Philosophers of science

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Are there any useful ones, or do they all end up being ego bloated omphaloskeptics satisfied with demolishing (at least in their eyes) the objective value of science. Are there any works in particular that are regarded as useful by practicing scientists or recommended by any members of this board?

[Keevan_Colton]

I know Richard Dawkins has some time for the works of philosopher Daniel Dennet, but for the most part philosophy went down the shitter about the time of Plato. Fuck him and his Academy, give me Epicurus and his Garden over that shit anyday.

[Eris]

Are there any useful ones, or do they all end up being ego bloated omphaloskeptics satisfied with demolishing (at least in their eyes) the objective value of science. Are there any works in particular that are regarded as useful by practicing scientists or recommended by any members of this board?

That's a pretty broad claim you're making there, and I'm guessing it's from a position of ignorance no less. Name me one analytic philosopher of science that doesn't defend the objective value of science to the death. I'll do you a favour and name you several that do. Jennan Ismael, Shaugan Lavine, W.V.O. Quine, Sir Karl Popper, Cas van Fraasen, Richard Feynman, Rudolph Carnap, and Richard Healey.

Not one of them is a sceptic in the sense I think you're after - I don't think there are many of those in the current. As in next to zero. The brain in the vat is a thought experiment designed to test the limits of our knowledge, not an actual proposed model of reality. As for works in particular, what are you looking for? If you're thinking of current issues in the modeling of quantum mechanics, look at anything Richard Healey has ever written: he's one of the leading scholars in the field. For holism, you can't beat Quine. Popper of course is the man behind falsfication, and Carnap and the rest of the Vienna circle did logical positivism, which while it's out of favour is still interesting to read, and lays the groundwork for the focus of the rest of modern phil of science.

Oh, and Dan Dennett could also be read, but he's more philosophy of mind (or lack thereof). It's not hard to find anti-sceptical arguments these days. You might also want to check out epistemologists Terry Horgan and Keith Lehrer for more in that vein.

[Eris]

Ghetto Edit: That should be Bas van Fraassen, not Cas van Fraasen. I cannot type.

[Rye]

There was this guy called Charles Darwin, perhaps you've heard of him.

[salm]

Personally i found Popper a very interesting read.

[Isana Kadeb]

Kuhn's a good read as well, he raised some interesting points.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

I made no claims in my OP. I was just being a bit bombastic in my wording of the alternatives. The truth is that I am completely ignorant of who writes in the field and who is considered useful or noteworthy. I just didn't know where to begin, so I thought I'd ask for opinions.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

And Eris, thanks for the wealth of leads. I have a friend who's a philosophy major at Berkeley, and who's rabidly anti-science just out of personal preference, apparently. There are no suitable classes at the local college that I'm aware of, so I couldn't start there.

[Kuroneko]

Are there any useful ones, or do they all end up being ego bloated omphaloskeptics satisfied with demolishing (at least in their eyes) the objective value of science. Are there any works in particular that are regarded as useful by practicing scientists or recommended by any members of this board?

I'm not sure what philosophers of science you are reading, but it shows a grave misunderstanding of philosophical endeavors. It's true that philosophers of science critique and demolish accounts of science, but they also generate them in the first place. For example, the most famous minimalist account, falsificationism, has been due largely to Sir Karl Popper, a philosopher of science rather than a scientist. Still, with a very few exceptions, philosophy of science has almost no impact on actual scientific practice.

Almost all of it seeks to elucidate scientific practice rather than guide it. In this respect, it's no different from the epistemologist's "when am I justified in believing something?" No philosopher would be interested in "how much evidence is enough?" That's not philosophy; it's something for the scientists to fiddle around with. A philosophical question along these lines would be something along the lines of "what constitutes evidence in the first place?"--i.e., a philosopher would be more interested in trying to characterize the common traits of what is used as evidence. That sort of abstraction makes it somewhat removed from practical use.

That's not to say that philosophy of science is completely irrelevant; questions like "what is the difference between science and pseudoscience?" are both highly topical (considering cases like Intelligent Design in particular) and philosophical (regardless of whether or not those who answer them are professional philosophers). Speaking of which, interesting names in this area include Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, Michael Ruse, and Paul Thagard. There is a famous series of papers between Ruse and Laudan, started because of Ruse being an expert witness for the ACLU regarding "creation-science", in which they have a debate.

That's not to say that your perception is baseless. A selective reading of the literature might therefore very well generate the impression that poking holes in science is all that's occurring. But the more famous concepts of the field are famous among philosophers exactly because they give a problem for them to solve. When hearing of "large" concept, e.g., Duhem-Quine thesis of regarding failures of empirical evidence to determine physical laws, one might miss Laudan's Demystifying Underdetermination that seeks to banish it. Kuhn is famous case; he is most often mischaracterized as an anti-rationalist that upholds a kind of mob psychology for science. However, his own Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice sets the record for a much tamer interpretation. A good distinction to make when reading Kuhn is whether he claims that science is subjective in the sense of process or the result (or both). He only has one of those in mind, and it's not as if other philosophers simply rolled over and declared him right--some, like the aforementioned Laudan, attack the entire holistic picture that Kuhn proposes.

The truth is that I am completely ignorant of who writes in the field and who is considered useful or noteworthy. I just didn't know where to begin, so I thought I'd ask for opinions.

I'm not sure I can answer your question in full. There's just too much. What sorts of questions are you interested in? Some interesting questions follow, along with some of those that have tried to answer them. Those lists are nowhere near exhaustive; some deserving have been omitted.
"What is a law of nature?" F. Dretske, R. Feynman (yes, him), D. Mellor.
"What constitutes a valid explanation (as opposed to handwaving)?" R. Carnap, C. Hempel, P. Railton.
"Science is successful. Why is that so?" L. Laudan, J. R. Brown, W. Newton-Smith.

The last is related to "in what sense, if any, are theoretical entities 'real'?", on which there is a massive amount of literature. In the end, none of it will be useful to you unless you're truly interested in thinking deeply about those questions.