Humanity reaps the many advantages of science while bemoaning the frequent misapplications and abuses of modern technology. Yet far too many of us admit to possessing little if any real knowledge of what scientists actually do, why they do it, or whether they should be otherwise occupied in more productive pursuits. Nonscientists need to appreciate the nature, purpose, and goals of science. Conversely, the narrow focus of many science enthusiasts fails to recognize that science cannot help but interact with sources of knowledge beyond its realm, placing scientific endeavors within a swirling caldron of competing knowledge claims. In Understanding Science noted author and researcher Arthur N. Strahler, whose career in science spans more than half a century, fills this double void by offering insights into both the philosophy and the sociology of science. Part One presents a basic outline of the concepts and issues that have occupied scientists for years: the Nature of Science: Laws, Explanations, Theories, and Hypotheses; Prediction, Testing, Corroboration, and Falsification; the Complex/Historical Sciences; Determinism, Randomness, Chaos, and Quantum Mechanics; the New Philosophy of Science; and Pseudoscience, both specific cases and the phenomenon in general. Part Two concentrates on science as it interacts with and is distinguished from other knowledge fields. Here readers begin to see the religious, political, cultural, and social forces within which science developed and out of which it carved its special identity: the Major Classes of Knowledge; the Nature and Place of Logic and Mathematics; Religion and the God Concept; Ethics, Aesthetics, and Ideologies; How Science Impacts theReligious/Ethical Systems; and Is Creationism Religion or Pseudoscience? Unless each of us is willing to set aside our respective fears to gain a better understanding of what science is and how it can be carefully distinguished from other types of beliefs and claims, the ignorance, confusion, and distortion that has tainted society's view of science will remain a fundamental obstacle to gaining the knowledge that will help us solve pressing problems of daily life. Understanding Science offers new hope that this goal is within reach.

The splendid achievements of Japanese mathematics and natural sciences during the second half of our 20th century have been a revival, a Renaissance, of the practical sciences developed along with the turn toward Western thinking in the late 19th century. The equally admirable results of Japanese philosophers (and historians) of science in our time followed upon a period less congenial to Western interests in the philosophical questions linked to modern science; and this reluctance to confront the epistemology, not even the humane significance, of the sciences went along with devotion to other Western trends. Thus, with the 'new' Japan of the Meiji restoration of 1868, and the early introduction of Western philosophy in the subsequent decade by Nishi Amane, a period of intellectual attraction to utilitarian, positivist, evolutionary, even materialist outlooks was soon replaced by devotion to scholarly work on Kant and Hegel, on ethical and general philosophical idealism. These studies often could emulate the critical spirit (the philosopher Onishe Hajime, praised for his own critical independence, was known as the Japanese Kant) but the neo Kantian and neo-Hegelian developments were not much affected by either empirical sciences or theoretical speculations about Nature. The pre-eminent philosopher of Japan ofthe first half of our century was Nishida Kitaro, with a pioneering treatise A Study of the Good, who, with his leading student Tanabe Hajime, formed the 'Kyoto School' of pre-war philosophy."

Evolutionary Theory and Human Nature is an original, highly theoretical work dealing with the transition from genes to behavior using general principles of evolution, especially those of sexual selection. It seeks to develop a seamless transition from genes to human motivations as bio-electric brain processes (emotional-cognitive processes), to human nature propensities (various constellations of emotional-cognitive forces, desires and fears) to species typical patterns of behavior. This work covers two often antagonistic fields: biology and the social sciences. It should be of strong interest to anthropologists, sociologists, sociobiologists, psychobiologists and psychologists who are interested in the question of human nature influences on social behavior.

This work is for scholars, researchers and students in history and philosophy of science focusing on Logical Empiricism and analytic philosophy (of science). It provides historical and systematic research and deals with the influence and impact of the Vienna Circle/Logical Empiricism on today's philosophy of science. It also explores the intellectual context of this scientific philosophy and focuses on main figures and peripheral adherents.

This book gives a state-of-the-art survey of current research in logic and philosophy of science, as viewed by invited speakers selected by the most prestigious international organization in the field. In particular, it gives a coherent picture of foundational research into the various sciences, both natural and social. In addition, it has special interest items such as symposia on interfaces between logic and methodology, semantics and semiotics, as well as updates on the current state of the field in Eastern Europe and the Far East.

