Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts PDF Download

Author: Katerina Ierodiakonou
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004201769
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
By analysing thought experiments from various periods in the history of philosophy and science, the essays in this volume seek to clarify how thought experiments work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004201777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
By analysing thought experiments from various periods in the history of philosophy and science, the essays in this volume seek to clarify how thought experiments work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be.

Author: Sören Häggqvist
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Author: Philip E. Tetlock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691027913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Author: Michael T Stuart
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351705512
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 709

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Book Description
Thought experiments are a means of imaginative reasoning that lie at the heart of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the modern era, and they also play central roles in a range of fields, from physics to politics. The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments is an invaluable guide and reference source to this multifaceted subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion covers the following important areas: · the history of thought experiments, from antiquity to the trolley problem and quantum non-locality; · thought experiments in the humanities, arts, and sciences, including ethics, physics, theology, biology, mathematics, economics, and politics; · theories about the nature of thought experiments; · new discussions concerning the impact of experimental philosophy, cross-cultural comparison studies, metaphilosophy, computer simulations, idealization, dialectics, cognitive science, the artistic nature of thought experiments, and metaphysical issues. This broad ranging Companion goes backwards through history and sideways across disciplines. It also engages with philosophical perspectives from empiricism, rationalism, naturalism, skepticism, pluralism, contextualism, and neo-Kantianism to phenomenology. This volume will be valuable for anyone studying the methods of philosophy or any discipline that employs thought experiments, as well as anyone interested in the power and limits of the mind.

Author: Lorenzo Magnani
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319305263
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1180

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Book Description
This handbook offers the first comprehensive reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning. It highlights the role of models as mediators between theory and experimentation, and as educational devices, as well as their relevance in testing hypotheses and explanatory functions. The Springer Handbook merges philosophical, cognitive and epistemological perspectives on models with the more practical needs related to the application of this tool across various disciplines and practices. The result is a unique, reliable source of information that guides readers toward an understanding of different aspects of model-based science, such as the theoretical and cognitive nature of models, as well as their practical and logical aspects. The inferential role of models in hypothetical reasoning, abduction and creativity once they are constructed, adopted, and manipulated for different scientific and technological purposes is also discussed. Written by a group of internationally renowned experts in philosophy, the history of science, general epistemology, mathematics, cognitive and computer science, physics and life sciences, as well as engineering, architecture, and economics, this Handbook uses numerous diagrams, schemes and other visual representations to promote a better understanding of the concepts. This also makes it highly accessible to an audience of scholars and students with different scientific backgrounds. All in all, the Springer Handbook of Model-Based Science represents the definitive application-oriented reference guide to the interdisciplinary field of model-based reasoning.

Author: Emrah Doğan
Publisher: IJOPEC PUBLICATION
ISBN: 1913809099
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Historical and current debates in social sciences mirror the reality of human existence. However, the reality and facts of human existence are also different from each other. At the same time, these phenomena in social sciences are multidimensional. In this sense, some of the human cases were included in this study. Besides, historical and current analyses in this study have been examined in other social science studies. The multidimensional perspective of the field of social science encourages re-examining the topics covered and revealing different trends. In this context, this study aimed to clarify light on the dark points in the field of social science by reconsidering the discussed or not discussed issues.

Author: Vlad Petre Glăveanu
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030909131
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 1812

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Book Description
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible represents a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners interested in an emerging multidisciplinary area within psychology and the social sciences: the study of how we engage with and cultivate the possible within self, society and culture. Far from being opposed either to the actual or the real, the possible engages with concrete facts and experiences, with the result of transforming them. This encyclopedia examines the notion of the possible and the concepts associated with it from standpoints within psychology, philosophy, sociology, neuroscience and logic, as well as multidisciplinary fields of research including anticipation studies, future studies, complexity theory and creativity research. Presenting multiple perspectives on the possible, the authors consider the distinct social, cultural and psychological processes - e.g., imagination, counterfactual thinking, wonder, play, inspiration, and many others - that define our engagement with new possibilities in domains as diverse as the arts, design and business.

Author: Tamar Szabo Gendler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113570693X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This book offers a novel analysis of the widely-used but ill-understood technique of thought experiment. The author argues that the powers and limits of this methodology can be traced to the fact that when the contemplation of an imaginary scenario brings us to new knowledge, it does so by forcing us to make sense of exceptional cases.

Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351321862
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Thought experimentation has been a staple of philosophical methodology since classical antiquity, when Xenophanes of Colophon speculated that if horses had gods, they would be equine in form. Nicholas Rescher's What If? undertakes a systematic survey of the role and utility of thought experiments in philosophy. After surveying the historical issues, Rescher examines the principles involved, and explains the conditions under which thought experimentation can validly yield instructive results in philosophy. The reader gains understanding of the differences between scientific and philosophical experiments. What If? begins by examining the nature of thought experiments. It presents an overview of how thought experiments have figured in natural science and in historical studies, before moving on to examine how they function as an instrument of philosophical inquiry. After examining thought experiments from the pre-Socratics to the present day, Rescher turns from history to analysis, and examines the modes of reasoning involved in the use of speculative hypotheses in philosophical problem solving. He shows the limitations of speculative ontology, showing that thought experimentation can lead readily to paradox in a way that increasingly diminishes its usefulness. The book concludes by arguing and illustrating how and when it becomes pointless to push speculation, or thought experimentation beyond the limits of intelligibility and cogent sense. Among the principal features of Rescher's book is its elaborate analysis of the appropriate conditions for philosophical thought experimentation. Its cardinal thesis is that there indeed are limits to the appropriateness of this important methodological resource and that transgressing these limits destroys the prospect of drawing any valid lessons for the philosophical enterprise. What If? will be of interest to philosophers, students of philosophy, and theorists of logic and reasoning.