Contents Preface General Introduction 1 | Science and Pseudoscience Introduction Karl Popper, Science: Conjectures and Refutations Thomas S. Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? Imre Lakatos, Science and Pseudoscience Paul R. Thagard, Why Astrology Is a Pseudoscience Michael Ruse, Creation-Science Is Not Science Larry Laudan, Commentary: Science at the Bar---Causes for Concern Commentary 2 | Rationality, Objectivity, and Values in Science Introduction Thomas S. Kuhn, The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn, Objectivity, Value Judgment, and (...) Theory Choice Ernan McMullin, Rationality and Paradigm Change in Science Larry Laudan, Kuhn’s Critique of Methodology Helen E. Longino, Values and Objectivity Kathleen Okruhlik, Gender and the Biological Sciences Commentary 3 | The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination Introduction Pierre Duhem, Physical Theory and Experiment W. V. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism Donald Gillies, The Duhem Thesis and the Quine Thesis Larry Laudan, Demystifying Underdetermination *Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, The Duhem Problem Commentary 4 | Induction, Prediction, and Evidence Introduction Peter Lipton, Induction Karl Popper, The Problem of Induction Wesley C. Salmon, Rational Prediction Carl G. Hempel, Criteria of Confirmation and Acceptability Peter Achinstein, Explanation v. Prediction: Which Carries More Weight? *Nelson Goodman, The New Riddle of Induction Commentary 5 | Confirmation and Relevance: Bayesian Approaches Introduction Wesley C. Salmon, Rationality and Objectivity in Science *Deborah G. Mayo, A Critique of Salmon’s Bayesian Way *Alan Chalmers, The Bayesian Approach Paul Horwich, Therapeutic Bayesianism Commentary 6 | Models of Explanation Introduction Rudolf Carnap, The Value of Laws: Explanation and Prediction Carl G. Hempel, Two Basic Types of Scientific Explanation Carl G. Hempel, The Thesis of Structural Identity Carl G. Hempel, Inductive-Statistical Explanation Peter Railton, A Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation *Philip Kitcher, Explanatory Unification *James Woodward, The Manipulability Conception of Causal Explanation Commentary 7 | Laws of Nature Introduction A. J. Ayer, What Is a Law of Nature? Fred I. Dretske, Laws of Nature D. H. Mellor, Necessities and Universals in Natural Laws Nancy Cartwright, Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts? Commentary 8 | Intertheoretic Reduction Introduction Ernest Nagel, Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations Paul K. Feyerabend, How to Be a Good Empiricist *Jerry A. Fodor, Special Sciences Philip Kitcher, 1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences Commentary 9 | Empiricism and Scientific Realism Introduction Grover Maxwell, The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities Bas C. van Fraassen, Arguments Concerning Scientific Realism Alan Musgrave, Realism versus Constructive Empiricism Larry Laudan, A Confutation of Convergent Realism *Juha T. Saatsi, On the Pessimistic Induction and Two Fallacies Ian Hacking, Experimentation and Scientific Realism David B. Resnik, Hacking’s Experimental Realism *Martin Carrier, What Is Right with the Miracle Argument Arthur Fine, The Natural Ontological Attitude Alan Musgrave, NOA’s Ark---Fine for Realism Commentary Glossary Bibliography Name Index Subject Index. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman defends the seemingly radical view that, in a certain sense, all facts depend on our perspective on the matter. We make the world, rather than merely find it. The aim of this contribution is three-fold: to make sense of Goodman's metaphysical perspectivalism, clearly explain how it differs from other branches of perspectivalism (epistemic and semantic), and put two issues on the agenda that deserve renewed attention.

I convenzionalisti sostengono che le verità fondamentali relative a un qualche ambito (come quelle dell’etica o della matematica) siano non il riflesso dell’esistenza di certi fatti relativi a quell’ambito, “che sono lì a prescindere”, bensì che siano fondate meramente in accordi espliciti o impliciti tra parlanti che parlano di quegli argomenti. Esse non sono verità relative al mondo intorno a noi, bensì verità generate da un sistema di convenzioni che noi stessi abbiamo stabilito. Di conseg...

This review article presents an important, newly published study of Popper's critical method by Zbigniew Liana. The review emphasizes the very high level of the study, points to its originality, and explains why the book is recommended mainly to specialists of Popper's thought. It is also explained how the book manages to contain so many original and valuable analyses in a small volume.

