 In the first part of our journey through the history of philosophy of science, we have seen our science arose in the antiquity and gradually evolved into a central institution in society. In the second part from around 1800 and until 1945, science tried to define itself. This search for an agreement on what science is happened mostly from within the scientific community. Now, after World War II, society intervenes in science and scientists also move away from the idea that science is an isolated activity in society. The war made the scientific community consider its foundations and ways of developing knowledge, even if there was no agreement about what that should imply. A pluralism in ways of thinking about science developed. After the Second World War, there is an understanding of the pluralism in science but also work in order to sort of develop and reconciliate different positions within science. This became the focus of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that was inspired by Martin Heidegger and developed the philosophy of existentialism. In many ways, he took up the way of thinking that the cup started. He started with a subject and that was in the time of natural science, starting with a subject was a kind of revolutionary new beginning and he wanted to make a synthesis of the subjective, the world of the consciousness of the soul of the subject on one hand and the objective world of science on the other. And the objective world he called being in itself and the kind of being that consciousness where that the human soul or thinking where he called being for itself. Sartre inspired what would become a particular tradition of French thinking in philosophy, often referred to as post-structuralism and post-modernism. His new way of thinking questioned the central role of subjectivity. We shouldn't forget that Sartre was the most important living French philosopher in the 50s and in the 60s so all these people knew about Sartre and read him and some of them even knew him personally, some of them did politics with him personally for instance in the 70s. So there is certainly a relationship. I would say first of all they all have this critical relationship, they are critical about his ideas. Society reacted to what scientists had been doing during the war and there was pressure to have more democratic influence and control over science and to lay down ethical guidelines. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on the 10th of December 1948. It didn't address science directly but made clear remarks about unethical behavior and assaults against all human beings. As there were increasing reports on scientific human experiments during the Nazi period work was started in 1953 by the World Medical Association to lay down ethical guidelines for research on humans. Work became the declaration of Helsinki in 1964. Philosophers engaged in trying to learn from what had happened before and during World War II. Among these were the Polish philosopher Sigmund Bauman who later wrote the book Modernity and the Holocaust. Abenzo's survivors were walking skeletons, most of them couldn't even walk or crawl. He said that Holocaust has been treated in the philosophy of more as a Jewish problem but then he tried to have a focus from a more scientific approach from sociology and asked the question how was this possible. One of his ideas is that the society today has this latent threat that Holocaust can happen again. They are criticizing this instrumental way of thinking that you can, this way of reasoning that you have a goal and you have a means to reach this goal and this way of thinking has been very basic for development, the development of our society today. It has been very positive but there is a dark side of it too. Could one develop a new starting point for scientific thinking that would avoid this kind of development? Several different opinions were expressed. Among these was a new interest in the role of language in making a correct description of the world. Again, Ludwig Wittgenstein, now a professor at Trinity College in Cambridge, was one of those who started this new debate. I'm now going to take from the case one of Wittgenstein's notebooks. We have a large collection of Wittgenstein philosophical notebooks and papers. He was a fellow of Trinity until his death in 1951. It's very typical of Wittgenstein, it's a mixture of languages, it's short sentences, long sentences, different types of ink, very, very unusual and very typical of his notebooks. Wittgenstein says that because of a very common feature of the language, namely that when we use substantives, we look for a substance that corresponds to the substantive and usually it does, like in a man or horse. But what corresponds to time? There is no physical entity, there is no phenomenon. But our mind, because we are used to use language in this way that we search for a substance, we will try to identify what is time. And for 2000 years, people have tried to identify it, but it's still a problem. And people say, of course, it's because time is a very complex and difficult matter. And Wittgenstein says, no, it's the way you pose the question that causes the problems. Because when we ask what is time, then we are starting to look for, if we just move forward, we will come to an end where we have identified time. If that was the case, well, in 2009 years, we should have been able to have done it. And then he go further and said that this problem doesn't only regards the question of time, if you ask, for instance, what is meaning. And like in this course, what is science, you will have the same problem if you think that you will be able to find a finite answer. A deep legacy of Wittgenstein is that we have got to stop thinking of language as just a neutral device for describing an independently existing reality. Not all agreed with Wittgenstein on the importance of language. Among the skeptics were Wittgenstein's cousin, Frederick von Hayek, and the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. They were also critical of neo-positivism and developed something they called critical rationalism. Both Frederick von Hayek and Karl Popper were skeptical to the Vienna circle and their thinking. They were also skeptical to the historical school in Germany. They were afraid of a science that would