Download or read book Science and Partial Truth written by Newton C. A. da Costa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past thirty years, two fundamental issues have emerged in the philosophy of science. One concerns the appropriate attitude we should take towards scientific theories--whether we should regard them as true or merely empirically adequate, for example. The other concerns the nature of scientific theories and models and how these might best be represented. In this ambitious book, da Costa and French bring these two issues together by arguing that theories and models should be regarded as partially rather than wholly true. They adopt a framework that sheds new light on issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate. The new machinery of "partial structures" that they develop offers a new perspective from which to view the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development. Their conclusions will be of wide interest to philosophers and historians of science.
Download or read book Science and Partial Truth written by Newton C. A. da Costa and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Science and Partial Truth written by Newton C. A. da Costa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past thirty years, two fundamental issues have emerged in the philosophy of science. One concerns the appropriate attitude we should take towards scientific theories--whether we should regard them as true or merely empirically adequate, for example. The other concerns the nature of scientific theories and models and how these might best be represented. In this ambitious book, da Costa and French bring these two issues together by arguing that theories and models should be regarded as partially rather than wholly true. They adopt a framework that sheds new light on issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate. The new machinery of "partial structures" that they develop offers a new perspective from which to view the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development. Their conclusions will be of wide interest to philosophers and historians of science.
Download or read book Truth and Beauty written by S. Chandrasekhar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What a splendid book! Reading it is a joy, and for me, at least, continuing reading it became compulsive. . . . Chandrasekhar is a distinguished astrophysicist and every one of the lectures bears the hallmark of all his work: precision, thoroughness, lucidity."—Sir Hermann Bondi, Nature The late S. Chandrasekhar was best known for his discovery of the upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf star, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. He was the author of many books, including The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes and, most recently, Newton's Principia for the Common Reader.
Download or read book Writing Culture written by James Clifford and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These seminal essays place ethnography at the intersection of interpretive anthropology, cultural studies, social history, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism. They grapple with issues of power and poetics in contemporary situations of globalization, post-coloniality, and post-modernity. Since its publication in 1986, Writing Culture has been a source of generative controversy and innovation in anthropology. It continues to inspire scholars and activists across the humanities, social sciences, and arts who are concerned with experimentation and ethics in cultural analysis. This anniversary edition is augmented with a new foreword by Kim Fortun, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, exploring the legacies of Writing Culture in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Hard Facts Dangerous Half Truths and Total Nonsense written by Jeffrey Pfeffer and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2006-02-14 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best organizations have the best talent. . . Financial incentives drive company performance. . . Firms must change or die. Popular axioms like these drive business decisions every day. Yet too much common management “wisdom” isn’t wise at all—but, instead, flawed knowledge based on “best practices” that are actually poor, incomplete, or outright obsolete. Worse, legions of managers use this dubious knowledge to make decisions that are hazardous to organizational health. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton show how companies can bolster performance and trump the competition through evidence-based management, an approach to decision-making and action that is driven by hard facts rather than half-truths or hype. This book guides managers in using this approach to dismantle six widely held—but ultimately flawed—management beliefs in core areas including leadership, strategy, change, talent, financial incentives, and work-life balance. The authors show managers how to find and apply the best practices for their companies, rather than blindly copy what seems to have worked elsewhere. This practical and candid book challenges leaders to commit to evidence-based management as a way of organizational life—and shows how to finally turn this common sense into common practice.
Download or read book An Instinct for Truth written by Robert T. Pennock and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the scientific mindset—such character virtues as curiosity, veracity, attentiveness, and humility to evidence—and its importance for science, democracy, and human flourishing. Exemplary scientists have a characteristic way of viewing the world and their work: their mindset and methods all aim at discovering truths about nature. In An Instinct for Truth, Robert Pennock explores this scientific mindset and argues that what Charles Darwin called “an instinct for truth, knowledge, and discovery” has a tacit moral structure—that it is important not only for scientific excellence and integrity but also for democracy and human flourishing. In an era of “post-truth,” the scientific drive to discover empirical truths has a special value. Taking a virtue-theoretic perspective, Pennock explores curiosity, veracity, skepticism, humility to evidence, and other scientific virtues and vices. He explains that curiosity is the most distinctive element of the scientific character, by which other norms are shaped; discusses the passionate nature of scientific attentiveness; and calls for science education not only to teach scientific findings and methods but also to nurture the scientific mindset and its core values. Drawing on historical sources as well as a sociological study of more than a thousand scientists, Pennock's philosophical account is grounded in values that scientists themselves recognize they should aspire to. Pennock argues that epistemic and ethical values are normatively interconnected, and that for science and society to flourish, we need not just a philosophy of science, but a philosophy of the scientist.
Download or read book Truth and Tension in Science and Religion written by Varadaraja V. Raman and published by Beech River Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An examination of the frameworks of science and religion that provides a multi-cultural view of how they affect our perception of the truth"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Truth Or Beauty written by David Orrell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions the promises and pitfalls of associating beauty with truth, showing how ideas of mathematical elegance have inspired, and have sometimes misled, scientists attempting to understand nature. The author also shows how the ancient Greeks constructed a concept of the world based on musical harmony.
