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Author: Mark Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192525247
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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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 wanted. 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: 0198803478
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
Mark Wilson explores our strategies for understanding the world. We frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must use alternative thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout ways; and philosophy must find better descriptive tools to reflect this.
Author: Mark Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191841651
Category : PHILOSOPHY
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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Book Description
Mark Wilson explores our strategies for understanding the world. We frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must use alternative thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout ways; and philosophy must find better descriptive tools to reflect this.
Author: Mark Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199532303
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 691
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Book Description
Mark Wilson investigates the way we get to grips with the world conceptually, and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this. He combines traditional philosophical concerns about human conceptual thinking with illuminating data derived from physics and applied mathematics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics.
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: F. Dignum
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642181805
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
While today's game engines and multi-agent platforms cross-fertilize each other to some extent, the technologies used in these areas are not readily compatible due to some differences in their primary concerns. Where game engines prioritize efficiency and central control, multi-agent platforms focus on agent autonomy and sophisticated communication capabilities. This volume gives an overview of the current state of the art for people wishing to combine agent technology with (serious) games. This state-of-the-art survey contains a collection of papers presented at AGS 2010; the Second International Workshop on Agents for Games and Simulations, held on May 10, 2010, in Toronto, as well as extended versions of papers from other workshops and from the AAMAS conference. The 14 papers are organized in three topical sections focusing on architectures combining agents and game engines, on the training aspects of the games, on social and organizational aspects of games and agents, respectively.
Author: Daniel S. Brooks
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262362252
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Scientific philosophers examine the nature and significance of levels of organization, a core structural principle in the biological sciences. This volume examines the idea of levels of organization as a distinct object of investigation, considering its merits as a core organizational principle for the scientific image of the natural world. It approaches levels of organization--roughly, the idea that the natural world is segregated into part-whole relationships of increasing spatiotemporal scale and complexity--in terms of its roles in scientific reasoning as a dynamic, open-ended idea capable of performing multiple overlapping functions in distinct empirical settings. The contributors--scientific philosophers with longstanding ties to the biological sciences--discuss topics including the philosophical and scientific contexts for an inquiry into levels; whether the concept can actually deliver on its organizational promises; the role of levels in the development and evolution of complex systems; conditional independence and downward causation; and the extension of the concept into the sociocultural realm. Taken together, the contributions embrace the diverse usages of the term as aspects of the big picture of levels of organization. Contributors Jan Baedke, Robert W. Batterman, Daniel S. Brooks, James DiFrisco, Markus I. Eronen, Carl Gillett, Sara Green, James Griesemer, Alan C. Love, Angela Potochnik, Thomas Reydon, Ilya Tëmkin, Jon Umerez, William C. Wimsatt, James Woodward
Author: Katherine Brading
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197678955
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 449
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Book Description
From pebbles to planets, tigers to tables, pine trees to people; animate and inanimate, natural and artificial; bodies are everywhere. Bodies populate the world, acting and interacting with one another, and they are the subject-matter of Newton's laws of motion. But what is a body? And how can we know how they behave? In Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, Katherine Brading and Marius Stan examine the struggle for a theory of bodies. At the beginning of the 18th century, physics was the branch of philosophy that studied bodies in general. Its primary task was to provide a qualitative account of the nature of bodies, including their essential properties, causal powers, and generic behaviors. Pursued by a variety of figures both canonical (from Leibniz to Kant) and less familiar (from Du Châtelet and Euler to d'Alembert and Lagrange), this proved a difficult task. At stake were the appropriate epistemologies and methods for theorizing about the natural world. Solutions demanded the combined resources of philosophy, physics, and mechanics: what Brading and Stan call a "philosophical mechanics." Brading and Stan analyze a century of widespread, concerted efforts to solve "the problem of bodies," they examine the consequences of the many failures, both for the problem itself and for philosophy more generally. They reveal relationships among disparate themes of 18th century physics and philosophy, from the nature of matter to the motion of a vibrating string; causation to the principle of least action; and the role of subtle matter in collision theory to analytic mechanics. All of these, Brading and Stan argue, are related to the eventual emergence of physics as an independent discipline, autonomous from philosophy, more than a century after Newton's Principia. This book provides a new framing of natural philosophy and its transformations in the Enlightenment; and it proposes an account of how physics and philosophy evolved into distinct fields of inquiry.
Author: Katie Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192677497
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The different sciences furnish us with a wide variety of explanations: some work at macroscopic scales, some work at microscopic scales, and some operate across different levels. How do these different explanatory levels relate to one another, and what is an explanatory level in the first place? Over the last 50 years, more and more philosophers--both reductionists and anti-reductionists--no longer subscribe to the idea that the best explanation resides at the fundamental physical level. New challenges arise from the success of scientific explanations employing multi-level models which mix levels of explanation, from distinctive differences between levels structures in biology, cognitive science, and social science, from the apparently radical reimagining of the explanatory role of spacetime in our current best theories of fundamental physics, and from the enduring mystery of how higher-level explanations are possible in the first place. These questions naturally connect to classic philosophical ways of thinking about the relationships between levels: reduction, emergence, and fundamentality. This volume presents a snapshot of cutting-edge research on explanatory levels, from their conceptual foundations to the details of how they are used in scientific practice.
Author: Library of Congress. Cataloging Policy and Support Office
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Subject headings, Library of Congress
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Library of Congress
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Subject headings, Library of Congress
Languages : en
Pages : 1816
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Book Description