lead to some sort of relativism. But on the other hand, they were afraid of a science that could have some sort of absolute claim on knowledge. So they tried to figure out how to balance a way of thinking science and truth. On the other hand, not fall into any of these traps. Hayek was very much against the idea of the unity of science. He thought it was the wrong idea to take the methods and ideas from natural science and transferred over to social science. This could lead to an engineering thinking in social matters, which is also a threat to society. Rather, the society has to be understood in its own way. And part of that is to understand that society is an evolutionary process. He illustrated this by saying that even if society is the result of human action, it is not necessarily the result of human design. Karl Popper was in his early thinking very much within the framework of the Vienna circle. But he was also critical. And he was particularly critical to the idea that you somehow could develop knowledge based on induction, based on observation only. The problem with Popper was that he heavily criticized Wittgenstein and opposed any idea of a philosophical movement. Therefore he rejected the land of his life. I had an interview with him in the 90s. Any form of inductivism. And here he went back to David Hume and David Hume's example of the swans. The solution to the problem that he proposed was falsification. If science is a process of falsification, it would over time rule out wrong ideas. So science can, in this way, become a system of growth of knowledge. So in the 1950s, in this questioning about what science is and should, again there was a parallel development in art and science. What starts to become more apparent both in science and in art is criticism and protests. One of the most visible expressions of this came from beat art. It was a huge reaction, a reaction to the atom bomb, to the dishwashing machine, to the car, to the constraints of the family, to religion, to the kitchen sink. It was a reaction to suburbia, to normality in a way. Did they have any rules, were there any sort of program? No, the rule was to have no rule. The rule was that you should experiment and try to find, and in the platform where you could just be you in a way. And just by looking at this picture here, I think it's quite evident how it was all about finding a space like this canvas where you could be yourself, where you could project your own inner emotions. The beat culture flourished in San Francisco in the Bay Area and became an element in the movement that included civil rights and later the hippies. The Golden Femmes of Skål. This context influenced the universities in the area. One person that would reflect this in the philosophy of science was an Austrian, Paul Feierabendt. Paul Feierabendt became a professor of philosophy of science at the UC Berkeley in 1958. He was an exponent of what we could call the sociology of scientific knowledge. And he remarked when he arrived here that the university was generally still a white male enterprise, and scientific discourse strongly influenced by that. This all changed in 1965 when the new education law came in the United States and brought whole new groups of students to the campus. The Governor-Leaves James Hood is the first of his race to become a University of Alabama student. This was an opportunity, Feierabendt remarked, for a new enlightenment. Another person that would set his mark on the understanding of science was Thomas Kuhn. Thomas Kuhn came to UC Berkeley in 1961 as a professor of the history of science. And the year after, in 1962, he published the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That would have a tremendous impact on the discourse on science. Kuhn argued against the idea of a uniform theory of science. He also argued that the history of science does not support the idea that science is constantly progressing. Rather, most science is done within normal science that establishes a set of procedures and rules that form a paradigm. Progress in science normally happens when somebody breaks with a paradigm and forms a new one. This is what he called scientific revolution. Tom really did change the conception that people had of the philosophy of science because prior to Kuhn, people thought the philosophy of science wasn't, at least in part, a normative discipline. You established standards of rationality and truth and scientific method was the purest expression of these standards of rationality and truth and that's why science was so successful. So Tom got rid of the idea that the philosophy of science was a normative discipline designed to articulate some ideal called scientific method. In the US, the Education Act of 1965 meant the end of all racial discrimination in higher education. He was followed into the registrar's office by Vivian Malone. Both the students are 20 years old. But also provided financial support for those who needed that in order to study. The number of university students in the US more or less doubled from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. The modern mass education university was born. It will move. It will spread. The academic year of 1964-65 marked the beginning of the free speech movement protest at UC Berkeley. And they can't understand why those people are put under curfew while they're tear gas. It started a student movement that would change the shape of the university worldwide as it inspired student strikes and uprising. Both in the US. We're going to go and face those pigs. In Germany. And in the spring of 1968, in France. Paris, 1968. Scene of student troubles which grew into an uprising that almost killed the world. And a call for freedom of speech. Also for students. And the democratization of the governing of the university. Paul Feierabern started to criticize what he thought was a form of self-centeredness in Western scientific thought. With the experience of all the new students with different background coming to the university. He envisioned the university as a place that could live from the rich reservoir of experiences that was gathered. But this would require a university that stepped down from its dry theorizing and came closer to practice. The Paris troubles were basically very much like student riots in other parts of the