This monograph offers a critical introduction to current theories of how scientific models represent their target systems. Representation is important because it allows scientists to study a model to discover features of reality. The authors provide a map of the conceptual landscape surrounding the issue of scientific representation, arguing that it consists of multiple intertwined problems. They provide an encyclopaedic overview of existing attempts to answer these questions, and they assess their strengths and weaknesses. The book also presents a comprehensive statement of their alternative proposal, the DEKI account of representation, which they have developed over the last few years. They show how the account works in the case of material as well as non-material models; how it accommodates the use of mathematics in scientific modelling; and how it sheds light on the relation between representation in science and art. The issue of representation has generated a sizeable literature, which has been growing fast in particular over the last decade. This makes it hard for novices to get a handle on the topic because so far there is no book-length introduction that would guide them through the discussion. Likewise, researchers may require a comprehensive review that they can refer to for critical evaluations. This book meets the needs of both groups.

Scholars from all the continents have written articles to celebrate the 70th birthday of Jan Srzednicki, a thinker still at the height of his powers. Srzednicki's scientific work alternates between problems of Austrian and German philosophy and questions of political philosophy. The papers published in this volume discuss topics of general philosophy, in the clear and deep style both of Srzednicki's own philosophical work and of the authors investigated in his writings (mainly Brentano and the Polish tradition of analytic philosophy). The topics developed pertain to the fields of epistemology (common sense, knowledge and objectivity, truth and perception) and of logic and philosophy of logic (paraconsistent logic, definition and duality).

This book provides an accessible and up-to-date discussion of contemporary theories of perceptual justification that each highlight different factors related to perception, i.e., conscious experience, higher-order beliefs, and reliable processes. The book's discussion starts from the viewpoint that perception is not only one of our fundamental sources of knowledge and justification, but also plays this role for many less sophisticated animals. It proposes a scientifically informed reliabilist theory which can accommodate this fact without denying that some of our epistemic abilities as human perceivers are special. This allows it to combine many of our intuitions about the importance of conscious experience and higher-order belief with the controversial thesis that perceptual justification is fundamentally non-evidential in character.

This book advances our theoretical understanding of the human experience. By overcoming dualities such as the relationship between reflection and action, it allows a more in-depth analysis of how concepts constitute complementary parts of the complex human thinking to be developed. Presenting texts written by leading philosophers and psychologists, it provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of theoretical elaboration, which is then used to discuss the place and value of reflection in moral and epistemic scenes. These topics are accessible to experts and young scholars in the field alike, and offer scope for further reflections that could improve our understanding beyond the existing models and "-isms". The novelty of the book is in the dialogue established between several perspectives (e.g. philosophers and psychologists; Europe, America and Asia; etc.). The contributions of philosophers and psychologists establish a fruitful dialogue, so that readers realize that disciplinary divisions are overcome through dialogue and the common object of inquiry: the way human beings reflect and act in their everyday experiences.

This book focuses on African metaphysics and epistemology, and is an exercise in decoloniality. The authors describe their approach to "decoloniality" as an intellectual repudiation of coloniality, using the method of conversational thinking grounded in Ezumezu logic. Focusing specifically on both African metaphysics and African epistemology, the authors put forward theories formulated to stimulate fresh debates and extend the frontiers of learning in the field. They emphasize that this book is not a project in comparative philosophy, nor is it geared towards making Africa/ns the object/subjects of philosophy. Rather, the book highlights and discusses philosophical insights that have been produced from the African perspective, which the authors argue must be further developed in order to achieve decoloniality in the field of philosophy more broadly.

From Plato to Quine, this volume provides a concise collection of the essential, classic readings in theory of knowledge.

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is one of the oldest and most central branches of philosophy. Do we know what we think we know? What are the sources of knowledge? These are among the perennial questions of philosophy. This volume contains twenty of the most important historical contributions - from the earliest times to Wittgenstein, from China to the USA - to this area of philosophy. Several of the texts address the problem of skepticism, whose challenge to the very possibility of knowledge has been the main inspiration to reflections on knowledge.

