Knowing Science

by Alexander Bird

In Knowing Science, Alexander Bird presents an epistemology of science that rejects empiricism and gives a central place to the concept of knowledge. Science aims at knowledge and progresses when it adds to the stock of knowledge. That knowledge is social knowing—it is known by the scientific community as a whole. Evidence is that from which knowledge can be obtained by inference. From this, it follows that evidence is knowledge, and is not limited to
perception, nor to observation. Observation supplies evidence that is basic relative to a field of enquiry and can be highly non-perceptual. Theoretical knowledge is typically gained by inference to the only explanation, in which competing plausible hypotheses are falsified by the evidence. In cases where not
all competing hypotheses are refuted, scientific hypotheses are not known but instead possess varying degrees of plausibility. Plausibilities in the light of the evidence are probabilities and link eliminative explanationism to Bayesian conditionalization. Bird argues that scientific realism and anti-realism as global metascientific claims should be rejected-the track record gives us only local metascientific claims.

Genres: Philosophy, Science

296 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 22, 2022

Reviews

[Vipul Vivek M-D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for a seminar at my university. This is the first book in the subfield of epistemology of science and brings together the scattered discussion in one place, thus making an introduction to the area easier and also (arguably) unified. So that is commendable in itself. However, chapters seem extremely repetitive and, at times, cursory in their discussions; even disconnected sometimes.