Born in London,Kitcher spent his early life in Eastbourne,East Sussex,on the south coast of the United Kingdom,where another distinguished philosopher of an earlier generation (A. J. Ayer) was also at school. Kitcher himself went to school at Christ's Hospital,Horsham,West Sussex.[5][6] He earned his BA in mathematics/history and philosophy of science from Christ's College,Cambridge,in 1969,and his PhD in history and philosophy of science from Princeton University in 1974,where he worked closely with Carl Hempel and Thomas Kuhn.
Within philosophy,Kitcher is best known for his work in philosophy of biology,science,and mathematics,and outside academia for his work examining creationism and sociobiology. His works attempt to connect the questions raised in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mathematics with the central philosophical issues of epistemology,metaphysics,and ethics. He has also published papers on John Stuart Mill,Kant and other figures in the history of philosophy. His 2012 book[10] documented his developing interest in John Dewey and a pragmatic approach to philosophical issues. He sees pragmatism as providing a unifying and reconstructive approach to traditional philosophy issues. He had,a year earlier,published a book outlining a naturalistic approach to ethics,The Ethical Project (Harvard University Press,2011).[11] He has also done work on the philosophy of climate change.[12][13]
Criteria for what constitutes "good science"
Kitcher's three criteria for good science are:[14]
1. Independent testability of auxiliary hypotheses
"An auxiliary hypothesis ought to be testable independently of the particular problem it is introduced to solve,independently of the theory it is designed to save" (e.g. the evidence for the existence of Neptune is independent of the anomalies in Uranus's orbit).
2. Unification
"A science should be unified .... Good theories consist of just one problem-solving strategy,or a small family of problem-solving strategies,that can be applied to a wide range of problems".
3. Fecundity
"A great scientific theory,like Newton's,opens up new areas of research... Because a theory presents a new way of looking at the world,it can lead us to ask new questions,and so to embark on new and fruitful lines of inquiry... Typically,a flourishing science is incomplete. At any time,it raises more questions than it can currently answer. But incompleteness is no vice. On the contrary,incompleteness is the mother of fecundity... A good theory should be productive;it should raise new questions and presume that those questions can be answered without giving up its problem-solving strategies".
He increasingly recognised the role of values in practical decisions about scientific research.[15]
Kuhn and creationism
Kitcher is the author of Abusing Science:The Case Against Creationism. He has commented on the way creationists have misinterpreted Kuhn:
Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has probably been more widely read—and more widely misinterpreted—than any other book in the recent philosophy of science. The broad circulation of his views has generated a popular caricature of Kuhn's position. According to this popular caricature, scientists working in a field belong to a club. All club members are required to agree on main points of doctrine. Indeed, the price of admission is several years of graduate education, during which the chief dogmas are inculcated. The views of outsiders are ignored. Now I want to emphasize that this is a hopeless caricature, both of the practice of scientists and of Kuhn's analysis of the practice. Nevertheless, the caricature has become commonly accepted as a faithful representation, thereby lending support to the Creationists' claims that their views are arrogantly disregarded.[16]
The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 1983 (paperback 1984).
Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. MIT Press, 1985 (paperback 1987).
The Advancement of Science, Oxford University Press, April 1993 (paper January 1995).
The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities (Simon and Schuster [US], Penguin [UK], January 1996, paperback editions 1997). The American paperback contains a postscript on cloning, almost identical with his article "Whose Self is it, Anyway?".
Patterns of Scientific Controversies, essay in Scientific Controversies: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives, Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN0-195-11987-8
Science, Truth, and Democracy, Oxford University Press, 2001; paperback 2003. ISBN0-19-516552-7
In Mendel's Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology, Oxford University Press, 2003. (This is a collection of seventeen of his articles).
The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education, Oxford University Press, 2022.
What's the Use of Philosophy?, Oxford University Press, 2023 ISBN978-0197657249
References
↑ Martin Carrier, Johannes Roggenhofer, Günter Küppers, Philippe Blanchard (eds.), Knowledge and the World: Challenges Beyond the Science Wars, Springer, 2013, p. 149.
↑ Miriam Solomon, Social Empiricism, MIT Press, 2007, p. 37.
↑ Boaz Miller, "What is Hacking's Argument for Entity Realism?", Synthese193(3):991–1006 (2016).
↑ Longino, Helen E. (2002), Science and the Common Good: Thoughts on Philip Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy, Philosophy of Science, 69, pp. 560–568 (PDFArchived 13 December 2022 at the Wayback Machine )
↑ Kitcher, P, 1982, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism, p. 168
Interview by Point of Inquiry 13 July 2007 (mp3/podcast). Kitcher "explores the implications of Darwinism for both literalist religion, and for liberal faith" and "discusses the role and benefits of religion, and explores alternatives to it, such as secular humanism, and offers ideas for how secular humanism might become more popular in society."
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