Download or read book Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science written by Daniela M. Bailer-Jones and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2009-09-13 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists have used models for hundreds of years as a means of describing phenomena and as a basis for further analogy. In Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science, Daniela Bailer-Jones assembles an original and comprehensive philosophical analysis of how models have been used and interpreted in both historical and contemporary contexts. Bailer-Jones delineates the many forms models can take (ranging from equations to animals; from physical objects to theoretical constructs), and how they are put to use. She examines early mechanical models employed by nineteenth-century physicists such as Kelvin and Maxwell, describes their roots in the mathematical principles of Newton and others, and compares them to contemporary mechanistic approaches. Bailer-Jones then views the use of analogy in the late nineteenth century as a means of understanding models and to link different branches of science. She reveals how analogies can also be models themselves, or can help to create them. The first half of the twentieth century saw little mention of models in the literature of logical empiricism. Focusing primarily on theory, logical empiricists believed that models were of temporary importance, flawed, and awaiting correction. The later contesting of logical empiricism, particularly the hypothetico-deductive account of theories, by philosophers such as Mary Hesse, sparked a renewed interest in the importance of models during the 1950s that continues to this day. Bailer-Jones analyzes subsequent propositions of: models as metaphors; Kuhn's concept of a paradigm; the Semantic View of theories; and the case study approaches of Cartwright and Morrison, among others. She then engages current debates on topics such as phenomena versus data, the distinctions between models and theories, the concepts of representation and realism, and the discerning of falsities in models.
Download or read book The Fate of Knowledge written by Helen E. Longino and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking to break the deadlock in the ongoing wars between philosophers of science and sociologists of science, this text argues that social interaction actually assists us in securing firm, rationally-based knowledge, clarifying the philosophical points at issue.
Download or read book Discovering Complexity written by William Bechtel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-08-06 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in divergent explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993.
Download or read book Metalinguistic Performance and Interlinguistic Competence written by David Birdsong and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often assumed that metalinguistic performance (e.g., detection of ambiguity, judgments of grammaticality) straightforwardly reflects linguistic knowledge. The inadequacies of such an assumption are explored in this volume, which documents the subtleties of the relationship between metalinguistic performance and knowledge of a second language (interlinguistic competence) from the perspectives of language acquisition theory and cognitive and developmental psychology. This thorough and up-to-date examination of metalinguistic phenomena offers insight to those involved in designing elicitation materials, analyzing and interpreting metalinguistic performance data, and applying such evidence to descriptions of interlanguage grammars and to second-language acquisition theory. The book also contributes constructively to the current debate concerning the role of metalinguistic variables in second-language acquisition, that is, how they ultimately affect success or failure in learning a second language.
Download or read book The Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis written by Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Philosophical Roots of the Ecological Crisis: Descartes and the Modern Worldview traces the conceptual sources of the present environmental degradation within the worldview of Modernity, and particularly within the thought of René Descartes, universally acclaimed as the father of modern philosophy. The book demonstrates how the triple foundations of the Modern worldview – in terms of an exaggerated anthropocentrism, a mechanistic conception of the natural world, and the metaphysical dualism between humanity and the rest of the physical world – can all be largely traced back to Cartesian thought, with direct ecological consequences.
Download or read book Statistical Inference as Severe Testing written by Deborah G. Mayo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlock today's statistical controversies and irreproducible results by viewing statistics as probing and controlling errors.
Download or read book Science Society and Values written by Sal P. Restivo and published by Lehigh University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He has tried - in his career and, specifically, in this volume - to understand science without accepting the culture of science uncritically.
Download or read book Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science written by Heidi E. Grasswick and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-05-16 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having enjoyed more than twenty years of development, feminist epistemology and philosophy of science are now thriving fields of inquiry, offering current scholars a rich tradition from which to draw. In addition to a recognition of the power of knowledge itself and its effects on women’s lives, a central feature of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science has been the attention they draw to the role of power dynamics within knowledge-seeking practices and the implications of these dynamics for our understandings of knowledge, science, and epistemology. Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge collects new works that address today’s key challenges for a power-sensitive feminist approach to questions of knowledge and scientific practice. The essays build upon established work in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science, offering new developments in the fields, and representing the broad array of the feminist work now being done and the many ways in which feminists incorporate power dynamics into their analyses.
Download or read book A Bibliography of the Philosophy of Science 1945 1981 written by Richard J. Blackwell and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1983-08-26 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Product information not available.
