This book offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the epistemology of science. It not only introduces readers to the general epistemological discussion of the nature of knowledge, but also provides key insights into the particular nuances of scientific knowledge. No prior knowledge of philosophy or science is assumed by The Nature of Scientific Knowledge. Nevertheless, the reader is taken on a journey through several core concepts of epistemology and philosophy of science that not only explores the characteristics of the scientific knowledge of individuals but also the way that the development of scientific knowledge is a particularly social endeavor. The topics covered in this book are of keen interest to students of epistemology and philosophy of science as well as science educators interested in the nature of scientific knowledge. In fact, as a result of its clear and engaging approach to understanding scientific knowledge The Nature of Scientific Knowledge is a book that anyone interested in scientific knowledge, knowledge in general, and any of a myriad of related concepts would be well advised to study closely.

This edited volume features essays written in honor of Ernst Mach. It explores his life, work, and legacy. Readers will gain a better understanding of this natural scientist and scholar who made major contributions to physics, the philosophy of science, and physiological psychology. The essays offer a critical inventory of Mach's lifework in line with state-of-the-art research and historiography. It begins with physics, where he paved the way for Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The account continues with Mach's contributions in biology, psychology, and physiology pioneering with an empiricist and gestalthaft Analysis of Sensations. Readers will also discover how in the philosophy of science he served as a model for the Vienna Circle with the Ernst Mach Society as well as paved the way for an integrated history and theory of science. Indeed, his influence extends far beyond the natural sciences -- to the Vienna Medical School and psychoanalysis (R. Barany, J. Breuer, S. Freud), to literature (Jung Wien, R. Musil), to politics (F. Adler, Austro-Marxism and the Viennese adult education), to arts between Futurism and Minimal Art as well as to social sciences between the liberal school (J. Schumpeter, F. A. von Hayek) and empirical social research (P. Lazarsfeld und M. Jahoda).

What is consciousness and why is it so philosophically and scientifically puzzling? For many years philosophers approached this question assuming a standard physicalist framework, on which consciousness can be explained by contemporary physics, biology, neuroscience and cognitive science. This book is a debate between two philosophers who are united in their rejection this kind of "standard" physicalism- but who differ sharply in what lesson to draw from this. Amy Kind defends dualism 2.0, a thoroughly modern version of dualism (the theory that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world, those that are physical and those that are mental) decoupled from any religious or non-scientific connotations. Daniel Stoljar defends non-standard physicalism, a kind of physicalism different from both the standard version and dualism 2.0. The book presents a cutting-edge assessment of the philosophy of consciousness, and a glimpse at what the future study of this area might bring. Key Features Outlines the different things people mean by 'consciousness' and provides an account of what consciousness is Reviews the key arguments for thinking that consciousness is incompatible with physicalism Explores and provides a defense of contrasting responses to those arguments, with a special focus on responses that reject the standard physicalist framework Provides an account of the basic aims of the science of consciousness Written in a lively and accessibly style Includes a comprehensive glossary

Critically and comprehensively examining the works of Habermas and Foucault, two giants of 20th century continental philosophy, this book illuminates the effects of scientific reason as it migrates from its specialized institutions into society. It explores how science permeates shared human consciousness, to produce effects that ripple through the entire social body to restructure relations between discourses, institutions, and power in ways which we are barely conscious of. The book shows how science, through its entwinement with power, politics, discourses, and practices, presents certain social arrangements as natural and certain courses of action as beyond question. By arguing for a non-reductive, liberal scientific naturalism that sees science as one form of rationality amongst others, it opens possibilities for thought and action beyond scientific knowledge. The book analyses the work of Foucault and Habermas in terms of their social, political, and historical contexts. It examines science in relation to society, power, and discourses and their shifting historical relations. But rather than withdrawing from normative dimensions by merely describing scientific practices within their contexts, McIntyre explicitly opens the normative question of the good life and the good society. He thus simultaneously raises the question of philosophy and how philosophical critique is both directed towards science and, at the same time, must accommodate it. Foucault and Habermas emerge as linked by a commitment to the Enlightenment tradition and its emancipatory telos which underlies their work. The significant differences between the two thinkers are seen to result from Foucault's radicalization of this tradition, a radicalization which is, at the same time, implicit within the Enlightenment project itself.

