Download or read book Perspectives in Metascience written by Jan Bärmark and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A History of Psychology in Metascientific Perspective written by K.B. Madsen and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 1988-06-01 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two fields of interest are combined in this volume: the history of science and the theory, or philosophy, of science (metascience). The result is a history of psychology with emphasis placed upon a metascientific analysis of the work of fourteen psychologists from various periods.Each analysis is set in historical context; a period or school is discussed in each chapter, together with a metascientific analysis of some major works from the respective period or school. The author employs a metascientific descriptive system or `systematology' developed during more than 30 years of work on comparative, metascientific studies of about 50 psychological theories. The results of those studies have been published in previous works.These analyses are also used here for verifying T.S. Kuhn's much-debated theory about the `revolutionary' development of sciences. The author revises Kuhn's theory and shows that it can be applied to the history of psychology. Thus, in a Kuhnian sense, psychology may be said to have had two `normal periods' and two `periods of crisis' leading to school formation.
Download or read book Why Study Biology by the Sea written by Karl S. Matlin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-03-12 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For almost a century and a half, biologists have gone to the seashore to study life. The oceans contain rich biodiversity, and organisms at the intersection of sea and shore provide a plentiful sampling for research into a variety of questions at the laboratory bench: How does life develop and how does it function? How are organisms that look different related, and what role does the environment play? From the Stazione Zoologica in Naples to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, the Amoy Station in China, or the Misaki Station in Japan, students and researchers at seaside research stations have long visited the ocean to investigate life at all stages of development and to convene discussions of biological discoveries. Exploring the history and current reasons for study by the sea, this book examines key people, institutions, research projects, organisms selected for study, and competing theories and interpretations of discoveries, and it considers different ways of understanding research, such as through research repertoires. A celebration of coastal marine research, Why Study Biology by the Sea? reveals why scientists have moved from the beach to the lab bench and back.
Download or read book Panpsychism written by Godehard Brüntrup and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent debates in philosophy of mind have resulted in an impasse, which lead to a renaissance of panpsychism as a viable alternative. Panpsychism is the thesis that mental being is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe. This book collects many of the most recent voices arguing for panpsychism as a genuine alternative in analytic philosophy of mind in the 21st century as well as some of the most prominent critics.
Download or read book Handbook on Science and Public Policy written by Dagmar Simon and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook assembles state-of-the-art insights into the co-evolutionary and precarious relations between science and public policy. Beyond this, it also offers a fresh outlook on emerging challenges for science (including technology and innovation) in changing societies, and related policy requirements, as well as the challenges for public policy in view of science-driven economic, societal, and cultural changes. In short, this book deals with science as a policy-triggered project as well as public policy as a science-driven venture.
Download or read book Understanding Perspectivism written by Michela Massimi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection is the first of its kind to explore the view called perspectivism in philosophy of science. The book brings together an array of essays that reflect on the methodological promises and scientific challenges of perspectivism in a variety of fields such as physics, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and cancer research, just as a few examples. What are the advantages of using a plurality of perspectives in a given scientific field and for interdisciplinary research? Can different perspectives be integrated? What is the relation between perspectivism, pluralism, and pragmatism? These ten new essays by top scholars in the field offer a polyphonic journey towards understanding the view called ‘perspectivism’ and its relevance to science.
Download or read book Science and Religion written by John Hedley Brooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Hedley Brooke offers an introduction and critical guide to one of the most fascinating and enduring issues in the development of the modern world: the relationship between scientific thought and religious belief. It is common knowledge that in western societies there have been periods of crisis when new science has threatened established authority. The trial of Galileo in 1633 and the uproar caused by Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) are two of the most famous examples. Taking account of recent scholarship in the history of science, Brooke takes a fresh look at these and similar episodes, showing that science and religion have been mutually relevant in so rich a variety of ways that no simple generalizations are possible.
Download or read book Can Science Make Sense of Life written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the discovery of the structure of DNA and the birth of the genetic age, a powerful vocabulary has emerged to express science’s growing command over the matter of life. Armed with knowledge of the code that governs all living things, biology and biotechnology are poised to edit, even rewrite, the texts of life to correct nature’s mistakes. Yet, how far should the capacity to manipulate what life is at the molecular level authorize science to define what life is for? This book looks at flash points in law, politics, ethics, and culture to argue that science’s promises of perfectibility have gone too far. Science may have editorial control over the material elements of life, but it does not supersede the languages of sense-making that have helped define human values across millennia: the meanings of autonomy, integrity, and privacy; the bonds of kinship, family, and society; and the place of humans in nature.
