Download or read book Philosophico Methodological Analysis of Prediction and its Role in Economics written by Wenceslao J. Gonzalez and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a philosophico-methodological analysis of prediction and its role in economics. Prediction plays a key role in economics in various ways. It can be seen as a basic science, as an applied science and in the application of this science. First, it is used by economic theory in order to test the available knowledge. In this regard, prediction has been presented as the scientific test for economics as a science. Second, prediction provides a content regarding the possible future that can be used for prescription in applied economics. Thus, it can be used as a guide for economic policy, i.e., as knowledge concerning the future to be employed for the resolution of specific problems. Third, prediction also has a role in the application of this science in the public arena. This is through the decision-making of the agents — individuals or organizations — in quite different settings, both in the realm of microeconomics and macroeconomics. Within this context, the research is organized in five parts, which discuss relevant aspects of the role of prediction in economics: I) The problem of prediction as a test for a science; II) The general orientation in methodology of science and the problem of prediction as a scientific test; III) The methodological framework of social sciences and economics: Incidence for prediction as a test; IV) Epistemology and methodology of economic prediction: Rationality and empirical approaches and V) Methodological aspects of economic prediction: From description to prescription. Thus, the book is of interest for philosophers and economists as well as policy-makers seeking to ascertain the roots of their performance. The style used lends itself to a wide audience.

Download or read book The Future of Scientific Practice written by Marta Bertolaso and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on cell dynamics, molecular medicine and robotics, contributors explore the interplay between biological, technological and theoretical ways of thinking. The collection makes a strong contribution to current debates in the philosophy of science and the changing role of scientific practice.

Download or read book Methodological Prospects for Scientific Research written by Wenceslao J. Gonzalez and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book highlights the existence of a diversity of methods in science, in general, in groups of sciences (natural, social or the artificial), and in individual sciences. This methodological variety is open to a number of consequences, such as the differences in the research according to levels of reality (micro, meso and macro), which leads to multi-scale modelling and to questioning “fundamental” parts in the sciences, understood as the necessary support for the whole discipline. In addition, this volume acknowledges the need to assess the efficacy of procedures and methods of scientific activity in engendering high quality results in research made; the relevance of contextual factors for methodology of science; the existence of a plurality of stratagems when doing research in empirical sciences (natural, social and of the artificial); and the need for an ethical component while developing scientific methods, because values should have a role in scientific research. The book is of interest to a broad audience of philosophers, academics in various fields, graduate students and research centers interested in methodology of science.

Download or read book Pragmatic Idealism and Scientific Prediction written by Amanda Guillán and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph analyzes Nicholas Rescher’s system of pragmatic idealism. It also looks at his approach to prediction in science. Coverage highlights a prominent contribution to a central topic in the philosophy and methodology of science. The author offers a full characterization of Rescher’s system of philosophy. She presents readers with a comprehensive philosophico-methodological analysis of this important work. Her research takes into account different thematic realms: semantic, logical, epistemological, methodological, ontological, axiological, and ethical. The book features three, thematic-parts: I) General Coordinates, Semantic Features and Logical Components of Scientific Prediction; II) Predictive Knowledge and Predictive Processes in Rescher’s Methodological Pragmatism; and III) From Reality to Values: Ontological Features, Axiological Elements, and Ethical Aspects of Scientific Prediction. This insightful analysis offers a critical reconstruction of Rescher’s philosophy. The system he created is often characterized as pragmatic idealism that is open to some realist elements. He is a prominent representative of contemporary pragmatism who has made a great deal of contributions to the study of this topic. This area is crucial for science and it has been little considered in the philosophy of science.

Download or read book The Limits of Science written by Wenceslao J. Gonzalez and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-10-05 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of the limits of science — of the “barriers” and the “confines” — requires a new analysis, which is the task of this book. The issue is considered from the perspective of science as a human activity.

