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Author: Anjan Chakravartty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139468391
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories give approximately true descriptions of both observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world. Debates between realists and their critics are at the very heart of the philosophy of science. Anjan Chakravartty traces the contemporary evolution of realism by examining the most promising strategies adopted by its proponents in response to the forceful challenges of antirealist sceptics, resulting in a positive proposal for scientific realism today. He examines the core principles of the realist position, and sheds light on topics including the varieties of metaphysical commitment required, and the nature of the conflict between realism and its empiricist rivals. By illuminating the connections between realist interpretations of scientific knowledge and the metaphysical foundations supporting them, his book offers a compelling vision of how realism can provide an internally consistent and coherent account of scientific knowledge.
Author: E. Agazzi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401593914
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Observability and Scientific Realism It is commonly thought that the birth of modern natural science was made possible by an intellectual shift from a mainly abstract and specuJative conception of the world to a carefully elaborated image based on observations. There is some grain of truth in this claim, but this grain depends very much on what one takes observation to be. In the philosophy of science of our century, observation has been practically equated with sense perception. This is understandable if we think of the attitude of radical empiricism that inspired Ernst Mach and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, who powerfully influenced our century's philosophy of science. However, this was not the atti tude of the f ounders of modern science: Galileo, f or example, expressed in a f amous passage of the Assayer the conviction that perceptual features of the world are merely subjective, and are produced in the 'anima!' by the motion and impacts of unobservable particles that are endowed uniquely with mathematically expressible properties, and which are therefore the real features of the world. Moreover, on other occasions, when defending the Copernican theory, he explicitly remarked that in admitting that the Sun is static and the Earth turns on its own axis, 'reason must do violence to the sense' , and that it is thanks to this violence that one can know the tme constitution of the universe.
Author: Anjan Chakravartty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139468391
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Get Book Here
Book Description
Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories give approximately true descriptions of both observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world. Debates between realists and their critics are at the very heart of the philosophy of science. Anjan Chakravartty traces the contemporary evolution of realism by examining the most promising strategies adopted by its proponents in response to the forceful challenges of antirealist sceptics, resulting in a positive proposal for scientific realism today. He examines the core principles of the realist position, and sheds light on topics including the varieties of metaphysical commitment required, and the nature of the conflict between realism and its empiricist rivals. By illuminating the connections between realist interpretations of scientific knowledge and the metaphysical foundations supporting them, his book offers a compelling vision of how realism can provide an internally consistent and coherent account of scientific knowledge.
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
Provides a spirited defence of anti-realism in philosophy of science. Shows the historical evidence and logical challenges facing scientific realism.
Author: Adam R. C. Humphreys
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192556657
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Causal Inquiry in International Relations defends a new, philosophically-informed account of the principles which must underpin any causal research in a discipline such as International Relations. Its central claim is that there is an underlying logic to all causal inquiry, at the core of which is the search for empirical evidence capable of ruling out competing accounts of how specific events were brought about. Although this crucial fact is obscured by the 'culture of generalization' which predominates in contemporary social science, all causal knowledge ultimately depends on the provision of empirical support for concrete claims about specific events, located in space and time. This book not only explores existing philosophical debates around causation, but also provides a detailed study of some of the most fundamental methodological questions which arise in the course of causal inquiry. Using examples drawn from philosophy and from the study of international relations, it demonstrates what is problematic about established ways of thinking, brings new clarity to both philosophical and methodological questions, and seeks to enhance collective understanding of the contribution that causal inquiry can make to empirically rich and critically aware scholarship about world politics. It concludes by situating 'causal inquiry' in relation to other forms of inquiry employed in the study of world politics, emphasizing especially the often-unnoticed dependence of causal inquiry on precisely the kind of knowledge of specific events which historians are well-placed to provide.
Author: VV.
Publisher: FrancoAngeli
ISBN: 8891709174
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Author: Heather Dyke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135246904
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
Questions about truth and questions about reality are intimately connected. One can ask whether numbers exist by asking "Are there numbers?" But one can also ask what arguably amounts to the same question by asking "Is the sentence 'There are numbers' true?" Such semantic ascent implies that reality can be investigated by investigating our true sentences. This line of thought was dominant in twentieth century philosophy, but is now beginning to be called into question. In From Truth to Reality, Heather Dyke brings together some of the foremost metaphysicians to examine approaches to truth, reality, and the connections between the two. This collection features new and previously unpublished material by JC Beall, Mark Colyvan, Michael Devitt, John Heil, Frank Jackson, Fred Kroon, D. H. Mellor, Luca Moretti, Alan Musgrave, Robert Nola, J. J. C. Smart, Paul Snowdon, and Daniel Stoljar.
Author: Jutta Schickore
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781402042508
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification has had a turbulent career in philosophy of science. This book presents a debate about the nature, development, and significance of the context distinction, about its merits and flaws. It provides readings and analyses of the original textual sources for the context distinction.
Author: Carol A. Kates
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501752189
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 138
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Book Description
What is the nature of communicative competence? Carol Kates addresses this crucial linguistic question, examining and finally rejecting the rationalistic theory proposed by Noam Chomsky and elaborated by Jerrold J. Katz, among others. She sets forth three reasons why the rationalistic model shoudl be rejected: (1) it has not been supported by empirical tests; (2) it cannot accommodate the pragmatic relation between speaker and sign; and (3) the theory of universal grammar carries with it unacceptable metaphysical implications unless it is interpreted in light of empiricism. Kates proposes an empiricist model in place of the rationalistic theory—a model that, in her view, is more consistent with recent findings in linguistics and psycholinguistics. In attempting to clarify the nature of utterance meaning, Kates develops theoretical perspectives on phenomenological empiricism and produces an account of reference and intentionality directly relevant to empiricaly based theories of speaking and understanding. Among the major topics addressed in the book are transformational-generative and universal grammer, cognitive theories of language acquisition, pragmatic structure, predication and topic-comment structure, and empiricism and the philosophical problem of universals. An innovative and probing work, Pragmatics and Semantics will be welcomed by philosophers, linguists, and psycholinguists.
Author: Peter Achinstein
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801879449
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
Included is a famous nineteenth-century debate about scientific reasoning between the hypothetico-deductivist William Whewell and the inductivist John Stuart Mill; and an account of the realism-antirealism dispute about unobservables in science, with a consideration of Perrin's argument for the existence of molecules in the early twentieth century.
Author: Howard Sankey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317058801
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
Scientific realism is the position that the aim of science is to advance on truth and increase knowledge about observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent world which we inhabit. This book articulates and defends that position. In presenting a clear formulation and addressing the major arguments for scientific realism Sankey appeals to philosophers beyond the community of, typically Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of science to appreciate and understand the doctrine. The book emphasizes the epistemological aspects of scientific realism and contains an original solution to the problem of induction that rests on an appeal to the principle of uniformity of nature.
