Leonardo's Underdeterminism paper and reviewing "Social Studies of Science"

Leonardo sent me his paper on underdeterminism (the Duhem-Quine thesis) on Tuesday after our long chat on Monday lunchtime. My response was two-fold.

Firstly, on Thursday, I quickly wrote up an essay of my own on this subject. I could remember quite a bit about this from my undergraduate studies where I had read Can Theories be Refuted?, a collection of papers on the D-Q thesis. After a quick exposition using primary quotes from D and Q, my essay had a very brief discussion of Kuhn & Lakatos as including D-Q in their philosophies and Popper & Grunbaum against D-Q. I decided to focus my latter attention on the Eddington "crucial experiment" for General Relativity. Overall I think it is a pretty good essay considering I only spent two hours on it.

Secondly, I decided to critically review Leonardo's paper and send him some comments. His paper was very dense with points and I did have trouble following his line of argument. But I also thought that he could usefully have some thoughts on the structure of his paper, so instead of commenting on the whole paper, I just looked in detail at the first two pages, sending him some layout points, and so on.

He seemed very pleased with the response. I have mixed views on doing this sort of thing. On the one hand, Leonardo is Italian and therefore has to manage the language issue. Vicenzo thinks Italians are too verbose and don't get their points across well. I have no view on that idea, but maybe my comments help that point. But I am also a bit concerned about some thoughts that arose in discussions over the summer in which it was pointed out that my main manner of interacting with people is by doing things for them (rather than some sort of deeper, more emotional connection). There could well be some truth in this, but I'm not sure I'm that bothered if there is. I am too old to seek to change something like that.

But I am making an impact on the people on the course it seems to me - just like my goal had been on the Yoga Course I did last year. It is also quite clear - as I knew it would be - that I am best suited to an academic environment where the things I care most about do not result in me being considered particularly odd or unusual. Would that I could remain in this environment going forward.

My latest journal review is Social Studies of Science. This is at the heart of the "sociology of scientific knowledge" and therefore tends to be very much looked down on by philosophers and historians of science. I have actually found all sorts of interesting articles in the journal covering all sorts of interesting issues. True, some of it is a bit odd, but I don't see that there is necessarily a total conflict between the disciplines. That said, an article called "The Social Construction of Mountain Bikes: Technology and Postmodernity in the Cycle Industry" is pretty unusual. But one set of articles I probably will try and study is a symposium based around Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks. If I am going to read a few such articles, then these might be a good theme to look at. That or Bruno Latour's "A Relativistic Account of Einstein's Relativity" - wasn't this one mentioned in one of the Sokal books?

Friday was mainly spent collecting Emma's things from Cambridge. Today has been mainly spent unpacking this same stuff. Emma meanwhile has gone skiing for a week. My two Christmas books that Linda ordered from Amazon has arrived and I am quite tempted to open and read the one on Feyerabend - "Enemy of Science?", the one that I failed to get out of the LSE library as an academic keeps renewing it.