It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing such understanding is highly important in our present-day society. But what does it mean to achieve this understanding? What precisely is scientific understanding? These are philosophical questions that have not yet received satisfactory answers. While there has been an ongoing debate about the nature of scientific explanation since Carl Hempel advanced his covering-law model in 1948, the related notion of understanding has been largely neglected, because most philosophers regarded understanding as merely a subjective by-product of objective explanations. By contrast, this book puts scientific understanding center stage. It is primarily a philosophical study, but also contains detailed historical case studies of scientific practice. In contrast to most existing studies in this area, it takes into account scientists' views and analyzes their role in scientific debate and development. The aim of Understanding Scientific Understanding is to develop and defend a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that can describe and explain the historical variation of criteria for understanding actually employed by scientists. The theory does justice to the insights of such famous physicists as Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman, while bringing much-needed conceptual rigor to their intuitions. The scope of the proposed account of understanding is the natural sciences: while the detailed case studies derive from physics, examples from other sciences are presented to illustrate its wider validity.

The ancient kalam cosmological argument maintains that the series of past events is finite and that therefore the universe began to exist. Two recent scientific discoveries have yielded plausible prima facie physical evidence for the beginning of the universe. The expansion of the universe points to its beginning-to a Big Bang-as one retraces the universe's expansion in time. And the second law of thermodynamics, which implies that the universe's energy is progressively degrading, suggests that the universe began with an initial low entropy condition. The kalam cosmological argument-perhaps the most discussed philosophical argument for God's existence in recent decades-maintains that whatever begins to exist must have a cause. And since the universe began to exist, there must be a transcendent cause of its beginning, a conclusion which is confirmatory of theism. So this medieval argument for the finitude of the past has received fresh wind in its sails from recent scientific discoveries. This collection reviews and assesses the merits of the latest scientific evidences for the universe's beginning. It ends with the kalam argument's conclusion that the universe has a cause-a personal cause with properties of theological significance.

This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy. The individual chapters are bound together by a general introduction followed by an opening chapter that surveys 2500 years of linguistic, philosophical, and scientific reflections on chance, coincidence, fortune, randomness, luck and related concepts. A main conclusion that can be drawn is that, even after all this time, we still cannot be sure whether chance is a truly fundamental and irreducible phenomenon, in that certain events are simply uncaused and could have been otherwise, or whether it is always simply a reflection of our ignorance. Other challenges that emerge from this book include a better understanding of the contextuality and perspectival character of chance (including its scale-dependence), and the curious fact that, throughout history (including contemporary science), chance has been used both as an explanation and as a hallmark of the absence of explanation. As such, this book challenges the reader to think about chance in a new way and to come to grips with this endlessly fascinating phenomenon.

Throughout history, humans have dreamed of knowing the reason for the existence of the universe. In The Mind of God, physicist Paul Davies explores whether modern science can provide the key that will unlock this last secret. In his quest for an ultimate explanation, Davies reexamines the great questions that have preoccupied humankind for millennia, and in the process explores, among other topics, the origin and evolution of the cosmos, the nature of life and consciousness, and the claim that our universe is a kind of gigantic computer. Charting the ways in which the theories of such scientists as Newton, Einstein, and more recently Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman have altered our conception of the physical universe. Davies puts these scientists' discoveries into context with the writings of philosophers such as Plato. Descartes, Hume, and Kant. His startling conclusion is that the universe is "no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here." By the means of science, we can truly see into the mind of God.

This book aims to enrich our understanding of the role the environment plays in processes of life and cognition, from the perspective of enactive cognitive science. Miguel A. Sepulveda-Pedro offers an unprecedented interpretation of the central claims of the enactive approach to cognition, supported by contemporary works of ecological psychology and phenomenology. The enactive approach conceives cognition as sense-making, a phenomenon emerging from the organizational nature of the living body that evolves in human beings through sensorimotor, intercorporeal, and linguistic interactions with the environment. From this standpoint, Sepulveda-Pedro suggests incorporating three new theses into the theoretical body of the enactive approach: sense-making and cognition fundamentally consist of processes of norm development; the environment, cognitive agents actually interact with, is an active ecological field enacted in their historical past; and sense-making occurs in a domain consisting of multiple normative dimensions that the author names enactive place.

