Download or read book From Stimulus to Science written by Willard Van Orman Quine and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. V. Quine is one of the most eminent philosophers alive today. Now in his mid-eighties he has produced a sharp, sprightly book that encapsulates the whole of his philosophical enterprise, including his thinking on all the key components of his epistemological stance--especially the value of logic and mathematics. New readers of Quine may have to go slowly, fathoming for themselves the richness that past readers already know lies between these elegant lines. For the faithful there is much to ponder. In this short book, based on lectures delivered in Spain in 1990, Quine begins by locating his work historically. He provides a lightning tour of the history of philosophy (particularly the history of epistemology), beginning with Plato and culminating in an appreciative sketch of Carnap's philosophical ambitions and achievements. This leads, in the second chapter, to an introduction to Quine's attempt to naturalize epistemology, which emphasizes his continuities with Carnap rather than the differences between them. The next chapters develop the naturalistic story of the development of science to take account of how our conceptual apparatus is enhanced so that we can view the world as containing re-identifiable objects. Having explained the role of observation sentences in providing a checkpoint for assessing scientific theories, and having despaired of constructing an empirical criterion to determine which sentences are meaningful, Quine in the remaining chapters takes up a variety of important issues about knowledge. He concludes with an extended treatment of his views about reference and meaning and his attitudes toward psychological and modal notions. The presentation is distinctive, and the many small refinements of detail and formulation will fascinate all who know Quine's philosophy.
Download or read book From a Logical Point of View written by Willard Van Orman Quine and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1980-05-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays has a unity and bears throughout the imprint of Quine's powerful and original mind. It is written with the felicity in the choice of words which makes everything that Quine writes a pleasure to read, and which ranks him among the best contemporary writers on abstract subjects.
Download or read book Pursuit of Truth written by Willard Van Orman Quine and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Pursuit of Truth W. V. Quine gives us his latest word on issues to which he has devoted many years. As he says in the preface: "In these pages I have undertaken to update, sum up, and clarify my variously intersecting views on cognitive meaning, objective reference, and the grounds of knowledge?'The pursuit of truth is a quest that links observation, theory, and the world. Various faulty efforts to forge such links have led to much intellectual confusion. Quine's efforts to get beyond the confusion begin by rejecting the very idea of binding together word and thing, rejecting the focus on the isolated word. For him, observation sentences and theoretical sentences are the alpha and omega ofthe scientific enterprise. Notions like "idea" and "meaning" are vague, but a sentence-now there's something you can sink your teeth into. Starting thus with sentences, Quine sketches an epistemological setting for the pursuit of truth. He proceeds to show how reification and reference contribute to the elaborate structure that can indeed relate science to its sensory evidence.In this book Quine both summarizes and moves ahead. Rich, lively chapters dissect his major concerns-evidence, reference, meaning, intension, and truth. "Some points;' he writes, "have become clearer in my mind in the eight years since Theories and Things. Some that were already clear in my mind have become clearer on paper. And there are some that have meanwhile undergone substantive change for the better." This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth century. The book is concise and elegantly written, as one would expect, and does not assume the reader's previous acquaintance with Quine's writings. Throughout, it is marked by Quine's wit and economy of style.
Download or read book Science And Human Behavior written by B.F Skinner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychology classic—a detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled—from one of the most influential behaviorists of the twentieth century and the author of Walden Two. “This is an important book, exceptionally well written, and logically consistent with the basic premise of the unitary nature of science. Many students of society and culture would take violent issue with most of the things that Skinner has to say, but even those who disagree most will find this a stimulating book.” —Samuel M. Strong, The American Journal of Sociology “This is a remarkable book—remarkable in that it presents a strong, consistent, and all but exhaustive case for a natural science of human behavior…It ought to be…valuable for those whose preferences lie with, as well as those whose preferences stand against, a behavioristic approach to human activity.” —Harry Prosch, Ethics
Download or read book Neurophilosophy written by Patricia Smith Churchland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Bradford book." Bibliography: p. [491]-523. Includes index.
Download or read book Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions written by Paul Hoyningen-Huene and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-05-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars from disciplines as diverse as political science and art history have offered widely differing interpretations of Kuhn's ideas, appropriating his notions of paradigm shifts and revolutions to fit their own theories, however imperfectly. Destined to become the authoritative philosophical study of Kuhn's work. Bibliography.
