Theory and Experiment: Recent Insights and New Perspectives on Their Relation

ISBN-13: 9789401077941 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 296 str.

Diderik Batens; Jean-Paul Van Bendegem

Opis

This is not "another collection of contributions on a traditional subject." Even more than we dared to expect during the preparatory stages, the papers in this volume prove that our thinking about science has taken a new turn and has reached a new stage. The progressive destruction of the received view has been a fascinating and healthy experience. At present, the period of destruction is over. A richer and more equilibrated analysis of a number of problems is possible and is being cru'ried out. In this sense, this book comes right on time. We owe a lot to the scholars of the Kuhnian period. They not only did away with obstacles, but in several respects instigated a shift in attention that changed history and philosophy of science in a irreversible way. A c1earcut example - we borrow it from the paper by Risto Hilpinen - concerns the study of science as a process, Rnd not only as a result. Moreover, they apparently reached several lasting results, e.g., concerning the tremendous impact of theoretical conceptions on empirical data. Apart from baffling people for several decades, this insight rules out an other return to simple-minded empiricism in the future."

Spis treści

I. Systematic Analyses.- Do Experiments Depend on Theories or Theories on Experiments?.- On Experimental Questions.- II. The Roles of Experiment: Theory Generation and Theory Testing.- Reconstructing Science: Discovery and Experiment.- The Role of Experiment and Theory in the Development of Nuclear Physics in the Early 1930’s.- Empirical Support for the Corpuscular Theory in the Seventeenth Century.- Theory and Experiment in the Early Writings of Johan Baptist Van Helmont.- The Significance of Empirical Evidence for Developments in the Foundations of Decision Theory.- Testing Freudian Hypotheses.- Experiment, Theory Choice, and the Duhem-Quine Problem.- III. The Role of Theoretical Conceptions.- Physical Reality and Closed Theories in Werner Heisenberg’s Early Papers.- Experiment and Theory in Ptolemy’s Optics.- Newton’s and Goethe’s Colour Theories — Contradictory or Complementary Approaches?.- On the Structure of Physics as a Science.- Models and Interpretation in Human Sciences: Anthropology and the Theoretical Notion of Field.- On the Dynamics of Scientific Paradigms.- Breaking the Link between Methodology and Rationality. A plea for Rhetoric in Scientific Inquiry.- Index of Names.