A substantial introduction by the editor, together with his preamble to each text, helps make this volume an invaluable one for students taking historically informed courses on the theory of knowledge.

This book explores the dispositional and categorical debates on the metaphysics of properties. It defends the view that all fundamental properties and relations are contingently categorical, while also examining alternative accounts of the nature of properties. Drawing upon both established research and the author's own investigation into the broader discipline of the metaphysics of science, this book provides a comprehensive study of the many views and opinions regarding a most debatable topic in contemporary metaphysics. Science in Metaphysics will be of interest to metaphysicians of science, analytic metaphysicians and philosophers of science and physics alike.

The development of Critical Realism (CR), as a philosophy of science, is generally attributed to a series of books by Roy Bhaskar. It has proven to be influential, not least because it has an affinity with many people's views about the way the world fits together, both within and outside of academia. Whilst there are numerous contributions outlining CR theory in sociological and organizational research, as well as general texts about realist ontology, work delineating the consequences of these views for research practice is an emerging area of interest. This book aims to fill a significant gap in the literature by providing a practical guide to the application of CR in empirical research projects. More specifically, it explores the methodological consequences of committing to a CR ontology-the assumptions that researchers from this tradition make about the nature of reality. These assumptions are important because ontological commitments, which relate what we believe exists, often affect our epistemological concerns, which relate to our beliefs about how whatever exists can be studied and known. Thus, for a researcher, ontology and epistemology are important because they have consequences for the possibilities and limits of the research methods, techniques, and analyses that they employ. The book explains what CR is and outlines the logic of research design. In a series of chapters on major social science research methods, purpose-written by experts in the relevant technique, the book contains extended illustration of how to conduct inquiry using CR.

There is a lot that we don't know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don't know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us at least, there is an epistemic possibility where it rained in Seattle yesterday, and one where it did not. What are these epistemic possibilities? They do not match up with metaphysical possibilities - there are various cases where something is epistemically possible but not metaphysically possible, and vice versa. How do we understand the semantics of statements of epistemic modality? The ten new essays in this volume explore various answers to these questions, including those offered by contextualism, relativism, and expressivism.

Foucault's intellectual indebtedness to Nietzsche is apparent in his writing, yet the precise nature, extent, and nuances of that debt are seldom explored. Foucault himself seems sometimes to claim that his approach is essentially Nietzschean, and sometimes to insist that he amounts to a radical break with Nietzsche. This volume is the first of its kind, presenting the relationship between these two thinkers on elements of contemporary culture that they shared interests in, including the nature of life in the modern world, philosophy as a way of life, and the ways in which we ought to read and write about other philosophers. The contributing authors are leading figures in Foucault and Nietzsche studies, and their contributions reflect the diversity of approaches possible in coming to terms with the Foucault-Nietzsche relationship. Specific points of comparison include Foucault and Nietzsche's differing understandings of the Death of God; art and aesthetics; power; writing and authorship; politics and society; the history of ideas; genealogy and archaeology; and the evolution of knowledge.

In this volume, Brakel raises questions about conventions in the study of mind in three disciplines-psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind, and experimental philosophy. She illuminates new understandings of the mind through interdisciplinary challenges to views long-accepted. Here she proposes a view of psychoanalysis as a treatment that owes its successes largely to its biological nature-biological in its capacity to best approximate the extinction of problems arising owing to aversive conditioning. She also discusses whether or not "the mental" can have any real ontological standing, arguing that a form of reductive physicalism can be sufficient ontologically, but that epistemological considerations require a branch of non-reductive physicalism. She then notes the positive implications of this view for psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Finally, she investigates the role of "consistency" in method and content, toward which experimental philosophers strive. In essence, Brakel articulates the different sets of challenges pertaining to: a) ancient dilemmas such as the mind/body problem; b) longstanding debates about the nature of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis; and c) new core questions arising in the relatively young discipline of experimental philosophy.

