land. My hope is that this dissertation will open the door to contributions by my peers (many of whom are, I am sure, far better equipped to deal with these issues than I am) to begin to have a conversation about this pressing social and scientific problem. My hope is that this will be the beginning of philosophers of science at least trying to do better.
0.1 Outline and General Structure
The somewhat unusual nature of this project, though, means that the structure and methodology of this dissertation will be somewhat different from most works both in philosophy and science. Before beginning the project proper, then, I want to say a bit about why I chose to structure things as I have, and why I have focused on the issues that I chose. My hope is that in flagging some of the unorthodox aspects of this work as intentional, I might short-circuit a few lines of objection to my project that would (I think) serve only to distract from the real work to be done. To get the ball rolling, let me lay out a sketch of how this work will proceed.
First, there are foundational questions. These questions concern the structure of science generally, the relationship between the various branches of science, climate science's continuity (or lack thereof) with the rest of science, and other issues that don’t seem to be investigated directly by any other branch of science. Foundational questions include those that are traditionally thought of as the purview of the philosopher: "how do we know that we can trust science?" is a paradigmatic foundational question (and a surprisingly difficult one to answer, at that). Chapters One, Two, and Three of this work will focus on foundational questions. Specifically, Chapter One outlines a novel approach to philosophy of science based on recent advances in information theory, and lays the groundwork for applying that approach to the
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