This study applies the findings of the new nonlinear sciences to understanding the processes of growing complexity and intensifying chaos in the modern world. It also identifies and reviews approaches for living and coping with these trends. Uri Merry seeks to clarify the role of chaos in the transformation of the social sciences to new orders by re-examining and re-evaluating some of the basic tenets of modern social and behavioral science in light of theories of chaos, self-organization, and complexity. Divided into three sections, the work provides an overview of the major findings of the new science of chaos; analyzes why chaos is on the upsurge and why human society is experiencing such anxiety about it; and surveys some of the major approaches for dealing with chaos in society, organizations, and our personal lives.

For many years, Karel Berka has worked at some of the central problems of the theory of the sciences. At once a logician, a mathematician, a careful student of the physical sciences and the social sciences, and a sharp but sympathetic critic of the major philosophies of science in this century, Berka brings to this treatise on measurement both his technical mastery and his historical sensitivity. We appreciate his careful analysis of his predecessors, notably Helmholtz, Campbell, Holder, Bridgman, Camap, Hempel, and Stevens, and of his contemporaries such as Brian Ellis and also Patrick Suppes and J. L. Zinnes. The issues to be clarified are familiar but still troubling: how to justify the conceptual transition from classification to a metric; how to explore ways to provide a quantitative understanding of a qualitative concept; indeed how to understand, and thereby control, the Galilean enthusiasm "to measure what is measurable and to try to render measurable what is not so as yet."

The twenty-three papers collected in tbis volume represent an important part of my published work up to the date of this volume. I have not arranged the paper chronologically, but under four main headings. Part I contains five papers on methodology concerned with models and measurement in the sciences. This part also contains the first paper I published, 'A Set of Independent Axioms for Extensive Quantities', in Portugaliae Mathematica in 1951. Part 11 also is concerned with methodology and ineludes six papers on probability and utility. It is not always easy to separate papers on probability and utility from papers on measurement, because of the elose connection between the two subjects, but Artieles 6 and 8, even though they have elose relations to measurement, seem more properly to belong in Part 11, because they are concerned with substantive questions about probability and utility. The last two parts are concerned with the foundations of physics and the foundations of psychology. I have used the term foundations rather than philosophy, because the papers are mainly concerned with specific axiomatic formulations for particular parts of physics or of psychology, and it seems to me that the termfoundations more appropriately describes such constructive axiomatic ventures. Part 111 contains four papers on the foundations of physics. The first paper deals with foundations of special relativity and the last three with the role ofprobability in quantum mechanics.

This book explores Pierre Bourdieu's philosophy and sociology of science, which, though central to his thought, have been largely neglected in critical examinations of his work. Addressing the resultant confusion that surrounds Bourdieu's sociologized philosophy of science, it expounds his epistemology and sociology of science, situating it within the context of Anglo-American post-positivist philosophy of science and shedding light on the critique of relativist sociology of science that emerges from his field theory. From a detailed critique of Bourdieu's reflexive sociology and his attempt to enhance the uneasy epistemic status of the social sciences, the author draws on the thought of Jurgen Habermas to suggest critical ethnography as a way of going beyond Bourdieu's critical theory. As such, Bourdieu's Philosophy and Sociology of Science will appeal to sociologists, philosophers, and scholars across the social sciences with interests in the work of Bourdieu and the sociology and philosophy of science.

Recent decades have seen attacks on philosophy as an irrelevant field of inquiry when compared with science. In this book, Graham McFee defends the claims of philosophy against attempts to minimize either philosophy's possibility or its importance by deploying a contrast with what Wittgenstein characterized as the "dazzling ideal" of science. This 'dazzling ideal' incorporates both the imagined completeness of scientific explanation-whereby completing its project would leave nothing unexplained-and the exceptionless character of the associated conception of causality. On such a scientistic world-view, what need is there for philosophy? In his defense of philosophy (and its truth-claims), McFee shows that rejecting such scientism is not automatically anti-scientific, and that it permits granting to natural science (properly understood) its own truth-generating power. Further, McFee argues for contextualism in the project of philosophy, and sets aside the pervasive (and pernicious) requirement for exceptionless generalizations while relating his account to interconnections between the concepts of person, substance, agency, and causation.

