About the Series
Contemporary philosophy of science combines a general study from a philosophical perspective of the methods of science, with an inquiry, again from the philosophical point of view, into foundational issues that arise in the various special sciences.
Methodological philosophy of science has deep connections with issues at the center of pure philosophy. It makes use of important results, for example, in traditional epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language. It also connects in various ways with other disciplines such as the history and sociology of the sciences, with pure logic, and with such branches of mathematics as probability theory.
These volumes are, for the most part, devoted to readings in the methodological aspects of the philosophy of science. One volume, however, takes up the philosophical issues in the foundations of a particularly important special science, that is the issues in the foundations of theories of contemporary physics.
The methodological volumes cover a number of crucial general problem areas. The first volume takes up issues in the nature of scientific explanation, and the related issues of the nature of scientific law and of the casual relation among events. The second volume explores issues in the nature and structure of scientific theories. The third volume collects inquiries into the nature of scientific change, as one theory is replaced by another. Volume four is devoted to readings concerning the nature of probability and the nature and justification of inductive reasoning in science. The following volume continues the exploration of the issue of confirming and rejecting theories with a series of readingsdevoted to Bayesian methodologies in science and to the exploration of non-inductive strategies for rationalizing belief. Finally, volume six explores three major problem areas in the foundation of physics: the nature and rationale for physical theories of space and time; the interpretive problems arising out of the quantum theory; and some puzzles arising out of statistical mechanical theories of physics.
The readings are selected and arranged to provide the user with systematic access to the most important contemporary themes in methodological philosophy of science and in philosophy of physics. The selections include many recent contributions to the field, as well as papers and extracts from books and journals otherwise not easily available.

About the Series
Contemporary philosophy of science combines a general study from a philosophical perspective of the methods of science, with an inquiry, again from the philosophical point of view, into foundational issues that arise in the various special sciences.
Methodological philosophy of science has deep connections with issues at the center of pure philosophy. It makes use of important results, for example, in traditional epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language. It also connects in various ways with other disciplines such as the history and sociology of the sciences, with pure logic, and with such branches of mathematics as probability theory.
These volumes are, for the most part, devoted to readings in the methodological aspects of the philosophy of science. One volume, however, takes up the philosophical issues in the foundations of a particularly important special science, that is the issues in the foundations of theories of contemporary physics.
The methodological volumes cover a number of crucial general problem areas. The first volume takes up issues in the nature of scientific explanation, and the related issues of the nature of scientific law and of the casual relation among events. The second volume explores issues in the nature and structure of scientific theories. The third volume collects inquiries into the nature of scientific change, as one theory is replaced by another. Volume four is devoted to readings concerning the nature of probability and the nature and justification of inductive reasoning in science. The following volume continues the exploration of the issue of confirming and rejecting theories with a series of readingsdevoted to Bayesian methodologies in science and to the exploration of non-inductive strategies for rationalizing belief. Finally, volume six explores three major problem areas in the foundation of physics: the nature and rationale for physical theories of space and time; the interpretive problems arising outof the quantum theory; and some puzzles arising out of statistical mechanical theories of physics.
The readings are selected and arranged to provide the user with systematic access to the most important contemporary themes in methodological philosophy of science and in philosophy of physics. The selections include many recent contributions to the field, as well as papers and extracts from books and journals otherwise not easily available.

