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Book The Structure and Dynamics of Theories

Download or read book The Structure and Dynamics of Theories written by Wolfgang Stegmüller and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first part of this book, Part I, can be read from two quite distinct points of view: one, as an attempt to develop and defend the important aspects of an entirely new approach to the analysis of the structure of scientific the ories; and second, as the source of the conceptual apparatus needed for the analysis of theory dynamics and the metascientific reconstruction of T. S. Kuhn's notions of 'normal science' and 'scientific revolutions. ' In the last few years a great deal has been written about Kuhnian 'irra tionalism' and 'relativism. ' Most writers felt that they must combat it; a few thought that they must develop it further and deploy it propagandistically against a 'logic of science. ' According to the view developed in Part II of this book, both parties are on the wrong track. As far as irrationalism is concerned, it must be said that Kuhn's position itself cannot be characterized as 'irrational' in any reasonable sense of the word. His language is much too clear, and his examples are historically too well founded. (He is thoroughly aware of his frequent use of metaphorical language which, as can also be shown, is his prerogative. ) Without precedent in his work is the fact that he appears to impute irrational behavior to the practioners of the exact natural sciences (of all people!).

Book Structure and Dynamics

    Book Details:
  • Author : Martin T. Dove
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2003-03-06
  • ISBN : 9780198506782
  • Pages : 364 pages

Download or read book Structure and Dynamics written by Martin T. Dove and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-06 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes how the arrangement and movement of atoms in a solid are related to the forces between atoms, and how they affect the behaviour and properties of materials. The book is intended for final year undergraduate students and graduate students in physics and materials science.

Book Novel Approaches to the Structure and Dynamics of Liquids  Experiments  Theories and Simulations

Download or read book Novel Approaches to the Structure and Dynamics of Liquids Experiments Theories and Simulations written by Jannis Samios and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unique behavior of the "liquid state", together with the richness of phenomena that are observed, render liquids particularly interesting for the scientific community. Note that the most important reactions in chemical and biological systems take place in solutions and liquid-like environments. Additionally, liquids are utilized for numerous industrial applications. It is for these reasons that the understanding of their properties at the molecular level is of foremost interest in many fields of science and engineering. What can be said with certainty is that both the experimental and theoretical studies of the liquid state have a long and rich history, so that one might suppose this to be essentially a solved problem. It should be emphasized, however, that although, for more than a century, the overall scientific effort has led to a considerable progress, our understanding of the properties of the liquid systems is still incomplete and there is still more to be explored. Basic reason for this is the "many body" character of the particle interactions in liquids and the lack of long-range order, which introduce in liquid state theory and existing simulation techniques a number of conceptual and technical problems that require specific approaches. Also, many of the elementary processes that take place in liquids, including molecular translational, rotational and vibrational motions (Trans. -Rot. -Vib. coupling), structural relaxation, energy dissipation and especially chemical changes in reactive systems occur at different and/or extremely short timescales.

Book The Structure and Dynamics of Cities

Download or read book The Structure and Dynamics of Cities written by Marc Barthelemy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a modern and interdisciplinary perspective on cities that combines new data with tools from statistical physics and urban economics.

Book The Structuralist View of Theories

Download or read book The Structuralist View of Theories written by Wolfgang Stegmüller and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-13 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present text originated with the intention of writing a brief reply to Feyerabend's detailed discussion of my book The Structure and Dynamics of Theories. For reasons explained in the Introduction this turned out to be an impossible undertaking. What resulted was a self-contained new approach to the structuralist view, combined with an attempt to bring it up to date by including a report on the latest developments. As matters stand it would have been unreasonable and unfair of me to ask the editors of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science to publish this text which exceeds by far the size of an average essay. Thus, a separate publication seemed advisable. I am deeply indebted to Springer-Verlag for making this publication possible. Since the publication of the above-mentioned book I have learned a lot from the works, partly unpublished, of Professor Joseph D. Sneed, Professor Carlos Ulises Moulines, and Dr. Wolfgang Balzer. I should like to thank my co-workers Dr. Wolfgang Balzer and Dr. Matthias Varga von Kibed and my student Michael Heidelberger for many constructive, critical remarks on the first draft of the manuscript and, in addition, Dr. Balzer for collecting and orga nizing the material for the Formal Appendix. Last, but not least, I express my warm thanks to Mrs. Clara Seneca, Oldenburg, and Mr. Roberto Minio, Springer Verlag, for amending my English formulations. V Table of Contents Introduction ....................................... .

