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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > Philosophy of science
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Without Hierarchies - The Scale Freedom of the Universe (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,749
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Without Hierarchies - The Scale Freedom of the Universe (Hardcover, New)
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A venerable tradition in the metaphysics of science commends
ontological reduction: the practice of analysis of theoretical
entities into further and further proper parts, with the
understanding that the original entity is nothing but the sum of
these. This tradition implicitly subscribes to the principle that
all the real action of the universe (also referred to as its
"causation") happens at the smallest scales-at the scale of
microphysics. A vast majority of metaphysicians and philosophers of
science, covering a wide swath of the spectrum from reductionists
to emergentists, defend this principle. It provides one pillar of
the most prominent theory of science, to the effect that the
sciences are organized in a hierarchy, according to the scales of
measurement occupied by the phenomena they study. On this view, the
fundamentality of a science is reckoned inversely to its position
on that scale. This venerable tradition has been justly and
vigorously countered-in physics, most notably: it is countered in
quantum theory, in theories of radiation and superconduction, and
most spectacularly in renormalization theories of the structure of
matter. But these counters-and the profound revisions they
prompt-lie just below the philosophical radar. This book
illuminates these counters to the tradition principle, in order to
assemble them in support of a vaster (and at its core Aristotelian)
philosophical vision of sciences that are not organized within a
hierarchy. In so doing, the book articulates the principle that the
universe is active at absolutely all scales of measurement. This
vision, as the book shows, is warranted by philosophical treatment
of cardinal issues in the philosophy of science: fundamentality,
causation, scientific innovation, dependence and independence, and
the proprieties of explanation.
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