About the Series
Contemporary philosophy of science combines a general study from a philosophical perspective of the methods of science, with an inquiry, again from the philosophical point of view, into foundational issues that arise in the various special sciences.
Methodological philosophy of science has deep connections with issues at the center of pure philosophy. It makes use of important results, for example, in traditional epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language. It also connects in various ways with other disciplines such as the history and sociology of the sciences, with pure logic, and with such branches of mathematics as probability theory.
These volumes are, for the most part, devoted to readings in the methodological aspects of the philosophy of science. One volume, however, takes up the philosophical issues in the foundations of a particularly important special science, that is the issues in the foundations of theories of contemporary physics.
The methodological volumes cover a number of crucial general problem areas. The first volume takes up issues in the nature of scientific explanation, and the related issues of the nature of scientific law and of the casual relation among events. The second volume explores issues in the nature and structure of scientific theories. The third volume collects inquiries into the nature of scientific change, as one theory is replaced by another. Volume four is devoted to readings concerning the nature of probability and the nature and justification of inductive reasoning in science. The following volume continues the exploration of the issue of confirming and rejecting theories with a series of readingsdevoted to Bayesian methodologies in science and to the exploration of non-inductive strategies for rationalizing belief. Finally, volume six explores three major problem areas in the foundation of physics: the nature and rationale for physical theories of space and time; the interpretive problems arising out of the quantum theory; and some puzzles arising out of statistical mechanical theories of physics.
The readings are selected and arranged to provide the user with systematic access to the most important contemporary themes in methodological philosophy of science and in philosophy of physics. The selections include many recent contributions to the field, as well as papers and extracts from books and journals otherwise not easily available.

Is social science really a science at all, and if so in what sense? This is the first question that any course on the philosophy of the social sciences must tackle. In this brief introduction, Malcolm Williams gives students the grounding that will enable them to discuss the issues involved with confidence. He looks at:
* The historical development of natural science and its distinctive methodology
* the case in favour of an objective science of the social which follows the same rules
* The arguments of social constructionists, interpretative sociologists and others against objectivity and even science itself * recent developments in natural science - for instance the rise of complexity theory and the increased questioning of positivism - which bring it closer to some of the key arguments of social science.
Throughout, the book is illustrated with short clear examples taken from the actual practice of social science research and from popular works of natural science which will illuminate the debate for all students whatever their background.

Scientific realism is the optimistic view that modern science is on the right track: that the world really is the way our best scientific theories describe it . In his book, Stathis Psillos gives us a detailed and comprehensive study which restores the intuitive plausibility of scientific realism. We see that throughout the twentieth century, scientific realism has been challenged by philosophical positions from all angles: from reductive empiricism, to instrumentalism and to modern sceptical empiricism.
Scientific Realism explains that the history of science does not undermine the arguments for scientific realism, but instead makes it reasonable to accept scientific realism as the best philosophical account of science, its empirical success, its progress and its practice.
Anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the state of modern science and why scientific realism is plausible, should read this book.

eBook available with sample pages: PB:041520819X

Imagining, forecasting and predicting the future is an inextricable and increasingly important part of the present. States, organizations and individuals almost continuously have to make decisions about future actions, financial investments or technological innovation, without much knowledge of what will exactly happen in the future. Science and technology play a crucial role in this collective attempt to make sense of the future. Technological developments such as nanotechnology, robotics or solar energy largely shape how we dream and think about the future, while economic forecasts, gene tests or climate change projections help us to make images of what may possibly occur in the future. This book provides one of the first interdisciplinary assessments of how scientific and technological imaginations matter in the formation of human, ecological and societal futures. Rooted in different disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, and science and technology studies, it explores how various actors such as scientists, companies or states imagine the future to be and act upon that imagination. Bringing together case studies from different regions around the globe, including the electrification of German car infrastructure, or genetically modified crops in India, Imagined Futures in Science, Technology and Society shows how science and technology create novel forms of imagination, thereby opening horizons toward alternative futures. By developing central aspects of the current debate on how scientific imagination and future-making interact, this timely volume provides a fresh look at the complex interrelationships between science, technology and society. This book will be of interest to postgraduate students interested in Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Political Sciences, Future Studies and Literary Sciences.

