Two Seminar Presentations

Tuesday October 21st

Part of my early MSc planning was to try and do all my seminar presentations at the start of the course - mainly in case it turned out that I wouldn't be able to attend as much of the courses later on for work reasons. So today I was presenting to the History of Science Seminar and tomorrow to the Dissertation Seminar.

My topic today was the apparent motion of the sun, moon and stars per the two-sphere model and in line with Kuhn's exposition in chapter 2 of The Copernican Revolution. However I was unconvinced by this - why re-hash what Kuhn (and indeed John Worrall) had said? If the other participants had read and understood Kuhn, they wouldn't need my presentation. If they had read it and not understood it, then another presentation of it might not help much. So I had decided to widen my topic a little and cover a few new things - in particular, some ideas about measurement of various complication things, like the year or the lunar month.

But before I started, George, our class teacher, was seeking volunteers for the next few weeks. And as he tried to do so, two of the class participants raised exactly my points about the value of the topics being chosen. Like me, their objection was that it should be assumed that we can read and understand the book's technical details and so the seminars should be focused on the wider philosophical issues being raised. There followed a heated discussion on these issue which George was clearly unhappy addressing.

Eventually a halt was called and I made my 15 minute or so presentation. George was not impressed I felt. He seemed to have the idea that I should have ranged much further but that didn't fit with the title I had been given to work to. So George launched into a long talk of his own, which annoyed some other class participants who felt they were there for a seminar, not another lecture.

So afterwards, a few of us had drinks in the NAB cafe and discussed our thoughts on what had happened. As luck would have it, today was the first meeting of the staff-student forum for our course and we decided that we would raise the issue there. So an hour later, we were at the meeting and, at the appropriate point, I raised, in a general manner, that there might be some concerns about one of the seminars and how should we proceed. I didn't actually say it was John's History of Science course as this might be a sensitive issue, but Femke did! So a meeting has been arranged with John for Thursday with Caroline representing us.

I was booked in overnight at a hotel nearer to LSE - the County up on Woburn Place. So after the forum ended I wandered up there. Another really poor hotel (worse that last week's) but only £40 a night and near enough to LSE to walk to and from. So another afternoon spent reading.

Back to LSE for the P of S lecture - now this is a well organised course. Today Miklos is speaking on induction and Popper - something that I, of course, have studied extensively in the past. The explanation of the problem of induction was shorter than I might have expected and didn't really give an idea of the vastness of the problem. And we were soon onto Popper. I would have thought that given the importance of the problem of induction to all confirmation approaches, it would have been useful to spend more time on it. But maybe it will be addressed again when we start to move onto these other problems.

These days Popper has little influence in the LSE department and I did wonder whether the inclusion of a lecture on Popper was more for historical departmental reasons than anything else. For instance, very few exam questions feature anything Popperian - they are mainly on what you would call the "received" logical empiricist approach to P of S (which Kuhn as the main alternative). And of course this was one of the reasons why I was less interested in this course - not sure I wanted to go through the paradoxes of confirmation, "grue" problems, and Bayesianism again.

Afterwards we have our P of S seminar. A solution has been found to the large group - it turns out that the inter-collegiate students have their own seminar back at King's. So we will be a smaller group of just LSE people going forward.

No speaker doing a presentation today. Instead we start with any general queries on the lecture and then Miklos moves through a number of other issue he wanted us to focus on. This is what George is failing to do on the History of Science course. Much of the discussion takes points from the lecture and refers them back to Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery - for which there is an extract in the Course Pack. I made a number of contributions to the discussion which I thought were good points. But I didn't tackle the issue of how the problem of induction is a really huge one and has an enormous impact on many areas. I did enjoy the discussion though.

And next week I have volunteered to present something on Lakatos's History of science and its rational reconstruction - a paper I know very well. And with that seminar presentation, I will have done one for all my current courses and may not need to do another for some while.

There was a short continuation of the discussion about the H of S seminar. It turns out that Victor - one of the objectors from earlier today - is going to accompany Caroline to see John. And some of the others - myself included - will be sending in emails. Wonder what the effect of this will be.

Wednesday October 22nd

Not a great night's sleep. The central heating was going full blast and I rather overheated. But I was on the front of the building and having the window open was incredibly noisy. So slept rather restlessly and woke up with a stiff neck and a headache.

And so to my dissertation seminar. It is still only week three, so the idea that there would be well-formed ideas for my topics is perhaps a little unlikely. And when I sent my presentation to Miklos, he had commented that my slides were a somewhat eclectic mix of themes. But that it what I would expect at this stage and is nothing to be bothered about.

So I worked my way through my slides taking various questions and with Miklos occasionally wanting to pause and discuss something in more general if he felt it would help the others as they make their decisions on their own dissertations. Overall, I was pretty happy with how it went - another hug from Leonardo at the end - his way of showing he approves I guess!

A few of us went to the Garrick cafe for drinks afterwards. I had decided that I would not be attending the Nancy Cartwright Evidence lecture anymore, but most of the others were. We talked about feminist epistemology and Victor spent some time investigating the very stable spin that his drink bottle had on the table. Victor also made a few more detailed points about what I had said at the seminar. It seems he is also very interested in Kepler and was thinking of doing something on him as well - maybe about aesthetics. It could be a very interesting development for someone else to be doing somthing similar - some element of competition perhaps, but in a good way? Victor is speaking to next week's dissertation group which I am now really looking forward to.

Back home mid afternoon with the thought of collecting my PC which I had been led to understand was now clear of viruses and ready for collection. But it turned out it wasn't - yet more final testing needs to be done and they have no power today at Milton Park. Maybe tomorrow.

For the next few days I have no plans other than to study. Linda is visiting her parents this weekend, so no excuses for not getting a lot done.