A picture of the world as chiefly one of discrete objects, distributed in space and time, has sometimes seemed compelling. It is however one of two main targets of Henry Laycock's book; for it is seriously incomplete. The picture, he argues, leaves no space for stuff like air and water. With discrete objects, we may always ask 'how many?', but with stuff the question has to be 'how much?' Within philosophy, stuff of certain basic kinds is central to the ancient pre-Socratic world-view; but it also constitutes the field of modern chemistry and is a major factor in ecology. Philosophers these days, in general, are unlikely to deny that stuff exists. But they are very likely to deny that it is ('ultimately') to be contrasted with things, and it is on this account that logic and semantics figure largely in the framework of the book. Elementary logic is a logic which takes values for its variables; and these values are precisely distinct individuals or things. Existence is then symbolized in just such terms; and this, it is proposed, creates a pressure for 'reducing' stuff to things. Non-singular expressions, which include words for stuff, 'mass' nouns, and also plural nouns, are 'explicated' as semantically singular. Here then is the second target of the book. The posit that both mass and plural nouns name special categories of objects (set-theoretical 'collections' of objects in the one case, mereological 'parcels' or 'portions' of stuff in the other) represents, so Laycock urges, the imposition of an alien logic upon both the many and the much.

This book argues against the common view that there are no essential differences between Plato and the Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus, on the issues of mysticism, epistemology, and ethics. Beginning by examining the ways in which Plato and Plotinus claim that it is possible to have an ultimate experience that answers the most significant philosophical questions, David J. Yount provides an extended analysis of why we should interpret both philosophers as mystics. The book then moves on to demonstrate that both philosophers share a belief in non-discursive knowledge and the methods to attain it, including dialectic and recollection, and shows that they do not essentially differ on any significant views on ethics. Making extensive use of primary and secondary sources, Plato and Plotinus on Mysticism, Epistemology and Ethics shows the similarities between the thought of these two philosophers on a variety of philosophical questions, such as meditation, divination, wisdom, knowledge, truth, happiness and love.

This book deals with a topic that has been largely neglected by philosophers of science to date: the ability to refer and analyze in tandem. On the basis of a set of philosophical case studies involving both problems in number theory and issues concerning time and cosmology from the era of Galileo, Newton and Leibniz up through the present day, the author argues that scientific knowledge is a combination of accurate reference and analytical interpretation. In order to think well, we must be able to refer successfully, so that we can show publicly and clearly what we are talking about. And we must be able to analyze well, that is, to discover productive and explanatory conditions of intelligibility for the things we are thinking about. The book's central claim is that the kinds of representations that make successful reference possible and those that make successful analysis possible are not the same, so that significant scientific and mathematical work typically proceeds by means of a heterogeneous discourse that juxtaposes and often superimposes a variety of kinds of representation, including formal and natural languages as well as more iconic modes. It demonstrates the virtues and necessity of heterogeneity in historically central reasoning, thus filling an important gap in the literature and fostering a new, timely discussion on the epistemology of science and mathematics.

This book collects research papers on the philosophical foundations of probability, causality, spacetime and quantum theory. The papers are related to talks presented in six subsequent workshops organized by The Budapest-Krakow Research Group on Probability, Causality and Determinism. Coverage consists of three parts. Part I focuses on the notion of probability from a general philosophical and formal epistemological perspective. Part II applies probabilistic considerations to address causal questions in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Part III investigates the question of indeterminism in spacetime theories. It also explores some related questions, such as decidability and observation. The contributing authors are all philosophers of science with a strong background in mathematics or physics. They believe that paying attention to the finer formal details often helps avoiding pitfalls that exacerbate the philosophical problems that are in the center of focus of contemporary research. The papers presented here help make explicit the mathematical-structural assumptions that underlie key philosophical argumentations. This formally rigorous and conceptually precise approach will appeal to researchers and philosophers as well as mathematicians and statisticians.

