This book highlights the existence of a diversity of methods in science, in general, in groups of sciences (natural, social or the artificial), and in individual sciences. This methodological variety is open to a number of consequences, such as the differences in the research according to levels of reality (micro, meso and macro), which leads to multi-scale modelling and to questioning "fundamental" parts in the sciences, understood as the necessary support for the whole discipline. In addition, this volume acknowledges the need to assess the efficacy of procedures and methods of scientific activity in engendering high quality results in research made; the relevance of contextual factors for methodology of science; the existence of a plurality of stratagems when doing research in empirical sciences (natural, social and of the artificial); and the need for an ethical component while developing scientific methods, because values should have a role in scientific research. The book is of interest to a broad audience of philosophers, academics in various fields, graduate students and research centers interested in methodology of science.

Fundamental problems of the uses of formal techniques and of natural and instrumental practices have been raised again and again these past two decades, in many quarters and from varying viewpoints. We have brought a number of quite basic studies of these issues together in this volume, not linked con ceptually nor by any rigorously defined problematic, but rather simply some of the most interesting and even provocative of recent research accomplish ments. Most of these papers are derived from the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during 1973-80, the two exceptions being those of Karel Berka (on scales of measurement) and A. A. Zinov'ev (on a non-tradi tional theory of quantifiers). Just how intriguing these results (or conjectures?) seem to us may be seen from some brief quotations: (1) Judson Webb: " . . . . the abstract machine concept has many of the appropriate kinds of properties for modelling living, reproducing, rule following, self-reflecting, accident-prone, and lucky creatures . . . the a priori logical results relevant to the abstract machine concept, above all Godel's, could not conceivably have turned out any better for the mechanist. " (2) M. L. Dalla Chiara: " . . . modal interpretation (of quantum logic) shows clearly that it possesses a logical meaning which is quite independent of quantum mechanics. " (3) Isaac Levi: (as against Peirce and Popper) " . . . infallibilism is con sistent with corrigibilism, and a view which respects avoidance of error is an important desideratum for science."

A passionate, highly accessible clarion call to a world dangerously threatened by irrational superstitions of all kinds. 'Truly a book for our time' Steven Pinker 'In Sweden's public square, Christer Sturmark has done as much as anyone to uphold reason and humane critical thinking' Richard Dawkins 'As lucid and illuminating as it is warm and inspiring' Rebecca Goldstein In country after country, conspiracy theories and religious dogmas that once seemed to have been overtaken by enlightened thought are helping to lift authoritarian leaders into power. The effects are being felt by women, ethnic minorities, teachers, scientists and students - and by the environment, the ultimate victim of climate change denial. We need clear thinking now more than ever. Christer Sturmark is a crusading secular humanist as well as a Swedish publisher and entrepreneur, and The Flame of Reason is his manifesto for a better world. It provides a set of simple tools for clear thinking in the face of populist dogmas, anti-science attitudes and pseudo-philosophy, and suggestions for how we can move towards a new enlightenment. From truth to Quantum Physics, moral philosophy to the Myers-Briggs test, Sturmark offers a passionate defence of rational thought, science, tolerance and pluralism; a warm and engaging guide for anyone who wants to better navigate the modern world. Translated by and co-written with Douglas Hofstadter, celebrated cognitive scientist, physicist and author of Godel, Escher, Bach.

This book examines the views of Hermann Helmholtz, Hermann Cohen and Gottlob Frege in reaction to the epistemic crises induced by rapid changes in 19th century scientific practice. Besides addressing longstanding interpretive puzzles of interest to Frege scholars, the book extracts precepts for rationally responding to paradigm shifts in scientific and religious traditions. Cohen's work in particular is held up as an example of wisely navigating epistemic and hermeneutical crises in science and religion. The book will appeal to philosophers and historians of science or religion, especially to those concerned with the epistemic challenges posed by Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