world. Whatever the political pretext, the practical result is the same. A fight with the police. The free speech movement was a turning point in American higher education because it put an end to the period of passivity that set in universities after the Second World War. People had been through the depression and the war and they wanted a sort of quiet, peaceful time and students mostly wanted to get enough training so they could go out and make money. But the actual free speech movement was a direct outgrowth of the civil rights movement. You cannot understand the FSM if you don't understand the Martin Luther King branch of the civil rights movement. It was peaceful protest, nonviolent protest. But the nonviolent, peaceful period of the student protest movement really only lasted about a year. But then what developed was a much more violent, much more illegal and really anti-intellectual element of the student protest movement. The student revolt in Germany started with a demonstration here at the Freie Universität in the summer of 1966. The whole student movement that demonstrated was partly inspired by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas had in his book from in 1966 the transformation of the public sphere argued that democratization in society should also include science. Science is part of society and should be within the swear of democratic thinking. Students used this to argue for democratization of the university and for criticizing the hierarchical structures of the university. These demonstrations then continued and escalated until in the 1960s, 68, there was a big revolt among the students here in Germany. In France, the students unrest in 1968 was integrated with a large philosophical movement and had political and social implications. French theory is a word which is used in usually in the English speaking academy to refer to French philosophy of from the 1970s onwards and how it has been used in particular in social sciences in the United States. In the social sciences department like gender studies, cultural studies, so on and so forth to characterize conceptually what all these people had slightly different projects had in common and what they had in common was a critique pretty much of many of the things which were popular or which were mainstream in French philosophy when they started to become philosophers themselves that is to say in the 1960s. So I would say there is a critique definitely in all of their thinkings. There's a critique of the subject as stable entity which would be able to describe objectively the world as it is. I think there is as well a critique of essences or the idea that you can just describe things or social phenomena for talking about social sciences as they are and that sits as would many positivists as many positivists would argue. Is there a political dimension to this sort of movement or this development of the thinking, do you think? Yeah, I think that's an excellent point in it. There is a strong political dimension to the works of all of these thinkers. France of the 1960s was a fairly conservative society with general de Gaulle in power so on and so forth and then you had May 68 which was almost a revolution happening and it changed everything culturally, politically so on and so forth and all these philosophers were strongly influenced by this some of them even participated in it. Guattari for instance was actively involved in it. So this made them think about ways to change radically or not radically society and this made them reflect on how social change happens so therefore they are so relevant to social sciences. Paul Feierabend saw the positivistic idea of one unified definition of science as a threat to the role science should play in society. He both argued that it's a wrong idea there is no historical support for that idea rather he said that in a free society science should play a more pluralistic role and he called for what he called anarchy in scientific research. The tension between the different positions in the philosophy of science led in the 1980s to what has been called the science wars. Was science simply a struggle between paradigms? Was there any way that the different positions could be reconciled? Now there's a very peculiar progression here and I think somebody ought to study it and it's this, there are three guys who all are related to each other, Popper, Kuhn, Feierabend and now in a sense Popper produced exactly what he most feared and what he most hated a kind of irrationalism but Popper unfortunately broke the connection between science and truth. Popper tried to show the scientist is not trying to tell us the truth, they're trying to get something that hasn't yet been falsified and you go tentatively with something and keep trying to falsify it until you falsify it and then you get something else. You're not trying to get at the truth. I don't know this is a fair interpretation of Popper but it's how Popper was read. Now then you go from there to Tom Kuhn and Kuhn says well people weren't following a methods of sublime rationality anyway. What they were doing was opportunistic often chaotic and the structure is not one of rational criteria applied relentlessly, it's one of movement from one scientific revolution to the next. You get a paradigm and then you try to overthrow that paradigm and you get a new paradigm. So the idea is now we get a further break between science and truth and then comes Paul, Tyrom and who is the limit of this crazy development and he says well the hell with the truth anyway. One argument that had the potential to understand the different paradigms beyond the conflicting opinions was to argue in terms of discourses that different positions in science were defined by different discursive practices. The problem is not that we are bad language users, the problem is rather the opposite that we are so good language users that we think that language is a tool that is possible to answer all kinds of questions. But suddenly in the science and philosophy we turns up again to questions that we cannot answer not because of the matter in question but because of the way we pose the question. And therefore Wittgenstein tried to show that this way of doing science and philosophy which think you can reach a final answer is based on a misunderstanding of