Innovatively combining existentialist philosophy with cutting edge post-structuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives, this book boldly reconsiders market freedom. Bloom argues that present day capitalism has robbed us of our individual and collective ability to imagine and implement alternative and more progressive economic and social systems; it has deprived us of our radical freedom to choose how we live and what we can become. Since the Great Recession, capitalism has been increasingly blamed for rising inequality and feelings of mass social and political alienation. In place of a deeper liberty, the free market offers subjects the opportunity to continually reinvest their personal and shared hopes within its dogmatic ideology and policies. This embrace helps to temporarily alleviate growing feelings of anxiety and insecurity at the expense of our fundamental human agency. What has become abundantly clear is that the free market is anything but free. Here, Bloom exposes our present day bad faith in the free market and how we can break free from it.

This edited collection provides new perspectives on some metaphysical questions arising in quantum mechanics. These questions have been long-standing and are of continued interest to researchers and graduate students working in physics, philosophy of physics, and metaphysics. It features contributions from a diverse set of researchers, ranging from senior scholars to junior academics, working in varied fields, from physics to philosophy of physics and metaphysics. The contributors reflect on issues about fundamentality (is quantum theory fundamental? If so, what is its fundamental ontology?), ontological dependence (how do ordinary objects exist even if they are not fundamental?), realism (what kind of realism is compatible with quantum theory?), indeterminacy (can the world itself exhibit ontological indeterminacy?). The book contains contributions from both physicists (including Nobel Prize winner Gerard 't Hooft), science communicators and philosophers.

The fundamental question of whether, or in what sense, science informs us about the real world has pervaded the history of thought since antiquity. Is what science tells us about the world determined unambiguously by facts, or does the content of any scientific theory in some way depend on the human condition? "Sokal s hoax" attacked the mere seriousness of post-modern views of science and shifted this controversial debate to a new level, which very quickly came to be known as "Science Wars."

"Knowledge and the World" examines and reviews the broad range of philosophical positions on this issue, extending from realism to relativism, to expound the epistemic merit of t science, and to tackle the central question: in what sense can science justifiably claim to provide a truthful portrait of reality? Challenges beyond the Science Wars are taken up by contributions of scientists, sociologists and philosophers of science, which connect perspectives of a wide variety of disciplines (including biology and cultural studies). This book addresses everyone interested in the philosophy and history of science, and in particular in the interplay between the social and natural sciences.

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But to admit things not visible to the gross creatures that we are is, in my opinion, to show a decent humility, and not just a lamentable addiction to metaphysics. J. S. Bell, Are There Quantum Jumps? ON CANADIAN THANKSGIVING WEEKEND in the autumn of 1994, a lively conference was held at The University of Western Ontario under the title "Conceptual Problems of Relativistic Quantum Mechanics." Most of the eighteen papers in this volume are directly connected with that conference. Articles by both theoretical physicists and philosophers of science are included, and many authors will be recognized immediately for their already substantive work in the foundations of physics. A quarter century ago Howard Stein suggested that relativistic quantum field theory should be 'the contemporary locus of metaphysical research', but there were few takers. Only fairly recently has that changed, with the result that the bulk of the papers here pursue issues that go beyond nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (or at least have serious implications for its relativistic generalization). Nevertheless, problems interpreting the nonrelativistic theory remain a persistent thorn in the side of any such endeavor, and so some of the papers develop innovative approaches to those issues as well.

