Knowing Science

In Knowing Science, Alexander Bird presents an epistemology of science that rejects empiricism and gives a central place to the concept of knowledge. Science aims at knowledge and progresses when it adds to the stock of knowledge. That knowledge is social knowing--it is known by the scientific community as a whole. Evidence is that from which knowledge can be obtained by inference. From this, it follows that evidence is knowledge, and is not limited to perception, nor to observation. Observation supplies evidence that is basic relative to a field of enquiry and can be highly non-perceptual. Theoretical knowledge is typically gained by inference to the only explanation, in which competing plausible hypotheses are falsified by the evidence. In cases where not all competing hypotheses are refuted, scientific hypotheses are not known but instead possess varying degrees of plausibility. Plausibilities in the light of the evidence are probabilities and link eliminative explanationism to Bayesian conditionalization. Bird argues that scientific realism and anti-realism as global metascientific claims should be rejected-the track record gives us only local metascientific claims.

Alexander Bird, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge

Alexander Bird was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School and a Thomas White Scholar at St John's College, Oxford. He studied at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich and then at the University of Cambridge for his MPhil (St Edmund's College) and PhD (King's College). Thereafter, he was
a civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food. His subsequent academic career includes permanent positions at the University of Edinburgh, University of Bristol, King's College London (Peter Sowerby Professor of Philosophy and Medicine), and the University of Cambridge
(Bertrand Russell Professor). He has held visiting positions at Dartmouth College, Monash University, St Louis University, and at All Souls College, Oxford and Exeter College, Oxford.