For our ongoing series of wicked book reviews; an excerpt:
Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford...continue the tradition in recent philosophy of science of avoiding the real scientific problems, or even reporting on new frameworks -- once radical -- to solve them. In their view, the contribution of philosophy is to provide and justify norms for science. The justification is supposed to be metaphysical. But there actually aren't many norms to justify in this book, and so, not much justification.
It would seem that the broad norms of scientific method are pretty clear: follow procedures that have an empirically or mathematically warranted good chance -- and preferably the best chance among available procedures -- of finding the true and avoiding the false. It's means-end. The justification on that scale of abstraction is elementary decision theory. The hard part is finding such methods suitable for the kinds of data we now collect and showing that any particular method or class of methods satisfy those criteria. The authors avoid all of the hard parts. Even their discussion of randomized clinical trials -- one of the few methods that they actually come close to engaging -- adds nothing to the known limitations of such trials or contributes anything to how to improve their reproducibility.
Now to some of the chapters. Chapter 1 tells us the job of philosophy for science is to provide norms and justify them. It gives a banal summary of norms which it proposes to improve on: Be objective; be consistent with the data, "more or less"; the more empirical evidence for a theory, the more acceptable it should be; prefer theories with the greater explanatory scope; predictive success counts in favor of a theory....
Chapter 3 is entitled "Evidence of Causation Is Not Causation." Yes, we know....
Chapter 6, "Ideal Conditions" observes that data are often messy and there are hard problems about extracting regularities from messy data, and reliably extrapolating from inside the lab to outside the lab. Some people, the authors observe, resort to probabilities, but, they object, that is not so helpful in deciding individual cases. What to do about these hard problems? Nothing said.
Chapter 7, "One Effect, One Cause" tells the reader that isn't always so.
Yes, I read the rest of the book, but you shouldn't. The whole thing is a mixture of banality, light criticism of other philosophers, and restatements of views about the disunity of science and plurality of causes that will be familiar to readers of Nancy Cartwright....
I am puzzled: for whom was this book written? Only the most naive scientist or methodologist would find it informative.... I cannot do better than the old witticism: this book fills a much-needed gap in the literature.
Of course, as longtime readers know, Clark Glymour is a rather opinionated character, but he's a useful antidote to our anodyne, "be nice" times in philosophy.
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