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The essays in this volume were written by leading researchers on classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity. They detail central topics in the foundations of physics, including the role of symmetry principles in classical and quantum physics, Einstein's hole argument in general relativity, quantum mechanics and special relativity, quantum correlations, quantum logic, and quantum probability and information.
A renowned philosopher's final work, illuminating how the logical empiricist tradition has failed to appreciate the role of actual experiments in forming its philosophy of science. The logical empiricist treatment of physics dominated twentieth-century philosophy of science. But the logical empiricist tradition, for all it accomplished, does not do justice to the way in which empirical evidence functions in modern physics. In his final work, the late philosopher of science William Demopoulos contends that philosophers have failed to provide an adequate epistemology of science because they have failed to appreciate the tightly woven character of theory and evidence. As a consequence, theory comes apart from evidence. This trouble is nowhere more evident than in theorizing about particle and quantum physics. Arguing that we must consider actual experiments as they have unfolded across history, Demopoulos provides a new epistemology of theories and evidence, albeit one that stands on the shoulders of giants. On Theories finds clarity in Isaac Newton's suspicion of mere "hypotheses." Newton's methodology lies in the background of Jean Perrin's experimental investigations of molecular reality and of the subatomic investigations of J. J. Thomson and Robert Millikan. Demopoulos extends this account to offer novel insights into the distinctive nature of quantum reality, where a logico-mathematical reconstruction of Bohrian complementarity meets John Stewart Bell's empirical analysis of Einstein's "local realism." On Theories ultimately provides a new interpretation of quantum probabilities as themselves objectively representing empirical reality.
Few areas of study have led to such close and intense interactions among computer scientists, psychologists, and philosophers as the area now referred to as cognitive science. Within this discipline, few problems have inspired as much debate as the use of notions such as meaning, intentionality, or the semantic content of mental states in explaining human behavior. The set of problems surrounding these notions have been viewed by some observers as threatening the foundations of cognitive science as currently conceived, and by others as providing a new and scientifically sound formulation of certain classical problems in the philosophy of mind. The chapters in this volume help bridge the gap among contributing disciplines-computer science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience-and discuss the problems posed from various perspectives.
The essays in this volume were written by leading researchers on classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity. They detail central topics in the foundations of physics, including the role of symmetry principles in classical and quantum physics, Einstein's hole argument in general relativity, quantum mechanics and special relativity, quantum correlations, quantum logic, and quantum probability and information.
Widespread interest in Frege's general philosophical writings is, relatively speaking, a fairly recent phenomenon. But it is only very recently that his philosophy of mathematics has begun to attract the attention it now enjoys. This interest has been elicited by the discovery of the remarkable mathematical properties of Frege's contextual definition of number and of the unique character of his proposals for a theory of the real numbers. This collection of essays addresses three main developments in recent work on Frege's philosophy of mathematics: the emerging interest in the intellectual background to his logicism; the rediscovery of Frege's theorem; and the reevaluation of the mathematical content of" The Basic Laws of Arithmetic," Each essay attempts a sympathetic, if not uncritical, reconstruction, evaluation, or extension of a facet of Frege's theory of arithmetic. Together they form an accessible and authoritative introduction to aspects of Frege's thought that have, until now, been largely missed by the philosophical community.
The impetus for this volume developed from the 1982 University of Western Ontario Learnability Workshop, which was organized by the editors and sponsored by that University's Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Cognitive Science. The volume e~plores the import of learnability theory for contemporary linguistic theory, focusing on foundational learning-theoretic issues associated with the parametrized Government-Binding (G-B) framework. Written by prominent re searchers in the field, all but two of the eight contributions are pre viously unpublished. The editor's introduction provides an overview that interrelates the separate papers and elucidates the foundational issues addressed by the volume. Osherson, Stob, and Weinstein's "Learning Theory and Natural Language" first appeared in Cognition (1984); Matthews's "The Plausi bility of Rationalism" was published in the Journal of Philosophy (1984). The editors would like to thank the publishers for permission to reprint these papers. Mr. Marin Marinov assisted with the preparation of the indices for the volume. VB ROBERT 1. MATTHEWS INTRODUCTION: LEARNABILITY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY 1. INTRODUCTION Formal learning theory, as the name suggests, studies the learnability of different classes of formal objects (languages, grammars, theories, etc.) under different formal models of learning. The specification of such a model, which specifies (a) a learning environment, (b) a learn ing strategy, and (c) a criterion for successful learning, determines (d) a class of formal objects, namely, the class that can be acquired to the level of the specified success criterion by a learner implementing the specified strategy in the specified enviroment.
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