Natural and social sciences seem very often, though usually only implicitly, to hedge their laws by ceteris paribus clauses - a practice which is philosophically very hard to understand because such clauses seem to render the laws trivial and unfalsifiable. After early worries the issue is vigorously discussed in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind since ca. 15 years.
This volume collects the most prominent philosophers of science in the field and presents a lively, controversial, but well-integrated, highly original and up-to-date discussion of the issue. It will be the reference book in the coming years concerning ceteris paribus laws.

This book is intended for anyone, regardless of discipline, who is interested in the use of statistical methods to help obtain scientific explanations or to predict the outcomes of actions, experiments or policies. Much of G. Udny Yule's work illustrates a vision of statistics whose goal is to investigate when and how causal influences may be reliably inferred, and their comparative strengths estimated, from statistical samples. Yule's enterprise has been largely replaced by Ronald Fisher's conception, in which there is a fundamental cleavage between experimental and non experimental inquiry, and statistics is largely unable to aid in causal inference without randomized experimental trials. Every now and then members of the statistical community express misgivings about this turn of events, and, in our view, rightly so. Our work represents a return to something like Yule's conception of the enterprise of theoretical statistics and its potential practical benefits. If intellectual history in the 20th century had gone otherwise, there might have been a discipline to which our work belongs. As it happens, there is not. We develop material that belongs to statistics, to computer science, and to philosophy; the combination may not be entirely satisfactory for specialists in any of these subjects. We hope it is nonetheless satisfactory for its purpose."

A reprint of the Prentice-Hall edition of 1992. Prepared by nine distinguished philosophers and historians of science, this thoughtful reader represents a cooperative effort to provide an introduction to the philosophy of science focused on cultivating an understanding of both the workings of science and its historical and social context. Selections range from discussions of topics in general methodology to a sampling of foundational problems in various physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences. Each chapter contains a list of suggested readings and study questions.

Natural and social sciences seem very often to hedge their laws by ceteris paribus clauses - a practice which is philosophically very hard to understand because such clauses seem to render the laws trivial and unfalsifiable. This volume collects the most prominent philosophers of science in the field and presents a lively, controversial, but well-integrated, highly original discussion of the issue. It will be the reference book in the coming years concerning ceteris paribus laws.

This volume collects the majority of the invited papers at the 13th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Beijing, August 2007. It consists of four sections: Logic, General Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Issues of Particular Sciences, and Science and Society, as well as three special symposia: Cosmology, Freud and Psychoanalysis and Chinese Traditional Medicine. The authors are among the most renowned scholars in their fields, and the collection represents advanced research in logic, methodology and philosophy of science.

The first English translation of Hans Reichenbach's lucid doctoral thesis sheds new light on how Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" was understood in some quarters at the time. The source of several themes in his still influential "The Direction of Time, " the thesis shows Reichenbach's early focus on the interdependence of physics, probability, and epistemology.

A reprint of the Prentice-Hall edition of 1992. Prepared by nine distinguished philosophers and historians of science, this thoughtful reader represents a cooperative effort to provide an introduction to the philosophy of science focused on cultivating an understanding of both the workings of science and its historical and social context. Selections range from discussions of topics in general methodology to a sampling of foundational problems in various physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences. Each chapter contains a list of suggested readings and study questions.

When this much-needed collection of critical essays was first published in 1985, it provoked controversy because never before had the various branches of the holistic movement in medicine been analyzed and discussed with such care to determine if the claims made for these methods and procedures could be substantiated. The stakes were high (and they still are!), since each year many desperate people attempt to secure physical relief by spending their hard-earned money on a vast array of exotic treatments: acupuncture; therapeutic touch; rolfing; reflexology; homeopathy; herbal medications; biofeedback; chiropractic; chelation therapy; megadose vitamin therapies; iridology; visualisation; and others.

What did the trial of Galileo share with the trial for fraud of the foremost investigator of the effects of lead exposure on children s intelligence? In the title essay of this rollicking collection on science and education, Clark Glymour argues that fundamentally both were disputes over what methods are legitimate and authoritative. From testing the expertise of NASA scientists to discovering where software goes to die to turning educational research upside down, Glymour s reports from the front lines of science and education read like a blend of Rachel Carson and Hunter S. Thompson. Contrarian and original, he criticizes the statistical arguments against Teach for America, argues for teaching the fallacies of Intelligent Design in high school science, places contemporary psychological research in a Platonic cave dug by Freud, and gives (and rejects) a fair argument for a self-interested, nationalist response to climate change. One of the creators of influential new statistical methods, Glymour has been involved in scientific investigations on such diverse topics as wildfire prediction, planetary science, genomics, climate studies, psychology, and educational research. Now he provides personal reports of the funny, the absurd, and the appalling in contemporary science and education. More bemused than indignant, "Galileo in Pittsburgh" is an ever-engaging call to rethink how we do science and how we teach it.