Download or read book Language and Scientific Research written by Wenceslao J. Gonzalez and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the role of language in scientific research and develops the semantics of science from different angles. The philosophical investigation of the volume is divided into four parts, which covers both basic science and applied science: I) The Problem of Reference and Potentialities of the Language in Science; II) Language and Change in Scientific Research: Evolution and Historicity; III) Scientific Language in the Context of Truth and Fiction; and IV) Language in Mathematics and in Empirical Sciences. Language plays a key role in science: our access to the theoretical, practical or evaluative dimensions of scientific activity begins with the mastery of language, continues with a deepening in the use of language and reaches the level of contribution when it creates new terms or changes them in sense and reference. This reveals the compatibility between objectivity in semantic contents and historicity in the progress of science. This volume is a valuable enrichment to students, academics and other professionals interested in science in all its forms, who seek to deepen the role that language plays in its structure and dynamics.

Download or read book Philosophy of Psychology Causality and Psychological Subject written by Wenceslao J. Gonzalez and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary philosophy of science analyzes psychology as a science with special features, because this discipline includes some specific philosophical problems – descriptive and normative, structural and dynamic. Some of these are particularly relevant both theoretically (casual explanation) and practically (the configuration of the psychological subject and its relations with psychiatry). Two central aspects in this book are the role of causality, especially conceived as intervention or manipulation, and the characterization of the psychological subject. This requires a clarification of scientific explanations in terms of causality in psychology, because characterizations of causality are quite different in epistemological and ontological terms. One of the most influential views is James Woodward’s approach to causality as intervention, which entails an analysis of its characteristics, new elements and limits. This means taking into account the structural and dynamic aspects included in causal cognition and psychological explanations. Psychology seen as special science also requires us to consider the scientific status of psychology and the psychological subject, which leads to limits of naturalism in psychology.

Download or read book Current Trends in Philosophy of Science written by Wenceslao J. Gonzalez and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-25 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to provide new perspectives, to broaden the field of philosophy of science, or to renew themes that have had a great impact on the profession. Thus, after an initial chapter to situate the current trends in philosophy of science and the prospective of the near future, it offers contributions in five thematic blocks: I) Philosophy of Medicine and Climate Change; II) Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet; III) New Analyses of Probability and the Use of Mathematics in Practice; IV) Scientific Progress Revisited; and V) Scientific Realism and the Instrumentalist Alternative. Within this framework, the volume addresses such relevant issues as the methodological validity of medical evidence or decision making in situations of uncertainty; recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and the future of the Internet; current forms of empirically based methodological pluralism and new ways of understanding mathematics with scientific practice; and the revision of the approaches to scientific progress based on the experiences accumulated in recent decades.

Download or read book New Approaches to Scientific Realism written by Wenceslao J. Gonzalez and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific realism is at the core of the contemporary philosophical debate on science. This book analyzes new versions of scientific realism. It makes explicit the advantages of scientific realism over alternatives and antagonists, contributes to deciding which of the new approaches better meets the descriptive and the prescriptive criteria, and expands the philosophico-methodological field to take in new topics and disciplines.

Download or read book The Internet and Philosophy of Science written by Wenceslao J Gonzalez and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-18 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the perspective of the philosophy of science, this book analyzes the Internet conceived in a broad sense. It includes three layers that require philosophical attention: (1) the technological infrastructure, (2) the Web, and (3) cloud computing, along with apps and mobile Internet. The study focuses on the network of networks from the viewpoint of complexity, both structural and dynamic. In addition to the scientific side, this volume considers the technological facet and the social dimension of the Internet as a novel design. There is a clear contribution of the Internet to science: first, the very development of the network of networks requires the creation of new science; second, the Internet empowers scientific disciplines, such as communication sciences; and third, the Internet has fostered a whole new emergent field of data and information. After the opening chapter, which offers a series of keys to the book, there are nine chapters, grouped into four parts: (I) Configuration of the Internet and Its Future, (II) Structural and Dynamic Complexity in the Design of the Internet, (III) Internal and External Contributions of the Internet, and (IV) The Internet and the Sciences. Following this framework, The Internet and Philosophy of Science will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of technology as well as science and technology studies.

