Draft of slides for upcoming talk and conferences

Tomorrow I will be presenting a talk on a possible solution to the demarcation problem at the Advanced Research Seminar at King's College London. The tentative title is as follows: 'Some suitable demarcation criteria: A novel approach to rehabilitating and extending demarcation criteria by adopting a temporal logic'.

This talk is an extension of the one I gave at NNPS 2017. (As an aside: I wish to thank Dr Ben Martin of University College London for his helpful commentary, as well as the comments from other philosophers during the Q&A). Shorter versions of this talk will be presented next month at SILFS 2017 and ECAP 9 in late August.

It seems only appropriate to post a revised (but far from finalised) draft of the slides. They are now available here. Any constructive (or destructive) criticism is welcome.

16/5/17

An objection from intuition or normal use of terms

I'm posting some more provisional thoughts I have about the underlying motivations for accepting the objection from ill-fit as a case of 'one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens'. That is to say, the structure of the argument is taken to show that if our intuitive concepts and explications and refinements of our intuitive concepts are in conflict, the intuition is to be preferred. Specifically, should any criteria of demarcation not be in accordance with our strongly-held intuitions, one of the two must go, intuition prevails at the expense of demarcation criteria.

Some brief notes surrounding popular misconceptions of the objection from ill-fit

Here are some brief notes on the perpetuation of three philosophic myths surrounding Popper's demarcation criterion:

(i) Popper's demarcation criterion sets out the limits of the natural sciences from non-science or pseudo-science.

(ii) Popper's criterion explicitly demarcates isolated scientific theories from non-scientific or pseudo-scientific theories.

Consequently,

(iii) Popper's criterion is either too restrictive and/or permissive a criterion to demarcate the domains of science from non-science or pseudo-science (the objection from ill-fit).

All are false.

(N.B. In fact, Ayer's 1936/46 criterion and Carnap's 1956 criterion are either trivial or reduce to Popper's 1934/35 criterion. See: Popper (1959, 65-66), Ayer (1936, 97-99) and Carnap (1956). Thus, there exist three different versions of the objection from ill-fit: the first objection addressed below is widely off the mark; a second objection I allude to has been answered in the literature (cf. Gillies, 1971); the third, seen in, e.g. Church's review of Ayer (1949), was so debilitating it put to rest most work done on the demarcation problem.)