+ Clearly exposes the most frequent calumnies made against science + Shows how dogmatic religion, the financial interests of certain industries, and opportunistic politicians sometime work in cohort to undermine the public’s trust in science + Acknowledges that science’s most mistaken critics are often skilled communicators, and that effectively defending science requires an equally skilled defense + Shows that while the “Science Wars“ of the 1990s have abated, their effects on some of the methodologies in higher education and the larger population continue + Examines three case studies to clearly illustrate how reliable scientific knowledge is secured: • Eratosthenes’ discovery of the circumference of the earth • Louis Pasteur’s development of anthrax and rabies vaccines • The rapid emergence of scientific consensus regarding continental drift

Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature. Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14 authors, including Robert Neville, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, Livia Kohn, Tienyu Cao, Abner Shimoney, Alfred Tauber, Krzysztof Michalski, Lawrence Cahoone, Stephen Scully, Alan Olson and Alfred Ferrarin. Dedicated to the phenomenological ecology of Erazim Koh k, with 10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on the question of the moral sense of nature.

The bulk of the present book has not been published previously though Chapters II and IV are based in part on two earlier papers of mine: "The Influence of Harald H 1lffding's Philosophy on Niels Bohr's Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics," which appeared in Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, 1979, and "The Bohr-H 1lffding Relationship Reconsidered," published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1988. These two papers comple ment each other, and in order to give the whole issue a more extended treatment I have sought, in the present volume by drawing on relevant historical material, to substantiate the claim that H 1lffding was Bohr's mentor. Besides containing a detailed account of Bohr's philosophy, the book, at the same time, serves the purpose of making H 1lffding' s ideas and historical significance better known to a non-Danish readership. During my work on this book I have consulted the Royal Danish Library; the National Archive of Denmark and the Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen, in search of relevant material. I am grateful for permission to use and quote material from these sources. Likewise, I am indebted to colleagues and friends for commenting upon the manuscript: I am especially grateful to Professor Henry Folse for our many discussions during my visit to New Orleans in November-December 1988 and again here in Elsinore in July 1990."

This book is dedicated to the Soviet theoretician Yakov Ilich Frenkel (1894 - 1952), whose work in solid and liquid state physics is considered to be the golden foundation of twentieth century physics. Best known are the Frenkel pairs (defects), kinetic theory of liquids, theory of mobile dislocations (Frenkel- Kontorova solitons). Today, the electron theory of solids is inconceivable without excitons - the quasiparticles he introduced in 1930. Frenkel also contributed important concepts to classical electrodynamics (which now go under Feynmana s appellation "Frenkela s Fields") and to nuclear physics (the Bohr-Frenkel drop model). The book surveys the genesis and ramifications of Yakov Frenkela s scientific achievements. Special attention is paid to Frenkela s civic convictions, his fight against official Soviet philosophy for the acceptance and development of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics in the Soviet Union of the 1920sa "1940s, a crucial thirty-year period in the history of Russian physics following the October Revolution. Much of the book is based on a wealth of archival documents, personal reminiscences and of Frenkela s letters. Thanks to his trenchant observations, a vivid picture emerges of scientists, universities and cultures in Europe, the United States and various cities of the Soviet Union. The book is richly illustrated by unique photos and copies of drawings and portraits from Frenkela s own hand.

In three volumes, a distinguished group of scholars from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts contribute essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The range of the essays, as well as their originality, and their critical and historical depth, pay tribute to the extraordinary scope of Professor Cohen's intellectual interests, as a scientist-philosopher and a humanist, and also to his engagement in the world of social and political practice. The essays presented in Physics, Philosophy, and the Scientific Community (Volume I of Essays in Honor of Robert S. Cohen) focus on philosophical and historical issues in contemporary physics: on the origins and conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics, on the reception and understanding of Bohr's and Einstein's work, on the emergence of quantum electrodynamics, and on some of the sharp philosophical and scientific issues that arise in current scientific practice (e.g. in superconductivity research). In addition, several essays deal with critical issues within the philosophy of science, both historical and contemporary: e.g. with Cartesian notions of mechanism in the philosophy of biology; with the language and logic of science - e.g. with new insights concerning the issue of a physicalistic' language in the arguments of Neurath, Carnap and Wittgenstein; with the notion of elementary logic'; and with rational and non-rational elements in the history of science. Two original contributions to the history of mathematics and some studies in the comparative sociology of science round off this outstanding collection.

The existence of a separation between science and literature has long been taken for granted. This study shows that in science language functions in very much the same way as in literature: it is rhetorical in that it persuades readers to the author's point of view, and it is poetical in that with its metaphors and other figures of speech it shapes the experience of author and reader. The separation between science and literature proves to be untenable. This has important ontological implications: science can no longer be considered an action performed by a speaking subject on a mute object. Does the creative role of language in science mean that human beings 'create' the world? The author emphatically rejects a conclusion which would degrade nature to mere malleable material at the mercy of human beings. A hermeneutical model for the relationship between knower and known is suggested: creative interaction between reader and text. The reader's responses actualise a text's meaning; in like manner, scientists give their responses to reality by actualising one of many possibilities. The hermeneutical ontology proposed in this book steers away from the rocks of realism and anti-realism.