Download or read book Metascience and Politics written by A. James Gregor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A central problem in political inquiry is the conceptual and linguistic informality of political science. For most of its history, the discipline has been largely pursued with the analytic and logical machinery of ordinary language. Likewise, there has been little effort to standardize how language is used, or to systematize theoretical procedures to insure methodological uniformity. In an effort to better understand and defend the research processes that attend, sustain, and foster the systematic credibility of political science, Gregor argues a special conceptual language is needed to enhance the rigor, replicability, articulation, and interpretation of political science's empirical findings. Gregor reviews the conceptual inventory of the social sciences in general with particular emphasis on distinctions between descriptive, theoretical, and normative language. He analyzes what might count as "objectivity" and "truth" in a given set of circumstances in an effort to standardize how political scientists make such distinctions. How "theory" and "explanation" might be assessed in less rigorous disciplines is also considered. Gregor is opposed to the postmodernist tendency to use "language games" in the social sciences that purport to close the gaps separating the discourses of knowledge, ethics and politics, but do so at the expense of clarity, rigor, and objectivity. In Gregor's view, these alternative perspectives have exploited vagueness and ambiguity in order to accomplish what they consider to be their political tasks. A substantial postscript to this edition traces some of the postmodernist perspectives to their origins in the works of particular individuals and to their history in the thought of twentieth-century Europe. Metascience and Politics attempts to address all these issues, with brevity and seriousness of purpose, in order to provide a defensible rationale for the scientific character of social and political studies. It will be of interest to political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and intellectual historians. A. James Gregor is professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley and an adjunct professor at Command and Staff College, U.S. Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia. He has also been awarded the Order of Merit by the President of the Italian Republic for his contribution to Italy as a nation through his published works. He is the author of Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, Interpretations of Fascism, Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, and Marxism, China, and Development, all published by Transaction.
Download or read book Science and Moral Imagination written by Matthew J. Brown and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed “the ideal of moral imagination,” emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Science written by Paul K. Feyerabend and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011-05-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Feyerabend is one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century and his book Against Method is an international bestseller. In this new book he masterfully weaves together the main elements of his mature philosophy into a gripping tale: the story of the rise of rationalism in Ancient Greece that eventually led to the entrenchment of a mythical ‘scientific worldview’. In this wide-ranging and accessible book Feyerabend challenges some modern myths about science, including the myth that ‘science is successful’. He argues that some very basic assumptions about science are simply false and that substantial parts of scientific ideology were created on the basis of superficial generalizations that led to absurd misconceptions about the nature of human life. Far from solving the pressing problems of our age, such as war and poverty, scientific theorizing glorifies ephemeral generalities, at the cost of confronting the real particulars that make life meaningful. Objectivity and generality are based on abstraction, and as such, they come at a high price. For abstraction drives a wedge between our thoughts and our experience, resulting in the degeneration of both. Theoreticians, as opposed to practitioners, tend to impose a tyranny on the concepts they use, abstracting away from the subjective experience that makes life meaningful. Feyerabend concludes by arguing that practical experience is a better guide to reality than any theory, by itself, ever could be, and he stresses that there is no tyranny that cannot be resisted, even if it is exerted with the best possible intentions. Provocative and iconoclastic, The Tyranny of Science is one of Feyerabend’s last books and one of his best. It will be widely read by everyone interested in the role that science has played, and continues to play, in the shaping of the modern world.
Download or read book Leibniz and the Structure of Sciences written by Vincenzo De Risi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book offers a collection of essays on various aspects of Leibniz’s scientific thought, written by historians of science and world-leading experts on Leibniz. The essays deal with a vast array of topics on the exact sciences: Leibniz’s logic, mereology, the notion of infinity and cardinality, the foundations of geometry, the theory of curves and differential geometry, and finally dynamics and general epistemology. Several chapters attempt a reading of Leibniz’s scientific works through modern mathematical tools, and compare Leibniz’s results in these fields with 19th- and 20th-Century conceptions of them. All of them have special care in framing Leibniz’s work in historical context, and sometimes offer wider historical perspectives that go much beyond Leibniz’s researches. A special emphasis is given to effective mathematical practice rather than purely epistemological thought. The book is addressed to all scholars of the exact sciences who have an interest in historical research and Leibniz in particular, and may be useful to historians of mathematics, physics, and epistemology, mathematicians with historical interests, and philosophers of science at large.