What if there were a pill for love? Or an anti-love drug, designed to help us break up? This controversial and timely new book argues that recent medical advances have brought chemical control of our romantic lives well within our grasp. Substances affecting love and relationships, whether prescribed by doctors or even illicitly administered, are not some far-off speculation - indeed our most intimate connections are already being influenced by pills we take for other purposes, such as antidepressants. Treatments involving certain psychoactive substances, including MDMA-the active ingredient in Ecstasy-might soon exist to encourage feelings of love and help ordinary couples work through relationship difficulties. Others may ease a breakup or soothe feelings of rejection. Such substances could have transformative implications for how we think about and experience love. This brilliant intervention into the debate builds a case for conducting further research into "love drugs" and "anti-love drugs" and explores their ethical implications for individuals and society. Rich in anecdotal evidence and case-studies, the book offers a highly readable insight into a cutting-edge field of medical research that could have profound effects on us all. Will relationships be the same in the future? Will we still marry? It may be up to you to decide whether you want a chemical romance. -- .

system reflected in Saussure's linguistic theory, and so influential in the great progress linguistic theory has made in this century. Indeed, Granger sees linguistic theory as expressing a paradigm for scientific theorizing, which research in other social sciences should adopt. But 'structuralism' as a method in science does not, in Granger's view, begin with Saussure and the linguists. It is nothing less than the strategy of all the sciences, both natural and social, since their beginnings. Now, 'structuralism' is a 'trendy' term no less in Anglophone methodology than in Francophone philosophy. But Granger's employment of the term is not to be assimilated to this trend, nor to the fashionable excesses for which this expression has been a watch word (he explicitly separates himself from this movement in the preface to the second edition). The exact nature of what Granger calls 'structuralist' methods is the subject of a large part of this work, and I will not dwell on it much further in this introduction. Suffice it to say that Granger's demand for structuralist description is nothing less than the recognition that the successful pursuit of science requires that its terms and predicates pick out what we may call 'natural kinds'; that is, describe classes of items that bear uniform nomolog ical relations to one another. A science whose descriptive terms do not meet this condition will never produce any laws that reflect such nomological connections."

This book offers a readable introduction to the main aspects of thought experimenting in philosophy and science (together with related imaginative activities in mathematics and linguistics). It presents the main options in understanding thought experiments, from empiricism to Platonism, and discusses their strengths and weaknesses. However, it also provides some original perspectives on the topic. Firstly, it provides a new definition and analysis of thought experimenting that brings it closer to laboratory experimenting. Secondly, it develops the author's earlier theory of "mental modelling", proposed some decades ago by him, and some other researchers in the field as the crucial procedure in thought experimenting. The mental modelling approach links work with thought experimenting to cognitive science and to research on mental simulation which is a hot topic in present-day research. Thirdly, it proposes a principled way to respond to criticism of thought experimenting by "experimental philosophers" as they have been dominating the present-day debates. The response suggests a possible ameliorative, self-help project for thought experimenting. Finally, the book provides a way to systematize the history of important thought experiments in science and philosophy and thus connects, in an original way, the systematic investigation of experimenting to the historical work of famous thought experiments. It is of interest to scholars interested in history of ideas and philosophy of science.

In this book I address a dichotomy that is as central as any in ontology - that between ordinary objects or substances and the various attributes (Le., properties, kinds, and relations) we associate with them. My aim is to arrive at the correct philosophical account of each member of the dichotomy. What I shall argue is that the various attempts to understand substances or attri butes in reductive terms fail. Talk about attributes, I shall try to show, is just that - talk about attributes; and, likewise, talk about substances is just tha- talk about substances. The result is what many will find a strange combina tion of views - a Platonistic theory of attributes, where attributes are univer sals or multiply exemplifiable entities whose existence is independent of "the world of flux," and an Aristotelian theory of substance, where substances are basic unities not reducible to metaphysically more fundamental kinds of things. Part One is concerned with the ontology of attributes. After distinguishing three different patterns of metaphysical thinking about attributes, I examine, in turn, the phenomena of predication, resemblance, and higher order quanti fication. I argue that none of these phenomena by itself is sufficient to establish the inescapability of a Platonistic interpretation of attributes. Then, I discuss the phenomenon of abstract reference as it is exhibited in the use of abstract singular terms."

