Download or read book Ceterus Paribus Laws written by John Earman and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2002 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural and social sciences seem very often, though usually only implicitly, to hedge their laws by ceteris paribus clauses - a practice which is philosophically very hard to understand because such clauses seem to render the laws trivial and unfalsifiable. After early worries the issue is vigorously discussed in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind since ca. 15 years. This volume collects the most prominent philosophers of science in the field and presents a lively, controversial, but well-integrated, highly original and up-to-date discussion of the issue. It will be the reference book in the coming years concerning ceteris paribus laws.
Download or read book The Metaphysics of Ceteris Paribus Laws written by Markus A. Schrenk and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Universality is not sufficient to distinguish laws of nature from accidental regularities. A multitude of additional defining features have been suggested. Yet, once it is acknowledged that exceptionless universality is not the only criterion for lawhood it is possible to start questioning whether it is necessary. Markus Schrenk's The Metaphysics of Ceteris Paribus Laws takes this bold step and it's provocative conclusion is that existing theories - especially David Lewis's and David Armstrong's - are, in fact, strong enough to guarantee lawhood even if there are instances that do not conform to the laws. Schrenk also advances two novel theories for special science ceteris paribus laws. His unorthodox exploration has the potential to stimulate a new debate about laws, lawhood and exceptions. This work has received the Award for Furthering Research in Ontology of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP).
Download or read book Explanation Laws and Causation written by Wei Wang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific explanation, laws of nature, and causation are crucial and frontier issues in the philosophy of science. This book studies the complex relationship between the three concepts, aiming to achieve a holistic synthesis about explanation–laws–causation. By reviewing Hempel's scientific explanation models and Salmon's three conceptions – the epistemic, modal, and ontic conception – the book suggests that laws are essential to explanation and that our understanding of laws will help solve the problems of the latter. Concerning the nature of laws, this book tackles both the problems of regularity approach and necessitarian approach. It also proposes that the ontological order of explanation should be from events (or processes) to causation, then to regularity (laws), and finally to science system, but the epistemological order should be from science system to laws to explanation and causation. In addition, this book examines the legitimacy of ceteris paribus laws, the connection between explanation and reduction, the relation between explanation and interpretation, and some other issues closely related to explanation–laws–causation. This book will attract scholars and students of philosophy of science, natural sciences, social sciences, etc.
Download or read book Rethinking Order written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a radical new picture of natural order. The Newtonian idea of a cosmos ruled by universal and exceptionless laws has been superseded; replaced by a conception of nature as a realm of diverse powers, potencies, and dispositions, a 'dappled world'. There is order in nature, but it is more local, diverse, piecemeal, open, and emergent than Newton imagined. In each chapter expert authors expound the historical context of the idea of laws of nature, and explore the diverse sorts of order actually presupposed by work in physics, biology, and the social sciences. They consider how human freedom might be understood, and explore how Newton's idea of a 'universal designer' might be revised, in this new context. They argue that there is not one unified totalizing program of science, aiming at the completion of one closed causal system. We live in an ordered universe, but we need to rethink the classical idea of the 'laws of nature' in a more dynamic and creatively diverse way.
Download or read book Laws Mind and Free Will written by Steven Horst and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-03-11 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of scientific laws that vindicates the status of psychological laws and shows natural laws to be compatible with free will. In Laws, Mind, and Free Will, Steven Horst addresses the apparent dissonance between the picture of the natural world that arises from the sciences and our understanding of ourselves as agents who think and act. If the mind and the world are entirely governed by natural laws, there seems to be no room left for free will to operate. Moreover, although the laws of physical science are clear and verifiable, the sciences of the mind seem to yield only rough generalizations rather than universal laws of nature. Horst argues that these two familiar problems in philosophy—the apparent tension between free will and natural law and the absence of "strict" laws in the sciences of the mind—are artifacts of a particular philosophical thesis about the nature of laws: that laws make claims about how objects actually behave. Horst argues against this Empiricist orthodoxy and proposes an alternative account of laws—an account rooted in a cognitivist approach to philosophy of science. Horst argues that once we abandon the Empiricist misunderstandings of the nature of laws there is no contrast between "strict" laws and generalizations about the mind ("ceteris paribus" laws, laws hedged by the caveat "other things being equal"), and that a commitment to laws is compatible with a commitment to the existence of free will. Horst's alternative account, which he calls "cognitive Pluralism," vindicates the truth of psychological laws and resolves the tension between human freedom and the sciences.
Download or read book The Dappled World written by Nancy Cartwright and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-09-23 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often supposed that the spectacular successes of our modern mathematical sciences support a lofty vision of a world completely ordered by one single elegant theory. In this book Nancy Cartwright argues to the contrary. When we draw our image of the world from the way modern science works - as empiricism teaches us we should - we end up with a world where some features are precisely ordered, others are given to rough regularity and still others behave in their own diverse ways. This patchwork makes sense when we realise that laws are very special productions of nature, requiring very special arrangements for their generation. Combining classic and newly written essays on physics and economics, The Dappled World carries important philosophical consequences and offers serious lessons for both the natural and the social sciences.
Download or read book How the Laws of Physics Lie written by Nancy Cartwright and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1983-06-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, Nancy Cartwright argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe the regularities that exist in nature. Yet she is not `anti-realist'. Rather, she draws a novel distinction, arguing that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but that the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.
Download or read book Explanatory Model Analysis written by Przemyslaw Biecek and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2021-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explanatory Model Analysis Explore, Explain and Examine Predictive Models is a set of methods and tools designed to build better predictive models and to monitor their behaviour in a changing environment. Today, the true bottleneck in predictive modelling is neither the lack of data, nor the lack of computational power, nor inadequate algorithms, nor the lack of flexible models. It is the lack of tools for model exploration (extraction of relationships learned by the model), model explanation (understanding the key factors influencing model decisions) and model examination (identification of model weaknesses and evaluation of model's performance). This book presents a collection of model agnostic methods that may be used for any black-box model together with real-world applications to classification and regression problems.
