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- Verified Buyer
Contemporary philosophers at their best, in my view, bring the accumulated wisdom of age-old debates to bear on questions of the day. In philosophy of science, I consider Miriam Solomon to be thinker number one in a field that has burned with bright stars in the late 20th century and early 21st. This book is her first, pulling together more than a decade of research and theoretical refinement. She seeks to account for how science has advanced despite human biases, especially sociological biases. And she provides advice targeted at scientific community agents, such as philanthropic grantmakers, in hopes they will make wise decisions shaping the scientific community. I recommend it with the highest accolades.Among social philosophers of science (feminists, social democrats, social constructionists), Solomon is the most pragmatic. And among philosophical pragmatists (Solomon trained at Harvard under ultra-empirical pragmatist WV Quine), Solomon is one of the most naturalistic. By this I mean, she looks to turn science on itself, to learn empirically what has made science work in the past and what's made it break down. Also among pragmatists, Solomon is the most *social*. By this I mean, she draws heavily on the social fields of sociology and history of science -- in addition to more individualistic psychology and evolutionary biology -- in order to understand the nature of science in human experience.Solomon also is an especially *social* epistemologist in that she locates solutions at the level of scientific communities. Here she contrasts with the standard advice that philosophers have given to scientists for centuries. Tradition advises that we pay attention to individual methods for purifying the mind. Solomon does not think individuals adequately correct for irrelevant bias in scientific inquiry. Bias is part of human nature. We should not expect or rely on individual scientists acting all out line with human nature. We should find ways to shape the communities of research in which individual scientists work, where they vie for resources to pursue their investigations, present their findings, and justify their claims.Solomon sees science as inextricably social and prone to attract irrelevant biases and distortions of resource allocation for theory development. However unlike many sociologists of science, Solomon does not conclude from the inevitability of wayward bias that science is phony or doomed. Instead, Solomon preserves aims for science that emerge in tact, despite politics and other biases on knowledge.Solomon's scientific aims are instrumentalist and twofold: 1.) truth with a small "t" subject to empirical revision; and 2.) engineering-type wins, which sometimes may be described and explained in theoretical truths, and sometimes not. (It is possible to know *how* but not know *that* and not know *why*.) Both of these, she sometimes refers to as "empirical success." One broad type of empirical success can be linguistic, as in scientific communication and theory. Another broad type of empirical success can be a manipulative procedure in nature. This latter variant, a manipulative kind of empirical success, draws science closer to engineering. But Solomon does not exactly conflate science and engineering. I would say, she presumes a distinction on novelty. Solomon seems to see science in the generation of novelty, while engineering tends to extend and repeat, manipulating nature by deploying know-how that already is understood -- refining and tweaking. This distinction may be soft, but it sort of works for me in most of the examples that have crossed my mind.Solomon does not say to banish bias, believing that unrealistic. Instead, she looks for patterns to discover which distributions of bias appear tolerable and unlikely to obstruct scientific advancement, and which distributions of bias are diversionary and threaten to squelch science. In Social Empiricism, she proposes an elaborate -- and clear -- theory of how to discern benign bias versus distorting bias after examining historical case studies in depth -- from evolutionary genetics to geological plate tectonics to treatment of peptic ulcers. She recommends ways to manage resources of money, research time, and researcher attention, within a community -- such as to create tolerable conditions of bias under which knowledge is best likely to progress. Her ideal site of normative action is not the individual scientist, whose agency at the community level is limited, but rather scientific policy makers, especially grant makers.Broadly, Solomon fits into a stream of philosophers of science since Thomas Kuhn's 1962 publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition. Philosophers have sought to explain when scientific consensus is appropriate and when dissent is needed to shake up the established order and let new theories emerge. Solomon joins other naturalists in presuming that this is handled by inquiring backwards. When has consensus been appropriate in a scientific community? And when not?Unlike some other post-Kuhnians, such as Larry Laudan (who Solomon draws closely on) and others, Solomon sees tension mounting on theories in a worldly sense, not purely a logical matter of straightening out our arguments and rationalizations. In Solomon's view, there is a world out there beyond the membrane of scientific theory. As Donna Haraway might say, there is a material world and it's loud. It pushes back and almost talks back. Solomon hangs onto that, in full recognition of human bias in reckoning the world's feedback on scientific theories.Last but not least, this book is written extremely well and concisely. Like Solomon in person, who I twice have met in dialogue with philosophy professionals and advanced students, this book is exquisitely *constructive* in style and tone. It isn't polemical. She builds conceptual a device and shows what it will and won't do. She shows what her conceptual device turns up in the historical record of science, and she makes some generalizations and recommendations for science policy. I recommend Social Empiricism most highly.
