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I've listened to two sets of lectures on the philosophy of science that treat Quine's results on underdetermination, the dissolution of the analytic/synthetic distinction, and confirmation holism as landmark developments in the philosophy of science. They also devoted considerable time to Feyerabend and "Against Method".

The SEP article on the demarcation problem doesn't mention either of them or any of their results.

Is this a major omission by the SEP that should be fixed? Or am I overestimating the importance of Quine and Feyerabend?

Do standard academic philosophy of science courses and text books cover Quine and Feyerabend?

Alexander S King
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  • are "how important" legitimate formats for questions? –  Apr 06 '17 at 21:13
  • @user3293056 in this case, I think objective answers are possible from the perspective of someone who has more exposure to academic philosophy than I do. – Alexander S King Apr 06 '17 at 21:16
  • but is that not always the case with such questions? –  Apr 06 '17 at 21:17
  • i mean i appreciate that the question provides its own measure, so will likely avoid the worst extremes of opinion based answers –  Apr 06 '17 at 21:21
  • @user3293056 [this previous question](http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/31297/why-do-philosophy-of-mind-courses-tend-to-bypass-kant) was deemed acceptable, so I don't see why the current one isn't. – Alexander S King Apr 06 '17 at 21:26
  • hmm i don't follow - many (the majortity of) questions like this get closed for this reason. –  Apr 06 '17 at 21:26
  • @user3293056 If the SEP article on Dualism failed to mention DesCartes, then the answer to a similar question "How important is Descartes to the mind-body problem and dualism?" would have been perfectly objective. – Alexander S King Apr 06 '17 at 21:43
  • i don't follow, because i assumed the lack of objectivity wasn't to the question, what motivated it, but the answers -- "how important is". it's good that the question is not so idle that you have done no research, but aside from the pre-defined measure (which **does** make it less subective) i see no difference –  Apr 06 '17 at 21:52
  • I do not think this has much to do with "importance". To Quine methodology is subject to the same test-and-replace process as science itself, to Feyerabend there is no methodology. Either way, there can be no hard and fast demarcations, or at best they are a concern for scientists in specific fields, not philosophy. The demarcation problem dissolves for them. It mattered to positivists and Popper because they were willing to prescribe methodological norms (which does not go over well with scientists). – Conifold Apr 06 '17 at 21:53
  • I would say that the SEP isn't ever trying to be an exhaustive treatment of topics, kind of just a rigorous overview. Given how little they address the logical positivist in the article even though they obviously, historically, had a huge role in this conversation, I'd say that it might be an "oversight" to not include Quine, but it's not due to the author thinking Quine isn't relevant, its just do to topic constraints. That article has a ton of topics in it already and there are a large amount of articles on the SEP that cover Quine. – Not_Here Apr 06 '17 at 22:28
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    Here is the index for the Oxford Handbook of Philosohpy of Science and you can see how many times Quine and Feyerabend are mentioned http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199368815.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199368815-indexList-1 Quine is mentioned only a little bit less than Popper so that should say something. – Not_Here Apr 06 '17 at 22:30
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    Importance to the philosophy of science is one thing. Importance to the demarcation problem is another thing. Bundling these together causes a confusion. – Ram Tobolski Apr 06 '17 at 22:45
  • @RamTobolski I was specifically thinking of the demarcation problem when I wrote this. – Alexander S King Apr 06 '17 at 23:48
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    @Not_Here I see your point. The impression I got from the lectures was that Quine's result was at least as "monumental" as Kuhn's, in terms of it being a challenge to Popper. At the very least, they would mention him at the end of the Falsification section of the article. – Alexander S King Apr 07 '17 at 00:04
  • Feyerabend cannot possibly be important, for starters ;-) – Frank Apr 07 '17 at 00:18

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As written, your question seems to assume that someone is an important philosopher of science only if they're mentioned in one particular Stanford Encyclopedia article. Both Feyerabend and Quine have entire articles of their own.

There's been relatively little work on the demarcation problem in professional philosophy of science over the past 30 years or so. The SEPh article's gloss on Laudan (1983) pretty much sums up where most professional philosophers are these days: "there is no hope of finding a necessary and sufficient criterion of something as heterogeneous as scientific methodology."

I can't think of any recent work on Quine and demarcation off the top of my head. But there's been an active debate between Ian James Kidd and Massimo Pigliucci over the past year (see here here here and here). Briefly, Kidd has very actively been promoting renewed attention to Feyerabend's work, arguing that Feyerabend's positions are much more reasonable than his contemporary critics made them seem, and indeed that Feyerabend's positions are often very similar to some mainstream feminist and pragmatist positions today. This includes defending Feyerabend from the charge that he advocated pseudoscience in an infamous defense of astrology. (For a list of Kidd's papers and books on Feyerabend, see here.) On the other hand, Pigliucci has been trying to revive work on the demarcation problem; I think he's motivated by the trope that there's a crisis in public confidence in science, and thinks that solving the demarcation problem can restore this confidence. Astrology is one of the standard examples of pseudoscience, so of course he didn't want to let a defense of astrology go completely unanswered. On Pigliucci's view, pseudoscience is a family resemblance concept, roughly characterized by a combination of low empirical support and theoretical articulation (see here).

This debate attracted a little attention, but it's too recent to tell whether it's going to amount to an important new chapter in work on the demarcation problem. Since the SEPh article on demarcation is only three years old, it's not surprising that it doesn't include a debate that happened last year.

Dan Hicks
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  • "I think he's motivated by the trope that there's a crisis in public confidence in science, and thinks that solving the demarcation problem can restore this confidence. " I have wondered this myself see [this post](http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/33332/has-anyone-used-the-challenges-facing-the-demarcation-of-science-problem-to-just) and [this post](http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/36555/if-everything-is-theory-laden-how-can-one-argue-against-climate-change-deniers) -- if you have any input on those, I'd be interested. – Alexander S King Apr 07 '17 at 18:55
  • I don't know enough about the communities of theology and religious apologetics to know whether anyone has appealed to underdetermination. (So nothing to offer on the first question, I'm afraid.) There's a substantial philosophy of climate science literature, including on climate skepticism; I've given some especially relevant citations in an answer to that question. – Dan Hicks Apr 09 '17 at 21:55