Before starting on this paper, you may want to visit my other page on how to write a better philosophy paper.

These are the topics that I will make available to you for the two papers, due May 5th and June 10th IN CLASS. There will be a deduction from your grade for any unexcused lateness. That penalty will be one step on the grade scale (e.g. from a B+ down to a B, etc.) for every day it is late and I am not contacted with a good reason for its being late.

Now that all the fire and brimstone has been dispensed, try to enjoy working on this paper. As I said in class, you can choose another topic of your own design, so long as you sit down and discuss it with me and then let me write the question you are to answer. You have plenty of time to write the paper, so you would be well advised to write a draft well in advance, let it sit for a while, talk to me, talk to your classmates, rewrite the parts you don't like, etc. The idea is to figure out the important stuff and polish your presentation of it a bit. You have around 2500-3000 words, or around 8-10 pages. Don't go too far over the word count, because in doing so, you are violating the spirit of the assignment in a way that will lead me to grade with much higher expectations. Just think about the topic, read your notes, read some of the books on reserve, and make the point as clear as possible for your idealized audience (who just happen to have red pens in their hands).

Paper One - Due May 5

1. Many philosophers have seen Kuhn's work as an endorsement of a certain kind of relativism or radical historicism in the philosophy of science, wherein any claim or theory that we wished to make would be true only relative to the paradigm in which it was uttered. Kuhn himself has said that this is a misreading of his views. What does Kuhn say about paradigms and how might they be defend against such charges?

2. In "To Save the Phenomena", Van Fraassen suggests that scientific realism is a view we should not endorse because we can present a more plausible theory that only calls upon the notion of "empirical adequacy." What is this notion, what reasons can be offered in support of such an anti-realist approach, and does Van Fraassen's argument succeed?

3.Hempel and the logical positivists saw theories as explanatory in virtue of certain properties of their laws. That is, they saw laws as standing in a very specific sort of relation to those claims that were to be explained. Make it clear just what this relation was supposed to be and how it was supposed to flow from their general empiricism. What objections might someone who shares their empiricism make to this approach? (Note: this is not a request for a recitation of the standard objections to Hempel's D-N model, and such a recitation will not fulfill the assignment.)

4. It has been said that Popper's doctrine of falsifiability fails because the doctrine itself is not subject to falsification by empirical investigation, and thus cannot be accepted as a guiding principle. (This is in much the same vein as rejections of the positivist's verification principle on the grounds that it was not itself verifiable.) What could be said in defense of Popper's view, or as a rehabilitation of the doctrine?

Second Paper - Due June 10

1. Hacking suggests that our emphasis on the theoretical level and the interpretation of what it is for a scientific theory to be true of the world has led us away from the proper focus of philosophical inquiry, namely the way in which real scientists practice their investigations of the world and how they use laws and posits of unobservable entities in that process. He suggests that most scientists are realists about entities, but not realists about theories. Thus, scientists hold that electrons are real even if they do not have much confidence in systematic claims about what sorts of things they are or how they are related to other sorts of entities. Critics will object that at the very least, consideration of general theories helps guide our views about the reality of entities and the experiments that Hacking talks about. Consider this argument and Hacking's response to it.

2. Kitcher argues against the reduction of classical genetics to molecular genetics, asserting instead that there must be a more subtle treatment of the relation between these two theories to account for the "almost universal idea that molecular biology has done something important for classical genetics." (Boyd, Gasper and Trout, pg. 554) Explain just what Kitcher means by reductionism, just why he think the relation between classical and molecular genetics does not fit this mold and argue whether or not he is correct in his diagnosis of the situation.

3. Explain Carnap's commitment to a reductionist program in the sciences.  What motivates it and how does he present it?  Consider these arguments for reductionism and make the most compelling case for it that you can.  Do these arguments succeed (i.e. should we all be reductionists?)?

4. Some have been critical of arguments like those offered by Jerry Fodor in "Special Sciences".  Critics like Paul Churchland have argued that the special status of those sciences is inherently problematic and indicates a failure to look at cognition in a scientific fashion.  Instead, we should simply eliminate from our theory those entities that cannot be reduced or assimilated into more "basic" theories like neurobiology and neurochemistry.  (Hence, this view is sometimes called "eliminativism".)  We have done this with other entities in the past, like phlogiston and many alchemical properties.  Consider Churchland's arguments against Fodor on these points and make the case for one of these approaches over the other.
(NB: In taking on this topic, you MUST read Churchland's "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes", which is included in the Boyd anthology.)