Dispositions are everywhere. We say that a wall is hard, that water quenches thirst and is transparent, that dogs can swim and oak trees can let their leaves fall, and that acid has the power to corrode metals. All these statements express attributions of dispositions, be they physical, physiological or psychological, yet there is much philosophical debate about how far, if at all, dispositional predicates can have complete meaning or figure in causal explanations. This collection of essays, by leading international researchers, examine the case for realism with respect to dispositions and causal powers in both metaphysics and science. Among the issues debated in this book is whether dispositions can be analyzed in terms of conditionals, whether all dispositions have a so-called categorical basis and, if they do, what is the relation between the disposition and its basis.

Wittgenstein was centrally concerned with the puzzling nature of the mind, mathematics, morality and modality. He also developed innovative views about the status and methodology of philosophy and was explicitly opposed to crudely "scientistic" worldviews. His later thought has thus often been understood as elaborating a nuanced form of naturalism appealing to such notions as "form of life", "primitive reactions", "natural history", "general facts of nature" and "common behaviour of mankind". And yet, Wittgenstein is strangely absent from much of the contemporary literature on naturalism and naturalising projects. This is the first collection of essays to focus explicitly on the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of naturalism and its relation to Wittgenstein's thought. The first section considers how naturalism could or should be understood. The second section deals with some of the main problematic domains-consciousness, meaning, mathematics-that philosophers have typically sought to naturalise. The third section explores ways in which the conceptual nature of human life might be continuous in important respects with animals. The final section is concerned with the naturalistic status and methodology of philosophy itself. This book thus casts a fresh light on many classical philosophical issues and brings Wittgensteinian ideas to bear on a number of current debates-for example experimental philosophy, neo-pragmatism and animal cognition/ethics-in which naturalism is playing a central role.

Michael Faraday has a good case to be crowned as the greatest experimental scientist who ever lived. His discoveries in electrochemistry, electromagnetism, dia-and para-magnetism and above all the unification of the forces of nature, continue to provide the backdrop against which the physical sciences operate at the end of the 20th century. Yet his contribution was more than simply scientific discovery. He was a fervent advocate of better understanding of science by the population at large, an inspirational lecturer on science to young people, advisor to governments and, perhaps most importantly, a deeply moral and spiritual man, whose life was founded on strongly held beliefs about man, society and religion. This book brings together for the first time a comprehensive selection of his writings, taken from all aspects of his life, intimate and public. They show the relationships between his many activities, especially with the Royal Institution, for whose bicentenary this collection is published.

Exploring what happens to science and computing when we think of them as texts. author Lynette Hunter weaves together such vast areas of thought as: rhetoric, politics, AI, computing, feminism, science studies, aesthetics and epistemology. Hunter takes the recent work on "situated knowledge" and argues that since we cannot have knowledge without communication, we need to think long and hard about textual strategies used when we try to locate knowledge in or from a particular place. She argues that the feminist standpoint critique of science hasn't considered the textual implications for such an approach and suggests that the arts and humanities are just as far behind in terms of democratizing access and evaluation, as the sciences. The text argues that what we need is a radical shake-up of approaches to the arts if the critiques of science and computing are to come to any fruition.

Full Contributors:
Contributors: Karen Barad, Mario Biagioli, Pierre Bourdieu, Robert M. Brian, Michael Callon, Sande Cohen, H.M. Collins, Lorraine Daston, Arnold Davidson, Peter Galison, James R. Griesemer, Ian Hacking, Donna J. Haraway, Roger Hart, Thomas Hughes, Lily Kay, Evelyn Fox Keller, Robert Kohler, Bruno Latour, John Law, Timothy Lenoir, Geoffrey Lloyd, Michael Lynch, Donald MacKenzie, Emily Martin, Andrew Pickering, Theodore Porter, Paul Rabinow, Hans Jorg Rheinberger, Brian Rotman, Joseph Rouse, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Susan Leigh Star, Sharon Traweek, Sherry Turkle, M. Norton Wise, Alison Wylie

This book develops new techniques in formal epistemology and applies them to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. It introduces two formats of epistemic evaluation that should be of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science: the dual-component format, which evaluates a statement on the basis of its safety and informativeness, and the relative-divergence format, which evaluates a probabilistic model on the basis of its complexity and goodness of fit with data. Tomoji Shogenji shows that the former lends support to Cartesian skepticism, but the latter allows us to defeat Cartesian skepticism. Along the way, Shogenji addresses a number of related issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, including epistemic circularity, epistemic closure, and inductive skepticism.

