Methodological Variance: Essays in Epistemological Ontology and the Methodology of Science

ISBN-13: 9780792312635 / Angielski / Twarda / 1991 / 431 str.

G. L. Pandit

Opis

For a philosopher with an abiding interest in the nature of objective knowledge systems in science, what could be more important than trying to think in terms of those very subjects of such knowledge to which men like Galileo, Newton, Max Planck, Einstein and others devoted their entire lifetimes? In certain respects, these systems and their structures may not be beyond the grasp of a linguistic conception of science, and scientific change, which men of science and philosophy have advocated in various forms in recent times. But certainly it is wrong-headed to think that one's conception of science can be based on an identification of its theories with languages in which they may be, my own alternatively, framed. There may be more than one place in book (1983: 87) where they may seem to get confused with each other, quite against my original intentiens. The distinction between the objec- tive knowledge systems in science and the dynamic frameworks of the languages of the special individual sciences, in which their growth can be embedded in significant ways, assumes here, therefore, much impor- tance. It must be recognized that the problems concerning scientific change, which these systems undergo, are not just problems concerning language change.

Spis treści

One.- 1 / On the Objects of Our Subjective Knowledge.- 1.1 What is Wrong with Traditional Epistemology?.- 1.2 The Nature of Subjective Knowledge: Traditional Analysis.- 1.3 Rational Belief, Objective Knowledge and Human Interaction.- 1.4 Ontological Presuppositions of Traditional Epistemology.- 2 / Human Knowledge and Human Interaction.- 2.1 Of the Philosopher’s Obsession with Perception.- 2.2 The Problem of Perception.- 2.3 On Interaction with What Our Theories Invariably Single Out as Observables.- 2.4 The Problem of Human Interaction.- 2.5 On Understanding the Concept of Human Knowledge.- 2.6 The Knowing Subject and the Perceiving Organism: the Structural and Functional Asymmetry between Knowledge and Perception.- 2.7 The Essential Unpredictability of the Growth of Knowledge and the Problem of the Predictability of Interactions.- 2.8 From an Objectivistic Point of View.- 2.9 Organization, Information and Knowledge: Instructed Interaction versus Creative Interaction.- 3 / Indeterminacy of Translation: A Non-Quinean Function of Content-Indeterminacy.- 3.1 Science and Language: Problems of Theory-Choice and Translational Indeterminacy.- 3.2 Quine’s Thesis of the Indeterminacy of Radical Translation.- 3.3 Translational Determinacy: Quine’s Behavioral Criteria.- 3.3.1. Language Viewed as a System of Dispositions to Verbal Behavior.- 3.3.2. Methodological Indeterminacy of Propositions Conceived Non-Mentalistically.- 3.4 The Ideologically Neutral Problem of the Conditions of Translational Determinacy.- 3.4.1. The Criterial Character of Quinean Indeterminacy.- 3.5 Indeterminacy of Translation: a Non-Quinean Function of Content-Indeterminacy.- 3.6 Epistemic Structuralism: Problems and Propositions in Retrospect.- 4 / On the Impossibility of any Enterprise Concerning Self-Knowledge within Traditional Epistemology.- 4.1 The Traditional Doctrine of Self-Knowledge and the Concept of a Person.- 4.2 The Impossibility of Any Enterprise Concerning Self-Knowledge within Traditional Epistemology.- 4.3 First-Person Psychological Sentences: Selfconsciousness, Objective Knowledge and Human Interaction.- 4.4 Persons as a Subject of Objective Knowledge.- 4.5 The Philosophical Significance of Scepticism in Hume and Wittgenstein.- 4.6 The ‘Private Language’ Version of the Problem of Self-Knowledge.- Two.- 5 / Methodological Essentialism in Science and in Philosophy.- 5.1 Methodological Conventionalism in Science and in Philosophy.- 5.1.1. On the Subjects of Objective Knowledge and Carnap’s Methodological Conventionalism.- 5.1.2. Science and Popper’s Methodological Conventionalism.- 5.2 Essentialism in Philosophy: Popper’s and Wittgenstein’s Criticism.- 5.2.1. Philosophy of Science and Methodological Conventionalism of Popper.- 5.2.2. Conventionalism and the Game-Theoretic Conception of Science.- 5.2.3. The Tension between Objectivism and Conventionalism.- 5.2.4. Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend.- 5.2.5. Later Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Language: Criticism.- 5.3 Models that Familiarize and Models that Formalize: Methodological Essentialism in Retrospect.- 6 / Of Variance and Invariance in Science: Empirical Science as an Enterprise ComprisingNFCPSSystems.- 6.1 The Problem of the Conditions of Objective Knowledge.- 6.2 The Structural-Dynamical Assumptions and the Ideal Type Assumptions in the Individual Sciences.- 6.2.1. The Subject-Specific Assumptions in the Individual Sciences: Some Case-Studies.- 6.3 The Subject-Specific Methodological Problems of Theory-Construction and Problem-Formulation.- 6.4 Two Concepts of Invariance: the Problem of Theoretical Universals.- 6.5 The Nature of Methodological Variance: Scientific Revolutions as a Function of Working Backwards from Rule-Entanglement.- 6.5.1. Of the Asymmetry between Scientific and Political Revolutions.- 6.5.2. Philosophy as a Higher-Order Enterprise: Against the Under-Labourer Conception.- 6.5.3. The Demarcation Problem: Empirical Science Viewed as a Game of Conjectures and Refutations.- 6.5.4. Methodological Aspects of Science as an Enterprise Comprising NFCPS Systems.- 7 / Falsifiability and Methodological Invariance in Science.- 7.1 The Principle of Falsifiability.- 7.1.1. The Argument from Logical Form.- 7.1.2. The Argument from Methodological Conventionalism.- 7.2 Theoretical Universals: Methodological Invariance in Science.- 7.2.1. Epistemic Structuralism and the Problem of Demarcating Science from Non-Science.- 8 / The Methodology of Theory-Problem Interactive Systems.- 8.1 The Question of the Nature of a Falsifiable Theory.- 8.2 How Simple is Theoretical Simplicity?.- 8.2.1. Problems of Simplicity: Different Approaches.- 8.2.2. The Probabilistic Model of Simplicity.- 8.2.3. The Popperian Model of Simplicity.- 8.2.4. Elliot Sober’s Model of Simplicity.- 8.2.5. Re-Ordering Theoretical Simplicity: Towards an Interaction-Theoretic Model.- 8.3 Methodological Implications of Epistemic Structuralism.- 8.4 What is Wrong with the Received Views on the Methodology of Science?.- 8.5 Theoretical Universals and the Principle of the Resolving Power of a Scientific Theory.- 8.6 The Methodology of Theory-Problem Interactive Systems.- 9 / The Resolving Power of a Scientific Theory as a Basis of its Epistemic Appraisal.- 9.1 Methodological Variance: From Newtonian to Einsteinian Theory-Problem Interactive Systems.- 9.2 The Nature of Novel Prediction: Two Concepts of the Predictive Power of a Scientific Theory.- 9.3 The Methodological Role of Physical Theory in Relativistic Cosmology.- 9.4 The Resolving Power of a Scientific Theory as a Basis of its Epistemic Appraisal.- 10 / Epilogue.- Notes.- Index of Symbols.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.