Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Philosophy & Social Aspects

While the scientist works essentially with what he observes, with the measurable properties of nature, the philosopher of science is concerned to formulate the conceptual foundations of the scientific method. In this systematic study, Professor Achinstein analyzes such concepts as definitions, theories, and models, and contrasts his view with currently held positions that he finds inadequate.

This new and expanded edition of A. W. F. Edwards' classic volume on scientific inference presents his most important published articles on the subject. Edwards argues that the appropriate axiomatic basis for inductive inference is not that of probability, with its addition axiom, but that of likelihood, the concept introduced by Fisher as a measure of relative support among different hypotheses. Starting from the simplest considerations and assuming no more than a basic acquaintancewith probability theory, the author sets out to reconstruct a consistent theory of statistical inference in...

In Bioethics in America, Tina Stevens challenges the view that the origins of the bioethics movement can be found in the 1960s, a decade mounting challenges to all variety of authority. Instead, Stevens sees bioethics as one more product of a -centuries-long cultural legacy of American ambivalence toward progress, - and she finds its modern roots in the responsible science movement that emerged following detonation of the atomic bomb.

Rather than challenging authority, she says, the bioethics movement was an aid to authority, in that it allowed medical doctors and researchers...

Is there a universal set of rules for discovering and testing scientific hypotheses? Since the birth of modern science, philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers have wrestled with this fundamental question of scientific practice. Efforts to devise rigorous methods for obtaining scientific knowledge include the twenty-one rules Descartes proposed in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind and the four rules of reasoning that begin the third book of Newton's Principia, and continue today in debates over the very possibility of such rules. Bringing together key primary...

Is there a universal set of rules for discovering and testing scientific hypotheses? Since the birth of modern science, philosophers, scientists, and other thinkers have wrestled with this fundamental question of scientific practice. Efforts to devise rigorous methods for obtaining scientific knowledge include the twenty-one rules Descartes proposed in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind and the four rules of reasoning that begin the third book of Newton's Principia, and continue today in debates over the very possibility of such rules. Bringing together key primary...

Physicists think they have discovered the top quark. Biologists believe in evolution. But what precisely constitutes evidence for such claims, and why? Scientists often disagree with one another over whether or to what extent some evidence counts in favor of a theory because they are operating with different concepts of scientific evidence. These concepts need to be critically explored. Peter Achinstein has gathered some prominent philosophers and historians of science for critical and lively discussions of both general questions about the meaning of evidence and specific ones about...

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Aristotelian notions of logic and causation came under serious attack. Traditional philosophy speaks of this period as marking a revolution in scientific thought. In this book Fred Wilson reinstates and extends the traditional conception of the scientific revolution and its significance, and explores the goals and directions of the new science according to the differing interpretations of rationalist and empiricist thinkers.

Wilson argues for an empiricist approach to scientific method and explanation, and defends an empiricist as...

Mechanics has long been recognized as the pivotal science in the decline of Aristotelian natural philosophy and the rise of the new, mathematical physics of the Scientific Revolution. Less well known, however, is the earlier transformation of mechanics from a practical art into a theoretical and mathematical science. This transformation was occasioned by the recovery of the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems and its assimilation in the course of the sixteenth century to the Aristotelian model of the subalternate or middle sciences, which deal with natural subject matter but...