The cornerstone of the radical program of positivism was the separation of science from metaphysics. In the good old days, the solution to this demarca tion problem was seen as a way of separating sheep from goats - ynthetic or analytic propositions, which were candidates for truth or falsity, either on empirical or formal grounds, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, those deceptive propositions which appeared to be truth claims, but were instead either meaningless, or nonsensical, or poetical, or merely expressive - i.e. without proper cognitive content and hence not verifiable or falsifiable. In the last half century, analytic philosophy of science, linguistic analysis and logic have formulated and reformulated and reformulated again the distinction be tween science and metaphysics. The outcome was unexpected: metaphysics rather than retreating from the scene, shriveling up, dissolving, has instead re emerged as an acknowledged, even if problematic component of scientific theorizing. This has made some philosophers of science happy, others miserable. For Morris Lazerowitz, it should serve as evidence for his thesis that the sort of philosophical assertions which metaphysics makes about the nature of things are not simply radically undecidable, but persist because they express a deeper and unconscious function in the mental life of philosophers (and presumably, of those scientists who find it necessary to be philosophical in this way, whether self-consciously or tacitly)."

This book presents quantum theory as a theory based on new relationships among matter, thought, and experimental technology, as against those previously found in physics, relationships that also redefine those between mathematics and physics in quantum theory. The argument of the book is based on its title concept, reality without realism (RWR), and in the corresponding view, the RWR view, of quantum theory. The book considers, from this perspective, the thinking of Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and Dirac, with the aim of bringing together the philosophy and history of quantum theory. With quantum theory, the book argues, the architecture of thought in theoretical physics was radically changed by the irreducible role of experimental technology in the constitution of physical phenomena, accordingly, no longer defined independently by matter alone, as they were in classical physics or relativity. Or so it appeared. For, quantum theory, the book further argues, made us realize that experimental technology, beginning with that of our bodies, irreducibly shapes all physical phenomena, and thus makes us rethink the relationships among matter, thought, and technology in all of physics.

Causation is now commonly supposed to involve a succession that instantiates some law-like regularity. Efficient Causation: A History examines how our modern notion developed from a very different understanding of efficient causation. This volume begins with Aristotle's initial conception of efficient causation, and then considers the transformations and reconsiderations of this conception in late antiquity, medieval and modern philosophy, ending with contemporary accounts of causation. It includes four short "Reflections" that explore the significance of the concept for literature, the history of music, the history of science, and contemporary art theory.

Whether philosophy of science is crucially tied down to epistemological justification is a significant topic of current debates. This book sets out an extensive argument against the foundationalist theories of justification. In developing a project of a hermeneutic context of constitution, it advocates new life for philosophy of science. At the present, there seems to be no middle ground between analytic approaches to scientific knowledge and hermeneutic conceptions of scientific research. The author brings together aspects of an ontology of the interpretative constitution of research objects and a holistic picture of science's cognitive structures. Yet the book is by no means an attempt to reconcile holistic epistemology and hermeneutic phenomenology. The context of constitution goes beyond both enterprises...

This book presents a multidisciplinary guide to gauge theory and gravity, with chapters by the world's leading theoretical physicists, mathematicians, historians and philosophers of science. The contributions from theoretical physics explore e.g. the consistency of the unification of gravitation and quantum theory, the underpinnings of experimental tests of gauge theory and its role in shedding light on the relationship between mathematics and physics. In turn, historians and philosophers of science assess the impact of Weyl's view on the philosophy of science. Graduate students, lecturers and researchers in the fields of history of science, theoretical physics and philosophy of science will benefit from this book by learning about the role played by Weyl's Raum-Zeit-Materie in shaping several modern research fields, and by gaining insights into the future prospects of gauge theory in both theoretical and experimental physics. Furthermore, the book facilitates interdisciplinary exchange and conceptual innovation in tackling fundamental questions about our deepest theories of physics. Chapter "Weyl's Raum-Zeit-Materie and the Philosophy of Science" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com

