Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Philosophy & Social Aspects

Metadecisions: Rehabilitating Epistemology constitutes an epistemological inquiry about the foundations of knowledge of a scientific discipline. This text warns contemporary scientific disciplines that neglecting epistemological issues threatens the viability of their pronouncements and designs.

It shows that the processes by which complex artefacts are created require a pluralistic approach to artefact design.

It argues that viable solutions to fundamental problems in each discipline require cooperation, creativity and respect for contributions from all...

In 1996, Alan Sokal published an essay in the hip intellectual magazine Social Text parodying the scientific but impenetrable lingo of contemporary theorists. Here, Sokal teams up with Jean Bricmont to expose the abuse of scientific concepts in the writings of today's most fashionable postmodern thinkers. From Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva to Luce Irigaray and Jean Baudrillard, the authors document the errors made by some postmodernists using science to bolster their arguments and theories. Witty and closely reasoned, Fashionable Nonsense dispels the notion that scientific...

"A passionate, minutely informed, and scrupulously fair analysis of all the abuses and misuses of science that are rampant today--a clarion call to action that concerns us all."--Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

The American public is suffering from a rampage against reason by special interests in government, commerce, and the faith industry. In Junk Science, Dan Agin offers an overdue indictment of the groups that twist science for their own gain.

Provocative, comprehensive, and hard-hitting,...

Durbin, history and philosophy of science scholar and writer, has created a volume that includes about 100 terms from the natural and social sciences. For each term there is an extended definition and discussion of related philosophic issues. Each entry, about three and one-half pages, also provides a bibliography of some six to a dozen sources. A thorough index includes all terms and people discussed in the entries. This is an excellent source for an entree to the scholarly literature on basic topics such as chance, gender, history, indeterminism, instrumentalism, paradigm, scientific...

This series of essays explores the impact of information on the quality of life in modern society. Addressing the significance of boredom as an indicator of overloads of information, Klapp argues that the information society has become boring in spite of itself. He contends that constant inundation with information has led to nothing less than the attrition of meaning. Redundancy and noise, Klapp asserts, have replaced resonance and variety in the modern world. The information society has become entropic rather than progressive and a deficit in the quality of life has resulted. The author...

-POWERFUL . . . A stirring defense of informed rationality. . . Rich in surprising information and beautiful writing.-
*The Washington Post Book World

How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don't understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan...