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Author: Mark Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192525247
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Mark Wilson presents a series of explorations of our strategies for understanding the world. "Physics avoidance" refers to the fact that we frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must seek alternative policies that allow us to address the questions we want answered in a tractable way. Within both science and everyday life, we find ourselves relying upon thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout manners. Conceptual innovators are often puzzled by the techniques they develop, when they stumble across reasoning patterns that are easy to implement but difficult to justify. But simple techniques frequently rest upon complex foundations—a young magician learns how to execute a card-guessing trick without understanding how its progressive steps squeeze in on a proper answer. As we collectively improve our inferential skills in this gradually evolving manner, we often wander into unfamiliar explanatory landscapes in which simple words encode physical information in complex and unanticipated ways. Like our juvenile conjurer, we fail to recognize the true strategic rationales underlying our achievements and may turn instead to preposterous rationalizations for our policies. We have learned how to reach better conclusions in a more fruitful way, but we remain baffled by our own successes. At its best, philosophical reflection illuminates the natural developmental processes that generate these confusions and explicates their complexities. But current thinking within philosophy of science and language works to opposite effect by relying upon simplistic conceptions of "cause", "law of nature", "possibility", and "reference" that ignore the strategic complexities in which these concepts become entangled within real life usage. To avoid these distortions, better descriptive tools are required in philosophy. The nine new essays within this volume illustrate this need for finer discriminations through a range of revealing cases, of both historical and contemporary significance.
Author: Mark Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192525247
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Get Book Here
Book Description
Mark Wilson presents a series of explorations of our strategies for understanding the world. "Physics avoidance" refers to the fact that we frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must seek alternative policies that allow us to address the questions we want answered in a tractable way. Within both science and everyday life, we find ourselves relying upon thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout manners. Conceptual innovators are often puzzled by the techniques they develop, when they stumble across reasoning patterns that are easy to implement but difficult to justify. But simple techniques frequently rest upon complex foundations—a young magician learns how to execute a card-guessing trick without understanding how its progressive steps squeeze in on a proper answer. As we collectively improve our inferential skills in this gradually evolving manner, we often wander into unfamiliar explanatory landscapes in which simple words encode physical information in complex and unanticipated ways. Like our juvenile conjurer, we fail to recognize the true strategic rationales underlying our achievements and may turn instead to preposterous rationalizations for our policies. We have learned how to reach better conclusions in a more fruitful way, but we remain baffled by our own successes. At its best, philosophical reflection illuminates the natural developmental processes that generate these confusions and explicates their complexities. But current thinking within philosophy of science and language works to opposite effect by relying upon simplistic conceptions of "cause", "law of nature", "possibility", and "reference" that ignore the strategic complexities in which these concepts become entangled within real life usage. To avoid these distortions, better descriptive tools are required in philosophy. The nine new essays within this volume illustrate this need for finer discriminations through a range of revealing cases, of both historical and contemporary significance.
Author: H. K. Andersen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198805454
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
The Pragmatist Challenge lays out a programmatic view for taking a pragmatist approach to topics in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Pragmatism involves a collection of specific views as well as comprising a general approach that can be applied to multiple topics. For topics at the intersection of philosophy of science and metaphysics, pragmatism as explored in this volume is an effective way to take entrenched debates and re-frame them in ways that move past old dichotomies and offer more fruitful paths forward. Each chapter explores a dual vision of pragmatism: specific pragmatist views are developed, demonstrating how to take a distinctively pragmatist approach to some particular issue or subfield; and the general shape of what it means to take a pragmatist approach is elucidated as well. The chapters thus tend to be synoptic in scope. Collectively, they offer a new approach that can be taken up in constructively reframing other discussions, ready to be applied to new specific topics. Pragmatism is an especially potent tool that sits at the interface between methodological and applied questions coming directly from sciences, and the underlying ontological or metaphysical commitments that are implied by or support the methodological discussions. The goal of the volume is to articulate a variety of ways to be a pragmatist without having to commit to a single specific set of -isms in order to make use of it, while highlighting the common themes that manifest across different discussions. The chapters offer a heterogenous yet programmatic approach to pragmatism.
Author: Emanuele Ratti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190081716
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Virtues have become a valuable and relevant resource for understanding modern science and technology. Scientific practice requires not only following prescribed rules but also cultivating judgment, building mental habits, and developing proper emotional responses. The rich philosophical traditions around virtue can provide key insights into scientific research, including understanding how daily practice shapes scientists themselves and how ethical dilemmas created by modern scientific research and technology should be navigated. Science, Technology, and Virtues gathers both new and eminent scholars to show how concepts of virtue can help us better understand, construct, and use the products of modern science and technology. Contributors draw from examples across philosophy, history, sociology, political science, and engineering to explore how virtue theory can help orient science and technology towards the pursuit of the good life. Split into four major sections, this volume covers virtues in science, technology, epistemology, and research ethics, with individual chapters discussing applications of virtues to scientific practice, the influence of virtue ethics on socially responsible research, and the concept of failing well within the scientific community. Rather than offer easy solutions, the essays in this volume instead illustrate how virtue concepts can provide a productive and illuminating perspective on two phenomena at the core of modern life. Fresh and thought-provoking, Science, Technology, and Virtues presents a pluralistic set of scholarship to show how virtue concepts can enrich our understanding of scientific research, guide the design and use of new technologies, and shape how we envision future scientists, engineers, consumers, and citizens.