Download or read book Theory and Truth written by Lawrence Sklar and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2002-02-07 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skeptics have cast doubt on the idea that scientific theories give us a true picture of an objective world. Lawrence Sklar examines three kinds of skeptical arguments about scientific truth, and explores the important role that these play within foundational science itself, especially physics. First, doubts have been expressed about the legitimacy of claiming truth for assertions about the realm of the unobservable. Second, scientific theories have been characterized as relying heavily on idealization of the physical systems they seek to describe. Third, it is noted that scientific theories tend to be transient, and even the best currently available are expected to be replaced in the future. Sklar demonstrates that these kinds of philosophical critique are employed within science itself, and reveals the clear difference between how they operate in a scientific and in a more abstract philosophical context. The underlying theme of Theory and Truth is that science and philosophy are essential to, and inextricable from, each other. One cannot understand the methods of science except by understanding philosophy, and one cannot fruitfully pursue philosophy of science without understanding foundational science as well.
Download or read book Science and Anthropology in a Post Truth World written by H. Sidky and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of 2019, Americans were living in an era of post-truth characterized by fake news, weaponized lies, alternative facts, conspiracy theories, magical thinking, and irrationalism. While many complex interconnected factors were at work, this post-truth era was partly the culmination of a cadre of anthropologists and other academics in American universities and colleges during the 1980’s and 1990’s. In Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World, H. Sidky examines how their untoward dalliance with problematic and dangerous ideas by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard informed and empowered a forceful assault on science and truth in the following decades by corporate organizations, politicians, religious extremists, and right-wing populists.
Download or read book Partial Truths and Our Common Future written by Donald A. Crosby and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-08-20 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that a pluralistic understanding of truth can foster productive conversations about common concerns involving religion, science, ethics, politics, economics, and ecology without falling into relativism. In this book, Donald A. Crosby defends the idea that all claims to truth are at best partial. Recognizing this, he argues, is a necessary safeguard against arrogance, close-mindedness, and potentially violent reactions to differences of outlook and practice. Crosby demonstrates how partial truths are inevitably at work in conversations and debates about religion, science, morality, economics, ecology, and social and political progress. He then focuses on the concept in the discipline of philosophy, looking at a number of distinctions that are taken to be strictly binarythose between fact and value, continuity and novelty, rationalism and empiricism, mind and body, and good and eviland demonstrates how in all of these cases, each on its own can offer only an incomplete picture. Partial Truths and Our Common Future invites ongoing dialogue with others for the sake of mutual enlargements of understanding rather than mere civility, and provides incentive for continuing open-minded and shared inquiries into the important issues of life. This is a transdisciplinary philosophical work that moves with grace across traditions, time periods, and thinkers. It is a master class in the existential and public relevance of philosophy and a rare example of a book that is both timely and timeless. Michael S. Hogue, author of The Promise of Religious Naturalism
Download or read book Tracking Truth written by Sherrilyn Roush and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracking Truth presents a unified treatment of knowledge, evidence, and epistemological realism and anti-realism about scientific theories. A wide range of knowledge-related phenomena, especially but not only in science, strongly favour the idea of tracking as the key to what makes something knowledge. A subject who tracks the truth - an idea first formulated by Robert Nozick - has the ability to follow the truth through time and changing circumstances. Epistemologistsrightly concluded that Nozick's theory was not viable, but a simple revision of that view is not only viable but superior to other current views. In this new tracking account of knowledge, in contrast to the old view, knowledge has the property of closure under known implication, and troublesome counterfactualsare replaced with well-defined conditional probability statements. Of particular interest are the new view's treatment of skepticism, reflective knowledge, lottery propositions, knowledge of logical truth, and the question why knowledge is power in the Baconian sense.Ideally, evidence indicates a hypothesis and discriminates it from other possible hypotheses. This is the idea behind a tracking view of evidence, and Sherrilyn Roush provides a defence of a confirmation theory based on the Likelihood Ratio. The accounts of knowledge and evidence she offers provide a deep and seamless explanation of why having better evidence makes one more likely to have knowledge. Roush approaches the question of epistemological realism about scientific theories through thequestion what is required for evidence, and rejects both traditional realist and traditional anti-realist positions in favour of a new position which evaluates realist claims in a piecemeal fashion according to a general standard of evidence. The results show that while anti-realists were immodest indeclaring a priori what science could not do, realists were excessively sanguine about how far our actual evidence has so far taken us.
Download or read book Where the Conflict Really Lies written by Alvin Plantinga and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this long-awaited book, pre-eminent analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that the conflict between science and theistic religion is actually superficial, and that at a deeper level they are in concord.
Download or read book Science Key Concepts in Philosophy written by Steven French and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great text for students wishing to examine the questions raised in the philosophy of science. An ideal first guide to this challenging subject.
Download or read book True to the Life A novel written by and published by . This book was released on 1868 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Truth in Mathematics written by Harold G. Dales and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of truth in mathematics has exercised the minds of thinkers from at least the time of the ancient Greeks. The great advances in mathematics and philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular the work by G]odel and the development of the notion of independence in mathematics have led to new and complex views on this question. Collecting the work of a number of outstanding mathematicians and philosophers, including Yurii Manin, Vaughan Jones, and Per Martin-L]of, this volume provides an overview of the forefront of current thinking and a valuable introduction for researchers in the area.
