General Information

Contact Information

Professor:: Abe Stone (abestone@ucsc.edu)
Push notiﬁcation:: Notify Abe
Website:: https://people.ucsc.edu/~abestone/courses
Zoom feed of lectures:: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/92258363070?pwd=bHNqNDRCRmozZitOa0I5YXdhMzBQUT09
Zoom office hours:: Mon. 2:00–3:00pm; Tues. 1:00–2:00pm (or by appointment)

We will read some of the classic texts which created and set the stage for later developments within the subdiscipline now known as philosophy of science. The course will be divided into two halves, corresponding to two fundamentally different views about what makes science distinctively rational (due to Rudolf Carnap and Karl Popper, respectively). In each case we will also read important later works which were taken to undermine the view in question.

Modality: The ﬁrst two weeks of the course will be on Zoom only, as the University has announced. After that, the (subject to change due to various possible developments, as we all know by now!) is that I will lecture in person in our assigned classroom. But I intend also to live-stream every lecture over Zoom. In both cases, I make a recording of every lecture available on YouTube. Office hours will be via Zoom only until further notice.

Course Requirements

A midterm assignment (your choice of a take-home exam or a 4–6 page paper) due Tuesday, February 15, and a ﬁnal assignment (your choice of a take-home exam or a 4–6 page paper), due Wednesday, March 16. Each of the two assignments is worth 50% of the course grade.

All paper assignments will be available on-line, and there are be links to them from this syllabus as well as from my main course page. I will discuss the assignments in class when the due date draws near. You can ﬁnd answers to some commonly asked questions about my assignments and grading in my FAQ.

Papers are to be handed in, as attachments, via the “Assignments” tool on Canvas. Please submit in PDF or in a format easily convertible to PDF (e.g., MSWord). The system will accept late submissions, but late papers may not receive full credit. The system is not set up to allow resubmissions: once you press the “submit” button, it will not let you change your response. If, however, you mistakenly submit something and want to change it, please contact me and I can make an exception.

Canvas site

Please do not plagiarize. If you have any questions about plagiarism and related issues, please see https://guides.library.ucsc.edu/citesources/plagiarism. To ﬁnd out what happens if you are accused of plagiarism, see the academic misconduct policy: https://ue.ucsc.edu/academic-misconduct.

Texts

Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World: (Open Court, 2003) (ISBN: 978-0812695236).
(This book is generally known as “the Aufbau,” following its original German title, Der logische Aufbau der Welt.)
Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast: (Harvard, 1983) (ISBN: 978-0674290716).
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientiﬁc Revolutions: (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012) (ISBN: 978-0226458120).
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientiﬁc Discovery: (Routledge, 2002) (ISBN: 978-0415278447).

These texts can be ordered through the Bay Tree Bookstore and are on reserve at McHenry. Popper’s book is also available online through the course reserves page. Also on reserve at McHenry are two books which are good sources of further reading: The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap and The Philosophy of Karl Popper, both edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (these contain papers about Carnap and Popper, respectively, by various well-known people — for example, Putnam and Kuhn — along with Carnap’s and Popper’s replies). Readings not from the above four texts will be available on Canvas