Wolfgang Stegmüller

philosopher · 4 mentions across 1 reading

In this course

Stegmüller is a philosopher of science known for analyzing the structure and dynamics of scientific theories, particularly challenging the idea that science progresses uniformly and convergently toward truth. In these readings, his work on theory-ladenness and the problem of reducibility at both micro and macro levels grounds debates about whether scientific knowledge genuinely accumulates or whether our concepts remain arbitrarily structured, a question crucial to understanding how AI systems inherit and perpetuate the theory-laden assumptions embedded in their training data. His skepticism about convergent scientific progress becomes essential for interrogating claims that machine learning models achieve objective understanding rather than simply systematizing particular epistemic frameworks.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Reza Negarestani

from Intelligence and Spirit

Scientific explanation, accordingly, can be understood as an activity of mind that forces the activity of self-conception to renegotiate its original alliance with appearances—particularly the appearance of how the world that appears for mi…The idea of a general convergent progress of science is based on the analysis of the structure and dynamics of scientific theories (the theory-ladenness of all sciences). According to Stegmüller, the conviction of a convergent and uniform p…At the level of the micrological analysis of stable cores concerning formally constructed and inferentially related sentences or classes of sentences, the reducibility fails to be nonarbitrary or general. And at the level of the macrologica…

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Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Immanuel Kant 2 Allen Wood 1 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1 Jay Rosenberg 1 Paul Guyer 1 Ray Brassier 1 Robert Brandom 1 Thomas Metzinger 1 Wilfrid Sellers 1