In 1936, G. Birkhoff and J. v. Neumann published an article with the title The logic of quantum mechanics'. In this paper, the authors demonstrated that in quantum mechanics the most simple observables which correspond to yes-no propositions about a quantum physical system constitute an algebraic structure, the most important proper ties of which are given by an orthocomplemented and quasimodular lattice Lq. Furthermore, this lattice of quantum mechanical proposi tions has, from a formal point of view, many similarities with a Boolean lattice L8 which is known to be the lattice of classical propositional logic. Therefore, one could conjecture that due to the algebraic structure of quantum mechanical observables a logical calculus Q of quantum mechanical propositions is established, which is slightly different from the calculus L of classical propositional logic but which is applicable to all quantum mechanical propositions (C. F. v. Weizsacker, 1955). This calculus has sometimes been called 'quan tum logic'. However, the statement that propositions about quantum physical systems are governed by the laws of quantum logic, which differ from ordinary classical logic and which are based on the empirically well-established quantum theory, is exposed to two serious objec tions: (a) Logic is a theory which deals with those relationships between various propositions that are valid independent of the content of the respective propositions. Thus, the validity of logical relationships is not restricted to a special type of proposition, e. g. to propositions about classical physical systems."

This book presents a collection of old and new essays exploring the author's unique contributions to the sociology of science, mathematics, logic, robotics, brain, and god. Known for his defense of a strong social constructionist approach to the hard problems in the sociology of science, the power and range of Restivo's interests and studies are discussed in this unique text. The essays range from his introduction of the sociology of objectivity early in his career to his recent construction of a social brain paradigm. The author situates himself in the context of the leading paradigms in science studies and his relationships with leading figures in the field including Latour, Woolgar, Needham, and D.T. Campbell. The book demonstrates a general theoretical focus on the rejection of transcendence. He rejects Platonism in mathematics and socially situates consciousness, genius, and God. The author's wide ranging interdisciplinary competencies reflect classical and postmodern influences and will be an invaluable reference for researchers working in this field.

In pulling these essays together for inclusion in one volume I do not believe that I have done them violence. Since they originally appeared at different times and places they constitute a scattered object. Never theless, to the author's eye they have unities of theme and development which, if they fail to give them the true identity of the book, may (to adapt a metaphor from Hume) generate those smooth and easy transi tions of the imagination which arouse dispositions appropriate to sur veying such identical objects. For the juxtaposition of historical and systematic studies I make no apology. It has been suggested, with a friendly touch of malice, that if Science and Metaphysics consists, as its subtitle proclaims, of Variations on Kantian Themes, it would be no less accurate to sub-title my historical essays 'variations on Sellars ian themes'. But this is as it should be. Phi losophy is a continuing dialogue with one's contemporaries, living and dead, and if one fails to see oneself in one's respondent and one's re spondent in oneself, there is confrontation but no dialogue. The historian, as Collingwood points out, becomes Caesar's contemporary by learning to think Caesar's thoughts. And it is because Plato thought so many of our thoughts that he is our contemporary and companion."

Long before science as we know it today existed, sophisticated studies of the external world were undertaken, notably in Mesopotamia, India, China, and Greece. G. E. R. Lloyd explores three interrelated issues concerning those investigations. This first issue is methods--how was it thought that they should be pursued? The second is subject-matter--what was assumed about what there is to be investigated? The third issue is aims and value--what were such investigations thought to be good for? Thus how did an ideal of demonstration that would yield incontrovertible conclusions come to arise and what did it owe to the political institutions of the society in which it first developed, namely ancient Greece? Debate has been widely practised and not just in literate societies: Lloyd's second chapter draws up a taxonomy of ancient debates and discusses how the ideals of transparency and accountability were made explicit. Then how did ideas about the need to undertake systematic research come to be formulated and such research practised, and what obstacles did it face? Different equally valid assumptions have been made about what there is to be investigated, reflecting what is here called the multidimensionality of the phenomena, and different ancient investigators entertained different aims for their work, mirroring but sometimes going beyond the current values of their society. Taking stock of all this diversity, the final chapter spells out the implications for our understanding of the history of human reasoning in general, exploring its commonalities and where and why it has manifested and continues to manifest specificities across different populations.

