Can philosophy of science help science progress faster?

Summary

All of us are dazzled by the gifts science gives to human society, gifts received on almost a daily basis. And yet the big bang of science only happened recently in human history. Why didn’t it start a lot earlier? We humans and all the elements of the natural world have been around for a long time. Why have the past 300 years seen such an explosive accomplishment?

The goal of the philosophy of science, a subfield in philosophy, is to explain this miracle, and it has had many chapters, each with a different story about the unifying principle of the scientific process. For instance Karl Popper argued that a rigorous and steady devotion to falsification of theories is the engine driving science. On the other hand, Thomas Kuhn made the case that science advanced by periodic revolutions that occurred due to the accumulation of evidence. Most recently, Michael Strevens has argued that the miracle of science is the result of very good "rules of the game" that motivate scientists to avoid the intellectual pleasures of philosophy and grand explanation, and instead do the hard and unglamorous work of collecting data and attending carefully to minutiae.

Strevens's theory, focused as it is on the procedural details of the culture and institutions of science, raises an important and under-asked question: what (if anything) can a century of careful work in the philosophy, history and sociology of science actually tell us about how we might improve these institutions? Can we use the findings from the study of science to not only understand science, but to actually speed it up?

We will assemble a group of 8-10 top philosophers, historians and working scientists to discuss the findings of a century of philosophy of science. Our goal will be to take a critical look at the modern institutions of science and ask whether the things we've learned from philosophy can help us accelerate the scientific process.