Ke xue zhe xue li lun yu li shi [Philosophy of Science: A Theoretical and Historical Introduction] (review)

Authors of introductory texts in philosophy of science usually organize the content of their books either thematically or chronologically. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but often the choice reflects an author's view of how best to give an overview of the field. Ruey-Lin Chen's book Philosophy of Science: A Theoretical and Historical Introduction belongs to the second group. The organization reflects Chen's assessment of Thomas S. Kuhn's impact on the field. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution divides the book into three periods: pre-Kuhn, Kuhn, and post-Kuhn. The first section surveys the field while considering logical empiricism and falsificationism. The second section discusses Kuhn and other philosophers' interpretations and refinements of his ideas. Ontological issues and their sociological and political reverberations (such as the science wars, as well as the "naturalistic approach," the view that philosophy of science should be researched in the same way as empirical sciences are) are the main topics of the third section. A critical assessment of Taiwan's philosophy of science since the 1950s concludes the book.

Chapter 1 gives a clear and accessible summary of important themes in philosophy of science by comparing Ptolemy's and Copernicus's theories of astronomy. This helps Chen to introduce ontological issues, such as the contrast between scientific instrumentalism and realism, and epistemological themes, such as the problem of choice among competing scientific hypotheses.

In chapter 2, which considers logical empiricism, an important feature of the book begins to emerge. Most of the chapters comprise a detailed survey of ideas followed by a critical discussion. More distinctively, Chen incorporates the contribution of philosophers of science of Taiwan into sections of critical discussion throughout the book. For example, Chen-Hung Lin's examination of Karl Popper's falsification theory, Daiwie Fu's interpretations of Imre Lakatos and Kuhn, and Chen's own extensive treatment of Kuhn and others are all constituents of critical discussion sections. How Taiwan's philosophers of science have engaged in past and current discussion has rarely been detailed in other Taiwanese textbooks.

This distinctive feature, as Chen himself notes, is the premise of this book: using issues discussed by philosophers of science in Taiwan to replace some issues examined in the English-speaking world. For example, in analyzing problems of the deductive-nomological (D-N) model of logical empiricism in chapter 2, Chen introduces Chen-Hung Lin's view that it is impossible for a scientific explanation to satisfy all the conditions Carl Hempel required for a proper explanation and presents Lin's proposed solution. Other textbooks would more generally present the claim that passing Hempel's conditions does not necessarily imply a satisfactory explanation and would discuss, by examining the conditions Hempel set, what constitutes a good explanation—an important lesson to be learned from logical empiricism. In an educational sense, the inclusion of the contribution from Taiwan is a good idea for a textbook, which implies that some of the foci would be different. To some this is not a problem because each textbook has its own focus. However, in this book, it seems that some of the foci are different, less because of Chen's own position (which leads him to choose among issues of interest) than because of the content he intends to include. Some of the issues included in the book are either so detailed in themselves or are presented so cursorily that they might discourage the reader. Perhaps in order to make the book conducive to critical discussion, some parts of the book are somewhat technical. For example, notation in predicate logic is used in chapter 2 without introduction. This assumes some prior knowledge among readers, and this book is better seen as an advanced introduction.

Chapter 2 ends with a succinct analysis of logical empiricists' view of instrumentalism and realism, which prepares...