Holism and the Understanding of Science 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 Holism and the Understanding of Science PDF full book. Access full book title Holism and the Understanding of Science by Louis Caruana. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Louis Caruana
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351738208
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Get Book Here
Book Description
This title was first published in 2000: This book addresses issues which are central in the philosophy of science, exploring a large and relevant literature. It should be of broad interest in the philosophy of science community." Professor Peter Lipton, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK. How can the complexities of understanding science be dealt with as a whole? Is philosophical realism still a defensible philosophical position? Exploring such fundamental questions, this book claims that science ought to be understood in terms of universal practices and that such an understanding supports an attractive version of scientific realism. Holism is attracting renewed scholarly attention but is still loosely used in a range of different contexts, from semantics to medicine. This book presents a detailed philosophical analysis of holism, concentrating on two complementary aspects of holism - cognitive and social - to investigate its relevance to science studies. Bridging the gap between analytical, historical and sociological accounts of science, Caruana draws together results from recent research by Davidson, Dummett, Quine, Wright and others, on Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Demonstrating that holism, both cognitive and social, is not only essential for a full understanding of science but also compatible with a particular version of scientific realism, this book presents important new perspectives for the philosophers of science and scholars of the history of science in particular. Louis Caruana is Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy of Science and Nature at the Gregorian University, Rome, Italy.
Author: Louis Caruana
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351738208
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Get Book Here
Book Description
This title was first published in 2000: This book addresses issues which are central in the philosophy of science, exploring a large and relevant literature. It should be of broad interest in the philosophy of science community." Professor Peter Lipton, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK. How can the complexities of understanding science be dealt with as a whole? Is philosophical realism still a defensible philosophical position? Exploring such fundamental questions, this book claims that science ought to be understood in terms of universal practices and that such an understanding supports an attractive version of scientific realism. Holism is attracting renewed scholarly attention but is still loosely used in a range of different contexts, from semantics to medicine. This book presents a detailed philosophical analysis of holism, concentrating on two complementary aspects of holism - cognitive and social - to investigate its relevance to science studies. Bridging the gap between analytical, historical and sociological accounts of science, Caruana draws together results from recent research by Davidson, Dummett, Quine, Wright and others, on Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Demonstrating that holism, both cognitive and social, is not only essential for a full understanding of science but also compatible with a particular version of scientific realism, this book presents important new perspectives for the philosophers of science and scholars of the history of science in particular. Louis Caruana is Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy of Science and Nature at the Gregorian University, Rome, Italy.
Author: Milena Ivanova
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009020145
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 118
Get Book Here
Book Description
The holistic thesis developed by Pierre Duhem challenges the idea that our evidence can conclusively falsify a theory. Given that no scientific theory is tested in isolation, a negative experiment can always be attributed to components other than the theory we test – to the auxiliary hypotheses and background assumptions. How do scientists decide whether the experimental result undermines the theory or points at an error in the underlying assumptions? Duhem argues that we cannot offer a rule that directs when the scientist should employ a radical or conservative strategy in light of a negative result, and ultimately they will appeal to their intuition. More recently philosophers have offered a number of strategies of how to locate error and justify the abandonment of a theory or an auxiliary hypothesis. This Element analyses Duhem's response to holism and subsequent accounts of how the problem can be resolved.
Author: Jan Christiaan Smuts
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Rick C. Looijen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401595607
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Get Book Here
Book Description
Holism and reductionism are traditionally seen as incompatible views or approaches to nature. Here Looijen argues that they should rather be seen as mutually dependent and hence co-operating research programmes. He sheds some interesting new light on the emergence thesis, its relation to the reduction thesis, and on the role and status of functional explanations in biology. He discusses several examples of reduction in both biology and ecology, showing the mutual dependence of holistic and reductionist research programmes. Ecologists are offered separate chapters, clarifying some major, yet highly and controversial ecological concepts, such as `community', `habitat', and `niche'. The book is the first in-depth study of the philosophy of ecology. Readership: Specialists in the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of biology, biologists and ecologists interested in the philosophy of their discipline. Also of interest to other scientists concerned with the holism-reductionism issue.
Author: Anne Harrington
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691218080
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Get Book Here
Book Description
By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework. Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.
Author: Julie Zahle
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319053442
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Get Book Here
Book Description
This collection of papers investigates the most recent debates about individualism and holism in the philosophy of social science. The debates revolve mainly around two issues: firstly, whether social phenomena exist sui generis and how they relate to individuals. This is the focus of discussions between ontological individualists and ontological holists. Secondly, to what extent social scientific explanations may and should, focus on individuals and social phenomena respectively. This issue is debated amongst methodological holists and methodological individualists. In social science and philosophy, both issues have been intensively discussed and new versions of the dispute have appeared just as new arguments have been advanced. At present, the individualism/holism debate is extremely lively and this book reflects the major positions and perspectives within the debate. This volume is also relevant to debates about two closely related issues in social science: the micro-macro debate and the agency-structure debate. This book presents contributions from key figures in both social science and philosophy, in the first such collection on this topic to be published since the 1970s.
Author: W. H. Newton-Smith
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631230205
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 596
Get Book Here
Book Description
Unmatched in the quality of its world-renowned contributors, this companion serves as both a course text and a reference book across the broad spectrum of issues of concern to the philosophy of science.
Author: Christopher Lawrence
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195109047
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book sheds new light on orthodox medicine and medical science in the interwar years. It challenges the accepted story that medicine in the twentieth century was subject to icreasing reductionism and shows instead that there was a holistic turn in the medical sciences and clinical practice that challenged reductionism and medical specialization.
Author: M. Esfeld
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792370031
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Get Book Here
Book Description
The topic of this book is a comparison between holism in the philosophy and language and social holism on the one hand and holism about space-time and quantum systems on the other hand. The main claim is that holism in the humanities and holism in fundamental physics come under the same substantial, general conception of holism. That is to say: arguments to the effect that the holism of the mental is unscientific or that the mental is separated from the physical owing to holism are not sound. The holism of the mental fits into a world-view that bases itself on scientific realism. The addressees of this book are all those who care about our view of the world and ourselves in the spirit of an argumentative examination of different positions. No familiarity with physics is presupposed.
Author: Vincent Descombes
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674419979
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 393
Get Book Here
Book Description
Holism maintains that a phenomenon is more than the sum of its parts. Yet analysis--a mental process crucial to comprehension--involves dismantling the whole to grasp it piecemeal and relationally. Wading through such quandaries, Vincent Descombes guides readers to a deepened appreciation of the entity that enables understanding: the human mind.
