Idealization And The Aims Of Science

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Idealization And The Aims Of Science

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Author : Angela Potochnik
language : en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date : 2020-09-23

Idealization And The Aims Of Science written by Angela Potochnik and has been published by University of Chicago Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-09-23 with Philosophy categories.

Introduction : doing science in a complex world. Science by humans ; Science in a complex world ; The payoff : idealizations and many aims -- Complex causality and simplified representation. Causal patterns in the face of complexity ; Causal patterns ; Causal complexity ; Simplification by idealization ; Reasons to idealize ; Idealizations' representational role ; Rampant and unchecked idealization -- The diversity of scientific projects. Broad patterns : modeling cooperation ; A specific phenomenon : variation in human aggression ; Predictions and idealizations in the physical sciences ; Surveying the diversity -- Science isn't after the truth. The aims of science ; Understanding as science's epistemic aim ; Separate pursuit of science's aims ; Understanding, truth, and knowledge ; The nature of scientific understanding ; The role of truth and scientific knowledge -- Causal pattern explanations. Explanation, communication, and understanding ; An account of scientific explanation ; The scope of causal patterns ; The crucial role of the audience ; Adequate explanations -- Levels and fields of science. Levels in philosophy and science ; Going without levels ; Against hierarchy ; Prizing apart forms of stratification ; The fields of science and how they relate -- Scientific pluralism and its limits. The entrenchment of social values ; How science doesn't inform metaphysics ; Scientific progress.

Idealization And The Aims Of Science

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Author : Angela Potochnik
language : en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date : 2017-11-17

Idealization And The Aims Of Science written by Angela Potochnik and has been published by University of Chicago Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-11-17 with Philosophy categories.

Science is the study of our world, as it is in its messy reality. Nonetheless, science requires idealization to function—if we are to attempt to understand the world, we have to find ways to reduce its complexity. Idealization and the Aims of Science shows just how crucial idealization is to science and why it matters. Beginning with the acknowledgment of our status as limited human agents trying to make sense of an exceedingly complex world, Angela Potochnik moves on to explain how science aims to depict and make use of causal patterns—a project that makes essential use of idealization. She offers case studies from a number of branches of science to demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization, shows how causal patterns are used to develop scientific explanations, and describes how the necessarily imperfect connection between science and truth leads to researchers’ values influencing their findings. The resulting book is a tour de force, a synthesis of the study of idealization that also offers countless new insights and avenues for future exploration.

True Enough

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Author : Catherine Z. Elgin
language : en
Publisher: MIT Press
Release Date : 2017-09-29

True Enough written by Catherine Z. Elgin and has been published by MIT Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017-09-29 with Philosophy categories.

The development of an epistemology that explains how science and art embody and convey understanding. Philosophy valorizes truth, holding that there can never be epistemically good reasons to accept a known falsehood, or to accept modes of justification that are not truth conducive. How can this stance account for the epistemic standing of science, which unabashedly relies on models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true? In True Enough, Catherine Elgin argues that we should not assume that the inaccuracy of models and idealizations constitutes an inadequacy. To the contrary, their divergence from truth or representational accuracy fosters their epistemic functioning. When effective, models and idealizations are, Elgin contends, felicitous falsehoods that exemplify features of the phenomena they bear on. Because works of art deploy the same sorts of felicitous falsehoods, she argues, they also advance understanding. Elgin develops a holistic epistemology that focuses on the understanding of broad ranges of phenomena rather than knowledge of individual facts. Epistemic acceptability, she maintains, is a matter not of truth-conduciveness, but of what would be reflectively endorsed by the members of an idealized epistemic community—a quasi-Kantian realm of epistemic ends.

The Instrument Of Science

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Author : Darrell P. Rowbottom
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2019-03-25

The Instrument Of Science written by Darrell P. Rowbottom and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019-03-25 with Philosophy categories.

Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily, and should primarily be, an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view, such as logical positivism, suffered from serious defects. In this book, however, Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism, which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This position—‘cognitive instrumentalism’—involves three core theses. First, science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second, scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third, scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness. There are examples from science throughout the book, and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics, and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history, Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding, empirical understanding, which we can achieve without having true, or even approximately true, representations of unobservable things. In closing the book, he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn, and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism, constructive empiricism, and semirealism. Overall, this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science.

Philosophy Of Science For Biologists

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Author : Kostas Kampourakis
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2020-09-24

Philosophy Of Science For Biologists written by Kostas Kampourakis and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-09-24 with Science categories.

A short and accessible introduction to philosophy of science for students and researchers across the life sciences.

Scientific Understanding

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Author : Henk W. de Regt
language : en
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Release Date : 2014-08-09

Scientific Understanding written by Henk W. de Regt and has been published by University of Pittsburgh Pre this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014-08-09 with Science categories.

To most scientists, and to those interested in the sciences, understanding is the ultimate aim of scientific endeavor. In spite of this, understanding, and how it is achieved, has received little attention in recent philosophy of science. Scientific Understanding seeks to reverse this trend by providing original and in-depth accounts of the concept of understanding and its essential role in the scientific process. To this end, the chapters in this volume explore and develop three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice. Earlier philosophers, such as Carl Hempel, dismissed understanding as subjective and pragmatic. They believed that the essence of science was to be found in scientific theories and explanations. In Scientific Understanding, the contributors maintain that we must also consider the relation between explanations and the scientists who construct and use them. They focus on understanding as the cognitive state that is a goal of explanation and on the understanding of theories and models as a means to this end. The chapters in this book highlight the multifaceted nature of the process of scientific research. The contributors examine current uses of theory, models, simulations, and experiments to evaluate the degree to which these elements contribute to understanding. Their analyses pay due attention to the roles of intelligibility, tacit knowledge, and feelings of understanding. Furthermore, they investigate how understanding is obtained within diverse scientific disciplines and examine how the acquisition of understanding depends on specific contexts, the objects of study, and the stated aims of research.

Understanding Scientific Understanding

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Author : Henk W. de Regt
language : en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date : 2017

Understanding Scientific Understanding written by Henk W. de Regt and has been published by Oxford University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with Philosophy categories.

Putting scientific understanding center-stage within the study of scientific explanations, Understanding Scientific Understanding develops and defends a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that can describe and explain the historical variation of criteria for understanding actually employed by scientists. Book jacket.

Idealization Xii

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Author : Martin R. Jones
language : en
Publisher: Rodopi
Release Date : 2005

Idealization Xii written by Martin R. Jones and has been published by Rodopi this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2005 with Philosophy categories.

The principal task of the book series Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities is to promote those developments in philosophy that respect the tradition of great philosophical ideas, on the one hand, and the manner of philosophical thinking introduced by analytical philosophy, on the other. The aim is to contribute to practicing philosophy as deep as Marxism and as caring about justification as positivism.

Understanding Metaphors In The Life Sciences

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Author : Andrew S. Reynolds
language : en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date : 2022-04-28

Understanding Metaphors In The Life Sciences written by Andrew S. Reynolds and has been published by Cambridge University Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2022-04-28 with Science categories.

Introduces the diverse roles metaphors play in the life sciences and highlights their significance for theory, communication, and education.

The Unity Of Science

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Author : Rudolf Carnap
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2013-05-13

The Unity Of Science written by Rudolf Carnap and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-05-13 with Philosophy categories.

As a leading member of the Vienna Circle, Rudolph Carnap's aim was to bring about a "unified science" by applying a method of logical analysis to the empirical data of all the sciences. This work, first published in English in 1934, endeavors to work out a way in which the observation statements required for verification are not private to the observer. The work shows the strong influence of Wittgenstein, Russell, and Frege.