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Author: Angela Potochnik
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675944X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Introduction : doing science in a complex world. Science by humans ; Science in a complex world ; The payoff : idealizations and many aims -- Complex causality and simplified representation. Causal patterns in the face of complexity ; Causal patterns ; Causal complexity ; Simplification by idealization ; Reasons to idealize ; Idealizations' representational role ; Rampant and unchecked idealization -- The diversity of scientific projects. Broad patterns : modeling cooperation ; A specific phenomenon : variation in human aggression ; Predictions and idealizations in the physical sciences ; Surveying the diversity -- Science isn't after the truth. The aims of science ; Understanding as science's epistemic aim ; Separate pursuit of science's aims ; Understanding, truth, and knowledge ; The nature of scientific understanding ; The role of truth and scientific knowledge -- Causal pattern explanations. Explanation, communication, and understanding ; An account of scientific explanation ; The scope of causal patterns ; The crucial role of the audience ; Adequate explanations -- Levels and fields of science. Levels in philosophy and science ; Going without levels ; Against hierarchy ; Prizing apart forms of stratification ; The fields of science and how they relate -- Scientific pluralism and its limits. The entrenchment of social values ; How science doesn't inform metaphysics ; Scientific progress.
Author: Angela Potochnik
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675944X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
Introduction : doing science in a complex world. Science by humans ; Science in a complex world ; The payoff : idealizations and many aims -- Complex causality and simplified representation. Causal patterns in the face of complexity ; Causal patterns ; Causal complexity ; Simplification by idealization ; Reasons to idealize ; Idealizations' representational role ; Rampant and unchecked idealization -- The diversity of scientific projects. Broad patterns : modeling cooperation ; A specific phenomenon : variation in human aggression ; Predictions and idealizations in the physical sciences ; Surveying the diversity -- Science isn't after the truth. The aims of science ; Understanding as science's epistemic aim ; Separate pursuit of science's aims ; Understanding, truth, and knowledge ; The nature of scientific understanding ; The role of truth and scientific knowledge -- Causal pattern explanations. Explanation, communication, and understanding ; An account of scientific explanation ; The scope of causal patterns ; The crucial role of the audience ; Adequate explanations -- Levels and fields of science. Levels in philosophy and science ; Going without levels ; Against hierarchy ; Prizing apart forms of stratification ; The fields of science and how they relate -- Scientific pluralism and its limits. The entrenchment of social values ; How science doesn't inform metaphysics ; Scientific progress.
Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822972069
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Perfected science is but an idealization that provides a useful contrast to highlight the limited character of what we do and can attain. This lies at the core of various debates in the philosophy of science and Rescher's discussion focuses on the question: how far could science go in principle—what are the theoretical limits on science? He concentrates on what science can discover, not what it should discover. He explores in detail the existence of limits or limitations on scientific inquiry, especially those that, in principle, preclude the full realization of the aims of science, as opposed to those that relate to economic obstacles to scientific progress. Rescher also places his argument within the politics of the day, where "strident calls of ideological extremes surround us," ranging from the exaggeration that "science can do anything"—to the antiscientism that views science as a costly diversion we would be well advised to abandon. Rescher offers a middle path between these two extremes and provides an appreciation of the actual powers and limitations of science, not only to philosophers of science but also to a larger, less specialized audience.
Author: Kwame Anthony Appiah
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674982193
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
“Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range... [He] has packed into this short book an impressive amount of original reflection... A rich and illuminating book.” —Thomas Nagel, New York Review of Books Idealization is a fundamental feature of human thought. We build simplified models to make sense of the world, and life is a constant adjustment between the models we make and the realities we encounter. Our beliefs, desires, and sense of justice are bound up with these ideals, and we proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. In this elegant and original meditation, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that this instinct to idealize is not dangerous or distracting so much as it is necessary. As If explores how strategic untruth plays a critical role in far-flung areas of inquiry: decision theory, psychology, natural science, and political philosophy. A polymath who writes with mainstream clarity, Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination not just in the arts but in science, morality, and everyday life. “Appiah is the rare public intellectual who is also a first-rate analytic philosopher, and the characteristic virtues associated with each of these identities are very much in evidence throughout the book.” —Thomas Kelly, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Author: Darrell P. Rowbottom
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429666292
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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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: Catherine Z. Elgin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262341387
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
The development of an epistemology that explains how science and art embody and convey understanding. Philosophy valorizes truth, holding that there can never be epistemically good reasons to accept a known falsehood, or to accept modes of justification that are not truth conducive. How can this stance account for the epistemic standing of science, which unabashedly relies on models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true? In True Enough, Catherine Elgin argues that we should not assume that the inaccuracy of models and idealizations constitutes an inadequacy. To the contrary, their divergence from truth or representational accuracy fosters their epistemic functioning. When effective, models and idealizations are, Elgin contends, felicitous falsehoods that exemplify features of the phenomena they bear on. Because works of art deploy the same sorts of felicitous falsehoods, she argues, they also advance understanding. Elgin develops a holistic epistemology that focuses on the understanding of broad ranges of phenomena rather than knowledge of individual facts. Epistemic acceptability, she maintains, is a matter not of truth-conduciveness, but of what would be reflectively endorsed by the members of an idealized epistemic community—a quasi-Kantian realm of epistemic ends.