This work explores the philosophical positions of five postmodern thinkers--Lyotard, Rorty, Schrag, Foucault, and Derrida--to show how their critiques imply that scholars are unduly limited by the belief that inquiry is fundamentally about gaining knowledge of phenomena that are assumed to exist prior to and independent of inquiry, and to persist essentially unchanged by inquiry. The author argues that there are good reasons why this constraint is both unnecessary and undesirable, and he resituates the disciplines within a more flexible foundation that would expand what counts as legitimate inquiry. This foundation would emphasize the inquirer as a cause of reality, not just an observer who aims to accurately describe and explain phenomena. Mourad proposes an intellectual and organizational form which he calls post-disciplinary research programs. These dynamic programs would be composed of scholars from diverse disciplines who collaborate to juxtapose disparate disciplinary concepts in order to create contexts for post-disciplinary inquries.

The main work of Immanuel Kant in which he argues that the mind forms its own experiences. These experiences are thus only as perceiving the phenomenal world and not experiencing the world around us as it truly is. He tries to combat the critique that such a view holds and to put the use of reason to justify our experiences by showing that we never truly experience what we perceive.

This volume presents essays by pioneering thinkers including Tyler Burge, Gregory Chaitin, Daniel Dennett, Barry Mazur, Nicholas Humphrey, John Searle and Ian Stewart. Together they illuminate the Map/Territory Distinction that underlies at the foundation of the scientific method, thought and the very reality itself. It is imperative to distinguish Map from the Territory while analyzing any subject but we often mistake map for the territory. Meaning for the Reference. Computational tool for what it computes. Representations are handy and tempting that we often end up committing the category error of over-marrying the representation with what is represented, so much so that the distinction between the former and the latter is lost. This error that has its roots in the pedagogy often generates a plethora of paradoxes/confusions which hinder the proper understanding of the subject. What are wave functions? Fields? Forces? Numbers? Sets? Classes? Operators? Functions? Alphabets and Sentences? Are they a part of our map (theory/representation)? Or do they actually belong to the territory (Reality)? Researcher, like a cartographer, clothes (or creates?) the reality by stitching multitudes of maps that simultaneously co-exist. A simple apple, for example, can be analyzed from several viewpoints beginning with evolution and biology, all the way down its microscopic quantum mechanical components. Is there a reality (or a real apple) out there apart from these maps? How do these various maps interact/intermingle with each other to produce a coherent reality that we interact with? Or do they not? Does our brain uses its own internal maps to facilitate "physicist/mathematician" in us to construct the maps about the external territories in turn? If so, what is the nature of these internal maps? Are there meta-maps? Evolution definitely fences our perception and thereby our ability to construct maps, revealing to us only those aspects beneficial for our survival. But the question is, to what extent? Is there a way out of the metaphorical Platonic cave erected around us by the nature? While "Map is not the territory" as Alfred Korzybski remarked, join us in this journey to know more, while we inquire on the nature and the reality of the maps which try to map the reality out there. The book also includes a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose and an afterword by Dagfinn Follesdal.

This book confronts the threats of epistemic relativism and Pyrrhonian scepticism to analytic philosophy. Epistemic relativists reject absolute notions of knowledge and justification, while sceptics claim that knowledge and justification of any kind are unattainable. If either of these views is correct, then there can be no objective basis for thinking that one set of methods does a better job of delivering accurate information than any other set of methods. Philosophers have generally sought to resist these threats by responding to the argument that seems to motivate both positions: the Agrippan trilemma. Steven Bland argues that this is a mistaken strategy. He surveys the most influential responses to the Agrippan trilemma, and shows that none of them succeeds in undermining epistemic relativism. Bland also offers a new, dialectical strategy of challenging epistemic relativism by uncovering how epistemic methods depend on one another for their applications. By means of this novel analysis, the book concludes that there are principled reasons to prefer naturalistic to non-naturalistic methods, even if these reasons do little to ease the threat of scepticism.

