April 28
Foundations
- Rudolf Carnap (1995). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Dover book.
- Rudolf Carnap has deeply influenced a very large number of excellent scholars. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, for example, mentioned that Carnap was one of three major influences for him when he was a Chicago graduate student. The book covers important topics such as laws, explanation, and probability, measurement and quantitative language, or causality and determinism. The book is strongly linked to physics but still very important for any (social) scientist.
- Thomas S. Kuhn (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
- Ian Hacking introduces this book with the following: “Great books are rare. This is one. Read it and you will see”. A big picture book that becomes very relevant, more so in the Publish or Perish environment in which we currently live. The book helps to understand the nature of discoveries, revolutions, paradigms, or crises.
- Karl Popper (2002). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Taylor & Francis Group.
- A classic in the thinking of science and knowledge. Peter Medawar calls the book one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. An important introduction to the logic of science and the theory of theories. His autobiography (Unended Quest) starts with: “When I was twenty I became apprenticed to an old master cabinetmaker in Vienna whose name was Adalbert Pösch, and I worked with him from 1922 to 1924, not long after the First World War. He looked exactly like Georges Clemenceau, but he was a very mild and kind man. After I had gained his confidence he would often, when we were alone in his workshop, give me the benefit of his inexhaustible store of knowledge. Once he told me that he had worked for many years on various models of a perpetual motion machine, adding musingly: “They say you can’t make it; but once it’s been made they’ll talk different!” (“Da sag’n s’ dass ma’ so was net mach’n kann; aber wann amal eina ein’s g’macht hat, dann wer’n s’ schon anders red’n!”) A favourite practice of his was to ask me a historical question and to answer it himself when it turned out that I did not know the answer (although I, his pupil, was a University student – a fact of which he was very proud). “And do you know”, he would ask, “who invented topboots? You don’t? It was Wallenstein, the Duke of Friedland, during the Thirty Years War.” After one or two even more difficult questions, posed by himself and triumphantly answered by himself, my master would say with modest pride: “There, you can ask me whatever you like: I know everything.” (Da können S’ mi’ frag’n was Sie woll’n: ich weiss alles.”). I believe I learned more about the theory of knowledge from my dear omniscient master Adalbert Pösch than from any other of my teachers. None did so much to turn me into a disciple of Socrates. For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance” (p. 7).
- Friedrich A. Hayek (1979). The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason
- Nobel laureate Hayek, economist and philosopher, impresses with his intellectual power. This book is a compilation of essays covering interesting subjects such as the influence of natural sciences on social sciences, the problem and the method of the natural sciences, the subjective character of the data of the social sciences and many more topics.
- Robin Dunbar (1995). The Trouble with Science. Harvard University Press.
- Dunbar, one of the most creative contemporary scholars, provides an excellent overview of the nature of science.
History, Sociology, Economics, and Psychology of Science
- Robert K. Merton (1979). The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press.
- Robert K. Merton is regarded as the father of the sociology of science (and a founding father of modern sociology). The book is a collection of his key papers. It covers many interesting topics such as sociology of scientific knowledge, the processes of evaluation in science and the reward system of science.
- Bruno Latour (1987). Science in Action. Harvard University Press.
- Latour is a famous French scholar, and one of the most cited scholars in social science (this book has been cited more than 22,000 times (Google Scholar)). A valuable source to understand social context and content and scientific activity.
- Paula Stephan (2012). How Economics Shapes Science. Harvard University Press.
- Stephan is one of the dominant forces in the economics of science. In this fact-driven book she focuses on some key factors of interest to economists, such as the production of research, funding, the market for scientists or the relationship of science to economic growth.
- Abraham H. Maslow (1969). The Psychology of Science: A Renaissance. Gateway Edition.
- The reading list has so far given voice to sociologists, philosophers and economists. Now it’s time for a psychologist. When you think of Maslow you can’t escape the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. His intuition and unconventional thinking is impressive. In this book he focuses on science as a product of the human nature of a scientist.
- Alfred North Whitehead (1925). Science and the Modern World. The Free Press.
- We all know Whitehead. He wrote Principia Mathematica with his former student Bertrand Russell. From the back cover: “Presaging by more than half a century most of today’s cutting-edge thought on the cultural ramifications of science and technology, Whitehead demands that readers understand and celebrate the contemporary, historical, and cultural context of scientific discovery”.
Advice and experience from the masters
- William Ian Beardmore Beveridge (1957). The Art of Scientific Investigation. Blackburn Press.
- W. I. B. Beveridge, an Australian animal pathologist, wrote a wonderful and timeless book worth reading and discussing. He writes on topics such as experimentation, chance, hypothesis, imagination, intuition, reason, observation, difficulties, or strategy.
- George J. Stigler (1985). Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist. Basic Books.
- Nobel laureate Stigler, one of the original leaders of the Chicago School, was famous for his witty remarks, breadth of knowledge as an historian of economic thought, and for his honest statements. Here is an example from George Loewenstein’s book Exotic Preferences: “Perhaps because he [Stigler] hated the paper so much that he didn’t know where to begin, or perhaps to preserve collegiality (U of C-ers tend to be nicer to their colleagues than they are to the outsiders they regularly demolish at seminars), Stigler did not tear the paper apart. However, in his brief and rather friendly commentary he did note that if William Stanley Jevons had written the words I attributed to him in 1932, it would have been “the event of the century” since at that point Jevons had been dead for almost fifty years. When I tracked down the problem I discovered that the statement I quoted was not from the great economist William Stanley Jevons, but his son, Herbert Stanley Jevons whose career provides unneeded support for the concept of regression to the mean. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately from the perspective of forensic academics, my chapter was published by the time I discovered the error” (p. 386). Easy to digest, we get an idea in Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist about Stigler’s experiences and insights.
The following three short books by two Nobel laureates (the visionary Ramón y Cajal and the elegant and witty Medawar) and by the eminent Wilson provide wonderful insights on how to conduct research, all of which will provide us with a good foundation for our discussion. Students are encouraged to read those books.
- Peter B. Medawar (1979). Advice to A Young Scientist. Basic Books.
- Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1999). Advice For a Young Investigator. MIT Press.
- Edward O. Wilson (2014). Letters to a Young Scientist. Liveright.