The instructor is Richard Heck. Office hours are Monday 11-12 and Wednesday 1-2.
The readings linked below are available to members of the course only. Please note that the pdfs are very large, since they are just scans, so they may take a while to download.
More recent files are posted in the DjVu format, which produces higher-resolution scans with smaller document sizes. Windows and Mac OSX users can download browser plugins from LizardTech; there are also open source viewers available from SourceForge. If you are on Linux, as you should be, then you should be able to install the DjVuLibre package through your package manager ("yum install djvulibre", on Fedora). This allows you both to view and to create DjVu files. (It may also be possible to compile DjVuLibre for Mac OSX. Reports are mixed.)
A list of possible paper topics is now available.
| 5 September | Introductory Meeting |
| 12 September | The Copernican Revolution, Chs 1-3 |
| 19 September | The Copernican Revolution, Chs 4-5 (Ben and Ike) |
| 26 September | The Copernican Revolution, Chs 6-7 (Allan and Ryan) |
| 3 October | Carl Hempel, "Aspects of Scientific Explanation", in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (pdf) (Nate and Jesse) |
| 10 October | Thomas Kuhn, "The Function of Measurement in Modern Physical Science", Isis 52 (1961), pp. 161-93 (pdf), and "A Function for Thought Experiments", in The Essential Tension (pdf) (Isaac and Connie) |
| 17 October | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chs. 1-4 (Hyun-Jae and Isaac) |
| 24 October | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chs. 5-8 (Ben and Ike) |
| 31 October | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chs. 9-10 (Allan and Nate) |
| 7 November | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chs. 11-13 (Connie and Ryan) |
| 14 November | No Class: Instructor Out of Town |
| 21 November | No Class: Thanksgiving |
| 28 November | Imre Lakatos, "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs" (djvu); Paul Feyerabend, "Consolations for the Specialist" (djvu); Thomas Kuhn, "Reflections on My Critics" (djvu) (Hyun-Jae and Jesse) |
| 5 December | Nancy J. Neressian, "Kuhn, Conceptual Change, and Cognitive Science" (pdf) and Susan Carey, "Conceptual Differences Between Children and Adults" (djvu) |
| Optional Reading | Margaret Masterman, "The Nature of a Paradigm" (djvu) |