Book Drawing Theories Apart

    Book Details:
  • Author : David Kaiser
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2009-11-15
  • ISBN : 0226422658
  • Pages : 376 pages

Download or read book Drawing Theories Apart written by David Kaiser and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-11-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2007 Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society. Feynman diagrams have revolutionized nearly every aspect of theoretical physics since the middle of the twentieth century. Introduced by the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88) soon after World War II as a means of simplifying lengthy calculations in quantum electrodynamics, they soon gained adherents in many branches of the discipline. Yet as new physicists adopted the tiny line drawings, they also adapted the diagrams and introduced their own interpretations. Drawing Theories Apart traces how generations of young theorists learned to frame their research in terms of the diagrams—and how both the diagrams and their users were molded in the process. Drawing on rich archival materials, interviews, and more than five hundred scientific articles from the period, Drawing Theories Apart uses the Feynman diagrams as a means to explore the development of American postwar physics. By focusing on the ways young physicists learned new calculational skills, David Kaiser frames his story around the crafting and stabilizing of the basic tools in the physicist's kit—thus offering the first book to follow the diagrams once they left Feynman's hands and entered the physics vernacular.

Book Theory of Value Structure

Download or read book Theory of Value Structure written by Erich H. Rast and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of value structure concerns the meaning of “better than” and “good,” as well as the way in which values serve as a basis for rational decision making. Drawing methodologically from economics and theories of decision making, the aim of serious axiology in metaethics is to do justice to problems that have puzzled philosophers of value for centuries. Can value comparisons be cyclic? Are all values comparable with each other and can decision makers just add up different aspects of an evaluation to determine the best course of action? A Theory of Value Structure: From Values to Decisions starts with a thorough introduction to the modeling of “better than” comparisons from a normative perspective. In the philosophical part of the book, Erich H. Rast argues that aspects of “better than” comparisons can differ qualitatively so much that one aspect may outrank another. Consequently, the classical weighted sum aggregation model fails. Values cannot always be summed up and comparisons may be fundamentally noncompensatory, an indeterminacy that explains problems like the apparent nontransitivity of “better than” and hard cases in decision making. Using a lexicographic method of value comparisons, Rast develops a multidimensional theory of “better than” and shows how and to which extent it can be combined with standard methods of decision making under uncertainty by using rank-dependent utility theory.

Book The New Science of Cities

Download or read book The New Science of Cities written by Michael Batty and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-11 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal for a new way to understand cities and their design not as artifacts but as systems composed of flows and networks. In The New Science of Cities, Michael Batty suggests that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, he argues, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks—the relations between objects that compose the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity sciences, social physics, urban economics, transportation theory, regional science, and urban geography, and building on his own previous work, Batty introduces theories and methods that reveal the deep structure of how cities function. Batty presents the foundations of a new science of cities, defining flows and their networks and introducing tools that can be applied to understanding different aspects of city structure. He examines the size of cities, their internal order, the transport routes that define them, and the locations that fix these networks. He introduces methods of simulation that range from simple stochastic models to bottom-up evolutionary models to aggregate land-use transportation models. Then, using largely the same tools, he presents design and decision-making models that predict interactions and flows in future cities. These networks emphasize a notion with relevance for future research and planning: that design of cities is collective action.

Book The Dynamics of Social Practice

Download or read book The Dynamics of Social Practice written by Elizabeth Shove and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday life is defined and characterised by the rise, transformation and fall of social practices. Using terminology that is both accessible and sophisticated, this essential book guides the reader through a multi-level analysis of this dynamic. In working through core propositions about social practices and how they change the book is clear and accessible; real world examples, including the history of car driving, the emergence of frozen food, and the fate of hula hooping, bring abstract concepts to life and firmly ground them in empirical case-studies and new research. Demonstrating the relevance of social theory for public policy problems, the authors show that the everyday is the basis of social transformation addressing questions such as: how do practices emerge, exist and die? what are the elements from which practices are made? how do practices recruit practitioners? how are elements, practices and the links between them generated, renewed and reproduced? Precise, relevant and persuasive this book will inspire students and researchers from across the social sciences. Elizabeth Shove is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. Mika Pantzar is Research Professor at the National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki. Matt Watson is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at University of Sheffield.

Book Introduction to the Modern Theory of Dynamical Systems

Download or read book Introduction to the Modern Theory of Dynamical Systems written by Anatole Katok and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provided the first self-contained comprehensive exposition of the theory of dynamical systems as a core mathematical discipline closely intertwined with most of the main areas of mathematics. The authors introduce and rigorously develop the theory while providing researchers interested in applications with fundamental tools and paradigms. The book begins with a discussion of several elementary but fundamental examples. These are used to formulate a program for the general study of asymptotic properties and to introduce the principal theoretical concepts and methods. The main theme of the second part of the book is the interplay between local analysis near individual orbits and the global complexity of the orbit structure. The third and fourth parts develop the theories of low-dimensional dynamical systems and hyperbolic dynamical systems in depth. Over 400 systematic exercises are included in the text. The book is aimed at students and researchers in mathematics at all levels from advanced undergraduate up.