In this incisive analysis of academic psychology, Gregg Henriques examines the fragmented nature of the discipline and explains why the field has had enormous difficulty specifying its subject matter and how this has limited its ability to advance our knowledge of the human condition. He traces the origins of the problem of psychology to a deep and profound gap in our knowledge systems that emerged in the context of the scientific Enlightenment. To address this problem, this book introduces a new vision for scientific psychology called mental behaviorism. The approach is anchored to a comprehensive metapsychological framework that integrates insights from physics and cosmic evolution, neuroscience, the cognitive and behavioral sciences, developmental and complex adaptive systems theory, attachment theory, phenomenology, and social constructionist perspectives and is well grounded in the philosophy of science. Building on more than twenty years of work in theoretical psychology and drawing on a wide range of literature, Professor Henriques shows how this new approach to scientific knowledge fills in the gaps of our current understanding of psychology and can allow us to develop a more holistic and sophisticated way to understand animal and human mental behavioral patterns. This work will especially appeal to students and scholars of general psychology and theoretical psychology, as well as to historians and philosophers of science.

What are the reasons for believing scientific theories to be true? The contemporary debate around scientific realism exposes questions about the very nature of scientific knowledge. A Critical Introduction to Scientific Realism explores and advances the main topics of the debate, allowing epistemologists to make new connections with the philosophy of science. Moving from its origins in logical positivism to some of the most recent issues discussed in the literature, this critical introduction covers the no-miracles argument, the pessimistic meta-induction and structural realism. Placing arguments in their historical context, Paul Dicken approaches scientific realism debate as a particular instance of our more general epistemological investigations. The recurrent theme is that the scientific realism debate is in fact a pseudo-philosophical question. Concerned with the methodology of the scientific realism debate, Dicken asks what it means to offer an epistemological assessment of our scientific practices. Taking those practices as a guide to our epistemological reflections, A Critical Introduction to Scientific Realism fills a gap in current introductory texts and presents a fresh approach to understanding a crucial debate.

Science Without Numbers caused a stir in philosophy on its original publication in 1980, with its bold nominalist approach to the ontology of mathematics and science. Hartry Field argues that we can explain the utility of mathematics without assuming it true. Part of the argument is that good mathematics has a special feature ("conservativeness") that allows it to be applied to "nominalistic" claims (roughly, those neutral to the existence of mathematical entities) in a way that generates nominalistic consequences more easily without generating any new ones. Field goes on to argue that we can axiomatize physical theories using nominalistic claims only, and that in fact this has advantages over the usual axiomatizations that are independent of nominalism. There has been much debate about the book since it first appeared. It is now reissued in a revised contains a substantial new preface giving the author's current views on the original book and the issues that were raised in the subsequent discussion of it.

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism, this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice.

What is consciousness? Does free will exist?There exists a widespread conviction that the recent scientific discoveries, especially those related to physics and biology, in particular in contemporary neurosciences, question the traditional attempts to give meaning to life and a basis for our moral compass. Current scientific thinking usually identifies the mind with the mere exchange of electrical signals among neurons. It claims that consciousness is an irrelevant epiphenomenon and that introspection is an unreliable instrument to achieve any form of knowledge. Also, that the physical universe is causally closed and therefore all that occurs only has physical causes and all kind of freedom is excluded. The problem of assigning meaning and purpose to our lives, to the essential conceptions of the value of human life and social justice, becomes practically insoluble if one accepts the predominant notions that supposedly stem from contemporary science. The clash between the scientific and humanistic conception of human beings seems to have no option but to abandon the latter.The aim of this book is to show that, contrary to what is usually considered, current advances in science allow to re-evaluate the role of consciousness and human freedom without entering into contradiction with empirical evidence or scientific theories in place today. The book starts by analyzing the certainties provided by the scientific thought and philosophical reflection while discussing the role and content of physical theories, and in particular, quantum mechanics. It discusses in detail the nature of quantum objects and the role they may have in consciousness. In particular, it analyzes models that allow phenomena of quantum nature to manifest themselves in the brains of animals and humans, and account for many of the properties of consciousness. Finally, we analyze how self-conscious and free entities like persons emerge, making compatible the scientific view with a renewed and better supported way of perceiving people, their values and culture.