This book grew out of previously published papers of mine composed over a period of years; they have been reworked (sometimes beyond recognition) so as to form a reasonably coherent whole. Part One treats of informative inference. I argue (Chapter 2) that the traditional principle of induction in its clearest formulation (that laws are confirmed by their positive cases) is clearly false. Other formulations in terms of the 'uniformity of nature' or the 'resemblance of the future to the past' seem to me hopelessly unclear. From a Bayesian point of view, 'learning from experience' goes by conditionalization (Bayes' rule). The traditional stum bling block for Bayesians has been to fmd objective probability inputs to conditionalize upon. Subjective Bayesians allow any probability inputs that do not violate the usual axioms of probability. Many subjectivists grant that this liberality seems prodigal but own themselves unable to think of additional constraints that might plausibly be imposed. To be sure, if we could agree on the correct probabilistic representation of 'ignorance' (or absence of pertinent data), then all probabilities obtained by applying Bayes' rule to an 'informationless' prior would be objective. But familiar contra dictions, like the Bertrand paradox, are thought to vitiate all attempts to objectify 'ignorance'. BuUding on the earlier work of Sir Harold Jeffreys, E. T. Jaynes, and the more recent work ofG. E. P. Box and G. E. Tiao, I have elected to bite this bullet. In Chapter 3, I develop and defend an objectivist Bayesian approach."

In May of 1973 we organized an international research colloquium on foundations of probability, statistics, and statistical theories of science at the University of Western Ontario. During the past four decades there have been striking formal advances in our understanding of logic, semantics and algebraic structure in probabilistic and statistical theories. These advances, which include the development of the relations between semantics and metamathematics, between logics and algebras and the algebraic-geometrical foundations of statistical theories (especially in the sciences), have led to striking new insights into the formal and conceptual structure of probability and statistical theory and their scientific applications in the form of scientific theory. The foundations of statistics are in a state of profound conflict. Fisher's objections to some aspects of Neyman-Pearson statistics have long been well known. More recently the emergence of Bayesian statistics as a radical alternative to standard views has made the conflict especially acute. In recent years the response of many practising statisticians to the conflict has been an eclectic approach to statistical inference. Many good statisticians have developed a kind of wisdom which enables them to know which problems are most appropriately handled by each of the methods available. The search for principles which would explain why each of the methods works where it does and fails where it does offers a fruitful approach to the controversy over foundations.

This book employs contemporary philosophy, scientific research, and clinical reports to argue that pain, though real, is not an appropriate object of scientific generalisations or an appropriate target for medical intervention. Each pain experience is instead complex and idiosyncratic in a way which undermines scientific utility. In addition to contributing novel arguments and developing a novel position on the nature of pain, the book provides an interdisciplinary overview of dominant models of pain. The author lays the needed groundwork for improved models and targeted treatments at a time when pain science, pain medicine, and philosophy are explicitly searching for both and failing to find them. The Complex Reality of Pain will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and students, including those working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, cognitive science, neuroscience, medicine, health, cognitive and behavioural psychology, and pain science.

How many miles to Babylon? Three-score and ten. Can I get there by candle-light? Yes, and back again. If your heels are nimble dnd light, You may get there by candle-light. Any philosopher who takes more than a fleeting interest in the sciences and their development must at some stage confront the issue of incommensurability in one or other of its many manifes tations. For the philosopher of science concerned with problems of conceptual change and the growth of knowledge, matters of incommensurability are of paramount concern. After many years of skating over, skimming through and skirting round this issue in my studies of intertheory relations in science, I decided to take the plunge and make the problem of incommensurability the central and unifying theme of a book. The present volume is the result of that decision. My interest in problems of comparability and commensurability in science was awakened in the formative years of my philosophi cal studies by my teacher, Jerzy Giedymin. From him I have learnt not only to enjoy philosophical problems but also to beware of simpleminded solutions to them. The vibrant seminars of Paul Feyerabend held at Sussex University in 1974 left me in no doubt that incommensurability was, and would remain, a major topic of debate and dispute in the philosophical study of human knowledge."

This volume contends that Evidential Pluralism—an account of the epistemology of causation, which maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one needs to establish the existence of a correlation and the existence of a mechanism—can be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. Through case studies in sociology, economics, political science and law, it advances new philosophical foundations for causal enquiry in the social sciences. The book provides an account of how to establish and evaluate causal claims and it offers a new way of thinking about evidence-based policy, basic social science research and mixed methods research. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social science research and methodology, the philosophy of science and evidence-based policy.

