spunky's compendium of philosophy of science videos/podcasts

[spunky]

this gentleman here said that if he had a microphone he would make vlogs or podcasts about philosophy of science. until now, no vlogs or podcasts have come :/

if you're a graduate student/researcher like me, then chances are that you don't really have much time to read other stuff that's not related in some way to your field (catching up with the literature is haaard!). so one thing i decided i'm gonna do is share a small (but growing) compendium of videos or podcasts related to philosophy of science, in general, and its relationship with mathematics/statistics. the key thing here is that it is stuff that one could listen to while doing something else. like, for example, i listened to the first video while i was cleaning my apartment during the weekend. it's not that this stuff is not interesting, but more like there's too much going on everywhere to be able to like read articles or books devoted to it.

in any case, here's the beginning of my list:


this i found was a fun, interesting introduction to philosophy of science

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-AbB26oAV8



this one was very, very interesting because it directly connects philosophy of science with computer science and Bayesian statistics\

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHrpqc6QvME

 

[bruin]

Thanks for posting these!

This was an excellent, short book on philosophy of science. Only $6.15 to put it on the kindle app for smartphone and be able to read about philosophy of science in the post office line...what a steal.

I've made a few attempts to move on from there to more specialized topics within the philosophy of science, like the philosophy of causation, and what it actually means to say that X 'causes' Y, but every treatment I've found of that question so far has either made my head hurt or my eyes glaze over.

I agree it's really relevant to behavioral science and statistics. Some of the theories of causation (like Hume's notion of causation as "constant conjunction") really seem to break down when compared to some of our probabilistic notions of causation. E.g., smoking is NOT always followed by cancer (no constant conjunction), yet probabilistically we can say (or at least we do say) that smoking causes cancer.

 

[noetsi]

Why does philosophy of science matter (other than to employ social scientist which is a noble cause I admit)? I had a fair number of such courses while a graduate student and while they were fun I am still not sure what their value is?

 

[bryangoodrich]

The value of philosophy is much like the value of mathematics: it teaches you to think. Most people don't take math classes because they're going to workout tangents and derivatives in their job. That is not the point of a mathematics education. Instead, it teaches you how to think about problems, decompose them into their constituents and analyze them appropriately.

Similarly, philosophy teaches you methods to decompose other types of problems and analyze them. In addition, it also teaches you how to communicate those ideas and synthesize them into holistic ideas.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/subjects/
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/year/

There is plenty to think about when it comes to science and plenty of these areas are active fields of research. Albeit, a lot of areas with practical significance are in the areas of quantum mechanics or sciences of the mind, because concepts there can be vague.

Areas of my particular interest are philosophy of economics, particularly the ethical implications and the philosophy of mathematics.