Rethinking Scientific Change and Theory Comparison: PDF Download

Author: Léna Soler
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402062796
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
This volume presents a collection of essays devoted to the analysis of scientific change and stability. It explores the balance and tension that exist between commensurability and continuity on the one hand and incommensurability and discontinuity on the other. The book constitutes fully revised versions of papers that were originally presented at an international colloquium held at the University of Nancy, France, in June 2004.

Author: Hakob Barseghyan
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648893961
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
During the so-called ‘historical turn’ in the philosophy of science, philosophers and historians boldly argued for general patterns throughout the history of science. From Kuhn’s landmark "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" until the "Scrutinizing Science" project led by Larry Laudan, there was optimism that there could be a general theoretical approach to understanding the process of scientific change. This optimism gradually faded as historians and philosophers began to focus on the details of specific case studies located within idiosyncratic historical, cultural, and political contexts, and abandoned attempts to uncover general patterns of how scientific theories and methods change through time. Recent research has suggested that while we have learned a great deal about the diversity and complexity of scientific practices across history, the push to abandon hope for a broader understanding of scientific change was premature. Because of this, philosophers, historians, and social scientists have become interested in reviving the project of understanding the mechanism of scientific change while respecting the diversity and complexity that has been unveiled by careful historical research over the past few decades. The chapters in this volume consider a particular proposal for a general theory of how scientific theories and methods change over time, first articulated by Hakob Barseghyan in "The Laws of Scientific Change" and since developed in a series of papers by a variety of members of the scientonomy community. The chapters consider a wide range of issues, from conceptual and historical challenges to the posited intellectual patterns in the history of science, to the possibility of constructing a general theory of scientific change, to begin with. Offering a new take on the project of constructing a theory of scientific change and integrating historical, philosophical, and social studies of science, this volume will be of interest to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science.

Author: Hakob Barseghyan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319175963
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This book systematically creates a general descriptive theory of scientific change that explains the mechanics of changes in both scientific theories and the methods of their assessment. It was once believed that, while scientific theories change through time, their change itself is governed by a fixed method of science. Nowadays we know that there is no such thing as an unchangeable method of science; the criteria employed by scientists in theory evaluation also change through time. But if that is so, how and why do theories and methods change? Are there any general laws that govern this process, or is the choice of theories and methods completely arbitrary and random? Contrary to the widespread opinion, the book argues that scientific change is indeed a law-governed process and that there can be a general descriptive theory of scientific change. It does so by first presenting meta-theoretical issues, divided into chapters on the scope, possibility and assessment of theory of scientific change. It then builds a theory about the general laws that govern the process of scientific change, and goes into detail about the axioms and theorems of the theory.

Author: Léna Soler
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400727585
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Mature sciences have been long been characterized in terms of the “successfulness”, “reliability” or “trustworthiness” of their theoretical, experimental or technical accomplishments. Today many philosophers of science talk of “robustness”, often without specifying in a precise way the meaning of this term. This lack of clarity is the cause of frequent misunderstandings, since all these notions, and that of robustness in particular, are connected to fundamental issues, which concern nothing less than the very nature of science and its specificity with respect to other human practices, the nature of rationality and of scientific progress; and science’s claim to be a truth-conducive activity. This book offers for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the problem of robustness, and in general, that of the reliability of science, based on several detailed case studies and on philosophical essays inspired by the so-called practical turn in philosophy of science.

Author: Moti Mizrahi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178660342X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
More than 50 years after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this volume assesses the adequacy of the Kuhnian model in explaining certain aspects of science, particularly the social and epistemic aspects of science. One argument put forward is that there are no good reasons to accept Kunh’s incommensurability thesis, according to which scientific revolutions involve the replacement of theories with conceptually incompatible ones. Perhaps, therefore, it is time for another “decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Only this time, the image of science that needs to be transformed is the Kuhnian one. Does the Kuhnian image of science provide an adequate model of scientific practice? If we abandon the Kuhnian picture of revolutionary change and incommensurability, what consequences would follow from that vis-à-vis our understanding of scientific knowledge as a social endeavour? The essays in this collection continue this debate, offering a critical examination of the arguments for and against the Kuhnian image of science as well as their implications for our understanding of science as a social and epistemic enterprise.

Author: Wenceslao J. González
Publisher: Netbiblo
ISBN: 8497459334
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Author: James A. Marcum
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472522087
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This new edition of Thomas Kuhn's Revolution marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Kuhn's most influential work. Drawing on the rich archival sources at MIT, and engaging fully with current scholarship, James Marcum provides the historical background to the development of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Exploring the shift Kuhn makes from a historical to an evolutionary philosophy of science and examining Kuhn's legacy in depth, Marcum answers key questions: What exactly was Kuhn's historiographic revolution and how did it come about? Why did it have the impact it did? What will its future impact be for both academia and society? Marcum's answers build a new portrait of Kuhn: his personality, his pedagogical style and the intellectual and social context in which he practiced his trade. Thomas Kuhn's Revolution shows how Kuhn transcends the boundaries of the philosophy of science, influencing sociologists, economists, theologians and even policy makers and politicians. This is a comprehensive historical and conceptual introduction to the man who changed our understanding of science.

Author: Oren Harman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022656990X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, editors Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers. From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word “biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.

Author: José Manuel Viejo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031303040
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This volume provides a broad overview of some cutting-edge philosophical topics of growing interest at the juncture between cognitive science and biology. The main goal is not to integrate the variety of approaches into a single account, but rather to offer diverse perspectives on a collection of selected biological issues of particular philosophical relevance, reflecting the plurality of current research in these areas. Four conceptual vectors give this volume its coherence: Animal and human cognition: With respect to animal cognition, this volume focuses on self-awareness and methodological flaws in the science of animal consciousness. Regarding human cognition, the authors of this volume address various aspects of so-called 4E cognition. Genetics: The role of genes in the development of mind and life has always been philosophically controversial. In this volume, the authors address the possibility of considering post-genomic genes as natural kinds and the proper analysis of the concept of genotype. Teleology: This volume addresses issues of evolutionary causality and teleosemantics, as well as questions relating to biological teleology and regulation. Evolution: Evolution exemplifies better than any other concept the convergence point between philosophy, biology and cognitive sciences. Among other things, the volume deals with the origin of novelties in evolutionary processes from various viewpoints (e.g., cultural evolution and developmental plasticity). Despite their disparity, all these topics belong to a common naturalistic framework. By presenting them in a single volume, the editors want to emphasize the need to always conduct philosophical research on mind and life with tangential domains in mind. This book is a valuable resource for students and researchers of philosophy with a special interest in life, cognition, and evolution, as well as for biologists and cognitive scientists.

Author: William J. Devlin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319133837
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In 1962, the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure ‘revolutionized’ the way one conducts philosophical and historical studies of science. Through the introduction of both memorable and controversial notions, such as paradigms, scientific revolutions, and incommensurability, Kuhn argued against the traditionally accepted notion of scientific change as a progression towards the truth about nature, and instead substituted the idea that science is a puzzle solving activity, operating under paradigms, which become discarded after it fails to respond accordingly to anomalous challenges and a rival paradigm. Kuhn’s Structure has sold over 1.4 million copies and the Times Literary Supplement named it one of the “Hundred Most Influential Books since the Second World War.” Now, fifty years after this groundbreaking work was published, this volume offers a timely reappraisal of the legacy of Kuhn’s book and an investigation into what Structure offers philosophical, historical, and sociological studies of science in the future.