Resisting Scientific Realism 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 Resisting Scientific Realism PDF full book. Access full book title Resisting Scientific Realism by K. Brad Wray. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Get Book
Book Description
Provides a spirited defence of anti-realism in philosophy of science. Shows the historical evidence and logical challenges facing scientific realism.
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Get Book
Book Description
Provides a spirited defence of anti-realism in philosophy of science. Shows the historical evidence and logical challenges facing scientific realism.
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108244564
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Get Book
Book Description
In this book K. Brad Wray provides a comprehensive survey of the arguments against scientific realism. In addition to presenting logical considerations that undermine the realists' inferences to the likely truth or approximate truth of our theories, he provides a thorough assessment of the evidence from the history of science. He also examines grounds for a defence of anti-realism, including an anti-realist explanation for the success of our current theories, an account of why false theories can be empirically successful, and an explanation for why we should expect radical changes of theory in the future. His arguments are supported and illustrated by cases from the history of science, including a sustained study of the Copernican Revolution, and a study of the revolution in early twentieth century chemistry, when chemists came to classify elements by their atomic number rather than by their atomic weight.
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512177
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Get Book
Book Description
Examines the influences on and impact of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Author: Stathis Psillos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134619820
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360
Get Book
Book Description
Scientific realism is the optimistic view that modern science is on the right track: that the world really is the way our best scientific theories describe it . In his book, Stathis Psillos gives us a detailed and comprehensive study which restores the intuitive plausibility of scientific realism. We see that throughout the twentieth century, scientific realism has been challenged by philosophical positions from all angles: from reductive empiricism, to instrumentalism and to modern sceptical empiricism. Scientific Realism explains that the history of science does not undermine the arguments for scientific realism, but instead makes it reasonable to accept scientific realism as the best philosophical account of science, its empirical success, its progress and its practice. Anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the state of modern science and why scientific realism is plausible, should read this book.
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498299
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Get Book
Book Description
"One might wonder if there is anything new to say about Thomas Kuhn and his views on science. Scholarship on Kuhn, though, has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. This is so for a number reasons"--
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 9781551114132
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 484
Get Book
Book Description
This anthology focuses on three areas in the theory of knowledge: epistemic justification; analyses of knowledge and scepticism; and recent developments in epistemology. Each of the three sections includes a brief introduction to the readings, a series of study questions, and a list of suggested readings. Section 1 deals with coherentism, foundationalism, reliabilism, and includes articles by Chisholm, BonJour, Audi, Goldman, and Fumerton. Section 2 deals with the analysis of knowledge and Gettier problems, and a variety of forms and responses to scepticism; it includes articles by Gettier, Conee, Feldman, Putnam, Nagel, and Stroud. Section 3 introduces the reader to recent developments in naturalized, feminist, and social epistemology, and includes articles by Quine, Almeder, Putnam, Anderson, Harding, Longino, Hardwig, Rorty, and Kitcher.
Author: Inmaculada de Melo-Martín
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190869259
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book
Book Description
The lack of public support for climate change policies and refusals to vaccinate children are just two alarming illustrations of the impacts of dissent about scientific claims. Dissent can lead to confusion, false beliefs, and widespread public doubt about highly justified scientific evidence. Even more dangerously, it has begun to corrode the very authority of scientific consensus and knowledge. Deployed aggressively and to political ends, some dissent can intimidate scientists, stymie research, and lead both the public and policymakers to oppose important public policies firmly rooted in science. To criticize dissent is, however, a fraught exercise. Skepticism and fearless debate are key to the scientific process, making it both vital and incredibly difficult to characterize and identify dissent that is problematic in its approach and consequences. Indeed, as de Melo-Martín and Intemann show, the criteria commonly proposed as means of identifying inappropriate dissent are flawed and the strategies generally recommended to tackle such dissent are not only ineffective but could even make the situation worse. The Fight Against Doubt proposes that progress on this front can best be achieved by enhancing the trustworthiness of the scientific community and by being more realistic about the limits of science when it comes to policymaking. It shows that a richer understanding of the context in which science operates is needed to disarm problematic dissent and those who deploy it. This, the authors argue, is the best way forward, rather than diagnosing the many instances of wrong-headed dissent.
Author: K. Brad Wray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139503464
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Get Book
Book Description
Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has been enduringly influential in philosophy of science, challenging many common presuppositions about the nature of science and the growth of scientific knowledge. However, philosophers have misunderstood Kuhn's view, treating him as a relativist or social constructionist. In this book, Brad Wray argues that Kuhn provides a useful framework for developing an epistemology of science that takes account of the constructive role that social factors play in scientific inquiry. He examines the core concepts of Structure and explains the main characteristics of both Kuhn's evolutionary epistemology and his social epistemology, relating Structure to Kuhn's developed view presented in his later writings. The discussion includes analyses of the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the plate tectonics revolution in geology. The book will be useful for scholars working in science studies, sociologists and historians of science as well as philosophers of science.
Author: Harold Jeffreys
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1447494784
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book
Book Description
Originally published in 1931. The present work had its beginnings in a series of papers published jointly some years ago by Dr Dorothy Wrinch and myself. Both before and since that time several books purporting to give analyses of the principles of scientific inquiry have appeared, but it seems to me that none of them gives adequate attention to the chief guiding principle of both scientific and everyday knowledge that it is possible to learn from experience and to make inferences from it beyond the data directly known by sensation. Discussions from the philosophical and logical point of view have tended to the conclusion that this principle cannot be justified by logic alone, which is true, and have left it at that. In discussions by physicists, on the other hand, it hardly seems to be noticed that such a principle exists. In the present work the principle is frankly adopted as a primitive postulate and its consequences are developed. It is found to lead to an explanation and a justification of the high probabilities attached in practice to simple quantitative laws, and thereby to a recasting of the processes involved in description. As illustrations of the actual relations of scientific laws to experience it is shown how the sciences of mensuration and dynamics may be developed. I have been stimulated to an interest in the subject myself on account of the fact that in my work in the subjects of cosmogony and geophysics it has habitually been necessary to apply physical laws far beyond their original range of verification in both time and distance, and the problems involved in such extrapolation have therefore always been prominent. This is a high quality digital version of the original title, thus a few of the images may be slightly blurred and difficult to read.
Author: Sally Haslanger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199892644
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Get Book
Book Description
Contemporary theorists use the term "social construction" with the aim of exposing how what's purportedly "natural" is often at least partly social and, more specifically, how this masking of the social is politically significant. In these previously published essays, Sally Haslanger draws on insights from feminist and critical race theory to explore and develop the idea that gender and race are positions within a structure of social relations. On this interpretation, the point of saying that gender and race are socially constructed is not to make a causal claim about the origins of our concepts of gender and race, or to take a stand in the nature/nurture debate, but to locate these categories within a realist social ontology. This is politically important, for by theorizing how gender and race fit within different structures of social relations we are better able to identify and combat forms of systematic injustice. Although the central essays of the book focus on a critical social realism about gender and race, these accounts function as case studies for a broader critical social realism. To develop this broader approach, several essays offer reworked notions of ideology, practice, and social structure, drawing on recent research in sociology and social psychology. Ideology, on the proposed view, is a relatively stable set of shared dispositions to respond to the world, often in ways that also shape the world to evoke those very dispositions. This looping of our dispositions through the material world enables the social to appear natural. Additional essays in the book situate this approach to social phenomena in relation to philosophical methodology, and to specific debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The book as a whole explores the interface between analytic philosophy and critical theory.
