Alexander Bird is the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, and a Fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. He was previously Peter Sowerby Professor of Philosophy and Medicine at King’s College London and before that the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He also taught at the University of Edinburgh, Dartmouth College, and St Louis University. His published works include Knowing Science (2002),Nature’s Metaphysics (2007), Thomas Kuhn (2000), and Philosophy of Science (1998). He is a Correspondant de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Institut de France.
I examine the implications of knowledge‐first epistemology for philosophy of science. We start with the idea that belief aims at knowledge. Correspondingly, I claim that scientific belief and science itself aim at scientific knowledge. This implies an account of scientific progress as the accumulation of scientific knowledge. More importantly, I argue that we can also infer an account of scientific evidence: science aims at producing knowledge by making inferences from evidence; science can achieve this if and only if evidence is knowledge. This knowledge‐first equation, E=K, runs counter to empiricist conceptions of evidence and observation as tied to perception. I note that it provides an answer to problems raised by the Duhem–Quine thesis. It also enables a picture of science that allows that as hypotheses come to be known the evidential basis of science can become ever more ‘theory‐laden’ in a benign way, allowing for further scientific progress.
~ Professor Bird ~