This book focuses on the contribution of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) to social theory and a theory of cooperation. It shows that Mauss's essay "The Gift" (1925) can be seen as a classic of a pragmatist, interactionist and anti-utilitarian sociology. It critiques the dichotomy of self-interest and normatively orientated action that forms the basis of sociology. This conceptual dichotomization has caused forms of social interaction (that cannot be localized either on the side of self-interest or on that of morality) to be overlooked or taken little notice of. The book argues that it is the logic of the gift and its reciprocity that accompany and structure all forms of interaction, from the social micro to the macro-level. It demonstrates that in modern societies agonistic and non-agonistic gifts form their own orders of interaction. This book uniquely establishes the paradigm of the gift as the basis for a theory of interaction. It will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduates in social theory, cultural theory, political sociology and global cooperation, anthropology, philosophy and politics.

The search for life on Mars—and the moral issues confronting us as we prepare to send humans there Does life exist on Mars? The question has captivated humans for centuries, but today it has taken on new urgency. As space agencies gear up to send the first manned missions to the Red Planet, we have a responsibility to think deeply about what kinds of life may already dwell there—and whether we have the right to invite ourselves in. Telling the complete story of our ongoing quest to answer one of the most tantalizing questions in astronomy, David Weintraub grapples with the profound moral and ethical questions confronting us as we prepare to introduce an unpredictable new life form—ourselves—into the Martian biosphere. Now with an afterword that discusses the most recent discoveries, Life on Mars explains what we need to know before we go.

"Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context" represents the intersection of knowledge and method, examined from the perspective of three distinct disciplines: linguistics, rhetoric-composition, and history. Herein, Dwight Atkinson describes the written language and rhetoric of the Royal Society of London, based on his analysis of its affiliated journal, The Philosophical Transactions, starting with the 17th century advent of modern empirical science through to the present day. Atkinson adopts two independent approaches to the analysis of written discourse--from the fields of linguistics and rhetoric-composition--and then integrates and interprets his findings in light of the history of the Royal Society and British science.
Atkinson's study provides the most complete and particular institutional account of a scientific journal, which in this case is a publication that stands as an icon of scientific publication. He supplies his readers with important material found nowhere else in the historical literature, including details about the operation of the journal and its relation to the society. The work embeds the history of the journal and its editors within the history of the Royal Society and other developments in science and society. The synthesis of historical, linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural analysis makes visible certain complex communicative dynamics that could not previously be seen from a single vantage point.
The work presented here reinforces how deep historical examinations of linguistic and rhetorical practices have direct bearing on how and what scholars read and write now. Most significantly, this volume demonstrates how these historical activities need to inform current teaching of and thinking about language.

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.

Most military researchers who have attempted to measure organizational commitment have done so on an ad hoc basis, preferring to invent new items and scales rather than incorporate well-established measures. The purpose of this special issue is to reverse this trend by bringing military organizational commitment research into the scientific mainstream and to do so in ways that will prove useful to military services while advancing organizational commitment theory and knowledge. This special issue grew out of a symposium conducted at the 1998 American Psychological Association Convention that arose when many in the field recognized the practical importance of measuring organizational commitment while maintaining a healthy concern for ensuring that this measurement was well-grounded in organizational commitment theory. Taken together, the articles in this issue demonstrate the concepts of affective and continuance commitment and their underlying measures by using them in different military samples and under a variety operational conditions.

