Philosophy of Economics

Although there are no doubts regarding the impact of economics in society and politics, doubts regarding its epistemological status endure. Does economics provide us with bona fide empirical theories? Are its mathematical models on a par with those of the hard sciences, or is its scientific character exaggerated? This chapter focuses on the key problem of the philosophy of economics: the reconciliation of its claim to empirical significance with what often appears as a non-empirical methodology, favoring deduction from a priori principles and showing little sensitivity to refutation by observation and experiment. Several attempts at answering this problem are considered, both in the Millian tradition and following neo-positivist approaches. Finally, the empirical status of the discipline is put in perspective with its recent extension to new fields of inquiry, such as behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, where experiments seem to be part of the core methodology.

Scientific Change

How should we think of the dynamics of science? What are the relationships between an earlier theory and the theory that has superseded it? This chapter introduces the heated debates on the nature of scientific change, at the intersection of philosophy of science and history of science, and their bearing on the more general question of the rationality of the scientific enterprise. It focuses on the issue of the continuity or discontinuity of scientific change and the various versions of the incommensurability thesis one may uphold. Historicist views are balanced against nagging questions regarding scientific progress (Is there such a thing? If so, how should it be defined?), the causes of scientific change (Are they to be found within scientific method itself?), and its necessity (Is the history of scientific developments an argument in favor of realism, or could we have had entirely different sciences?).

Scientific Explanation

One of the major aims of science, it is commonly held, is to provide explanations. Philosophers of science have tried to understand what it is to provide a scientific explanation, what distinguishes good from bad explanations, and why explanations are valuable. This chapter goes through the main answers that have been elaborated in the last decades. It starts with a detailed discussion of the famous deductive-nomological (DN) model of explanation proposed by Hempel and Oppenheim. Then, the two main rivals to the DN model, the causal theory and the unificationist theory, are introduced and discussed. Some other contemporary approaches are sketched out in the closing section.

Metaphysics of Science as Naturalized Metaphysics

This chapter outlines a metaphysics of science in the sense of a naturalized metaphysics. It considers in the first place the interplay of physics and metaphysics in Newtonian mechanics, then goes into the issues for the metaphysics of time that relativity physics raises, shows that what one considers as the referent of quantum theory depends on metaphysical considerations, and finally explains how the stance that one takes with respect to objective modality and laws of nature shapes the options that are available for an ontology of quantum physics. In that way, this chapter seeks to make a case for a natural philosophy that treats physics and metaphysics as inseparable in the enquiry into the constitution of the world, there being neither a neo-positivist way of deducing metaphysics from the formalisms of physical theories, nor a neo-rationalist realm of investigation for metaphysics that is independent of physics.

Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Cognitive science, which appears as an articulated group of research programs whose aim is to constitute a science of the mind, raises a number of issues from the point of view of philosophy of science. This chapter will sample the field by dealing with two main topics. The first one is the hypothesis of a modular architecture of the mind, which has occupied cognitive science since more than 30 years. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the foundations and limits of cognitive science, dealing notably with the functionalist framework (in particular, the computational theory of the mind) and the so-called language of thought hypothesis. We conclude by saying a few words about the division of labor among philosophers who are interested in cognition.

Philosophy of Social Sciences

This chapter addresses problems and themes in the social sciences. Social sciences are understood specifically as sciences that have (or should have) the following minimal characteristics: their object of study is human behavior and they follow a certain number of methodological principles, including a marked effort towards analytical clarity; the investigation of causal explanations through the formulation of causal laws or at least causal mechanisms; and a subscription to a form of methodological individualism, if an amended one, which puts at the heart of social science the notion of choice. We discuss three principal themes. The first raises the question of the status of laws in the social sciences and, in particular, that of “consequence laws,” otherwise known as functionalist explanations. The second theme takes up methodological individualism, as compared to holistic approaches. The last theme concerns hypotheses of rationality and self-interested motivations, which increasingly figure in social scientific explanations.

Philosophy of Logic

Logic may be characterized as the science aiming at revealing the deep logical structure of statements and, correlatively, at evaluating the arguments involving such statements. This chapter focuses on the content of different categories of expression of ordinary language, a question that arises typically in the analysis of singular terms and propositional attitudes. It starts from the paradoxes of the “indiscernibility of identicals” and goes through two main solutions to these paradoxes: a “logic of sense and denotation” (à la Frege) and a “logic of meaning” (à la Russell). A logic halfway between the two is also discussed. In the closing section, a comparative appraisal of these solutions is proposed.

Philosophy of Linguistics

This chapter is an enquiry into the goals and methods of linguistics, with the aim of understanding both the specifics of the discipline and the relationships between linguists’ take on the methodology of their field and general principles of philosophy of science. The first part highlights linguistics as an inquiry into language, as opposed to languages. The second part describes the shift from structural linguistics to generative grammar as a paradigm shift, involving major changes in both what is studied and how it is studied. The next section focuses on the empirical import of contemporary linguistics, discussing standards of explanation and prediction, as well as confirmation and refutation of linguistic hypotheses. The last part introduces linguistic universals, what they are and how they may be identified and explained, thus making explicit the connection with the goal of understanding not only the variety of languages but the faculty of language.

Philosophy of Medicine

This chapter views philosophy of medicine as a domain within philosophy of science as opposed to a province of bioethics. Thus, it first deals with the philosophical analysis of health, disease, and illness concepts and with the scientific nature of medicine. Relative to the second theme, it addresses questions relative to the causes and explanations of disease and the status of theories in biomedical science. A central concern here is the status and nature of proof in medicine and the relationship between theory and practice at the heart of evidence-based medicine. Finally, the chapter focuses on the specific problems raised by causal analysis and experimentation in medicine and on the nature of clinical reasoning.

Philosophy of Physics

Philosophical reflections on physics and its theories have been shaping the agenda of general philosophy of science, including issues such as the nature of scientific theories, the meaning of scientific terms, and scientific modeling. But physics is also well worth being considered a special science of its own, whose methods and tools raised specific questions for philosophers of science: this is the approach followed in this chapter, which has as its main thread the role of mathematics in physical theories. It tackles classical issues concerning measurement and determinism and long-standing controversies in the philosophy of statistical mechanics (how may the reversible laws of mechanics account for the irreversible principles of thermodynamics?) and in the philosophy of quantum physics (does quantum mechanics provide us a with a complete description of quantum phenomena?). It also addresses emerging issues in the field, such as computer simulations and their role between theory and observation.