In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, but also about (...) its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Vergil, Nelson argues, deliberately modeled his poem upon the Works and Days, and did so in order to reveal that his is a very different vision. Hesiod saw the hardship in farming; Vergil sees its violence as well. Farming is for him both our life within nature, and also our battle against her. Against the background of Hesiods poem, which found a single meaning for human life, Vergil thus creates a split vision and suggests that human beings may be radically alienated from both nature and the divine. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 9, September 2022.

This essay proposes to view networks as sociocultural structures. Following authors from Leopold von Wiese and Norbert Elias to Gary Alan Fine and Harrison White, networks are configurations of social relationships interwoven with meaning. Social relationships as the basic building blocks of networks are conceived of as dynamic structures of reciprocal (but not necessarily symmetric) expectations between alter and ego. Through their transactions, alter and ego construct an idiosyncratic "relationship culture" comprising symbols, narratives, and relational identities. The coupling of social (...) relationships to networks, too, is heavily laden with meaning. The symbolic construction of persons is one instance of this coupling. Another instance is the application of social categories (like race or gender), which both map and structure social networks. The conclusion offers an agenda for research on this "meaning structure of social networks.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence by Ezio VailatiJan A. CoverEzio Vailati. Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 250. Cloth, $45.00.When Leibniz received the 1710 issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in early 1711, he read John Keill’s public charge that he had stolen the calculus from Newton. Leibniz twice sought amends (...) from the Society in the form of a retraction, in response to which a committee was formed to investigate and issue a report. The resulting Commercium epistolicum, written by the good Isaac Newton himself and condemning Leibniz, was published in early 1713. In Vienna at the time, Leibniz learned of its contents in a June letter from Johann Bernoulli, who complained about this “scarcely civilized way” of holding what was in effect a tribunal from which the chief witness was absent. By year’s end Leibniz had enlisted Wolff to see into print Leibniz’s anonymous statement—overstatement, in fact—of his case, and nine months later Keill replied with an equally overstated rejoinder. Late autumn of 1714 found Leibniz back in Hannover, suffering from gout and the tiresome pressure to advance his work on the history of the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg. If only he felt better and had more free time, he could collect his mathematical papers and set an end to the dispute by writing his own Commercium epistolicum: as it was (Leibniz told Wolff in the spring of 1715), he had no intention of giving Newton’s cronies the luxury of his time.The Leibniz-Clarke exchange began in the shadows of this dispute, contributing to Leibniz’s already established distaste for parts of British philosophy. Already in 1690 he was describing (to Huygens and others) Newton’s gravitational attraction as “inexplicable.” Soon after Leibniz was surprised to discover that Locke had accepted Newtonian attraction in the second edition of the Essay—surprised, at least, until he came to see it as part and parcel of the dangerous idea that God could attach any old property whatever to matter if He chose, including thought. Materialism and frequent miracles [End Page 533] were just around the corner, and from there it was a short distance to the mortality of the soul, and a mean view of God’s power; the decay of natural theology itself could only follow. Leibniz’s misgivings didn’t see the light of day in the early 1700s, when he penned them in the Preface to the Nouveaux Essais; but he went out of his way to work an explicit complaint about Mr. Newton and Mr. Locke into the Théodicée of 1710 (§19 of the Preliminary Discourse). The calculus dispute followed. By the time Leibniz got round to writing Princess Caroline about the dispute in a letter of May 1715, he was insisting that the Newtonians deserved public censure, and that the Britons deserved Leibniz as historiographer of England. For her own part, Caroline now wondered if Samuel Clarke, who had translated Newton’s Opticks into Latin, would in the end be unbiased enough to translate Leibniz’s Théodicée into English. Moreover Caroline doubted that Clarke’s notion of the soul was theologically innocent. Replying in November, Leibniz summarized his view that natural religion was in great decline in England, and the famous exchange began.Despite there being no monograph devoted to it until now, the Correspondence ıs (and was) famous. If a book-length study is overdue, so perhaps are three reminders—that a significant portion of the Correspondence is devoted to issues other than space and time and gravitation, that the depth to which its issues are pursued was compromised by impatience on the side of both parties, and that Clarke’s philosophical views aren’t so well-understood as Leibniz’s own. Nowhere does Vailati set out to make these points explicitly, but they emerge over the course of his book, and together with exegetical soundness are its chief contributions. While this volume makes no historical or philosophical waves, it indirectly (perhaps unwittingly) explains why none are readily forthcoming in a book... (shrink)

