Download Free Models And Methods In The Philosophy Of Science Selected Essays Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Models And Methods In The Philosophy Of Science Selected Essays and write the review.

The thirty-one papers collected in this volume represent most of the arti cles that I have published in the philosophy of science and related founda tional areas of science since 1970. The present volume is a natural succes sor to Studies in the Methodology and Foundations of Science, a collection of my articles published in 1969 by Reidel (now a part of Kluwer). The articles are arranged under five main headings. Part I contains six articles on general methodology. The topics range from formal methods to the plurality of science. Part II contains six articles on causality and explanation. The emphasis is almost entirely on probabilistic approaches. Part III contains six articles on probability and measurement. The impor tance of representation theorems for both probability and measurement is stressed. Part IV contains five articles on the foundations of physics. The first three articles are concerned with action at a distance and space and time, the last two with quantum mechanics. Part V contains eight articles on the foundations of psychology. This is the longest part and the articles reflect my continuing strong interest in the nature of learning and perception. Within each part the articles are arranged chronologically. I turn now to a more detailed overview of the content. The first article of Part I concerns the role of formal methods in the philosophy of science. Here I discuss what is the new role for formal methods now that the imperialism of logical positivism has disappeared.
The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of application of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief, perception, memory, hoping, and striving, to mention just a few of the more obvious ones. When a satisfactory semantics (in the sense of Tarski and Carnap) was first developed for modal logic, a fascinating new set of methods and ideas was thus made available for philosophical studies. The pioneers of this model theory of modality include prominently Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke. Several others were working in the same area independently and more or less concurrently. Some of the older papers in this collection, especially 'Quantification and Modality' and 'Modes of Modality', serve to clarify some of the main possibilities in the semantics of modal logics in general.
No Marketing Blurb
This book provides both an introduction to the philosophy of scientific modeling and a contribution to the discussion and clarification of two recent philosophical conceptions of models: artifactualism and fictionalism. These can be viewed as different stances concerning the standard representationalist account of scientific models. By better understanding these two alternative views, readers will gain a deeper insight into what a model is as well as how models function in different sciences. Fictionalism has been a traditional epistemological stance related to antirealist construals of laws and theories, such as instrumentalism and inferentialism. By contrast, the more recent fictional view of models holds that scientific models must be conceived of as the same kind of entities as literary characters and places. This approach is essentially an answer to the ontological question concerning the nature of models, which in principle is not incompatible with a representationalist account of the function of models. The artifactual view of models is an approach according to which scientific models are epistemic artifacts, whose main function is not to represent the phenomena but rather to provide epistemic access to them. It can be conceived of as a non-representationalist and pragmatic account of modeling, which does not intend to focus on the ontology of models but rather on the ways they are built and used for different purposes. The different essays address questions such as the artifactual view of idealization, the use of information theory to elucidate the concepts of abstraction and idealization, the deidealization of models, the nature of scientific fictions, the structural account of representation and the ontological status of structures, the role of surrogative reasoning with models, and the use of models for explaining and predicting physical phenomena.
For some years we have been conducting at the University of Haifa an interdisciplinary seminar on explanation in philosophy and psychology. We habitually begin the seminar with some philosophical reflections on explanation - an analysis of the concept and its metaphysical underpinnings. We discuss the various models and proceed to examine explanation in the setting of psychology. Thus, from the outset, we have focused not only on the concept itself but also on its application. The objective that we have set for the seminar, attended by students from both departments, Philosophy and Psychology, has been a critical understanding of the concept of explanation, its use and limitations. We were keen on deepening our understanding of the concept and on exploring its applications in fields of knowledge other than psychology. This was the motivation for convening an international conference on explanation and its application. The conference took place in the spring of 1998 under the auspices of the University of Haifa. The present book is the fruit of this meeting. The reader should note that the second part of the Introduction presents a detailed analytical account of the book. We hope that this overview will facilitate efficient use of the book by directing the reader's attention to those issues that might be of interest to him or her.
This is the first of two volumes comprising the papers submitted for publication by the invited participants to the Tenth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, held in Florence, August 1995. The Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. The invited lectures published in the two volumes demonstrate much of what goes on in the fields of the Congress and give the state of the art of current research. The two volumes cover the traditional subdisciplines of mathematical logic and philosophical logic, as well as their interfaces with computer science, linguistics and philosophy. Philosophy of science is broadly represented, too, including general issues of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. The papers in Volume One are concerned with logic, mathematical logic, the philosophy of logic and mathematics, and computer science.
In this book Emma Ruttkamp demonstrates the power of the full-blown employment of the model-theoretic paradigm in the philosophy of science. Within this paradigm she gives an account of sciences as process and product. She expounds the "received statement" and the "non-statement" views of science, and shows how the model-theoretic approach resolves the spurious tension between these views. In this endeavour she also engages the views of a number of contemporary philosophers of science with affinity to model theory. This text can be read by specialists working in philosophy of science or formal semantics, by logicians working on the structure of theories, and by students in philosophy of science - this text offers a thorough introduction to non-statement accounts of sciences as well as a discussion of the traditional statement account of science.
This book offers new perspectives and paradigms in science, specifically to point out novel characteristics in natural processes. The issues are discussed by outstanding scientists from among the most advanced fields of science, who bring with them various points of the scientific horizon and widely different new experimental evidence.
This book contains seminal discussions of central issues in the philosophy of language, mathematics, mind, religion and time. Is common language conceptually prior to idiolectics? What is a theory of meaning? Does constructivism provide a satisfactory account of mathematics? What are indefinitely extensible concepts? Can we change the past? These are only some of the very important questions addressed here. Both the papers written by the contributors and Dummett's replies provide a great wealth of stimulating ideas for those who currently do research in the respective areas touched upon without making the reading exceedingly tedious. This feature, common to most of the papers in this book, makes it possible to use the material presented in undergraduate courses at university level.
This book tries to explore, in language as non-technical as possible, the deepest philosophical problems regarding the logical status of empty (singular) terms such as `Pegasus', `Batman', `The impossible staircase departs in Escher's painting `Ascending-Descending'+ etc., and regarding sentences which deny the existence of singled-out fictional entities. It will be fascinating for literary theorists with a flair for logic, to students of metaphysics and philosophy of language, and for historians of philosophy interested in the fate of the Russell-Meinong debate. For teachers of these aspects of analytic philosophy this will provide a textbook which goes beyond the Western tradition (without plunging into any mystical Eastern `Emptiness', which is what some previous comparative philosophers did!).