 Hi there. Welcome back to History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. I'm Matt Brown. Today is part three of our discussion of Fireobbin's book, Against Method. We're talking primarily about chapters 15 and 16 and the interstitial appendices there. So, in these chapters, Fireobbin is attempting to sort of wrap up the main argument of the first part of the book, really the primary focus of the book, which is the argument against method, against the notion that there's a single scientific method that unites all of the diverse activities that we call science. And he's trying to do so by responding to some ideas that might be used against the main part of his argument, right? So, just to remind you, the main part of Fireobbin's argument against method stems from, on the one hand, the Galileo case. Galileo violates a variety of empiricist prescriptions of scientific method by essentially using what Fireobbin calls counter-inductive approaches. And Fireobbin also provides sort of scaffolding or supplementary theoretical abstract arguments that go along with the historical arguments that this is a reasonable set of things for Galileo to do. And in the background, of course, is the idea that Galileo is an important figure in modern science. And so we should regard, sort of by default, the things that Galileo is doing as at least permissible aspects of science, if not exemplary. So, in Chapter 15, Fireobbin considers some responses to his argument. The main one is based in a classic logical empiricist distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. So, the context of discovery is supposed to be that part of science where scientists discover new phenomena, pose new theories, come up with new theories, and do all of the messy things that scientists do to arrive at their ideas and conclusions. And then the context of justification is supposed to be that part of science where those results, those theories, hypotheses are logically justified on the basis of the evidence that is gathered. Now, many thinkers at Fireobbin's time and since have questioned this distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, and Fireobbin is no different here. And he largely points to the fact that these processes are entangled in practice, right, as the main argument. But he also points out, as he's done throughout the book, that the strict sort of application of the methods that are supposed to apply just to the context of justification would still wipe out broad swaths of science, including Galileo's innovations, right? The practical impossibility of making the distinction, the overly restrictive notions of what happens in the context of discovery, and also the need for the close interaction between the two in order to criticize abstract theories of method are all parts of Fireobbin's argument against this distinction. There is, I think, a distinction in the neighborhood that's relevant to think about. I wouldn't call it the context of discovery versus justification, but there are two processes that tend to be somewhat separable in science, and that's what you might call the context of inquiry when a scientist or more likely a team of researchers in a laboratory conduct experiments, propose theories, and then publish their results. In the context of certification where those publications are peer-reviewed, published, and then potentially taken up by other members of the scientific community. So I think that there is an interesting difference there, but it's not one that lines up with the philosopher's attempt to draw a difference between the historical process, the messy history of science that happens in the context of discovery, and the philosophically interesting process of justification. Justification happens in both of the real-world context of inquiry and the context of credibility. In attempting to oppose the context distinction, Fireobbin also raises an objection to a similar distinction between prescription and description. Particularly thinking of methodological prescription for science and historical description of how science actually works. Now, I think Fireobbin doesn't mean to say that there's no meaningful distinction to be had there. Rather, what I think Fireobbin says is that there's an important way in which the descriptive and the prescriptive interact. So philosophical prescriptions are tested in the history of science and by the history of science in a sense. And there are important ways in which not only can you criticize happenings in the history of science based on methodological prescriptions, you can criticize methodological prescriptions as unrealistic or inapplicable or irrelevant by looking at how they would work out in the history. So of course there is some kind of distinction between ought and is, but it's not as fundamental as some philosophers have led us to believe. There's also a lengthy discussion rather of critical rationalism, which I won't try to repeat here, but rather I think what's most interesting about it is the way in which Fireobbin talks about different conceptions of scientific progress from one theory to the next. So he has this diagram. It's on page 159 in the fourth edition. It looks like this. So the top diagram here is sort of how Fireobbin thinks we tend to think of the history of science, right? So we tend to think, you know, the old theory was okay, but it wasn't as good as the new theory. The new theory has increased content and the relationship between the two is one of growth. The knowledge has increased, right? But in fact, what Fireobbin points out is that this version of the old theory is kind of a fiction. It's kind of a construction from the perspective of the new theory. So the old theory wasn't... This isn't really what the old theory was. This is a version of the old theory, which has been kind of sanitized and rendered compatible with the new theory. Another version of that is one where we admit, okay, there were some things that the old theory got wrong, but still there were parts that it got right and the parts that it got right here are explained by the place of those sort of predictions in the new theory, right? And so