Brian Skyrms presents eighteen essays which apply adaptive dynamics (of cultural evolution and individual learning) to social theory. Altruism, spite, fairness, trust, division of labor, and signaling are treated from this perspective. Correlation is seen to be of fundamental importance. Interactions with neighbors in space, on static networks, and on co-evolving dynamics networks are investigated. Spontaneous emergence of social structure and of signaling systems are examined in the context of learning dynamics.

In my early years I was constituted in the exacting imperatives of philosophical analysis. That stern face is present in the composition of the Newton essays chosen here for republication. It is my hope that potential readers will be patient with the old Adam of analysis, and seize the portrait of Newton's intellec tual world presented in these essays. It is gratifying for me to acknowledge the encouragement of Robert Butts and John Nicholas of the University of Western Ontario, intellectual comrades in arms. It was at Western that I began my intellectual journey, and many of the present members of the Philosophy Department remain my friends and mentors. I thank also Marta Spranzi Zuber who long ago believed in the merit of my Newton scholarship. But most important to me is the sustaining encouragement of Professor Barbara Tuchanska, who shares my vision of the historicity of scientific thought. It is a pleasure to express my gratitude for membership, over twenty years, in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. It is the mecca for one who seeks to understand. J. E."

In this timely and expansive book, Wakefield-Rann investigates how emerging disease ecologies are undermining definitions of health and immunity that have persisted since the 19th century, and had a formative influence over the design of not only homes, but entire cities. This wide-ranging account traces the links between the history of medicine, modernist design and architecture, the rise of inflammatory disease, the microbiomes of buildings and humans, antimicrobial resistance, and novel chemical pollutants, to show how indoor environments have made us as we have made them. In highlighting the processes that have been missed in designing perfectly controlled interior habitats, Life Indoors shows the limitations of dominant practices, classifications and philosophies to apprehend current indoor pathogen ecologies.

This book is focused on quality management, and four different lenses which can be used to explore the phenomenon. It introduces emergence as a paradigm in thinking about quality, and explores conditions which are beneficial to radical innovation. The Emergence Paradigm in Quality Management provides an overview of the existing movements in thinking about quality, and discusses why these movements in fact represent paradigms. Three paradigms, the Empirical Paradigm, the Reference Paradigm and the Reflective Paradigm, are explained followed by a search for the Fourth Paradigm, the so-called Emergence Paradigm, which presents a route to radical innovation in organizations when plans, strategies and models fail. It presents the debates around the paradigms, and explores which is the best approach. This professional text will be ideal for strategy and policy makers wanting to establish a link between their conceived plans and the attention for quality, while finding ways to facilitate innovation. Professionals in a range of for-profit and non-profit organizations, including healthcare, will be able to expand their knowledge on quality management, operations management, and organizational studies.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction in to the various theories of colour and how they developed over the centuries and millennia. As colour is the perception of light by our brains, the book captures not only the physical phenomena but also psychological and philosophical aspects of colours. It starts with ancient studies of Greek philosophers and their insights into light and mirrors, then reviews the theory of colors in the middle ages in Europe and Middle East. The last big part of the book explains the theories of colours by modern scientists and philosophers, starting with Isaac Newton and ending colour schemes of modern digital pictures.

This volume presents eco-phenomenology's role in pandemics and post-pandemics and takes up the task of eco-phenomenology as a unified project by not focusing on naturalizing phenomenology but rather exploring the full range of possibilities - such as creative acts and self-individualization - in dealing with ecological threats. Eco-phenomenological developments are based on the main concepts of "phenomenology of life", as created by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. This volume also uniquely explores the Covid-19 pandemic as a phenomenologically interpreted and ecological phenomenon. It appeals to students and researchers working in the fields of phenomenology and environmental philosophy.