The emergence of experimental philosophy was one of the most significant developments in the early modern period. However, it is often overlooked in modern scholarship, despite being associated with leading figures such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, David Hume and Christian Wolff. Ranging from the early Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century to the uptake of experimental philosophy in Paris and Berlin in the eighteenth, this book provides new terms of reference for understanding early modern philosophy and science, and its eventual eclipse in the shadow of post-Kantian notions of empiricism and rationalism. Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism is an integrated history of early modern experimental philosophy which challenges the rationalism and empiricism historiography that has dominated Anglophone history of philosophy for more than a century.

In "Constructing the Beginning," Simon Locke offers a new approach to considering the enigma of creation science, using the perspective of discourse analysis. Using the publications of the British Creation Science Movement to perform a detailed analysis of the creationist case, Locke demonstrates that the discourses and rhetorics used by natural and social scientists are also employed by non-scientists. Out of this study, a view of science as a cultural resource develops, questioning the adequacy of perceived sociological wisdom that sees science as the source and emmbodiment of cultural "rationalization."
As a case study of the use of science as a discursive resource in everyday life, "Constructing the Beginning" speaks to scholars of discourse analysis, constructionism, rhetorics, and the public understanding of science. It will also be of great interest to scholars in the areas of cultural studies, sociology of scientific knowledge and of religion, postmodernism, and sociological theory.
Additional Copy
Creation science is the target of much attack these days from both within and outside of the orthodox scientific community. This book, however, takes a different approach. It is not an attack on creationism; nor is it a defense. The author's interest is not in creationism at all, but rather, it is in the questions of the role and significance of science in modernity or the public understanding of science. Locke's approach to this issue is a discursive and rhetorical one. Creationism is treated as a case study of the argumentative engagement between science and non-science which--in his view--is as central to the commonsense lifeworld of modernity as much as it is to the lives of its intellectuals. An important dimension of the public meaning of science in modernity is its limits and its relations with other modes of thought and belief, which continue to survive as discourses in the wider culture. Creationism is merely one example of this general feature.
The book begins with a discussion of the current issues in the public understanding of science in relation to traditional sociological views of the impact of science on modernity. This is examined through rationalization and the contrasting view derived from the sociology of scientific knowledge which points to the likelihood of a much more complex and variable relationship than rationalization proposes. It continues with an argument and detailed analysis that focuses on three main points:
*the problem of a competing account of reality (the world), in the form of evolution;
*the problem of competing accounts of the Bible (the Word), in the form of different versions of Christianity; and
*the realization that both of these problems must be managed together in such a way that creationists' own version(s) of the world and of the Word are compatible--a compatibility achieved through a "discursive syncretism."
The final chapter brings together the strands of the argument to further develop the implications of the dilemma of science for the public understanding of science through the idea of "science as a cultural resource" and its possible relation to other such cultural resources within modernity--such as Christianity. It is suggested that much so-called "anti-science" could be made sense of in these terms and proposes further research in this direction.

This collection of original essays aims to reinvigorate the debate surrounding philosophical realism in relation to philosophy of science, pragmatism, epistemology, and theory of perception. Questions concerning realism are as current and as ancient as philosophy itself; this volume explores relations between different positions designated as 'realism' by examining specific cases in point, drawn from a broad range of systematic problems and historical views, from ancient Greek philosophy through the present. The first section examines the context of the project; contributions systematically engage the historical background of philosophical realism, re-examining key works of Aristotle, Descartes, Quine, and others. The following two sections epitomize the central tension within current debates: scientific realism and pragmatism. These contributions address contemporary questions of scientific realism and the reality of the objects of science, and consider whether, how or the extent to which realism and pragmatism are compatible. With an editorial introduction by Kenneth R. Westphal, these fourteen original essays provide wide-ranging, salient insights into the status of realism today.

An up-to-date, clear but rigorous introduction to the philosophy of science offering an indispensable grounding in the philosophical understanding of science and its problems. The book pays full heed to the neglected but vital conceptual issues such as the nature of scientific laws, while balancing and linking this with a full coverage of epistemological problems such as our knowledge of such laws.