Download or read book Science and Religion written by Yves Gingras and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-06-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we hear renewed calls for a dialogue between science and religion: why has the old question of the relations between science and religion now returned to the public domain and what is at stake in this debate? To answer these questions, historian and sociologist of science Yves Gingras retraces the long history of the troubled relationship between science and religion, from the condemnation of Galileo for heresy in 1633 until his rehabilitation by John Paul II in 1992. He reconstructs the process of the gradual separation of science from theology and religion, showing how God and natural theology became marginalized in the scientific field in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the dominant trend among historians of science, Gingras argues that science and religion are social institutions that give rise to incompatible ways of knowing, rooted in different methodologies and forms of knowledge, and that there never was, and cannot be, a genuine dialogue between them. Wide-ranging and authoritative, this new book on one of the fundamental questions of Western thought will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history of science and of religion as well as to general readers who are intrigued by the new and much-publicized conversations about the alleged links between science and religion.
Download or read book A Paul Meehl Reader written by Niels G. Waller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new book introduces a new generation to the important insights of Paul Meehl. In addition to selected papers from the classic reader, Psychodiagnosis, this book features new material selected from Meehl's most influential writings. The resulting collection is a tour de force illustrating quantitative analysis of life science problems, an examination of the inadequacy of some methods of analysis, and a review of the application of taxometrics. A Paul Meehl Reader is organized into five content areas: theory building and appraisal - how we discover and test the true causal relations of psychological constructs; specific etiology - an examination of genetic, behavioral, and environmental etiology in psychopathology; diagnosis and prediction - a review of the appropriate use of base rates; taxometrics - a look at Meehl's development of the method he invented; thinking effectively about psychological questions - a critique of correlation research and the power of quantitative thinking in psychology. The Reader features section introductions to orient the reader and provide a context and structure for Paul Meehl's work. The section on diagnosis and prediction features problem sets with solutions to guide the reader through practical applications of the principles described. Accompanying downloadable resources contain footage from Paul Meehl's engaging seminar on clinical versus statistical prediction. This book appeals to advanced students and professionals in psychology, sociology, law, education, human development, and philosophy.
Download or read book Poincar Philosopher of Science written by María de Paz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a selection of papers from the Poincaré Project of the Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Lisbon, bringing together an international group of scholars with new assessments of Henri Poincaré's philosophy of science—both its historical impact on the foundations of science and mathematics, and its relevance to contemporary philosophical inquiry. The work of Poincaré (1854-1912) extends over many fields within mathematics and mathematical physics. But his scientific work was inseparable from his groundbreaking philosophical reflections, and the scientific ferment in which he participated was inseparable from the philosophical controversies in which he played a pre-eminent part. The subsequent history of the mathematical sciences was profoundly influenced by Poincaré’s philosophical analyses of the relations between and among mathematics, logic, and physics, and, more generally, the relations between formal structures and the world of experience. The papers in this collection illuminate Poincaré’s place within his own historical context as well as the implications of his work for ours.
Download or read book Materials of the Mind written by James Poskett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-02-19 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phrenology was the most popular mental science of the Victorian age. From American senators to Indian social reformers, this new mental science found supporters stretching around the globe. Materials of the Mind tells the story of how phrenology changed the world--and how the world changed phrenology. This is a story of skulls from the Arctic, plaster casts from Haiti, books from Bengal, and letters from the Pacific. Drawing on far-flung museum and archival collections, and addressing sources in six different languages, Materials of the Mind is the first substantial account of science in the nineteenth century as part of global history. It shows how the circulation of material culture underpinned the emergence of a new materialist philosophy of the mind, while also demonstrating how a global approach to history could help us reassess issues such as race, technology, and politics today.
Download or read book String Theory and the Scientific Method written by Richard Dawid and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: String theory has played a highly influential role in theoretical physics for nearly three decades and has substantially altered our view of the elementary building principles of the Universe. However, the theory remains empirically unconfirmed, and is expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. So why do string theorists have such a strong belief in their theory? This book explores this question, offering a novel insight into the nature of theory assessment itself. Dawid approaches the topic from a unique position, having extensive experience in both philosophy and high-energy physics. He argues that string theory is just the most conspicuous example of a number of theories in high-energy physics where non-empirical theory assessment has an important part to play. Aimed at physicists and philosophers of science, the book does not use mathematical formalism and explains most technical terms.