Download or read book Philosophy of Chemistry written by Hrvoj Vančik and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-22 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, Philosophy of Chemistry, is dedicated to some of the general principles of philosophy of chemistry, the special branch of philosophy of science. Since the work is a collection of lectures that the Author gave at the University of Zagreb (Croatia) during the period of twenty years, the book could serve also as a university textbook in philosophy of chemistry. Philosophy of chemistry is represented through the discussion about some of the general philosophical problems such as, theory of complexity, autonomy of sciences, epistemology, falsificationism, emergence and unity of science, holism and reductionism, the problem of identity, and hierarchical structures, as well as the teleological aspects of science. The work consists from thirteen chapters where the main science-philosophical problems are represented and discussed within the historical context of the development of chemistry as a science. The book is aimed at wider academic audience interesting in the philosophy of science, and especially at university students of life sciences.
Download or read book Philosophy of Chemistry written by Jaap Brakel and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses themes in the newly emerging discipline of philosophy of chemistry, in particular issues in connection with discussions in general philosophy of science on natural kinds, reduction and ceteris paribus laws. The philosophical issue addressed in all chapters is the relation between, on the one hand, the manifest image (the daily practice or common-sense-life-form) and on the other the scientific image, both of which claim to be the final arbiter of "everything."With respect to chemistry, the question raised is this: Where does this branch of science fit in, with the manifest or scientific image? Most philosophers and chemists probably would reply unhesitatingly, the scientific image. The aim of this book is to raise doubts about that self-evidence. It is argued that chemistry is primarily the science of manifest substances, whereas "micro" or "submicro" scientific talk--though important, useful, and insightful--does not change what matters, namely the properties of manifest substances.These manifest substances, their properties and uses cannot be reduced to talk of molecules or solutions of the Schrödinger equation. If "submicroscopic" quantum mechanics were to be wrong, it would not affect all (or any) "microlevel" chemical knowledge of molecules. If molecular chemistry were to be wrong, it wouldn't disqualify knowledge of, say, water--not at the "macrolevel" (e.g. its viscosity at 50 C), nor at the pre- or protoscientific manifest level (e.g. ice is frozen water).
Download or read book Nature s Principles written by Jan Faye and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-07-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most basic problems in the philosophy of science involves determining the extent to which nature is governed by laws. This volume presents a wide-ranging overview of the contemporary debate and includes some of its foremost participants. It begins with an extensive introduction describing the historical, logical and philosophical background of the problems dealt with in the essays. Among the topics treated in the essays is the relationship between laws of nature and causal laws as well as the role of ceteris paribus clauses in scientific explanations. Traditionally, the problem of the unity of science was intimately connected to the problem of understanding the unity of nature. This fourth volume of Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science tackles these problems as part of our consideration of the most fundamental aspects of scientific understanding.
Download or read book Causing Actions written by Paul M. Pietroski and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Pietroski defends a dualist view of the mind-body problem. Central to his account is his proposed treatment of ceteris paribus laws, their role in explanation, and how such laws are related to singular causal claims.
Download or read book Nature s Metaphysics written by Alexander Bird and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2007-08-09 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bird, a world-leader in the field, offers an original approach to key issues in philosophy. He discusses hot topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.
Download or read book The Laws of Belief written by Wolfgang Spohn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wolfgang Spohn presents the first full account of the dynamic laws of belief, by means of ranking theory, a relative of probability theory which he has pioneered since the 1980s. He offers novel insights into the nature of laws, the theory of causation, inductive reasoning and its experiential base, and a priori principles of reason.
Download or read book Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind written by T. Horgan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information and data processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and to computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. One of the most, if not the most, exciting developments within cognitive science has been the emergence of connectionism as an alternative to the computational conception of the mind that tends to dominate the discipline. In this volume, John Tienson and Terence Horgan have brought together a fine collection of stimulating studies on connectionism and its significance. As the Introduction explains, the most pressing questions concern whether or not connectionism can provide a new conception of the nature of mentality. By focusing on the similarities and differences between connectionism and other approaches to cognitive science, the chapters of this book supply valuable resources that advance our understanding of these difficult issues. J.H.F.
Download or read book A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism written by Anjan Chakravartty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories give approximately true descriptions of both observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world. Debates between realists and their critics are at the very heart of the philosophy of science. Anjan Chakravartty traces the contemporary evolution of realism by examining the most promising strategies adopted by its proponents in response to the forceful challenges of antirealist sceptics, resulting in a positive proposal for scientific realism today. He examines the core principles of the realist position, and sheds light on topics including the varieties of metaphysical commitment required, and the nature of the conflict between realism and its empiricist rivals. By illuminating the connections between realist interpretations of scientific knowledge and the metaphysical foundations supporting them, his book offers a compelling vision of how realism can provide an internally consistent and coherent account of scientific knowledge.
Download or read book Philosophy of Science in Practice written by Hsiang-Ke Chao and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-27 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reflects the ‘philosophy of science in practice’ approach and takes a fresh look at traditional philosophical problems in the context of natural, social, and health research. Inspired by the work of Nancy Cartwright that shows how the practices and apparatuses of science help us to understand science and to build theories in the philosophy of science, this volume critically examines the philosophical concepts of evidence, laws, causation, and models and their roles in the process of scientific reasoning. Each chapter is an important one in the philosophy of science, while the volume as a whole deals with these philosophical concepts in a unified way in the context of actual scientific practice. This volume thus aims to contribute to this new direction in the philosophy of science.