language because if language was sort of being guided by one logical form then language will be able to make pictures of reality. What Wittgenstein shows is that there are so many forms of language, so many uses of language and so many contexts in which it's used. So it is impossible to make one theory about language and that is why he started to show by examples different forms of language use and he developed this model or this bio-making examples that are called language games. The linguistic turn in science was seen by many as a relativization of scientific discovery. However, some also saw it as a way to develop reason and rationality. Jürgen Habermas has been one of the strongest exponents of this thinking. Being German, he felt a particular responsibility for contributing to building a democratic, open and civilized society. The communicative turn that included the linguistic insights was for him an opportunity to position the public deliberation at the center of the democratic process. Habermas saw democracy as the only remedy against totalitarian tendencies both in science and in society. But he didn't regard the students' protest movement as democratic. Rather, he argued that democracy requires thorough discussion, deliberation and the possibility to sort out the best arguments. Habermas saw the development of coffee houses in Britain in the 18th century and the cafes at the continent in the 19th century as institutions that paved the way for democracy. They did so because these were places where people could come and bring their discussions, disagreements and conversations and it happened out in a public space. The communicative turn should, according to Habermas, also have impact on the organization of science. But where does that leave the current situation? Is there still a role for philosophy in science? See, I don't think of science as a uniform phenomenon. I think if you look at this university, there are lots of different people doing all sorts of different things. Now, what goes on in chemistry departments is not at all like what goes on in economics or sociology. I don't know if economics is a science or not, but I think they're making some disastrously mistaken assumptions in economics departments and I couldn't say that about chemistry because I don't know enough. But I think that we shouldn't assume there's a unified phenomenon called science. There are series of disparate sciences and over a period of a very long time, the natural sciences have developed a certain kind of a style of investigation that seems to be very productive by natural sciences. I mean things like physics and chemistry and biochemistry and biology, but that's quite different from such social sciences as economics and political science. If ethics is the first science and then we develop from that perspective, it's an integrated part of science. But on the other side, I don't know if that's possible, more theoretical. It's very complicated, theoretical. But on the other side, we need watchdogs that are aware of what's going on and what's going on in very advanced science today in technology, in physics, in health. Because I think there is a motor inside science that people that are doing science, they are so eager of doing more and more and more. They can see, oh, we have to solve this and this and this. So they are working very much inside this box, but we need someone outside that said, no, maybe we should stop here or maybe we should take it different. We have to be aware or we have to discuss this. I think, philosophically speaking, it's extremely interesting to try to combine post-structuralist approaches with other approaches. So phenomenology is one, definitely, but as well, for instance, critical theory. I think it would be very interesting, perhaps as well the tradition of Marxism and so on and so forth. And as well, more broadly, in particular, for social sciences, I think it's very, what is interesting for researchers is to understand what is going on in society now, social change. So I think now, researchers would need to use these theories to understand what is new now, because this is how you can be creative, I think, with the philosophy. If philosophy of science should be relevant and significant, it has to be updated. It has to be embedded and contextualized with what is going on in all sciences. The foundation of science and true knowledge and secure knowledge is only the end. One cannot reach in the long run. So science is basically hypothetical. And this is the tension between science and the public and politics. They are demanding what are the facts. So the limits and the prospects of sciences are at the end again. Well, the philosophers' questions tend to be very broad conceptual questions. So the question, what causes cancer, that's not a philosopher's question. That's a question for medical and biological sciences. But what is the nature of causation? That's a philosopher's question. That's the kind of question that worries me, because it's a conceptual question. We have seen through our journey that science has changed. But there is still something that makes science a particular activity in society. And certain problems and issues seems to have followed science through its history. In some sense, we are still struggling with some of the ancient philosophical questions. The influences of Aristotle are seen almost everywhere, both in the proponents of science, but also in the opponents of science, if you like, or the alternative ways of thinking science. So in a way, every aspect of modern conceptions of science are molded, in a way, in the forms that were laid out by Aristotle. I mean, both the people who are very oriented towards what you might call conventional empirical research, they are in a sort of stream of influence from Aristotle, but also the people who claim what's called experiential learning, if you like, are also inspired by different parts of Aristotle. We started this journey by asking the question, how can science be diverse and contribute to pluralism in society, and at the same time provide valid knowledge? What I think this journey has told us is that science has never been one thing. There has been a continuous discussion about what science is. And we have seen that science has been in constant change, and it will continue to change.