Author: Lee Hardy
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444700
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, is usually read as an idealist in his metaphysics and an instrumentalist in his philosophy of science. In Nature’s Suit, Lee Hardy argues that both views represent a serious misreading of Husserl’s texts. Drawing upon the full range of Husserl’s major published works together with material from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts, Hardy develops a consistent interpretation of Husserl’s conception of logic as a theory of science, his phenomenological account of truth and rationality, his ontology of the physical thing and mathematical objectivity, his account of the process of idealization in the physical sciences, and his approach to the phenomenological clarification and critique of scientific knowledge. Offering a jargon-free explanation of the basic principles of Husserl’s phenomenology, Nature’s Suit provides an excellent introduction to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl as well as a focused examination of his potential contributions to the philosophy of science. While the majority of research on Husserl’s philosophy of the sciences focuses on the critique of science in his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences, Lee Hardy covers the entire breadth of Husserl’s reflections on science in a systematic fashion, contextualizing Husserl’s phenomenological critique to demonstrate that it is entirely compatible with the theoretical dimensions of contemporary science.
Author: Henk W. de Regt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190652918
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Putting scientific understanding center-stage within the study of scientific explanations, Understanding Scientific Understanding develops and defends a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that can describe and explain the historical variation of criteria for understanding actually employed by scientists. Book jacket.
Author: Mauricio Suárez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135854718
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 494
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Book Description
Science is popularly understood as being an ideal of impartial algorithmic objectivity that provides us with a realistic description of the world down to the last detail. The essays collected in this book—written by some of the leading experts in the field—challenge this popular image right at its heart, taking as their starting point that science trades not only in truth, but in fiction, too. With case studies that range from physics to economics and to biology, Fictions in Science reveals that fictions are as ubiquitous in scientific narratives and practice as they are in any other human endeavor, including literature and art. Of course scientific activity, most prominently in the formal sciences, employs logically precise algorithmic thinking. However, the key to the predictive and technological success of the empirical sciences might well lie elsewhere—perhaps even in scientists’ extraordinary creative imagination instead. As these essays demonstrate, within the bounds of what is empirically possible, a scientist’s capacity for invention and creative thinking matches that of any writer or artist.
Author: Henk W. de Regt
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822971240
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
To most scientists, and to those interested in the sciences, understanding is the ultimate aim of scientific endeavor. In spite of this, understanding, and how it is achieved, has received little attention in recent philosophy of science. Scientific Understanding seeks to reverse this trend by providing original and in-depth accounts of the concept of understanding and its essential role in the scientific process. To this end, the chapters in this volume explore and develop three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice. Earlier philosophers, such as Carl Hempel, dismissed understanding as subjective and pragmatic. They believed that the essence of science was to be found in scientific theories and explanations. In Scientific Understanding, the contributors maintain that we must also consider the relation between explanations and the scientists who construct and use them. They focus on understanding as the cognitive state that is a goal of explanation and on the understanding of theories and models as a means to this end. The chapters in this book highlight the multifaceted nature of the process of scientific research. The contributors examine current uses of theory, models, simulations, and experiments to evaluate the degree to which these elements contribute to understanding. Their analyses pay due attention to the roles of intelligibility, tacit knowledge, and feelings of understanding. Furthermore, they investigate how understanding is obtained within diverse scientific disciplines and examine how the acquisition of understanding depends on specific contexts, the objects of study, and the stated aims of research.
Author: Kostas Kampourakis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190871660
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Anti-evolutionists, climate denialists, and anti-vaxxers, among others, question some of the best-established scientific findings by referring to the uncertainties in these areas of research. Uncertainty: How It Makes Science Advance shows that uncertainty is an inherent feature of science that makes it advance by motivating further research.