Download or read book Search Foundations written by Sachi Arafat and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A call to redirect the intellectual focus of information retrieval and science (IR&S) toward the phenomenon of technology-mediated experience. In this book, Sachi Arafat and Elham Ashoori issue a call to reorient the intellectual focus of information retrieval and science (IR&S) away from search and related processes toward the more general phenomenon of technology-mediated experience. Technology-mediated experience accounts for an increasing proportion of human lived experience; the phenomenon of mediation gets at the heart of the human-machine relationship. Framing IR&S more broadly in this way generalizes its problems and perspectives, dovetailing them with those shared across disciplines dealing with socio-technical phenomena. This reorientation of IR&S requires imagining it as a new kind of science: a science of technology-mediated experience (STME). Arafat and Ashoori not only offer detailed analysis of the foundational concepts underlying IR&S and other technical disciplines but also boldly call for a radical, systematic appropriation of the sciences and humanities to create a better understanding of the human-technology relationship. Arafat and Ashoori discuss the notion of progress in IR&S and consider ideas of progress from the history and philosophy of science. They argue that progress in IR&S requires explicit linking between technical and nontechnical aspects of discourse. They develop a network of basic questions and present a discursive framework for addressing these questions. With this book, Arafat and Ashoori provide both a manifesto for the reimagining of their field and the foundations on which a reframed IR&S would rest.

Download or read book Expectations in Economic Theory written by S. A. Ozga and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with economic theory, not methodology. It does employ certain methodological resolutions. These resolutions and the limitations they impose on the nature and the scope of the analysis are reviewed. The first resolution concerns what kind of a theory is to be discussed. The word theory may mean many things; it may mean a hypothesis put forward as an explanation of something, an idea, or a notion. In a normative sense it may mean a recommendation, a rule, or principle to be followed. In science it usually means a system of hypotheses to be accepted as an explanation of certain facts, a set of general laws, and principles. It is also used to distinguish the general principles and methods of a subject from the practice of it.The theory with which this volume is concerned is that of science. In very general terms it may be defined as a system of hypotheses, one following from another, which permits the reader to derive from known facts and predictions of other facts. If the knowledge of the fact which we predict is important for us, in the sense that it permits us to achieve better the objectives we pursue, the theory may have a practical value. This book is therefore not only a contribution to the analysis of expectations but also an introduction to a number of selected topics in economic theory.

Download or read book Solving Practical Engineering Mechanics Problems written by Sayavur Bakhtiyarov and published by Springer. This book was released on 2022-06-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineering mechanics is one of the fundamental branches of science that is important in the education of professional engineers of any major. Most of the basic engineering courses, such as mechanics of materials, fluid and gas mechanics, machine design, mechatronics, acoustics, vibrations, etc. are based on engineering mechanics courses. In order to absorb the materials of engineering mechanics, it is not enough to consume just theoretical laws and theorems—a student also must develop an ability to solve practical problems. Therefore, it is necessary to solve many problems independently. This book is a part of a four-book series designed to supplement the engineering mechanics courses. This series instructs and applies the principles required to solve practical engineering problems in the following branches of mechanics: statics, kinematics, dynamics, and advanced kinetics. Each book contains between 6 and 8 topics on its specific branch and each topic features 30 problems to be assigned as homework, tests, and/or midterm/final exams with the consent of the instructor. A solution of one similar sample problem from each topic is provided. This first book contains seven topics of statics, the branch of mechanics concerned with the analysis of forces acting on construction systems without an acceleration (a state of the static equilibrium). The book targets the undergraduate students of the sophomore/junior level majoring in science and engineering.

Download or read book Testing Rationality and Progress written by D. Wade Hands and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hahn and Economic Methodology written by Thomas Boylan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hahn on Methodology: The Quest for Understanding addresses two fundamental questions: (i) what is distinctive about economic theorising?; (ii) what is the cognitive value of the outcome of this activity of economic theorising, i.e. economic theory. We will argue that for Hahn, economic theorising is distinctive with respect to four dimensions. Firstly, the aim of economic theory is neither to describe nor explain the real economic world, as in the physical sciences. Rather the aim is to achieve objective, but non-scientific, understanding. Secondly, the central question for economic theory remains for Hahn how to understand, but not to predict as in physics for instance, how decentralised choices interact and perhaps get co-ordinated. Thirdly, Hahn identifies ‘three commitments’ without which, he argues, economic theorising for him is not possible. Finally, economic theorising has a distinctive approach, which Hahn calls its ‘grammar of argumentation’ .