An up-to-date, clear but rigorous introduction to the philosophy of science offering an indispensable grounding in the philosophical understanding of science and its problems. The book pays full heed to the neglected but vital conceptual issues such as the nature of scientific laws, while balancing and linking this with a full coverage of epistemological problems such as our knowledge of such laws.

Moral skepticism is at present a vibrant topic of philosophical inquiry. Particularly since the turn of the millennium, the debates between moral skeptics of various stripes and their opponents have gained renewed force not only by taking account of innovative ideas in moral philosophy, but also by drawing on novel positions in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language as well as on recent findings in empirical sciences. As a result, new arguments for and against moral skepticism have been devised, while the traditional ones have been reexamined. This collection of original essays will advance the ongoing debates about various forms of moral skepticism by discussing such topics as error theory, disagreement, constructivism, non-naturalism, expressivism, fictionalism, and evolutionary debunking arguments. It will be a valuable resource for academics and advanced students working in metaethics and moral philosophy more generally.

This collection of essays, written on four continents by scientists, philosophers and humanists, was initially presented to Karl R. Popper on his sixtieth birthday as a token of critical admiration and in recognition of his work. But the volume also stands on its own as a remarkable series of statements utilizing Popper's critical vision in the study of philosophy proper, logic, mathematics, science as method and theory, and finally to the study of society and history. What is remarkable is that Popper worked in all of these areas, not in a cursory or discursive way, but with the utmost clarity and rigor.

. The core position of this volume and its contributors is that the progress of knowledge is not a linear accumulation of definitive acquisitions but a zigzagging process in which counterexamples and unfavorable evidence ruin generalizations and prompt the invention of more comprehensive and sometimes deeper generalizations, to be criticized in their turn. A critical approach to problems, procedures, and results in every field of inquiry is therefore a necessary condition for the continuance of progress.

The title of this volume then is, in a sense, an homage to Popper's critical rationalism and critical empiricism. The essays are a tribute to his unceasing and uncompromising quest, not for final certainty, but for closer truth and increased clarity. Among the contributors are outstanding figures in philosophy and the exact sciences in their own right, including Herbert Feigl, R. M. Hare, J.O. Wisdom, Nicholas Rescher, David Bohm, Paul K. Feyerabend, F. A. Hayek, and Adolf Grunbaum. Social science contributions include Hans Albert on social science and moral philosophy, W. B. Gallie, on the critical philosophy of history, Pieter Geyl on "The Open Society and its Enemies, "and George H. Nadel on the philosophy of History.

Originally published as "Scientific Research, "this pair of volumes constitutes a fundamental treatise on the strategy of science. Mario Bunge, one of the major figures of the century in the development of a scientific epistemology, describes and analyzes scientific philosophy, as well as discloses its philosophical presuppositions. This work may be used as a map to identify the various stages in the road to scientific knowledge.

"Philosophy of Science "is divided into two volumes, each with two parts. Part 1 offers a preview of the scheme of science and the logical and semantical took that will be used throughout the work. The account of scientific research begins with part 2, where Bunge discusses formulating the problem to be solved, hypothesis, scientific law, and theory.

The second volume opens with part 3, which deals with the application of theories to explanation, prediction, and action. This section is graced by an outstanding discussion of the philosophy of technology. Part 4 begins with measurement and experiment. It then examines risks in jumping to conclusions from data to hypotheses as well as the converse procedure.

Bunge begins this mammoth work with a section entitled "How to Use This Book." He writes that it is intended for both independent reading and reference as well as for use in courses on scientific method and the philosophy of science. It suits a variety of purposes from introductory to advanced levels. "Philosophy of Science "is a versatile, informative, and useful text that will benefit professors, researchers, and students in a variety of disciplines, ranging from the behavioral and biological sciences to the physical sciences.