Author: Jeffry L. Ramsey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003804004
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
This book demonstrates how the philosophy of science can enhance our understanding of sustainability and the practices we use to enact it. Examining assumptions about concepts, theories, evidence, and the moral ideals of sustainability can better orient us as we pursue this urgent and important goal. The book applies perspectives and tools from the philosophy of science – construed broadly to include portions of science and technology studies, history of science, and philosophy more generally – to sustainability discourse. It argues that widely held assumptions regarding the meaning of concepts, methods of theorizing and inferential practice, evidential structure, and ethics limit our understanding and practice of sustainability. It offers philosophical alternatives that capture more fully the confusing, wicked nature of sustainability challenges. The alternatives draw attention to existing but often undervalued frameworks in sustainability discourse. This book is aimed towards academics, researchers, and post-graduates working in sustainability, as well as philosophers of science and environmental philosophers interested in the philosophical issues raised by the pursuit of sustainability.
Author: Paul Humphreys
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199368821
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 800
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Book Description
This handbook provides both an overview of state-of-the-art scholarship in philosophy of science, as well as a guide to new directions in the discipline. Section I contains broad overviews of the main lines of research and the state of established knowledge in six principal areas of the discipline, including computational, physical, biological, psychological and social sciences, as well as general philosophy of science. Section II covers what are considered to be the traditional topics in the philosophy of science, such as causation, probability, models, ethics and values, and explanation. Section III identifies new areas of investigation that show promise of becoming important areas of research, including the philosophy of astronomy and astrophysics, data, complexity theory, neuroscience, simulations, post-Kuhnian philosophy, post-empiricist epistemology, and emergence. Most chapters are accessible to scientifically educated non-philosophers as well as to professional philosophers, and the contributors - all leading researchers in their field -- bring diverse perspectives from the North American, European, and Australasian research communities. This volume is an essential resource for scholars and students.
Author: Wolfgang Lefèvre
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031343409
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 397
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Book Description
This addresses the transformations of metaphysics as a discipline, the emergence of analytical mechanics, the diverging avenues of 18th-century Newtonianism, the body-mind problem, and philosophical principles of classification in the life sciences. An appendix contains a critical edition and first translation into English of Newton's scholia from David Gregory's Estate on the Propositions IV through IX Book III of his Principia.
Author: Jeffrey A. Barrett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192583115
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
In this book Jeffrey A. Barrett provides an introduction to the history and conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. He begins with a description of classical mechanics and a discussion of the quantum phenomena that radically undermine our common-sense classical intuitions about how the physical world works. He then considers the physical and conceptual arguments that led to the standard von Neumann-Dirac formulation of quantum mechanics and how the standard theory explains quantum phenomena. This includes a discussion of how the theory's two dynamical laws work with the standard interpretation of states to explain determinate measurement records, quantum statistics, interference effects, entanglement, decoherence, and quantum nonlocality. A careful understanding of how the standard theory works ultimately leads to the quantum measurement problem. Barrett considers how this problem threatens the logical consistency of the standard theory and then turns to a discussion of the main proposals for resolving it. This includes collapse formulations of quantum mechanics, the various many-worlds theories, and Bohmian mechanics. In discussing alternative formulations he pays particular attention to the explanatory role played by each theory's empirical ontology and associated metaphysical commitments, and the conceptual trade-offs between theoretical options. The book is well-suited to those interested in physics and the history and philosophy of quantum mechanics.
Author: Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316123839
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 567
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Book Description
Cosmology is in crisis. The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A philosopher and a physicist, world-renowned for their radical ideas in their fields, argue for a revolution. To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve. Then we can hope to explain them. The revolution that Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin propose relies on three central ideas. There is only one universe at a time. Time is real: everything in the structure and regularities of nature changes sooner or later. Mathematics, which has trouble with time, is not the oracle of nature and the prophet of science; it is simply a tool with great power and immense limitations. The argument is readily accessible to non-scientists as well as to the physicists and cosmologists whom it challenges.
Author: Robert W. Batterman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197568610
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
Autonomy -- Hydrodynamics -- Brownian motion -- From Brownian motion to bending beams -- An engineering approach -- The right variables and natural kinds.
Author: Mark Wilson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191533440
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 696
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Book Description
Mark Wilson presents a highly original and broad-ranging investigation of the way we get to grips with the world conceptually, and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this. Words such as colour, shape, solidity exemplify the commonplace conceptual tools we employ to describe and order the world around us. But the world's goods are complex in their behaviors and we often overlook the subtle adjustments that our evaluative terms undergo as their usage becomes gradually adapted to different forms of supportive circumstance. Wilson not only explains how these surprising strategies of hidden management operate, but also tells the astonishing story of how faulty schemes and great metaphysical systems sometimes spring from a simple failure to recognize the innocent wanderings to which our descriptive words are heir. Wilson combines traditional philosophical concerns about human conceptual thinking with illuminating data derived from a large variety of fields including physics and applied mathematics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. Wandering Significance offers abundant new insights and perspectives for philosophers of language, mind, and science, and will also reward the interest of psychologists, linguists, and anyone curious about the mysterious ways in which useful language obtains its practical applicability.
