Theory and Reality, Peter GodfreySmith
Theory and Reality, Peter GodfreySmith
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Theory and Reality
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

Author: Peter Godfrey-Smith

Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies

Unabridged: 10 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/19/2017

Synopsis

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the listener on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science.

Intended for undergraduates and general audiences with no prior background in philosophy, Theory and Reality covers logical positivism; the problems of induction and confirmation; Karl Popper's theory of science; Thomas Kuhn and "scientific revolutions"; the views of Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend; and challenges to the field from sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. The book then looks in more detail at some specific problems and theories, including scientific realism, the theory-ladeness of observation, scientific explanation, and Bayesianism. Finally, Godfrey-Smith defends a form of philosophical naturalism as the best way to solve the main problems in the field.

About Peter Godfrey-Smith

Peter Godfrey-Smith is the author of the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. His other books include Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award. He is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Morgan on January 13, 2019

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is" (Yogi Berra). After reading this book I’m convinced that Yogi’s quip could be modified and extended to the philosophy of science as such; in theory science is easy to circumscribe, explain, or even define - in pract......more

Goodreads review by Jafar on July 04, 2017

It was an exhausting, long, and sometimes boring read. Nevertheless considering the depth of the field and the amount of disorder and confusion surrounding it, these were expected. Author definitely deserves an applause for successfully outlining basic trends in philosophy of science during twentiet......more

Goodreads review by Paul on August 14, 2014

This was a letdown, in that it was sold to me (by a book about the philosophy of science as applied specifically to geology) as a great introduction to the current state of philosophy of science, but seems as if writing such a broad survey tired its author. In some ways, the earlier chapters are bet......more

Goodreads review by Dan on January 01, 2023

The book starts well - by presenting logical empiricism, induction, confirmation, Popper's refutation, Kuhn's paradigms, the superiority of Kuhn's over Popper's theory of science, and a few more. But at some point it drops the philosophy of science in favor of the sociology of science, and then star......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on January 22, 2019

I went into this with vague questions regarding how to conceptualize “science” in time and space (i.e. how does it fit into human history? How to distinguish it? What is its scope of inquiry/use?). After reading this, I see a great need for a study on the political economy of science… The Good: --I qu......more

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