Among the many books on Galileo Galilei only very few deal directly and in depth with his scientific accomplishments proper. This is one of them and among the correspondingly sparse literature the author of this work distinguishes himself by focusing on mechanics, in particular on the fundamental concept of motion and percussion - having performed crucial original experiments and in Galileos spirit. Indeed, while the author lets Galilei speak for himself when he explains his experiments and findings, he also makes full use of our present day knowledge of physics to make the reader better understand the perspective.

The result of this very fine understanding is an unsurpassingly authoritative account on some of the foundations of preclassical mechanics as laid down by the great Pisan scientist, widely regarded as the first experimental physicist in the modern sense.

This book will not only be an indispensable source of reference for historians of sciences but appeal to anyone interested in the foundations of experimental physics in general and of mechanics in particular."

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.

What are individuals? How can they be identified? These are crucial questions for philosophers and scientists alike. Criteria of individuality seem to differ markedly between metaphysics and the empirical sciences - and this might well explain why no work has hitherto attempted to relate the contributions of metaphysics, physics and biology on this question. This timely volume brings together various strands of research into 'individuality', examining how different sciences handle the issue, and reflecting on how this scientific work relates to metaphysical concerns. The collection makes a major contribution to clarifying and overcoming obstacles to the construction of a general conception of the individual adequate for both physics and biology, and perhaps even beyond.

The Economics of Scientific Knowledge demonstrates how contemporary economic theories, such as rational choice theory, public choice theory, game theory, and neo-institutionalist economics can be successfully applied to resolve the issues currently existing in science studies and science and technology policy. Yanfei Shi criticizes the sociology of scientific knowledge and the traditional philosophy of science for their failures in justifying science as a rational enterprise. From an economic perspective, he explains why scientific enterprise as a public good is possible if individual scientists are self-interested and presents a new and convincing story of how scientific knowledge is produced in the contemporary society. With professional experience as a policy analyst, Yanfei Shi's economic perspective on scientists and their behaviors, and his institutional analysis will have great implications to the current discussions on science and innovation policy issues. Scholars and students in the fields of economics, philosophy and sociology as well as scientists, administrators and policy analysts will find this book a welcome addition to the literature of the increasingly important field of science studies.

Is a genuine logic of scientific discovery possible? In the essays collected here, Hintikka not only defends an affirmative answer; he also outlines such a logic. It is the logic of questions and answers. Thus inquiry in the sense of knowledge-seeking becomes inquiry in the sense of interrogation. Using this new logic, Hintikka establishes a result that will undoubtedly be considered the fundamental theorem of all epistemology, viz., the virtual identity of optimal strategies of pure discovery with optimal deductive strategies. Questions to Nature, of course, must include observations and experiments. Hintikka shows, in fact, how the logic of experimental inquiry can be understood from the interrogative vantage point. Other important topics examined include induction (in a forgotten sense that has nevertheless played a role in science), explanation, the incommensurability of theories, theory-ladenness of observations, and identifiability.

Holism and reductionism are traditionally seen as incompatible views or approaches to nature. Here Looijen argues that they should rather be seen as mutually dependent and hence co-operating research programmes. He sheds some interesting new light on the emergence thesis, its relation to the reduction thesis, and on the role and status of functional explanations in biology. He discusses several examples of reduction in both biology and ecology, showing the mutual dependence of holistic and reductionist research programmes. Ecologists are offered separate chapters, clarifying some major, yet highly and controversial ecological concepts, such as `community', `habitat', and `niche'. The book is the first in-depth study of the philosophy of ecology. Readership: Specialists in the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of biology, biologists and ecologists interested in the philosophy of their discipline. Also of interest to other scientists concerned with the holism-reductionism issue.

This monograph is unique in its kind, giving as it does an independent and self-contained introduction to the eight prominent verisimilitude proposals that make up the verisimilitude literature after the breakdown of Popper's definition in 1974. The author brings them together by comparing the ways in which they order propositional formulae. Using this method, he shows that the distinction of content and likeness definitions partitions the entire field of investigation. In addition, it is shown that the weak content definitions can be strengthened by incorporating considerations of similarity between possible worlds. The resulting refined verisimilitude definition has many desirable properties. For instance, it is the first qualitative proposal that evades the problem of truth-value dependence. In addition, in chapter five the often discussed and misunderstood problem of "language dependency" is solved. The book will be of interest to those working in the fields of logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, and (computational) linguistics.

