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Top comments that mention products on r/PhilosophyofScience:

u/BreSput · 2 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

Curd and Cover is pretty much standard undergraduate textbook for philosophy of science courses. It has a ton of very good articles and a ton of very well put together commentary on each article. If you are interested in getting into the philosophy of science it is literally your best choice.

The Rosenberg and this book, which I have read and would definitely recommend, are very good supplements to help you understand the general themes in the philosophy of science, but the Curd and Cover is your best bet. If you have to choose one choose that one. It it such a good compilation of the most important essays in the philosophy of science.

Yeah. Don't know how much harder I can stress: Curd and Cover is great.

>This second one is from what seems like a very well respected and legit publishing company that has a gigantic list of books, which all seem excellent after reading descriptions:

You'd be surprised how little this means in academia, especially philosophy. Essentially if you have a good cv and can write a coherent statement of purpose you can get a book published, probably even on a big name academic publisher. Books aren't referee'd the way articles are, and if you get a book deal the chances of them pulling the plug is very small (you'd have to fuck up big). Articles by contrast have to go through a rigorous process of peer review, and only the best (hopefully) make it to the pages of a journal. Curd and Cover is a compilation of the best articles in the philosophy of science.

u/[deleted] · 9 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

I was just asked this the other day by an incoming graduate student. It's really hard -- textbooks are a real hassle. For history, the best book I know, though it's limited in scope, is David Lindberg's The Beginnings of Western Science. It runs up through 1450. After that, you have trouble -- you have to start looking at individual figures or periods. H.F. Cohen's The Scientific Revolution is nice for its period. Then you get really fragmented. The Cambridge Studies in the History of Science series (1 2 3) is really nice for what it covers, if its topics interest you.

For PoS, again, textbooks are hard. I like the Curd and Cover anthology, it's got lots of primary readings with good explanatory material (dt already recommended that one, I see -- I didn't realize it because I've never referred to it by title...). Rosenberg's Routledge Introduction also seems pretty good, though I should warn that I've never read it, I'm going on brief skims and what I know of the author's other stuff (which is great).

Good luck! You can always come back here to ask questions!

u/ForScale · 2 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

I'm quite enjoying it! And, full disclosure, I'm a bit of an ADD type... I don't stay focused on one thing for too long. I like to get to the point of something in as few steps as possible. The book really plays in to that! It's a collection of about 150 1-4 page little essays from prominent thinkers. They all were simply asked "What is your favorite deep, beautiful, elegant theory?"

It comes from edge.org.

Edge puts out a new one every year (at least I think that's the frequency...).

Last year's was a great read as well! Same format as this year's, just a different question.

u/Themoopanator123 · 11 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

As for your main question, Theory and Reality by Peter Godfrey-Smith is definitely something you want to read. Godfrey-Smith's general work focuses on philosophy of biology as a subset of philosophy of science which may be particularly interesting to you. Theory and Reality itself deals with a wide range of issues. From epistemic, to methodological, to historical, to sociological. The only stuff it doesn't really touch on are the metaphysical issues in philosophy of science. But even if that's what you're looking for, the book's content will be indispensable to you in developing a baseline knowledge about philosophy of science which you can bring to the table when reading more specific literature that you're interested in. It's broad approach is also just a good way to discover said interests.

As for your bonus question, the answer really turns somewhat on what you mean by "testable" but especially on what you mean by "useless". Useless in terms of what? Forming justified beliefs? Or for instrumental applications? Or something else?

Given this uncertainty, two positions come to mind: verificationism about meaning and Popper's falsificationism. But I might be able to give you something better if you could answer my above questions.

Hope that's helpful!

u/incredulitor · 4 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

The social branch of network science studies this kind of thing and would have some good uses for the data set, I'm sure.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=social+contact+network&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=

http://barabasilab.com/pubs-socialnets.php

http://barabasilab.com/pubs-humandynamics.php

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/pubs.html

With respect to looking for happiness, you might look for studies on sentiment analysis and the spreading of emotion in social networks. I know people have looked at how positive and negative emotion traverses the graph of twitter followers and retweets.

There's a small lifetime's worth of reading in those links. If you want a fairly comprehensive introduction that balances well between theory and examples, check out Mark Newman's book.

u/philb0t5000 · 9 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

I highly recommend "Theory and Reality" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Another great text is "What is This Thing Called Science?" by A.F. Chalmers. As a book with primary readings my favorite thus far is "Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues" edited by Martin Curd and J.A. Cover. The Curd & Cover book is a tad expensive, but it is worth every penny. There are about 50 primary texts with commentary, and introductions to each main section.