Download or read book Science and Hypothesis written by Larry Laudan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book consists of a collection of essays written between 1965 and 1981. Some have been published elsewhere; others appear here for the first time. Although dealing with different figures and different periods, they have a common theme: all are concerned with examining how the method of hy pothesis came to be the ruling orthodoxy in the philosophy of science and the quasi-official methodology of the scientific community. It might have been otherwise. Barely three centuries ago, hypothetico deduction was in both disfavor and disarray. Numerous rival methods for scientific inquiry - including eliminative and enumerative induction, analogy and derivation from first principles - were widely touted. The method of hypothesis, known since antiquity, found few proponents between 1700 and 1850. During the last century, of course, that ordering has been inverted and - despite an almost universal acknowledgement of its weaknesses - the method of hypothesis (usually under such descriptions as 'hypothetico deduction' or 'conjectures and refutations') has become the orthodoxy of the 20th century. Behind the waxing and waning of the method of hypothesis, embedded within the vicissitudes of its fortunes, there is a fascinating story to be told. It is a story that forms an integral part of modern science and its philosophy.

Download or read book Science Technology and Society written by Wenceslao J. González and published by Netbiblo. This book was released on 2005 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emphasis on the realm of Science, Technology and Society or Science and Technology Studies may have the same degree of relevance that the “historical turn” had in the past. It is a “social turn” which affects philosophy of science as well as philosophy of technology. It includes a new vision of the aims, processes and results of scientific activities and technological doings, because the focus of attention is on several aspects of science and technology which used to be considered as secondary, or even irrelevant. This turn highlights science and technology as social undertakings rather than intellectual contents. According to this new vision, there are several important changes as to what should be studied the objects of research, how it should be studied the method and what the consequences for those studies are. The new focus of attention can be seen in many changes, and among them are several of special interest: a) from what science and technology are in themselves (mainly, epistemic contents) to how science and technology are made (largely, social constructions); b) from the language and structure of basic science to the characteristics of applied science and the applications of science; c) from technology as a feature through which human beings control their natural surroundings (a step beyond “technics” due to the contribution of science) to technology as a social practice and an instrument of power; and d) from the role of internal values necessary for “mature science” and “innovative technology” to the role of contextual or external values (cultural, political, economic ...) of science and technology. Wenceslao J. Gonzalez is professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of A Coruña (Spain). He has been vicedean of the School of Humanities and president of the Committee of Doctoral Programs at the University. He has been a visting researcher at the Universities of St. Andrews, Münster and London (London School of Economics), as well as Visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. He has given lectures at the Universities of Pittsburgh, Stanford, Quebec and Helsinki. The conferences in which he has participated include those organized by the Universities of Uppsala, New South Wales, Bologne and Canterbury (New Zealand). He has edited 20 volumes and published 70 papers. He is the editor of the monographic issues on Philosophy and Methodology of Economics (1998) and Lakatos’s Philosophy Today (2001). His writings include “Economic Prediction and Human Activity. An Analysis of Prediction in Economics from Action Theory” (1994), “On the Theoretical Basis of Prediction in Economics” (1996), “Rationality in Economics and Scientific Predictions: A Critical Reconstruction of Bounded Rationality and its Role in Economic Predictions” (1997), “Lakatos’s Approach on Prediction and Novel Facts” (2001), “Rationality in Experimental Economics: An Analysis of R. Selten’s Approach” (2003), “From ErklärenVerstehen to PredictionUnderstanding: The Methodological Framework in Economics” (2003), and “The Many Faces of Popper’s Methodological Approach to Prediction” (2004).