Theory and Truth: Philosophical Critique Within Foundational Science

ISBN-13: 9780199251575 / Angielski / Miękka / 2002 / 168 str.

Lawrence Sklar

Opis

Skeptics have cast doubt on the idea that scientific theories give us a true picture of an objective world. Lawrence Sklar examines three kinds of skeptical arguments about scientific truth, and explores the important role they play within foundational science itself. Sklar demonstrates that these kinds of philosophical critique are employed within science, and reveals the clear difference between how they operate in a scientific context and more abstract philosophical contexts. The underlying theme of Theory and Truth is that science and philosophy are essential to one another. Sklar advances the claim that one cannot understand the methods of science without a comprehension of philosophy, and one cannot fruitfully pursue philosophy of science without understanding fundamental science as well.

Recenzje

Theory and Truth is, amongst other things, a call for a reconceptualization of the respective tasks of general philosophy of science and philosophy of physics, and for a closer relationship between the two specialties. If Sklar is right, then there is a vast store of interesting philosophical problems lying between the fine-grained topics of philosophy of physics and the more abstract problems of general philosophy of science - and this largely unexplored set of problems is of fundamental importance to the project of understanding the structure and content of scientific knowledge... Theory and Truth contains a number of provocative ideas in addition to its central programmatic thesis.

O autorze

Lawrence Sklar is William K. Frankena Collegiate Professor and Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.