While there are affinities between Collingwood’s views and pragmatism, their shared considerations of the socio-historical dimensions of scientific knowledge have not been explored thus far. This chapter aims to fill this gap by comparing Collingwood’s views from An Essay on Metaphysics with pragmatist stances in contemporary philosophy of science by Philip Kitcher and Hasok Chang. In addition to similarities regarding the importance of the purposes of inquiry and framing knowledge in relation to a system of practice, there are disagreements between Collingwood and this strand of pragmatism regarding truth, propositional knowledge, and drawing out political implications. I argue that Collingwood’s approach can supply tools that can assist the pragmatist goals of improving scientific practice, mainly through analyzing cases from the history of science. This warrants mapping Collingwood’s place in twentieth-century philosophy as a precursor to recent attempts to overcome the clash between logical and historical approaches to scientific knowledge.

Chapter 2 covers the basics of research design.It is written so that students without any research design experience or coursework can learn common research designs to enable them to conduct statistical analyses in the text.Hypotheses development with variable construction (dependent and independent variables) are covered and applied to experimental and non-experimental designs.Survey methods including question construction and implementation of surveys is presented.

The chapter defends a particular philosophical engagement with medicine (i.e., normative philosophy of medicine) that is directly connected to the problem of determining the nature of philosophical inquiry. It starts with the discontinuity view, notably advocated by Pellegrino (1986; 2001), suggesting philosophy and science are discrete. Two primary arguments support the discontinuity view: science is empirical while philosophy is conceptual (Dummett 2010), and science is descriptive while philosophy is normative (Thomasson 2015; 2017). The chapter critically examines and ultimately rejects these claims, introducing the continuity view as an alternative, positing a close relationship between philosophical inquiry and science. Building on the works of Sober (2008), Kaiser (2019), and Kitcher (2011), a normative philosophy of science approach is proposed, distinguishing three levels of analysis (aims, nature, and key concepts), which mirror the types of questions posed by modern medical challenges. The chapter concludes by endorsing philosophy of medicine as a legitimate subdiscipline of philosophy of science, and arguing for the comprehensive value of this approach over conventional perspectives.

In this chapter, a case is made for the inclusion of computational approaches to linguistics within the theoretical fold. Computational models aimed at application are a special case of predictive models. The status quo in the philosophy of linguistics is that explanation is scientifically prior to prediction. This is a mistake. Once corrected, the theoretical place of prediction is restored and, with it, computational models of language. The chapter first describes the history behind the emergence of explanation over prediction views in the general philosophy of science. It’s then suggested that this post-positivist intellectual milieu influenced the rejection of computational linguistics in the philosophy of theoretical linguistics. A case study of the predictive power already embedded in contemporary linguistic theory is presented through some work on negative polarity items. The discussion moves to the competence–performance divide informed by the so-called Galilean style in linguistics that retains the explanatory over prediction ideal. In the final sections of the chapter, continuous methods, such as probabilistic linguistics, are used to showcase the explanatory and predictive possibilities of nondiscrete approaches, before a discussion of the contemporary field of deep learning in natural language processing (NLP), where these predictive possibilities are further amplified.

This chapter discusses the application of the logic to actual theories. In particular, it discusses the use of this relevant logic to make inferences about classical theories. It also examines the internal structure of theories and the nature of the conditionals in those theories. At the end of the chapter, some suggestions are made about generalizing the semantical theory of the book to treat the application of background scientific theories to other theories and some consequences for scientific confirmation.

The propositions of a scientific theory are connected with empirical states of affairs. Determining how theoretical propositions are connected with empirical facts, what Carnap called the “empirical significance” of a theory, is a complex affair. Carnap’s account of the relationship between theoretical frameworks and methods of observation has come in for plentiful criticism, alleging that Carnap’s theory of science does not allow for a sophisticated entwinement of theory and observation, instead favoring heavy formalism and a brittle reductionism. I present evidence that Carnap’s account of the distinction between theoretical and observation languages is more flexible than it is usually depicted to be and is motivated by his philosophy of science. In particular, in his mature work Carnap argues that the "specific calculus" of a scientific theory, including mathematical structure and physical laws, are included in the axiomatic foundations and linguistic framework of that theory. Carnap’s account of language thus turns out to be deeply entangled with his philosophy of science, and one cannot be understood independently of the other.

What a scientific community holds to be its core beliefs change over time. Gilbert and Weatherall and Gilbert argue that a community’s core beliefs should be understood as a collective belief formed by a joint commitment and that these core group beliefs are difficult to change as it would require a new joint commitment to be formed. This chapter argues that the primary normative constraints on group belief revision are the weight of the evidence being considered by the group, and not the normative constraints that arise from joint commitments. This chapter sketches a positive view of how epistemic groups may respond to new evidence by looking to Kuhn’s own account of how crises arise and are resolved in science.

