Integrated HPS? Formal versus historical approaches to philosophy of science

The project of integrated HPS (‘integrated history and philosophy of science’) has occupied philosophers of science in one form or another since at least the 1960s. Yet, despite this substantial interest in bringing together philosophical and historical reflections on the nature of science, history of science and formal philosophy of science remain as divided as ever. In this paper, I will argue that the continuing separation between historical and formal philosophy of science is ill-founded. I will argue for this in both abstract and concrete terms. At the abstract level, I reconstruct two possible arguments for the incompatibility of historical and formal philosophy of science and argue that they are both wanting. At the concrete level, I discuss how historical and formal philosophy of science have been brought together in practice, namely: in the form of a largely forgotten research tradition that I will refer to here as the study of formalized macro-units. After a brief exposition, I argue that this research tradition has been unduly overlooked by historically minded philosophers of science. Bringing together these observations, I argue that the divide between historical and formal philosophy of science is not grounded in any substantive arguments, but can be primarily attributed to disciplinary happenstance.

WHAT MACHINE PHILOSOPHY ISN’T

This short paper clears up three misunderstandings about machine philosophy. First, machine philosophy does not demand computational or formal philosophy. Instead, it only calls for a grounding of philosophical theorising in statistical learning, not that philosophy must proceed by means of statistical learning. Second, machine philosophy does not entail the collapse of metaphysics. In fact, it doesn’t affect metaphysics more than any other philosophical field. Third, while machine philosophy potentially entails the illegitimacy of widely discussed philosophical problems, this consideration isn’t a worry for machine philosophy.

Formal Philosophy of Science: Statement and Set-theoretic Approaches

The so-called received view of scientific theory, initially proposed by logical positivists, represented scientific theory as a set of statements of some formal language, ordered by syntactic relation of deductive derivability. By late 1960s this strategy had met with severe criticism which called into question the effectiveness of formal methods in philosophy of science. The set-theoretic (semantic) approach in formal philosophy of science, which can be treated as natural development of received view, is based on the concept of model in Tarski’s sense and is capable of neutralizing the most part of these objections.

What Is Formal Philosophy?

The paper focuses on the review of current literature on formal philosophy. Special attention is paid to the review of the book «Introduction to Formal Philosophy» [Hansson, Hendricks, 2018]. The book is a consistent introduction to the problems of formal philosophy, a research tradition that relies on the precise mathematical tools in order to study traditional philosophical problems. The methods of formal philosophy are successfully applied not only to the problems of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of language but also relevant for the problems of ethics, axiology and social philosophy. The book demonstrates that it is not correct to identify formal philosophy with another area of study – philosophical logic, since formal philosophy uses not only logical methods of analysis, but also uses the tools of game theory, decision theory, probability theory, Bayesian statistics, and other theories. Although the book has a propaedeutic character, it also contains some open problems. These problems include the aggregation of the opinions of the group under the condition of a conflicting base of premises in the theory of public choice, there are still open problems in the interpretation of Arrow’s impossibility theorem and others. Certainly, formalization in itself is not a general solution to the particular philosophical problem, but only a tool that allows to formulate a problem in a more rigorous and precise way, which sometimes allows to reveal some unexpected consequences, some implicit contradictions and new solutions. Despite the importance of the concept of coherence in ethics, decision theory, philosophy of law, Bayesian epistemology, philosophy of science, the existing formalizations of the concept of coherence are highly specialized for epistemology, researchers recognize the lack of the relevant explanatory models. Overall, the book is an excellent introduction in to the field of formal philosophy, which provides a general overview of different aspects of formal philosophy and the opportunity to study particular research topics by means of an extensive bibliography accompanying each of the chapters.

PHILOSOPHICAL MEANINGS OF TRADITIONAL CUISINE RENDANG MINANGKABAU AS A CULTURAL HERITAGE OF INDONESIA

This research is related to the philosophical meanings of traditional cuisine Rendang Minangkabau as a cultural heritage of Indonesia. The research is conducted by means qualitative descriptive. The theory used is taken from the philosophy. Philosophy is the mother of all the sciences that have material objects and formal objects, objects the material is the mind while the object formal philosophy of science is truth, goodness and beauty in a manner dialogue. (Syafiie, 2010). This study explained the meanings of the philosophy in Rendang Minangkabau cuisine. Rendang is revered in Minangkabau culture as an embodiment of the philosophy of musyawarah, discussion and consultation with elders. The results show there are four meanings in each of the ingredients Rendang Minangkabau: Meat (dagiang) symbolizes Niniak Mamak (paman) and Bundo Kanduang (ibu) refers to the traditional clan leaders (respect for the parents). The coconut milk (karambia) symbolizes the Cadiak Pandai refers to the intellectuals (learning). The chilli (lado) symbolizes Alim Ulama refers to the religious leaders (uplifting Islamic laws). The spice mixture (pemasak) symbolizes the rest of Minangkabau society refers to the each individual (unity). This philosophy was indeed made to maintain the integrity of the Minang community in West Sumatra and also as a cultural heritage of Indonesia.