A Philosophical Approach to MOND

A Philosophical Approach to MOND PDF Author: David Merritt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110849269X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Outlining Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), this volume assesses its viability as the leading alternative to the standard cosmological model.

A Philosophical Approach to MOND

A Philosophical Approach to MOND PDF Author: David Merritt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110849269X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Outlining Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), this volume assesses its viability as the leading alternative to the standard cosmological model.

Lakatos

Lakatos PDF Author: Brendan Larvor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134765142
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Lakatos: An Introduction provides a thorough overview of both Lakatos's thought and his place in twentieth century philosophy. It is an essential and insightful read for students and anyone interested in the philosophy of science.

Freedom and Rationality

Freedom and Rationality PDF Author: F. D'Agostino
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780792302643
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
x philosophy when he inaugurated a debate about the principle of methodologi cal individualism, a debate which continues to this day, and which has inspired a literature as great as any in contemporary philosophy. Few collections of material in the general area of philosophy of social science would be considered complete unless they contained at least one of Watkins's many contributions to the discussion of this issue. In 1957 Watkins published the flrst of a series of three papers (1957b, 1958d and 196Oa) in which he tried to codify and rehabilitate metaphysics within the Popperian philosophy, placing it somewhere between the analytic and the empirical. He thus signalled the emergence of an important implica tion of Popper's thought that had not to that point been stressed by Sir Karl himself, and which marked off his followers from the antimetaphysical ideas of the regnant logical positivists. In 1965 years of work in political philosophy and in the history of philosophy in the seventeenth century were brought to fruition in Watkins's widely cited and admired Hobbes's System of Ideas (1965a, second edition 1973d). This book is an important contribution not just to our understanding of Hobbes's political thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, to our understanding of the way in which a system of ideas is constituted and applied. Watkins built on earlier work in developing an account of Hobbes's ideas in which was revealed and clarifled the unity of Hobbes's metaphysical, epistemological and political ideas.

The Rational and the Social (RLE Social Theory)

The Rational and the Social (RLE Social Theory) PDF Author: James Robert Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317651294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
To paraphrase Marx, sociologists have only interpreted science; the point is to improve it. The Rational and the Social attempts both. It begins by sketching recent sociological approaches to science, notably the strong programme – Bloor’s ‘science of science’ and Barnes’s ‘finitism’ – and that of the ‘anthropologists in the lab’, Collins and Latour and Woolgar. The author argues that although sociological accounts are valuable in many respects, when morals are drawn about the structure and epistemology of science, they are badly flawed. In rejecting the sociological theory of science, it is not necessary to conclude that science develops without reference to the social. James Robert Brown argues for an alternative account. He proposes a novel way of viewing the history of science as a source of evidence for how to do good science and argues that the most important aspect of methodology is that it is comparative. Rival theories are evaluated by comparison and the contribution of the social to this process is inevitable and should be acknowledged. This is the challenge to science.

Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism

Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism PDF Author: Jeff Buechner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261979
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
The first systematic examination of Hilary Putnam's arguments against computational functionalism challenges each of Putnam's main arguments. With mind-brain identity theories no longer dominant in philosophy of mind in the late 1950s, scientific materialists turned to functionalism, the view that the identity of any mental state depends on its function in the cognitive system of which it is a part. The philosopher Hilary Putnam was one of the primary architects of functionalism and was the first to propose computational functionalism, which views the human mind as a computer or an information processor. But, in the early 1970s, Putnam began to have doubts about functionalism, and in his masterwork Representation and Reality (MIT Press, 1988), he advanced four powerful arguments against his own doctrine of computational functionalism. In Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism, Jeff Buechner systematically examines Putnam's arguments against functionalism and contends that they are unsuccessful. Putnam's first argument uses Gödel's incompleteness theorem to refute the view that there is a computational description of human reasoning and rationality; his second, the “triviality argument,” demonstrates that any computational description can be attributed to any physical system; his third, the multirealization argument, shows that there are infinitely many computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state; his fourth argument buttresses this assertion by showing that there cannot be local computational reductions because there is no computable partitioning of the infinity of computational realizations of an arbitrary intentional state into a single package or small set of packages (equivalence classes). Buechner analyzes these arguments and the important inferential connections among them—for example, the use of both the Gödel and triviality arguments in the argument against local computational reductions—and argues that none of Putnam's four arguments succeeds in refuting functionalism. Gödel, Putnam, and Functionalism will inspire renewed discussion of Putnam's influential book and will confirm Representation and Reality as a major work by a major philosopher.

Drifting Continents and Colliding Paradigms

Drifting Continents and Colliding Paradigms PDF Author: John A. Stewart
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253354051
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
"The book provides an excellent historical summary of the debates over continental drift theory in this century." —Contemporary Sociology "This is a useful discussion of the way that science works. The book will be of value to philosophers of science . . . " —Choice " . . . will find an important place in university and department libraries, and will interest afficionados of the factual and intellectual history of the earth sciences." —Terra Nova " . . . an excellent core analysis . . . " —The Times Higher Education Supplement " . . . an ambitious and important contribution to the new sociology of science." —American Journal of Sociology " . . . Stewart's book is a noble effort, an interesting and readable discussion, and another higher notch on the scoreboard of critical scholarship that deserves wide examination and close attention." —Geophysics This fascinating book describes the rise and fall and rebirth of continental drift theory in this century. It uses the recent revolution in geoscientinsts' beliefs about the earth to examine questions such as, How does scientific knowledge develop and change? The book also explores how well different perspectives help us to understand revolutionary change in science.

