In this stimulating study of the logical character of selected fundamental topics of physics, Zinov'ev has written the first, and major, stage of a general semantics of science. In that sense he has shown, by rigorous examples, that in certain basic and surprising respects we may envision a reducibility of science to logic; and further that we may detect and eliminate frequent confusion of abstract and empirical objects. In place of a near chaos of unplanned theoretical languages, we may look toward a unified and epistemologically clarified general scientific language. In the course of this...

The 1977 lectures of the International School for the History of Science at Erice in Sicily were devoted to that vexing but inexorable problem, the nature of scientific discovery. With all that has been written, by scientists themselves, by historians and philosophers and social theorists, by psycholo- gists and psychiatrists, by logicians and novelists, the problem remains elusive. Happily we are able to bring the penetrating lectures from Erice that summer to a wider audience in this volume of theoretical investigations and detailed case studies. The ancient and lovely town of Erice in...

The last decades have seen major reformations in the philosophy and history of science. What has been called 'post-positivist' philosophy of science has introduced radically new concerns with historical, social, and valuative components of scientific thought in the natural sciences, and has raised up the demons of relativism, subjectivism and sociologism to haunt the once- calm precincts of objectivity and realism. Though these disturbances intruded upon what had seemed to be the logically well-ordered domain of the philoso- phy of the natural sciences, they were no news to the social...

To celebrate Adolf Griinbaum's sixtieth birthday by offering him this bouquet of essays written for this purpose was the happy task of an autonomous Editorial Committee: Wesley C. Salmon, Nicholas Rescher, Larry Laudan, Carl G. Hempel, and Robert S. Cohen. To present the book within the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science was altogether fitting and natural, for Griinbaum has' been friend and supporter of philosophy of science at Boston University for twenty-five years, and unofficial godfather to the Boston Colloquium. To regret that we could not include contributions from all his...

These essays on the conceptual understanding of modern physics strike directly at some of the principal difficulties faced by contemporary philos- ophers of physical science. Moreover, they reverberate to earlier and classical struggles with those difficulties. Each of these essays may be seen as both a commentary on our predecessors and an original analytic interpretation. They come from work of the past decade, most from meetings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, and they demonstrate again how problematic the fundamentals of our understanding of nature still are. The...

This selection of papers that were presented (or nearly so ) to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during the seventies fairly re- presents some of the most disturbing issues of scientific knowledge in these years. To the distant observer, it may seem that the defense of rational standards, objective reference, methodical self-correction, even the distin- guishing of the foolish from the sensible and the truth-seeking from the ideological, has nearly collapsed. In fact, the defense may be seen to have shifted; the knowledge business came under scrutiny decades ago and,...

Within the last ten years, the interest of historians and philosophers of science in the epistemological writings of the Polish medical microbiologist Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961), who had up to then been almost completely unknown, has advanced with great strides. His main writings on epistemological questions were published in the mid-1930's, but they remained almost unnoticed. Today, however, one may rightly call Fleck a 'classical' figure both of episte- mology and of the historical sociology of science, one whose works are comparable with Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery or Merton's...

The Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science began 2S years ago as an interdisciplinary, interuniversity collaboration of friends and colleagues in philosophy, logic, the natural sciences and the social sciences, psychology, religious studies, arts and literature, and often the celebrated man-in-the- street. Boston University came to be the home base. Within a few years, pro- ceedings were seen to be candidates for publication, first suggested by Gerald Holton for the journal Synthese within the Synthese Library, both from the D. Reidel Publishing Company of Dordrecht, then and now in...

Experimental Metaphysics is intended for theoretical physicists and philosophers of science and is devoted to fundamental issues in the quantum domain. The book presents a number of discussions of experiments, theoretical puzzles and alternative interpretations, and philosophical treatments of the metaphysical foundations of science and the way these throw a scientific light on metaphysics. Hence the title: experimental metaphysics' is a term coined by Abner Shimony, to whom the book is dedicated.
This collection of 16 scientific and philosophical essays by leading physicists,...

Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature. Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14 authors, including Robert Neville, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, Livia Kohn, Tienyu Cao, Abner Shimoney, Alfred Tauber, Krzysztof Michalski, Lawrence Cahoone, Stephen Scully, Alan Olson and Alfred Ferrarin. Dedicated to the phenomenological ecology of Erazim Kohak, with 10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on the question of the moral sense of nature.