Download or read book Exploratory Experiments written by Friedrich Steinle and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated by Alex Levine The nineteenth century was a formative period for electromagnetism and electrodynamics. Hans Christian Orsted's groundbreaking discovery of the interaction between electricity and magnetism in 1820 inspired a wave of research, led to the science of electrodynamics, and resulted in the development of electromagnetic theory. Remarkably, in response, Andre-Marie Ampere and Michael Faraday developed two incompatible, competing theories. Although their approaches and conceptual frameworks were fundamentally different, together their work launched a technological revolution—laying the foundation for our modern scientific understanding of electricity—and one of the most important debates in physics, between electrodynamic action-at-a-distance and field theories. In this foundational study, Friedrich Steinle compares the influential work of Ampere and Faraday to reveal the prominent role of exploratory experimentation in the development of science. While this exploratory phase was responsible for decisive conceptual innovations, it has yet to be examined in such great detail. Focusing on Ampere's and Faraday's research practices, reconstructed from previously unknown archival materials, including laboratory notes, diaries, letters, and interactions with instrument makers, this book considers both the historic and epistemological basis of exploratory experimentation and its importance to scientific development.
Download or read book Atomism in Philosophy written by Ugo Zilioli and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of matter and the idea of indivisible parts has fascinated philosophers, historians, scientists and physicists from antiquity to the present day. This collection covers the richness of its history, starting with how the Ancient Greeks came to assume the existence of atoms and concluding with contemporary metaphysical debates about structure, time and reality. Focusing on important moments in the history of human thought when the debate about atomism was particularly flourishing and transformative for the scientific and philosophical spirit of the time, this collection covers: - The discovery of atomism in ancient philosophy - Ancient non-Western, Arabic and late Medieval thought - The Renaissance, when along with the re-discovery of ancient thought, atomism became once again an important doctrine to be fully debated - Logical atomism in early analytic philosophy, with Russell and Wittgenstein - Atomism in Liberalism and Marxism - Atomism and the philosophy of time - Atomism in contemporary metaphysics - Atomism and the sciences Featuring 28 chapters by leading and younger scholars, this valuable collection reveals the development of one of philosophy's central doctrines across 2,500 years and within a broad range of philosophical traditions.
Download or read book Theory and Evidence written by Barbara Koslowski and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Koslowski boldly criticizes many of the currently classic studies and musters a compelling set of arguments, backed by an exhaustive set of experiments carried out during the last decade.
Download or read book Probabilities in Physics written by Claus Beisbart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a philosophical appraisal of probabilities in all of physics. It makes sense of probabilistic statements as they occur in the various physical theories and models and presents a plausible epistemology and metaphysics of probabilities.
Download or read book Rationality Redeemed written by Harvey Siegel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Educating Reason, Harvey Siegel presented the case regarding rationality and critical thinking as fundamental education ideals. In Rationality Redeemed?, a collection of essays written since that time, he develops this view, responds to major criticisms raised against it, and engages those critics in dialogue. In developing his ideas and responding to critics, Siegel addresses main currents in contemporary thought, including feminism, postmodernism and multiculturalism.
Download or read book Computation Dynamics and Cognition written by Marco Giunti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-26 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Currently there is growing interest in the application of dynamical methods to the study of cognition. Computation, Dynamics, and Cognition investigates this convergence from a theoretical and philosophical perspective, generating a provocative new view of the aims and methods of cognitive science. Advancing the dynamical approach as the methodological frame best equipped to guide inquiry in the field's two main research programs--the symbolic and connectionist approaches--Marco Giunti engages a host of questions crucial not only to the science of cognition, but also to computation theory, dynamical systems theory, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. In chapter one Giunti employs a dynamical viewpoint to explore foundational issues in computation theory. Using the concept of Turing computability, he precisely and originally defines the nature of a computational system, sharpening our understanding of computation theory and its applications. In chapter two he generalizes his definition of a computational system, arguing that the concept of Turing computability itself is relative to the kind of support on which Turing machine operate. Chapter three completes the book's conceptual foundation, discussing a form of scientific explanation for real dynamical systems that Giunti calls "Galilean explanation." The book's fourth and final chapter develops the methodological thesis that all cognitive systems are dynamical systems. On Giunti's view, a dynamical approach is likely to benefit even those scientific explanations of cognition which are based on symbolic models. Giunti concludes by proposing a new modeling practice for cognitive science, one based on "Galilean models" of cognitive systems. Innovative, lucidly-written, and broad-ranging in its analysis, Computation, Dynamics, and Cognition will interest philosophers of science and mind, as well as cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and theorists of dynamical systems. This book elaborates a comprehensive picture of the application of dynamical methods to the study of cognition. Giunti argues that both computational systems and connectionist networks are special types of dynamical systems. He shows how this dynamical approach can be applied to problems of cognition, information processing, consciousness, meaning, and the relation between body and mind.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Science N Z Index written by Sahotra Sarkar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in-depth reference to the field that combines scientific knowledge with philosophical inquiry, this encyclopedia brings together a team of leading scholars to provide nearly 150 entries on the essential concepts in the philosophy of science. The areas covered include biology, chemistry, epistemology and metaphysics, physics, psychology and mind, the social sciences, and key figures in the combined studies of science and philosophy. (Midwest).