Existentialisms arise when the foundations of being, such as meaning, morals, and purpose come under assault. In the first-wave of existentialism, writings typified by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to support a foundation of being. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to similar realizations about the overly optimistic Enlightenment vision of reason and the common good. The third-wave of existentialism, a new existentialism, developed in response to advances in the neurosciences that threaten the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self. Given the increasing explanatory and therapeutic power of neuroscience, the mind no longer stands apart from the world to serve as a foundation of meaning. This produces foundational anxiety. In Neuroexistentialism, a group of contributors that includes some of the world's leading philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars, explores the anxiety caused by third-wave existentialism and possible responses to it. Together, these essays tackle our neuroexistentialist predicament, and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose.

The book offers a collection of essays on various aspects of Leibniz's scientific thought, written by historians of science and world-leading experts on Leibniz. The essays deal with a vast array of topics on the exact sciences: Leibniz's logic, mereology, the notion of infinity and cardinality, the foundations of geometry, the theory of curves and differential geometry, and finally dynamics and general epistemology. Several chapters attempt a reading of Leibniz's scientific works through modern mathematical tools, and compare Leibniz's results in these fields with 19th- and 20th-Century conceptions of them. All of them have special care in framing Leibniz's work in historical context, and sometimes offer wider historical perspectives that go much beyond Leibniz's researches. A special emphasis is given to effective mathematical practice rather than purely epistemological thought. The book is addressed to all scholars of the exact sciences who have an interest in historical research and Leibniz in particular, and may be useful to historians of mathematics, physics, and epistemology, mathematicians with historical interests, and philosophers of science at large.

For a thing to be real, it must be able to communicate with other things. If this is so, then the problem of being receives a straightforward resolution: to be is to be in communion. So the fundamental science, indeed the science that needs to underwrite all other sciences, is a theory of communication. Within such a theory of communication the proper object of study becomes not isolated particles but the information that passes between entities. In Being as Communion philosopher and mathematician William Dembski provides a non-technical overview of his work on information. Dembski attempts to make good on the promise of John Wheeler, Paul Davies, and others that information is poised to replace matter as the primary stuff of reality. With profound implications for theology and metaphysics, Being as Communion develops a relational ontology that is at once congenial to science and open to teleology in nature. All those interested in the intersections of theology, philosophy and science should read this book.

These essays on the conceptual understanding of modern physics strike directly at some of the principal difficulties faced by contemporary philos ophers of physical science. Moreover, they reverberate to earlier and classical struggles with those difficulties. Each of these essays may be seen as both a commentary on our predecessors and an original analytic interpretation. They come from work of the past decade, most from meetings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, and they demonstrate again how problematic the fundamentals of our understanding of nature still are. The themes will seem to be familiar but the variations are not only ingenious but also stimulating, in some ways counterpoint. And so once again we are confronted with issues of space and time, irreversibility and measurement, matter and process, hypothetical reality and verifiability, explanation and reduction, phenomenal base and sophisticated theory, unified science and the unity of nature, and the limits of conventionalism. We are grateful for the cooperation of our contributors, and in particular for the agreement of George Ellis and C. F. von Weizsiicker to allow us to use previously published papers."

* Written by an interdisciplinary group of specialists from the arts, humanities and sciences at Oxford University * Suitable for a wide non-academic readership, and will appeal to anyone with an interest in mathematics, science and philosophy.

philosophers with both hermeneutic-phenomenological and scientific back- grounds (such as Heelan, Ihde, Theodore Kisiel, Joseph Kockelmans) have begun to read the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and others as also entailing a positive re-evaluation of practices of the natural sciences. A few professional scientists with a scholarly background in hermeneutic- phenomenological philosophy (among whom is Martin Eger) have begun to do the same. A number of more mainstream philosophers of science are utilizing hermeneutical insights effectively and perceptively (Joseph Rouse), while many sociologically-trained scholars who speak with the terminolo- gy and often the assumptions of analytic philosophy reveal in their work a deep appreciation for the hermeneutical insight into the nature of his tori- cally situated knowledge (Harry Collins, Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering, Simon Schaffer, Steve Shapin and others inftuenced by social constructivism). of these initiatives manifest the rediscovery that all dis course is situat- All ed culturally and historically. The days are gone when it could be seriously 2 debated whether a hermeneutical perspective on the natural sciences exists. The challenge remains today to understand more explicitly the hermeneutical dimension of the natural sciences in terms of an overarching hermeneutic of all knowledge.