing
and improving tools for predicting and explaining phenomena in the world.