Exceeding Our Grasp PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Exceeding Our Grasp PDF full book. Access full book title Exceeding Our Grasp by P. Kyle Stanford. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: P. Kyle Stanford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195174089
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume argues that history reveals our routine failure to even conceive of well-confirmed alternatives to our scientific theories, and similar alternatives to our own theories likely remain unconceived. It shows why defences of scientific realism cannot evade the problem and proposes an alternative image of the scientific enterprise.
Author: P. Kyle Stanford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195174089
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume argues that history reveals our routine failure to even conceive of well-confirmed alternatives to our scientific theories, and similar alternatives to our own theories likely remain unconceived. It shows why defences of scientific realism cannot evade the problem and proposes an alternative image of the scientific enterprise.
Author: P. Kyle Stanford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190454040
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Get Book Here
Book Description
The incredible achievements of modern scientific theories lead most of us to embrace scientific realism: the view that our best theories offer us at least roughly accurate descriptions of otherwise inaccessible parts of the world like genes, atoms, and the big bang. In Exceeding Our Grasp, Stanford argues that careful attention to the history of scientific investigation invites a challenge to this view that is not well represented in contemporary debates about the nature of the scientific enterprise. The historical record of scientific inquiry, Stanford suggests, is characterized by what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives. Past scientists have routinely failed even to conceive of alternatives to their own theories and lines of theoretical investigation, alternatives that were both well-confirmed by the evidence available at the time and sufficiently serious as to be ultimately accepted by later scientific communities. Stanford supports this claim with a detailed investigation of the mid-to-late 19th century theories of inheritance and generation proposed in turn by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and August Weismann. He goes on to argue that this historical pattern strongly suggests that there are equally well-confirmed and scientifically serious alternatives to our own best theories that remain currently unconceived. Moreover, this challenge is more serious than those rooted in either the so-called pessimistic induction or the underdetermination of theories by evidence, in part because existing realist responses to these latter challenges offer no relief from the problem of unconceived alternatives itself. Stanford concludes by investigating what positive account of the spectacularly successful edifice of modern theoretical science remains open to us if we accept that our best scientific theories are powerful conceptual tools for accomplishing our practical goals, but abandon the view that the descriptions of the world around us that they offer are therefore even probably or approximately true.
Author: Brent Marchant
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1930491123
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Get Book Here
Book Description
Conscious creation is the theory that we create our own reality when we watch the movie screen. Brent Marchant examines psychological aspects of motion pictures.
Author: Darrell P. Rowbottom
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429666292
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Get Book Here
Book Description
Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily, and should primarily be, an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view, such as logical positivism, suffered from serious defects. In this book, however, Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism, which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This position—‘cognitive instrumentalism’—involves three core theses. First, science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second, scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third, scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness. There are examples from science throughout the book, and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics, and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history, Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding, empirical understanding, which we can achieve without having true, or even approximately true, representations of unobservable things. In closing the book, he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn, and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism, constructive empiricism, and semirealism. Overall, this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science.
Author: Esther Phoebe Defries
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author:
Publisher: Brill Archive
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Christian W. Chun
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317614712
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Get Book Here
Book Description
Since the global economic crisis of 2007–2008, ‘capitalism’ has been the topic of widespread general discussion in both mainstream and social media. In this book, Christian W. Chun examines the discourses of capitalism taken up by people in their responses to a street art installation created by Steve Lambert, entitled Capitalism Works for Me! In doing so, he considers several key questions, including: How do everyday people view and make sense of capitalism and its role in their work and personal lives? What are the discourses they use in their common-sense understandings of the economy to defend or reject capitalism as a system? Chun looks at how dominant discourses in social circulation operate to co-construct and support capitalism, and the accompanying counter-discourses that critique it. This is key reading for advanced students of discourse analysis, language and globalization/politics, media/communication studies, and related areas. A video lecture by the author can be accessed via the Routledge website (www.routledge.com/9781138807105) and the Routledge Language and Communication Portal (www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/languageandcommunication).
Author: David A. Roberts
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847143709
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Get Book Here
Book Description
For thousands of years philosophers and theologians have grappled with the problem of evil. Traditionally, evil has been seen as a weakness of sorts: the evil person is either ignorant, or weak-willed. But in the most horrifying acts of evil, the perpetrators are resolute, deliberate, and well aware of the pain they are causing. Here David Roberts painstakingly details the matrix of issues that evolved into Kierkegaard's own solution. Kierkegaard's psychological understanding of evil is that it arises out of despair - a despair that can become so vehement and ferocious that it lashes out at existence itself. Roberts shows how the despairing self can become strengthened and intensified through a conscious and free choice against the Good. This type of radical evil is neither ignorant nor weak.
Author: Peter Vickers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192862731
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
Is science getting at the truth? The sceptics - those who spread doubt about science - often employ a simple argument: scientists were 'sure' in the past, and then they ended up being wrong. Through a combination of historical investigation and philosophical-sociological analysis, Identifying Future-Proof Science defends science against this potentially dangerous scepticism. Indeed, we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever, so long as science continues. How do we identify future-proof claims? This appears to be a new question for science scholars, and not an unimportant one. Peter Vickers argues that the best way to identify future-proof science is to avoid any attempt to analyse the relevant first-order scientific evidence, instead focusing purely on second-order evidence. Specifically, a scientific claim is future-proof when the relevant scientific community is large, international, and diverse, and at least 95% of that community would describe the claim as a 'scientific fact'. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity.
Author: Peter Vickers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192677217
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
Is science getting at the truth? The sceptics - those who spread doubt about science - often employ a simple argument: scientists were 'sure' in the past, and then they ended up being wrong. Through a combination of historical investigation and philosophical-sociological analysis, Identifying Future-Proof Science defends science against this potentially dangerous scepticism. Indeed, we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever, so long as science continues. How do we identify future-proof claims? This appears to be a new question for science scholars, and not an unimportant one. Peter Vickers argues that the best way to identify future-proof science is to avoid any attempt to analyse the relevant first-order scientific evidence, instead focusing purely on second-order evidence. Specifically, a scientific claim is future-proof when the relevant scientific community is large, international, and diverse, and at least 95% of that community would describe the claim as a 'scientific fact'. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity.