Some other books that may be of help and/or of interest after a basic foundation is set are: "Philosophy of Biology" by Elliot Sober; "Quantum Reality" by Nick Herbert; "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn; "Sex and Death" by Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths; "Progress and It's Problems" by Larry Laudan; "The Empirical Stance" by Bas C. Van Fraassen; and "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy" by Hans Reichenbach. I welcome others to suggest more or to critique the ones I chose to highlight as too difficult or not worth the time.

Edit: Formatting and a comma.

u/Parmeniscus · 2 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

Daniel Dennett's entire book on free will is a discussion of what free will is, why it can exist in a materialistic and natural world, and the implications of defining free-will out of existence - which has been done on one side by theologians who claim free-will must be supernatural, and on the other by naive neuroscientists who claim free will is an illusion.

u/illogician · 2 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

I sometimes find it helpful to draw a mental line between the actual research on the one hand, and the researchers interpretations of their results on the other. One can often find many possible interpretations of a given experiment.

>What Im wondering about is if humans having little or no control over our actions is the standpoint scientists are generally taking now that a lot of new research exists to support it.

I can't comment as to whether the majority of neuroscientists would endorse this view, but I can see another interpretation that jibes well with the research I've read: we do have control over a number of factors and situations (e.g. ducking when somebody throws something at you shows control), but control amounts to a mishmash of both conscious and unconscious factors. Where others see research showing that we don't have control, I see research showing that conscious awareness has a more limited scope than was previously believed. I would not call conscious awareness an "illusion" as such, because clearly we have awareness, but I think we do have illusions about the scope of that awareness and we underestimate the importance and power of unconscious processes.

>I could add that the paper Im writing is on the emergence of Descartes dualistic theory and how it is proven or disproven in todays scientific and religious world.

You might check out Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error.

u/il_padrino_77 · 3 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

I think you should take a read of this book. I read it and it gives a great picture on topics close to what you brought up here. Antonio Damasio did a great job, although it can get a bit heavy on the technical stuff near the end.

u/ThMogget · 3 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

Here's a twofer ya. The reason one should believe in theories is that theories have explanatory power. Most of the philosophical razors you have heard of are an attempt to get at good explanations.

A great book about explanatory power is The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch, and his 'hard to vary' razor is keener than Occam's.

u/sixbillionthsheep · 5 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

Theory and Reality : An Introduction to Philosophy of Science by Peter Godfrey-Smith at Harvard. Small and readable. Recommended by PoS academics I have met. PGS is a youngish guy and writes in an understandable fashion. Here is his Harvard website. Awesome reference in my view. Covers all the main issues. Podcast with him about PoS at Philosophy Talk.

u/mirh · 7 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

This is my favorite book.

And why studying philosophy of science? Because science is the way you know things (or perhaps less rudely it's the best practice to do so)

And knowing things, how to say.. it is the key to everything? There's so much to it that any example would seem reductive.

u/drunkentune · 4 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

If you want a good introductory text and have money to burn, check out Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues.

u/nogre · 1 pointr/PhilosophyofScience

A book on this subject is "House of Cards" by Robyn Dawes (1996). From an editorial on the Amazon page:

>Dawes (social and decision sciences, Carnegie Mellon Univ.) presents a strong argument, based on empirical research, that psychotherapy is largely a shill game. He argues that while studies have shown that empathetic therapy is often helpful to people in emotional distress, there is no evidence that licensed psychologists or psychiatrists are any better at performing therapy than minimally trained laypeople. Nor are psychologists or psychiatrists any better at predicting future behavior than the average person--a disturbing conclusion when one contemplates the influence such "experts" have on the U.S. judicial system. While other books have criticized the psychologizing of our society, none has been so sweeping or so convincingly argued. This book raises such important societal issues that all academic and public libraries have a duty to make a permanent place for it on their shelves.

u/coocookuhchoo · 1 pointr/PhilosophyofScience

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn


Wikipedia article

Amazon

u/fubuvsfitch · -1 pointsr/PhilosophyofScience

Popper's.

The same goes for astrology. It was never science. It was never a scientific theory. Popper wrote whole essays on why astrology is not and never was a science.

This is where I got most of my understanding of the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393971759