Drawing on shared research experiences and collaborative projects, this book offers a broad and timely perspective on research on the hand and its current challenges. It especially emphasizes the interdisciplinary context in which researchers need to be trained in contemporary science. From language to psychology, from neurology to the social sciences, and from art to philosophy and religion, the chapters discuss various aspects involved in hand research and therapy. On the basis of concrete and validated case studies, they approach hand function and gestures from different perspectives - not only neurological and medical, but also philosophical, evolutionary and anthropological. By highlighting the overlaps between different areas of research, the book seeks to foster better communication between researchers, and ultimately a better understanding of hand function and its recovery. It offers essential information and inspirations for students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of psychology, epistemology, bioengineering, neuroscience, anthropology and bioethics.

Probabilistic models have much to offer to philosophy. We continually receive information from a variety of sources: from our senses, from witnesses, from scientific instruments. When considering whether we should believe this information, we assess whether the sources are independent, how reliable they are, and how plausible and coherent the information is. Bovens and Hartmann provide a systematic Bayesian account of these features of reasoning. Simple Bayesian networks allow us to model alternative assumptions about the nature of the information sources. Measurement of the coherence of information is a controversial matter: arguably, the more coherent a set of information is, the more confident we may be that its content is true, other things being equal. The authors offer a new treatment of coherence which respects this claim and shows its relevance to scientific theory choice. Bovens and Hartmann apply this methodology to a wide range of much-discussed issues regarding evidence, testimony, scientific theories and voting. "Bayesian Epistemology" is for anyone working on probabilistic methods in philosophy, and has broad implications for many other disciplines.

Knowledge in an Uncertain World is an exploration of the relation between knowledge, reasons, and justification. According to the primary argument of the book, you can rely on what you know in action and belief, because what you know can be a reason you have and you can rely on the reasons you have. If knowledge doesn't allow for a chance of error, then this result is unsurprising. But if knowledge does allow for a chance of error - as seems required if we know much of anything at all - this result entails the denial of a received position in epistemology. Because any chance of error, if the stakes are high enough, can make a difference to what can be relied on, two subjects with the same evidence and generally the same strength of epistemic position for a proposition can differ with respect to whether they are in a position to know.
In defending these points, Fantl and McGrath investigate the ramifications for debates about epistemological externalism and contextualism, the value and importance of knowledge, Wittgensteinian hinge propositions, Bayesianism, and the nature of belief. The book is essential reading for epistemologists, philosophers who work on reasons and rationality, philosophers of language and mind, and decision theorists.

This book presents a novel approach to the analysis of interdisciplinary science based on the contemporary philosophical literature on scientific representation. The basic motivation for developing this approach is that epistemic issues are insufficiently dealt with in the existing literature on interdisciplinarity. This means that when interdisciplinary science is praised (as it often is), it is far from clear to what extent this praise is merited - at least if one cares about various more or less standardised measures of scientific quality. To develop a more adequate way of capturing what is going on in interdisciplinary science, the author draws inspiration from the rich philosophical literature on modelling, idealisation, perspectivism, and scientific pluralism. The discussion hereof reveals a number of critical pitfalls related to transferring mathematical and conceptual tools between scientific contexts, which should be relevant and interesting for anyone actively engaged in funding, evaluating, or carrying out interdisciplinary science.

Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck-novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics-and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune. The Myth of Luck tells us why we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. Taking us on a guided tour of one of our oldest concepts, we begin in ancient Greece and Rome, considering how Plato, Plutarch, and the Stoics understood luck, before entering the theoretical world of probability and exploring how luck relates to theology, sports, ethics, gambling, knowledge, and present-day psychology. As we travel across traditions, times and cultures, we come to realize that it's not that as soon as we solve one philosophical problem with luck that two more appear, like heads on a hydra, but rather that the monster is altogether mythological. We cannot master luck because there is nothing to defeat: luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion. By introducing us to compelling arguments and convincing reasons that explain why there is no such thing as luck, we finally see why in a very real sense we make our own luck, that luck is our own doing. The Myth of Luck helps us to regain our own agency in the world - telling the entertaining story of the philosophy and history of luck along the way.