Book The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes

Download or read book The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes written by John F. Rauthmann and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2021-01-20 with total page 1406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes is a primer to the basic and most important concepts, theories, methods, empirical findings, and applications of personality dynamics and processes. This book details how personality psychology has evolved from descriptive research to a more explanatory and dynamic science of personality, thus bridging structure- and process-based approaches, and it also reflects personality psychology's interest in the dynamic organization and interplay of thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions within persons who are always embedded into social, cultural and historic contexts. The Handbook of Personality Dynamics and Processes tackles each topic with a range of methods geared towards assessing and analyzing their dynamic nature, such as ecological momentary sampling of personality manifestations in real-life; dynamic modeling of time-series or longitudinal personality data; network modeling and simulation; and systems-theoretical models of dynamic processes. - Ties topics and methods together for a more dynamic understanding of personality - Summarizes existing knowledge and insights of personality dynamics and processes - Covers a broad compilation of cutting-edge insights - Addresses the biophysiological and social mechanisms underlying the expression and effects of personality - Examines within-person consistency and variability

Book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Download or read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions written by Thomas S. Kuhn and published by Chicago : University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1969 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics

Download or read book The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics written by Joseph D. Sneed and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about scientific theories of a particular kind - theories of mathematical physics. Examples of such theories are classical and relativis tic particle mechanics, classical electrodynamics, classical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, hydrodynamics, and quantum mechanics. Roughly, these are theories in which a certain mathematical structure is employed to make statements about some fragment of the world. Most of the book is simply an elaboration of this rough characterization of theories of mathematical physics. It is argued that each theory of mathematical physics has associated with it a certain characteristic mathematical struc ture. This structure may be used in a variety of ways to make empirical claims about putative applications of the theory. Typically - though not necessarily - the way this structure is used in making such claims requires that certain elements in the structure play essentially different roles. Some playa "theoretical" role; others playa "non-theoretical" role. For example, in classical particle mechanics, mass and force playa theoretical role while position plays a non-theoretical role. Some attention is given to showing how this distinction can be drawn and describing precisely the way in which the theoretical and non-theoretical elements function in the claims of the theory. An attempt is made to say, rather precisely, what a theory of mathematical physics is and how you tell one such theory from anothe- what the identity conditions for these theories are.

Book The Discovery of Dynamics

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julian B. Barbour
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2001-09-06
  • ISBN : 019028515X
  • Pages : 784 pages

Download or read book The Discovery of Dynamics written by Julian B. Barbour and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-06 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Newton created dynamics, there has been controversy about its foundations. Are space and time absolute? Do they form a rigid but invisible framework and container of the universe? Or are space, time, and motion relative? If so, does Newton's 'framework' arise through the influence of the universe at large, as Ernst Mach suggested? Einstein's aim when creating his general theory of relativity was to demonstrate this and thereby implement 'Mach's Principle'. However, it is widely believed that he achieved only partial success. This question of whether motion is absolute or relative has been a central issues in philosophy; the nature of time has perennial interest. Current attempts to create a quantum description of the whole universe keep these issues at the cutting edge of modern research. Written by the world's leading expert on Mach's Principle, The Discovery of Dynamics is a highly original account of the development of notions about space, time, and motion. Widely praised in its hardback version, it is one of the fullest and most readable accounts of the astronomical studies that culminated in Kepler's laws of planetary motion and of the creation of dynamics by Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton. Originally published as Absolute or Relative Motion?, Vol. 1: The Discovery of Dynamics (Cambridge), The Discovery of Dynamics provides the technical background to Barbour's recently published The End of Time, in which he argues that time disappears from the description of the quantum universe.

Book Theory of Flight

Download or read book Theory of Flight written by Richard von Mises and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-27 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mises' classic avoids the formidable mathematical structure of fluid dynamics, while conveying — by often unorthodox methods — a full understanding of the physical phenomena and mathematical concepts of aeronautical engineering.

Book Conceptual Theories in Structural Dynamics

Download or read book Conceptual Theories in Structural Dynamics written by Farzad Hejazi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the conceptual theory of structural dynamics, using simplified methods and clear, concise explanations. It illustrates all the hypotheses in a simple and effective way and describes in detail the derivation of all related formulations. Further, comprehensive step-by-step explanations combined with conceptual derivations, drawings and figures allow readers to grasp all the analytical formulations related to the dynamics of structures. Covering free and forced vibrations of single- and multi-degree of freedom systems represented as structure, subjected to dynamic load, the book also explores the most common types of dynamic loads applicable to structures, such as harmonic loads, impact loads and earthquakes, presenting relevant details, derivations and effective problems to explain the concept for various conditions. In addition, each chapter provides examples at different levels to help students, researchers and engineers gain a better understanding of the topics better, and includes numerous real-world problems to familiarize readers with the challenges related to structural engineering.

Book The Structure  Dynamics and Equilibrium Properties of Colloidal Systems

Download or read book The Structure Dynamics and Equilibrium Properties of Colloidal Systems written by D. Bloor and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 869 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Properties of Colloidal Systems, Aberystwyth, Wales, U.K., September 10-23, 1989