What information should jurors have during court proceedings to render a just decision? Should politicians know who is donating money to their campaigns? Will scientists draw biased conclusions about drug efficacy when they know more about the patient or study population? The potential for bias in decision-making by physicians, lawyers, politicians, and scientists has been recognized for hundreds of years and drawn attention from media and scholars seeking to understand the role that conflicts of interests and other psychological processes play. However, commonly proposed solutions to biased decision-making, such as transparency (disclosing conflicts) or exclusion (avoiding conflicts) do not directly solve the underlying problem of bias and may have unintended consequences. Robertson and Kesselheim bring together a renowned group of interdisciplinary scholars to consider another way to reduce the risk of biased decision-making: blinding. What are the advantages and limitations of blinding? How can we quantify the biases in unblinded research? Can we develop new ways to blind decision-makers? What are the ethical problems with withholding information from decision-makers in the course of blinding? How can blinding be adapted to legal and scientific procedures and in institutions not previously open to this approach? Fundamentally, these sorts of questions-about who needs to know what-open new doors of inquiry for the design of scientific research studies, regulatory institutions, and courts. The volume surveys the theory, practice, and future of blinding, drawing upon leading authors with a diverse range of methodologies and areas of expertise, including forensic sciences, medicine, law, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, and statistics.

This book describes the framework of a new theory of science.Over the last hundred years, philosophy of science has developed its theory based on what philosophers perceived what science is and what scientists do. It does not address the basic questions that scientists care about. Thus, this book examines the conventional theories of philosophy of science from a completely different point of view and describes the most difficult problems that scientists are concerned about and how science is conducted.This book is based on the lecture notes under the same title in Honors College at the junior level in UMASS Lowell. It is qualified as a required course in Art and Humanity for science and engineering majors.

Did the universe begin to exist? If so, did it have a cause? Or could it have come into existence uncaused, from nothing? These questions are taken up by the medieval-though recently-revived-kalam cosmological argument, which has arguably been the most discussed philosophical argument for God's existence in recent decades. The kalam's line of reasoning maintains that the series of past events cannot be infinite but rather is finite. Since the universe could not have come into being uncaused, there must be a transcendent cause of the universe's beginning, a conclusion supportive of theism. This anthology on the philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past asks: Is an infinite series of past events metaphysically possible? Should actual infinites be restricted to theoretical mathematics, or can an actual infinite exist in the concrete world? These essays by kalam proponents and detractors engage in lively debate about the nature of infinity and its conundrums; about frequently-used kalam argument paradoxes of Tristram Shandy, the Grim Reaper, and Hilbert's Hotel; and about the infinity of the future.

Textbooks and other popular venues commonly present science as a progressive "brick-by-brick" accumulation of knowledge and facts. Despite its hallowed history and familiar ring, this depiction is nowadays rejected by most specialists. There currently are two competing models of the scientific enterprise: reductionism and antireductionism. Neither provides an accurate depiction of the productive interaction between knowledge and ignorance, supplanting the old metaphor of the "wall" of knowledge. This book explores an original conception of the nature and advancement of science. Marco J. Nathan's proposed shift brings attention to a prominent, albeit often neglected, construct-the black box-which underlies a well-oiled technique for incorporating a productive role of ignorance and failure into the acquisition of empirical knowledge. The black box is a metaphorical term used by scientists for the isolation of a complex phenomenon that they have deliberately set aside or may not yet fully understand. What is a black box? How does it work? How do we construct one? How do we determine what to include and what to leave out? What role do boxes play in contemporary scientific practice? Nathan's monograph develops an overarching framework for thinking about black boxes and discusses prominent historical cases that used it, including Darwin's view of inheritance in his theory of evolution and the "stimulus-response model" in psychology, among others. By detailing some fascinating episodes in the history of biology, psychology, and economics, Nathan revisits foundational questions about causation, explanation, emergence, and progress, showing how the insights of both reductionism and antireductionism can be reconciled into a fresh and exciting approach to science.