Download or read book Transactions and Creations written by Eric Hirsch and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent economic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language. In a bold theoretical move, "property" is put alongside two other terms: "transactions" and "creations." The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people's creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises!
Download or read book Supernormal Stimuli How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose written by Deirdre Barrett and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-02-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How our once-helpful instincts got hijacked by our garish modern world. Have you ever wondered why some men choose pornography over actual women? Why so many people watch Friends instead of going out with their own buddies? Why a person would “feed” a plastic Pocket Pet while shirking real duties? Why both sides of every war see the other as the aggressor against whom their “Department of Defense” must respond? Harvard evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett explains how human instincts—for food, sex, or territorial protection—developed for life on the savannah ten thousand years ago, not for today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. Evolution, quite simply, has been unable to keep pace with the rapid changes of modern life. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects—from candy to pornography to atomic bombs—that gratify outmoded but persistent drives with dangerous results. In the 1930s Dutch Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen found that birds that lay small, pale-blue eggs speckled with gray preferred to sit on giant, bright-blue, plaster dummies with black polka dots. He coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe these imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and, oddly, exert a stronger attraction than real things. Obviously these hard-wired preferences pose a danger to a species’ survival. Barrett’s singular insight is to apply this phenomenon for the first time to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment. Her book adroitly demonstrates how supernormal stimuli are a driving force in many of today’s most pressing problems, including obesity, our addiction to television and video games, and the past century’s extraordinarily violent wars. Man-made imitations, it turns out, have wreaked havoc on how we nurture our children, what food we put into our bodies, how we make love and war, and even how we understand ourselves. Barrett does more than pull the fire alarm to show how these unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. There is a hopeful message here as well. Once we recognize how supernormal stimuli operate, we can craft new approaches to modern predicaments. Humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen’s birds: a giant brain. The message of this book is that this gives us the unique ability to exercise self-control, override instincts that lead us astray, and save ourselves from civilization’s gaudy traps.
Download or read book A Realist Theory of Science written by Roy Bhaskar and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Realist Theory of Science is one of the few books that have changed our understanding of the philosophy of science. In this analysis of the natural sciences, with a particular focus on the experimental process itself, Roy Bhaskar provides a definitive critique of the traditional, positivist conception of science and stakes out an alternative, realist position. Since it original publication in 1975, a movement known as 'Critical Realism', which is both intellectually diverse and international in scope, has developed on the basis of key concepts outlined in the text. The book has been hailed in many quarters as a 'Copernican Revolution' in the study of the nature of science, and the implications of its account have been far-reaching for many fields of the humanities and social sciences.
Download or read book The Golem written by Harry M. Collins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-09-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the golem? In Jewish mythology the Golem is an effigy or image brought to life. While not evil, it is a strong, clumsy and incomplete servant. Through a series of case studies, ranging from relativity and cold fusion to memory in worms and the sex lives of lizards, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch debunk the traditional view that science is the straightforward result of competent theorization, observation and experimentation. Scientific certainty is the interpretation of ambiguous results. The very well received first edition generated much debate, reflected in a substantial new Afterword in this new edition, which seeks to place the book in what have become known as 'the science wars'.
Download or read book Treatise on Basic Philosophy written by Mario BUNGE and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1977-06-30 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this Introduction' we shall sketch the business of ontology, or metaphysics, and shall locate it on the map of learning. This has to be done because there are many ways of construing the word 'ontology' and because of the bad reputation metaphysics has suffered until recently - a well deserved one in most cases. 1. ONTOLOGICAL PROBLEMS Ontological (or metaphysical) views are answers to ontological ques tions. And ontological (or metaphysical) questions are questions with an extremely wide scope, such as 'Is the world material or ideal - or perhaps neutral?" 'Is there radical novelty, and if so how does it come about?', 'Is there objective chance or just an appearance of such due to human ignorance?', 'How is the mental related to the physical?', 'Is a community anything but the set of its members?', and 'Are there laws of history?'. Just as religion was born from helplessness, ideology from conflict, and technology from the need to master the environment, so metaphysics - just like theoretical science - was probably begotten by the awe and bewilderment at the boundless variety and apparent chaos of the phenomenal world, i. e. the sum total of human experience. Like the scientist, the metaphysician looked and looks for unity in diversity, for pattern in disorder, for structure in the amorphous heap of phenomena - and in some cases even for some sense, direction or finality in reality as a whole.
