Author : W.H. Newton-Smith
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 471 pages
File Size : 38,65 MB
Release : 2002-02-07
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1134930968
A clear, original and systematic introduction to philosophy of science which examines the theories of Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend before proposing a new, temperate rationalist perspective.
Author : W. Newton-Smith
Publisher : Routledge & Kegan Paul Books
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 37,21 MB
Release : 1981
Category : Science
ISBN :
Traditional philosophical accounts of the scientific enterprise represent it as a paradigm of institutionalized rationality. The scientist is held to possess a special method which he disinterestedly applied, generating an accumulation of scientific knowledge about the world, and the evolution of science is seen as being determined by the rational deliberations of scientists and not by psychological or sociological factors. More recently, various philosophers, historians and sociologists of science have held that this rational model is no longer tenable. Some have claimed that there is no such thing as a scientific method or scientific progress, and that theories are incommensurable and so there is no possibility of choice between alternative theories. The more extreme non-rationalists seek to explain scientific change exclusively in terms of psychological and sociological factors. In this book, the author explores the controversy between the two approaches and presents a strongly critical and independent view of both rationalists like Popper and Lakatos and non-rationalists such as Kuhn and Feyerabend. He goes on to develop his own account of the scientific enterprise--temperate rationalism, a vindication of the rationalist approach to science and of a realist construal of theories.--
Author : Stefano Gattei
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 13,61 MB
Release : 2008-10-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1134182953
Rectifying misrepresentations of Popperian thought with a historical approach to Popper’s philosophy, Gattei reconstructs the logic of Popper’s development to show how one problem and its tentative solution led to a new problem.
Author : Howard Sankey
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 43,60 MB
Release : 2016-04-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1317058801
Scientific realism is the position that the aim of science is to advance on truth and increase knowledge about observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent world which we inhabit. This book articulates and defends that position. In presenting a clear formulation and addressing the major arguments for scientific realism Sankey appeals to philosophers beyond the community of, typically Anglo-American, analytic philosophers of science to appreciate and understand the doctrine. The book emphasizes the epistemological aspects of scientific realism and contains an original solution to the problem of induction that rests on an appeal to the principle of uniformity of nature.
Author : Roger Trigg
Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 33,87 MB
Release : 1993-12-08
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780631190370
In this important new work, Professor Trigg deals with the question of the rational foundations of science. In so doing, he explains and evaluates the views of Rorty, Wittgensteing, Quine, Putnam, and Hawking, amongst others. The limits of science and rationality are explored and the power of human reason is in the end upheld.
Author : Mikael Stenmark
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 25,94 MB
Release : 2016-09-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0268091676
Mikael Stenmark examines four models of rationality and argues for a discussion of rationality that takes into account the function and aim of such human practices as science and religion.
Author : M.A. Finocchiaro
Publisher : Springer
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 40,23 MB
Release : 1980-08-31
Category : Science
ISBN : 9027710945
The work of Galileo has long been important not only as a foundation of modern physics but also as a model - and perhaps the paradigmatic model - of scientific method, and therefore as a leading example of scientific rationality. However, as we know, the matter is not so simple. The range of Galileo readings is so varied that one may be led to the conclusion that it is a case of chacun a son Galileo; that here, as with the Bible, or Plato or Kant or Freud or Finnegan's Wake, the texts themselves underdetermine just what moral is to be pointed. But if there is no canonical reading, how can the texts be taken as evidence or example of a canonical view of scientific rationality, as in Galileo? Or is it the case, instead, that we decide a priori what the norms of rationality are and then pick through texts to fmd those which satisfy these norms? Specifically, how and on what grounds are we to accept or reject scientific theories, or scientific reasoning? If we are to do this on the basis of historical analysis of how, in fact, theories came to be accepted or rejected, how shall we distinguish 'is' from 'ought'? What follows (if anything does) from such analysis or reconstruction about how theories ought to be accepted or rejected? Maurice Finocchiaro's study of Galileo brings an important and original approach to the question of scientific rationality by way of a systematic read
Author : Karl Popper
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 14,24 MB
Release : 2014-04-23
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 113597473X
In a career spanning sixty years, Sir Karl Popper has made some of the most important contributions to the twentieth century discussion of science and rationality. The Myth of the Framework is a new collection of some of Popper's most important material on this subject. Sir Karl discusses such issues as the aims of science, the role that it plays in our civilization, the moral responsibility of the scientist, the structure of history, and the perennial choice between reason and revolution. In doing so, he attacks intellectual fashions (like positivism) that exagerrate what science and rationality have done, as well as intellectual fashions (like relativism) that denigrate what science and rationality can do. Scientific knowledge, according to Popper, is one of the most rational and creative of human achievements, but it is also inherently fallible and subject to revision. In place of intellectual fashions, Popper offers his own critical rationalism - a view that he regards both as a theory of knowlege and as an attitude towards human life, human morals and democracy. Published in cooperation with the Central European University.
Author : Edward Stein
Publisher : Clarendon Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 32,2 MB
Release : 1996-01-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 019158472X
Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational—we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy and cognitive science. He discusses concepts of rationality—the pictures of rationality that the debate centres on—and assesses the empirical evidence used to argue that humans are irrational. He concludes that the question of human rationality must be answered not conceptually but empirically, using the full resources of an advanced cognitive science. Furthermore, he extends this conclusion to argue that empirical considerations are also relevant to the theory of knowledge—in other words, that epistemology should be naturalized.
Author : Thomas Nickles
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 37,63 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Science
ISBN : 9400989865
It is fast becoming a cliche that scientific discovery is being rediscovered. For two philosophical generations (that of the Founders and that of the Followers of the logical positivist and logical empiricist movements), discovery had been consigned to the domain of the intractable, the ineffable, the inscrutable. The philosophy of science was focused on the so-called context of justification as its proper domain. More recently, as the exclusivity of the logical reconstruc tion program in philosophy of science came under question, and as the critique of justification developed within the framework of logical and epistemological analysis, the old question of scientific discovery, which had been put on the back burner, began to emerge once again. Emphasis on the relation of the history of science to the philosophy of science, and attention to the question of theory change and theory replacement, also served to legitimate a new concern with the origins of scientific change to be found within discovery and invention. How welcome then to see what a wide range of issues and what a broad representation of philosophers and historians of science have been brought together in the present two volumes of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science! For what these volumes achieve, in effect, is the continuation of a tradition which had once been strong in the philosophy of science - namely, that tradition which addressed the question of scientific discovery as a central question in the understanding of science.