Triumph of the Optimists

Triumph of the Optimists PDF Author: Elroy Dimson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140082947X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
"Brilliant."—Time "By far the most important investment book in years."—Bloomberg Money "A book that belongs on every investor's bookshelf."—MSN.com An essential and authoritative account of a century of investment returns in sixteen countries—the U.S., the U.K., Japan, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, and South Africa Investors have too often extrapolated from recent experience. In the 1950s, who but the most rampant optimist would have dreamt that over the next fifty years the real return on equities would be 9% per year? Yet this is what happened in the U.S. stock market. The optimists triumphed. However, as Don Marquis observed, an optimist is someone who never had much experience. In Triumph of the Optimists, renowned investment authorities Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton extend our experience across regions and across time. They present a comprehensive and consistent analysis of investment returns for equities, bonds, bills, currencies, and inflation, spanning sixteen countries, from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. This is achieved in a clear and simple way, with over 130 color diagrams that make comparison easy. Crucially, the authors analyze total returns, including reinvested income. They show that some historical indexes overstate long-term performance because they are contaminated by survivorship bias and that long-term stock returns are in most countries seriously overestimated, due to a focus on periods that with hindsight are known to have been successful. The book also provides the first comprehensive evidence on the long-term equity risk premium—the reward for bearing the risk of common stocks. The authors reveal whether the United States and United Kingdom have had unusually high stock market returns compared to other countries. The book covers the U.S., the U.K., Japan, France, Germany, Canada, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, and South Africa. Triumph of the Optimists is required reading for investment professionals, financial economists, and investors. It will be the definitive reference in the field and consulted for years to come.

Theories of Scientific Method

Theories of Scientific Method PDF Author: Robert Nola
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317493494
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
What is it to be scientific? Is there such a thing as scientific method? And if so, how might such methods be justified? Robert Nola and Howard Sankey seek to provide answers to these fundamental questions in their exploration of the major recent theories of scientific method. Although for many scientists their understanding of method is something they just pick up in the course of being trained, Nola and Sankey argue that it is possible to be explicit about what this tacit understanding of method is, rather than leave it as some unfathomable mystery. They robustly defend the idea that there is such a thing as scientific method and show how this might be legitimated. This book begins with the question of what methodology might mean and explores the notions of values, rules and principles, before investigating how methodologists have sought to show that our scientific methods are rational. Part 2 of this book sets out some principles of inductive method and examines its alternatives including abduction, IBE, and hypothetico-deductivism. Part 3 introduces probabilistic modes of reasoning, particularly Bayesianism in its various guises, and shows how it is able to give an account of many of the values and rules of method. Part 4 considers the ideas of philosophers who have proposed distinctive theories of method such as Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend and Part 5 continues this theme by considering philosophers who have proposed naturalised theories of method such as Quine, Laudan and Rescher. This book offers readers a comprehensive introduction to the idea of scientific method and a wide-ranging discussion of how historians of science, philosophers of science and scientists have grappled with the question over the last fifty years.

The Bounds of Agency

The Bounds of Agency PDF Author: Carol Rovane
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691655057
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The subject of personal identity is one of the most central and most contested and exciting in philosophy. Ever since Locke, psychological and bodily criteria have vied with one another in conflicting accounts of personal identity. Carol Rovane argues that, as things stand, the debate is unresolvable since both sides hold coherent positions that our common sense, she maintains, is conflicted; so any resolution to the debate is bound to be revisionary. She boldly offers such a revisionary theory of personal identity by first inquiring into the nature of persons. Rovane begins with a premise about the distinctive ethical nature of persons to which all substantive ethical doctrines, ranging from Kantian to egoist, can subscribe. From this starting point, she derives two startling metaphysical possibilities: there could be group persons composed of many human beings and muliple persons within a single human being. Her conclusions supports Locke's distinction between persons and human beings, but on altogether new grounds. These grounds lie in her radically normative analysis of the condition of personal identity, as the condition in which a certain normative commitment arises, namely, the commitment to achieve overall rational unity within a rational point of view. It is by virtue of this normative commitment that individual agents can engage one another specifically as persons, and possess the distinctive ethical status of persons. Carol Rovan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Fittingness

Fittingness PDF Author: Chris Howard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192649221
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Fittingness explores the nature, roles, and applications of the notion of fittingness in contemporary normative and metanormative philosophy. The fittingness relation is the relation in which a response stands to a feature of the world when that feature merits, or is worthy of, that response. In the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, this notion of fittingness played a prominent role in the theories of the period's most influential ethical theorists, and in recent years it has regained prominence, promising to enrich the theoretical resources of contemporary theorists working in the philosophy of normativity. This volume is the first central discussion of the notion of fit to date. It is composed of seventeen new essays covering a range of topics including the nature and epistemology of fittingness, the relation between fittingness and reasons, the normativity of fittingness, fittingness and value theory, and the role of fittingness in theorizing about responsibility. In addition to making important contributions to the debates in the philosophy of normativity with which they're concerned, the essays in the volume support the hypothesis that the notion of fittingness has great theoretical utility in investigating a range of normative matters, across a variety of domains.