Philip Kitcher

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Philip Kitcher
selective realism)[3]

Philip Stuart Kitcher (born 20 February 1947) is a

philosophy of literature, and more recently pragmatism
.

Life and career

Born in London, Kitcher spent his early life in

Carl Hempel and Thomas Kuhn
.

Kitcher is currently John Dewey Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Columbia University. As chair of Columbia's Contemporary Civilization program (part of its undergraduate Core Curriculum), he also held the James R. Barker Professorship of Contemporary Civilization. Before moving to Columbia, Kitcher held tenure-track positions at the University of Vermont, the University of Minnesota, and University of California, San Diego, where he held the position of Presidential Professor of Philosophy.

Kitcher is past president of the American Philosophical Association. In 2002, Kitcher was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was awarded the inaugural Prometheus Prize from the American Philosophical Association in 2006 in honour of extended achievement in the philosophy of science. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.[7] Kitcher was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Philosophy of Science from 1994 to 1999, was also a member of the NIH/DOE Working Group on the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project from 1995 to 1997.

He has trained a number of philosophers of science, including Peter Godfrey-Smith (University of Sydney), Kyle Stanford (University of California, Irvine), and Michael R. Dietrich (University of Pittsburgh). He also taught C. Kenneth Waters (University of Calgary) and Michael Weisberg (University of Pennsylvania) as undergraduates.[citation needed]

He is married to

philosopher of mind who has been the Mark Van Doren Professor of Humanities at Columbia. Their son, Charles Kitcher, is the associate general counsel for the Federal Election Commission.[8][9]

Philosophical work

Within philosophy, Kitcher is best known for his work in philosophy of biology, science, and mathematics, and outside academia for his work examining creationism and sociobiology. His works attempt to connect the questions raised in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mathematics with the central philosophical issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. He has also published papers on John Stuart Mill, Kant and other figures in the history of philosophy. His 2012 book[10] documented his developing interest in John Dewey and a pragmatic approach to philosophical issues. He sees pragmatism as providing a unifying and reconstructive approach to traditional philosophy issues. He had, a year earlier, published a book outlining a naturalistic approach to ethics, The Ethical Project (Harvard University Press, 2011).[11] He has also done work on the philosophy of climate change.[12][13]

Criteria for what constitutes "good science"

Kitcher's three criteria for good science are:[14]

1. Independent testability of auxiliary hypotheses
"An auxiliary hypothesis ought to be testable independently of the particular problem it is introduced to solve, independently of the theory it is designed to save" (e.g. the evidence for the existence of Neptune is independent of the anomalies in Uranus's orbit).
2. Unification
"A science should be unified .... Good theories consist of just one problem-solving strategy, or a small family of problem-solving strategies, that can be applied to a wide range of problems".
3. Fecundity
"A great scientific theory, like Newton's, opens up new areas of research... Because a theory presents a new way of looking at the world, it can lead us to ask new questions, and so to embark on new and fruitful lines of inquiry... Typically, a flourishing science is incomplete. At any time, it raises more questions than it can currently answer. But incompleteness is no vice. On the contrary, incompleteness is the mother of fecundity... A good theory should be productive; it should raise new questions and presume that those questions can be answered without giving up its problem-solving strategies".

He increasingly recognised the role of values in practical decisions about scientific research.[15]

Kuhn and creationism

Kitcher is the author of Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. He has commented on the way creationists have misinterpreted Kuhn:

graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn's analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists' claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded.[16]

Books

References

  1. ^ Martin Carrier, Johannes Roggenhofer, Günter Küppers, Philippe Blanchard (eds.), Knowledge and the World: Challenges Beyond the Science Wars, Springer, 2013, p. 149.
  2. ^ Miriam Solomon, Social Empiricism, MIT Press, 2007, p. 37.
  3. ^ Boaz Miller, "What is Hacking's Argument for Entity Realism?", Synthese 193(3):991–1006 (2016).
  4. ^ "Philip Kitcher | Philosophy". Archived from the original on 8 June 2021. Retrieved 14 November 2021.
  5. ^ "ACADEMIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY – PHILIP KITCHER". www.columbia.edu. Retrieved 8 November 2017.
  6. ISBN 978-0195321029
    .
  7. ^ "Election of New Members at the 2018 Spring Meeting"
  8. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 8 August 2021.
  9. ^ "FEC announces appointment of Charles Kitcher as Associate General Counsel". FEC.gov. Retrieved 8 August 2021.
  10. ^ Kitcher, P. Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2012
  11. ISBN 0-67-406144-6
    (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
  12. ^ Kitcher, Philip (2010). "The Climate Change Debates" Science, 328(5983):pp.1230-1234
  13. ^ Kitcher, Philip (March 25, 2015). "Climate Change: The Hard Problem" 'Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas-UNAM'
  14. ISBN 978-0262110853
    .
  15. ^ Longino, Helen E. (2002), Science and the Common Good: Thoughts on Philip Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy, Philosophy of Science, 69, pp. 560–568 (PDF Archived 13 December 2022 at the Wayback Machine)
  16. ^ Kitcher, P, 1982, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism, p. 168

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Philip Kitcher.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philip_Kitcher&oldid=1218677787"