The influence of Kuhn’s Structure has been remarkably wide-ranging. The author was honored by the History of Science Society, the Philosophy of Science Association, and the Society for the Social Studies of Science, three very different academic societies. The chapter reviews the impact of Structure and the changing perceptions of its significance, one discipline at a time. It focuses on book reviews of Structure, some written soon after the book was first published, and others written as much as fifty years after its publication, in response to the publication of the fourth edition. It also discusses articles that reflect on the impact of the book and eulogies or appreciations of Kuhn marking his death in 1996.

This chapter integrates the notion of “theory” into the causal-model framework that we use in the book. We describe an approach in which theoretical claims are thought of as model justifications within a hierarchy of causal models. The approach has implications for the consistency of inferences across models and for assessing when and how theory is useful for strengthening causal claims.

John Gould’s father was a gardener. A very, very good one – good enough to be head of the Royal Gardens at Windsor. John apprenticed, too, becoming a gardener in his own right at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, in 1825. As good as he was at flowers and trees, birds became young John Gould’s true passion early in life. Like John Edmonstone, John Gould (1804–1881) adopted Charles Waterton’s preservation techniques that kept taxidermied bird feathers crisp and vibrant for decades (some still exist in museums today), and he began to employ the technique to make extra cash. He sold preserved birds and their eggs to fancy Eton schoolboys near his father’s work. His collecting side-hustle soon landed him a professional post: curator and preserver of the new Zoological Society of London. They paid him £100 a year, a respectable sum for an uneducated son of a gardener, though not enough to make him Charles Darwin’s social equal (Darwin initially received a £400 annual allowance from his father plus £10,000 as a wedding present).

Darwin claimed that On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was only an “abstract” of that much longer book he had begun to write in 1856, after his irreverent meeting with J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and T. V. Wollaston, and Lyell’s exasperated encouragement in May. But he never completed that larger book. Instead, he worked on plants and pigeons and collected information through surveys from other naturalists and professional specimen hunters like Alfred Russel Wallace for the better part of a decade.

For all their scientific prowess and public renown, there is no comparable Lyell-ism, Faraday-ism, Einstein-ism, Curie-ism, Hawking-ism, or deGrasse-Tyson-ism. So, there must be something even more powerful than scientific ideas alone caught in the net of this ism attached to Darwin. And whatever the term meant, it’s fair to say that Darwinism frightened Bryan.

Historian Everett Mendelsohn was intrigued. In the middle of writing a review of an annual survey of academic publications in the History of Science, he marveled that an article in that volume contained almost 40 pages’ worth of references to works on Darwin published in just the years between 1959 and 1963. Almost 200 works published in a handful of years – no single figure in the history of science commanded such an impressive academic following. Yet Mendelsohn noted that, paradoxically, no one had written a proper biography of Darwin by 1965. Oh sure, there was commentary. Lots of commentary. But so many of the authors were retired biologists who had a tendency toward hagiography or, the opposite, with axes to grind.

Meeting the “White Raja of Sarawak” in Singapore in 1853 had been a stroke of luck. Honestly, it could have been a major turning point in what had been an unlucky career so far for 30-year-old collector Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) (Figure 4.1). But the steep, rocky, sweaty climb up Borneo’s Mt. Serembu (also known as Bung Moan or Bukit Peninjau) in the last week of December 1855 wasn’t exactly what Wallace expected. His eyeglasses fogged in the humidity. Bamboo taller than buildings crowded the narrow path. Near the top, the rainforest finally parted. But it revealed neither a temple nor some sort of massive colonial complex with all the trappings of empire worthy of a “raja.” Instead, there leaned a modest, very un-colonial-ruler-like white cabin. When he saw it, Wallace literally called it “rude.”

Charles Darwin spent nearly the whole of his writing career attempting to convince his colleagues, the general public, and, by extension, you and me, that change occurs gradually. Tiny slivers of difference accumulate over time like grains of sand in a vast hourglass. Change happens, in other words. It’s painfully slow, but it’s inevitable. By implication, two organisms that look different enough to us to be classified as separate species share, many tens of thousands or even millions of generations back, the same ancestors. (Inbreeding means we don’t even need to go back quite that many generations to demonstrate overlap, but you get the point.) But change that gradual means, as Darwin himself well recognized, that looking for “missing links” would be a pretty silly errand. Differences between one generation and the next look to our eyes just like common variation. It’s one grain falling from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. You can’t perceive the change. You would have to go back in time to find the very first individuals who possessed a particular trait – bat-like wings, say, or human-ish hands – and then, turning to their parents, you would see something almost identical.

Transmutation. “Evolutio,” if you wanted to be fancy and Italian about it. Whatever you want to call it, the grand unrolling of one type into another, connecting all living things into a single tree of life was all the rage among the society gentlemen. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, an influential Scottish judge in the 1700s, had said shocking things about it. Monboddo’s metaphysics separated humans from brutes by only the thinnest slice of cognition. And imagine how he scandalized the chattering classes when, according to rumor anyway, he suggested perhaps tails even lingered, dangling from the spinal cords of the underdeveloped. They called him an “eccentric,” a fusty, argumentative judge and a voracious reader. Perhaps too learned – genius and madness, you know.