it's still a matter of empirical growth, right? Growth of empirical content, right? In fact, on Fireobbin's conception, it really works more like this, right? First, theories are much more open-ended on Fireobbin's conception. So, you know, we know to some extent what the old theory and the new theory say, but they have a kind of open-ended content, a kind of variety of different ways in which the basic commitments can be developed by further research. So the fact that they're not closed here in the diagram, that's what that represents is the open-endedness. The other is that the shared content, such as it is, is also kind of a distortion, kind of a construction, right? So there is stuff that the old theory predicted that seemed fairly successful and this gets shoehorned into the new theory, but because in part of what Fireobbin calls the incommensurability between the two theories, it's not, you know, the idea that it's shared content is a little bit of a fiction as well, right? So what you have is sort of a replacement of the old theory and the new theory, some shared content, but only sort of, and really it's more of a replacement of focus and emphasis going on there. Now I just used the word incommensurability. We've talked about it a little bit before, but this is really a major focus of these chapters. So let's talk about it for a moment. Incommensurability for Fireobbin means, to some extent, incomparability, right? That's where the word comes from, right? So one of the original uses of the word, or the home uses of the word incommensurability is in mathematics to describe, for example, the relationship between the length of the side of a square and the length of a diagonal, okay? The length of the side of the square and the length of the diagonal are incommensurable. In the sense that the length of the side of the square is one, right? The length of the diagonal is the square root of two and there's no finite number or a decimal or fraction that you can use to express those numbers in the same system, right? If you switch to treating the diagonal as a whole number, then you're going to get an irrational number for the sides. Of course, they're comparable in a sense, like you can mark the approximate lengths on one ruler and you can see one is longer than the other. They're comparable in that sense, but they're not rationally comparable. They can't be made part of the same sort of accounting system, right? Insofar as that means, you know, having a finite representation in the same numerical system, right? So, Too-Fire-Oven thinks that scientific theories are incommensurable and so far as there's no rational, logical way to line up all of the concepts, laws, claims, predictions, evidence, experiments for one theory and another theory to compare them one to one, right? The conceptual change that accompanies the move from one theory to another means that there is some ambiguity, some slippage between the two, right? Some change of not only theoretical but also perceptual content. In fact, in these chapters, Fire-Oven tells us that it's not just that our perceptions or our observations are influenced by theory to some extent. They're actually fully theoretical, right? And observational claims are fully informed by our theoretical commitments, right? We can, of course, within a framework on a pragmatic basis distinguish between something that's an observation and something that's a theoretical claim, but there's no sort of in-principle difference between the two, right? Any kind of commitment is on the same ground as another kind of commitment. So that's incommensurability. Fire-Oven tells us incommensurability is a philosopher's problem, not so much a scientific problem, right? It has to do with the way that philosophers want to rationally reconstruct, logically reconstruct scientific activity and not so much with the activities that actually scientists engage with. Scientists are more comfortable with ambiguity. They can make these comparisons just like an engineer, right? Can compare the side and the diagonal of a square for length, right? So it's a sort of artificial problem, but it is one that helps to undermine rationalist conceptions of scientific method. In Chapter 16, Fire-Oven has a very long description of ancient cosmology. He's really in the sense of the ancient worldview in relation to art, mythology, science, language. And his argument there is that one's conceptual system is influential on not only what one believes about the world, but the way one sees the world, right? A tight connection between concepts and conceptions and perceptions, right? And so it's a rather long description of that, but the key idea, I think, to connect it to scientific method, the key idea is that when you change from one theory to another, when you change from one language to another, and all of these associated conceptual changes that go with that, to a certain extent, one is perceiving a different world. The facts that one believes, right? One's beliefs about what the evidence says, what the facts are, will change. In effect, to use language from Thomas Kuhn, when you move from one conceptual framework to another, you're living in a different world. So that's what's going on, I think, in this third part of the book to sort of sum up, you know, scientific practice is much more complex than the philosophical rationalist would have you believe. Plurality, variety, creativity, you might say, complexity are all important parts of science. From the perspective of the philosophical rationalist, disorder and chaos are essential to knowledge and its progress, according to Fireabend. And the way to really understand science is to look at how it unfolds historically and to some extent to give space for the scientists to proceed creatively. And, you know, one of the things that Fireabend, I think, is trying to get us out of is rigid conceptual systems that impede the progress of science. That's a big part of what's going on in the first three quarters of the book. Part four, we'll start to get outside of science, per se, and into a broader view, but we'll save that for the next video. All right, see you next time.