This book attempts to advance Donald Griffin's vision of the "final, crowning chapter of the Darwinian revolution" by developing a philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. It advocates a Darwinian bottom-up approach that treats consciousness as a complex, evolved, and multi-dimensional phenomenon in nature, rather than a mysterious all-or-nothing property immune to the tools of science and restricted to a single species. The so-called emergence of a science of consciousness in the 1990s has at best been a science of human consciousness. This book aims to advance a true Darwinian science of consciousness in which its evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity are moved from the field's periphery to its very centre; thus enabling us to integrate consciousness into an evolutionary view of life. Accordingly, this book has two objectives: (i) to argue for the need and possibility of an evolutionary bottom-up approach that addresses the problem of consciousness in terms of the evolutionary origins of a new ecological lifestyle that made consciousness worth having, and (ii) to articulate a thesis and beginnings of a theory of the place of consciousness as a complex evolved phenomenon in nature that can help us to answer the question of what it is like to be a bat, an octopus, or a crow. A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in advancing our understanding of animal minds, as well as anyone with a keen interest in how we can develop a science of animal consciousness.

The author attempts to show that scientific realism is compatible with the presence of idealization in the sciences. His main contention is that idealized theories can be treated as counterfactuals about how things are in worlds that are similar to but simpler than the actual world.

Dovring explores the limits of science as causes of ignorance. Some topics examined in these essays are problems with our ways of knowing and the impact of emotion on objectivity. He argues that reality consists of designs--of things and processes. While most designs we might think of cannot exist, those that can exist add up to a tool box of creation which contains the detailed laws of nature, many of them synergisms. Reality must conform to this web of necessities, hence the danger of unchecked virtual reality.

These lines of thought are then applied to evolution as creation and history. In a final essay, Dovring explores topics upon which science should concentrate. This book will be of interest to scientists as well as the lay public interested in the theory of science and questions of truth and faith.

Although produced in controversy, this book is not a controversial work. The calming effects of the years that have passed since the tumultuous days in Lubeck are enough to guarantee that these pages will accurately trace the coming and going of opinions, the battle for the truth and the recognition of error. In only a few passages, especially in Part Six, will one be able to tell from the tone of the book that it comes out of this struggle. For these I ask the indulgence of my reader, since they contain explanations the extent of which probably does not correspond either to the difficulty of the questions treated or to their influence. But in such passages the extent of treatment could not - as was otherwise the case - be made to depend solely on a judgment as to the value and significance of the investigations presented. There considerations of defense, more than concern for symmetry, had to determine the structure.

Though the publication of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions seemed to herald the advent of a unified study of the history and philosophy of science, it is a hard fact that history of science and philosophy of science have increasingly grown apart. Recently, however, there has been a series of workshops on both sides of the Atlantic (called '&HPS') intended to bring historians and philosophers of science together to discuss new integrative approaches. This is therefore an especially appropriate time to explore the problems with and prospects for integrating history and philosophy of science. The original essays in this volume, all from specialists in the history of science or philosophy of science, offer such an exploration from a wide variety of perspectives. The volume combines general reflections on the current state of history and philosophy of science with studies of the relation between the two disciplines in specific historical and scientific cases.

This book explores the complexity of two philosophical traditions, extending from their origins to the current developments in neopragmatism. Chapters deal with the first encounters of these traditions and beyond, looking at metaphysics and the Vienna circle as well as semantics and the principle of tolerance. There is a general consensus that North-American (neo-)pragmatism and European Logical Empiricism were converging philosophical traditions, especially after the forced migration of the European Philosophers. But readers will discover a pluralist image of this relation and interaction with an obvious family resemblance. This work clarifies and specifies the common features and differences of these currents since the beginning of their mutual scientific communication in the 19th century. The book draws on collaboration between authors and philosophers from Vienna, Tubingen, and Helsinki, and their networks. It will appeal to philosophers, scholars in the history of philosophy, philosophers of science, pragmatists and beyond.

What distinguishes good explanations in neuroscience from bad? Carl F. Craver constructs and defends standards for evaluating neuroscientific explanations that are grounded in a systematic view of what neuroscientific explanations are: descriptions of multilevel mechanisms. In developing this approach, he draws on a wide range of examples in the history of neuroscience (e.g. Hodgkin and Huxleys model of the action potential and LTP as a putative explanation for different kinds of memory), as well as recent philosophical work on the nature of scientific explanation. Readers in neuroscience, psychology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science will find much to provoke and stimulate them in this book.