Books like The Foundations of Scientific Inference

In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.

That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one." 

The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!

Hanson’s book was received as a breath of fresh air–establishing the important distinction between what came to be called the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification.”

While the former was often relegated to the psychological phenomenon of the “aha” moment of insight, leaving the logic to the justifications of reasoning, Hanson’s treatment made philosophers of science think twice about the “intelligence” and the importance of these often spontaneous insights.        

This is a fascinating analysis of the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Gilbert, Boyle, and Newton. It not only establishes the reasons for the triumph of the modern perspective but also accounts for certain limitations in this view that continue to characterize contemporary scientific thought.

A criticism as well as a history of the change that made possible the rise of modern science, this volume is also a guide to understanding the methods and accomplishments of the great philosopher-scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This book begins with Kuhn's statement of his position followed by seven essays offering criticism and analysis, and finally by Kuhn's reply. It will interest senior undergraduates and graduate students of the philosophy and history of science, as well as professional philosophers, philosophically inclined scientists, and some psychologists and sociologists.

This collection provided an update to the wide reaction to Kuhn’s 1962 book by others in this field of inquiry, beginning and ending with essays by Kuhn himself. 

As a circular economy professional from Cambridge university, I pursue to cross that bridge between life sciences and organizational theory.

Capra and Luisi provide exactly that. Their synthesis of systems thinking, complexity theory, and living systems research gives us the conceptual foundation for understanding why organizations function best when mimicking natural characteristics.

I was especially moved by their argument that the mechanistic worldview dominating business for centuries is not just outdated but actively harmful. They show how living systems operate through networks of relationships rather than hierarchies, through emergence rather than control, through continuous adaptation rather than static structures.

Every time I work with an organization struggling with rigid hierarchies or siloed thinking, I draw on frameworks from this book. Their chapter on cognition and consciousness in living systems shifted how I think about organizational learning.

This is dense material, but they write with such clarity that complex concepts become… show more.

This book explains what not to do to know the Universe, with examples from non-fiction postmodern nonsense "texts." These texts include discourses detached from experimental verification and scientific terms used completely out of context.

I love this book because I find pseudo- and postmodern science distasteful and harmful. I think it shows clearly how some famous postmodern intellectuals promote antipathy for facts, clear thinking, empirical tests, and, in general, science — our best shot at understanding the Universe. These postmodern intellectuals have huge influence and have helped spread the trend of rejection of reason and science throughout the World.

I adore this book stressing science is not an arbitrary "narration" or a collection of metaphors for postmodern essays. I share the authors’ dreams about a future after postmodernism. 

I really like this book and I regularly use it as a textbook in my Introduction to the Philosophy of Science course.

What I like is the way that Losee uses very short case studies in the history of science to refute the popular view that, through experimentation and observation, nature decides between competing theories and provides the justification for replacing an older theory with a new one. Although Losee does not always agree with Kuhn, I find that his book beautifully complements the history-based argument in Kuhn’s book, and both are short!

I regard this book as perhaps the greatest book about the nature of science ever published. In it, Popper spells out his dramatic view that science proceeds by putting forward bold, imaginative guesses, which are then subjected to ferocious attempts at empirical refutation. When these conjectured theories are refuted, scientists are forced to think up a better conjectural theory–and that is how science makes progress.

In this book, Popper shows how this dramatic account of how science proceeds by a process of conjecture and refutation has implications for fields beyond science, such as philosophy, in that it implies that, whatever we are doing, our best hope of success in solving our problems is to consider possible solutions and subject them to ferocious criticism.

Collins is a brilliant and lucid exponent of the (mainly British) “strong programme” in the sociology of science. He is one of the numerous “children of Kuhn,” in the sense that like Kuhn he understands scientists to be (usually) honest and serious human beings, not machines implementing an alleged Scientific Method.

I spend a lot of my time trying to clarify the bilge poured out by the merchants of fake science: the flat-earthers, creationists, and climate deniers mainly, but also medical quacks and other fruitloops who throw out alternative science, stuff which is like normal science, with one small exception. I was already fighting these fights when Wolpert came to Sydney, and I chaired a lecture he gave. He showed us where the problem lay in combatting idiocy: the idiots depend on naïve and naked intuition.

Invariably, these unhinged pseudo-realities rely on a simple misreading of scientific lore, and Lewis explained that this is because a great deal of science is counter-intuitive. We can’t see evolution happening, the world looks flat, the sun appears to go around us, and common sense says that kinetic energy must be proportional to velocity, not it's square. Enter the simpleton who slept through a key… show more.