Download or read book Radical Embodied Cognitive Science written by Anthony Chemero and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proposal for a new way to do cognitive science argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than computation and representation. While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought.
Download or read book Moonwalking with Einstein written by Joshua Foer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-03-03 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The blockbuster phenomenon that charts an amazing journey of the mind while revolutionizing our concept of memory “Highly entertaining.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker “Funny, curious, erudite, and full of useful details about ancient techniques of training memory.” —The Boston Globe An instant bestseller that has now become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer's yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top "mental athletes." He draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author's own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.
Download or read book Prisoners of Our Thoughts written by Alex Pattakos and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book expands on Viktor Frankl's seminal Man's Search for Meaning, examining the book's concepts in depth and widening the market for them by introducing an entirely new way to look at work and the workplace. Alex Pattakos, a former colleague of Frankl's, brings the search for meaning at work within the grasp of every reader using simple, straightforward language. The author distills Frankl's ideas into seven core principles: Exercise the freedom to choose your attitude; Realize your will to meaning; Detect the meaning of life's moments; Don't work against yourself; Look at yourself from a distance; Shift your focus of attention; and Extend beyond yourself. By demonstrating how Dr. Frankl's key principles can be applied to all kinds of work situations, Prisoners of Our Thoughts opens up new opportunities for finding personal meaning and living an authentic work life.
Download or read book Science Set Free written by Rupert Sheldrake and published by Deepak Chopra. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home offers an intriguing new assessment of modern day science that will radically change the way we view what is possible. In Science Set Free (originally published to acclaim in the UK as The Science Delusion), Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, one of the world's most innovative scientists, shows the ways in which science is being constricted by assumptions that have, over the years, hardened into dogmas. Such dogmas are not only limiting, but dangerous for the future of humanity. According to these principles, all of reality is material or physical; the world is a machine, made up of inanimate matter; nature is purposeless; consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain; free will is an illusion; God exists only as an idea in human minds, imprisoned within our skulls. But should science be a belief-system, or a method of enquiry? Sheldrake shows that the materialist ideology is moribund; under its sway, increasingly expensive research is reaping diminishing returns while societies around the world are paying the price. In the skeptical spirit of true science, Sheldrake turns the ten fundamental dogmas of materialism into exciting questions, and shows how all of them open up startling new possibilities for discovery. Science Set Free will radically change your view of what is real and what is possible.
Download or read book The Science of Human Motricity written by Rudy José Nodari and published by . This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Human Motricity Network (IHMN) is a non-profit educational, technical, scientific and cultural association whose main objectives are to promote the voluntary association of teaching, research or scientific dissemination institutions, as well as people and physical or legal entities interested in education, research and dissemination of science. For this purpose, it carries out bilateral or multilateral cooperation agreements between all involved, in order to promote teaching, research and content qualification for intervention in the promotion of health and performance through human motor skills. All professionals from different areas of knowledge have the IHMN as their locus of action, since there is no limit to the crossing of information from different types of knowledge that can directly or indirectly achieve the objective of this Network. Thus, one can see the perception that all involved have of the importance of multidisciplinarity in the construction of interdisciplinarity and how much, from basic to intervention research, each of its effective members will be welcomed. This book is a first action of all members of the Network in order to present the main lines of investigation, their themes and research results so that more researchers, institutions and other networks want to join our work, which excels in all its actions for the good of the human being. Our greatest desire is that reading the information contained herein will be a stimulus for research, a guide to research topics, an understanding of contemporary trends and, fundamentally, a way of attracting new professionals to the world of research and the dissemination of knowledge. To do so, we list our research group leaders with the most recent results in their research topics so that you have in your hands the excellence of our knowledge produced between 2007 and 2020, the time of IHMN's existence. Enjoy the knowledge you are now accessing and feel invited to participate in the International Human Motricity Network and thus be able to produce even more scientific knowledge, as well as disseminate to all people the importance of the human motricity and its benefits and the great value of life to the fullest.
Download or read book Islands of Genius written by Darold A. Treffert and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. This book was released on 2011-10-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Dr. Treffert looks at what we know about savant syndrome, and at new discoveries that raise interesting questions about the hidden brain potential within us all. He looks both at how savant skills can be nurtured, and how they can help the person who has them, particularly if that person is on the autism spectrum.