Arithmetical texts involving division are governed by conventions that avoid the risk of problems to do with division by zero (DbZ). A model for elementary arithmetic texts is given, and with the help of many examples and counter examples a partial description of what may be called traditional conventions on DbZ is explored. We introduce the informal notions of legal and illegal texts to analyse these conventions. First, we show that the legality of a text is algorithmically undecidable. As a (...) consequence, we know that there is no simple sound and complete set of guidelines to determine unambiguously how DbZ is to be avoided. We argue that these observations call for further explorations of mathematical conventions. We propose a method using logics to progress the analysis of legality versus illegality: arithmetical texts in a model can be transformed into logical formulae over special total algebras that are able to approximate partiality but in a total world. The algebras we use are called common meadows. Our dive into informal mathematical practice using formal methods opens up questions about DbZ which we address in conclusion. (shrink)

The paper presents the sources and the development of the medieval doctrine of transcendentals. In Aertsen's opinion transcendental philosophy of the Middle Ages differs considerably from the ontological doctrine of the Ancients as well as from the modern theory referring to the sphere of cognition. The beginnings of the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals were inspired mostly by considerations concerning primary conceptions of human mind included in Avicenna's "Metaphysica". Furthermore, they were connected with the Aristotelian idea of science, the Boethian (...) axiomatic method of "common conceptions of the soul", and theologians' interest in the horizon of human intellectual knowledge. Beside the Aristotelian-Avicennian reduction to the most universal predicate Albert the Great acknowledge another reduction (originating from the Christian-Neoplatonic tradition): reduction to the first cause. In his opinion, these two resolutions are complementary to each other. In the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, transcendentals are most fundamental insofar as they are the foundations of theoretical and practical science. The principle of contradiction – considered as the beginning of theoretical science – rests on the understanding of "being", and the first precept of natural law is founded on "the good". The development of the doctrine of the transcendentals in 13th century aloows to call the period "the second beginning of metaphysics" – since it changes the understanding of the proper subject of First Philosophy. In Albert the Great, for example, matephysics ceases to be the science of the divine, and becomes the science concerning what is first and the most fundamental – "being-as-being". In St. Bonaventure's philosophy, the doctrine of the transcendentals undergoes a theologizing transformation: that, which is first in the cognitive order is, at the same time, first ontologically. For Bonaventure, the latter "first" is God. (shrink)

We apply a paraconsistent strategy to reasoning about fractions.

Two fundamentally different conceptions of unity can be found in the philosophical tradition. My thesis is that both of them go back to one text, Plato's Parmenides. Plato argues that if the One is posed as unity (the first hypothesis), the One is unthinkable and unnamable. If the One is posed as being (the second hypothesis), we think a plurality. Plotinus explicitly relates his conception of unity to the Parmenides. The One is the origin of the second hypostasis that is (...) marked by the connection of unity and plurality. The One itself is Apollo, a name that is explained as a polla, that is, the ‘not-many’, is indistinct and beyond being. Characteristic of Neoplatonic thought, for which the term ‘henology’ has been introduced, is the absolute transcendence of the One. According to E. Gilson (Being and Some Philosophers) Neoplatonism is incompatible with ‘the mental universe of Christian thinkers’ on account of its thesis that the One transcends being. Yet two henological moments strongly influenced Christian tradition. The first is the idea of ‘negative theology’. It is perceptible in Nicolaus of Cues, who considers ‘Unity’ the most appropriate name for God. The second moment is the spiritual, mystical idea of ‘the union with the One’ (cf. Master Eckhart). More substantial than Gilson's criticism is the position of Levinas who reproaches classical philosophy with the elimination of plurality. The question is whether unity can be conceived in such a way that the plurality of things is saved. The second conception of unity was developed by Aristotle in his Metaphysics (IV, 2). In a critical reaction to the second hypothesis of the Parmenides he argues that ‘being’ and ‘one’ are identical in reality, but differ conceptually. ‘One’ expresses the undividedness (indivisio) of that which is. What deserves attention is that unity does not deny plurality, but division. Aristotle's exposition became the startingpoint of the 13th century doctrine of the transcendentia. Characteristic of this conception of the one is the transcendentality : the one is a property belonging to every being. The importance of this view is twofold. First, the metaphysical one is clearly distinguished from the mathematical one, that belongs to the category of quantity. Second, from the transcendentality follows that ‘one’ has an analogous character. There is no uniformity in unity. The transcendental one determines being in itself. Is not another type of unity required, that is relational in nature ? Some Dutch philosophers have recently developed a new conception of unity, namely, ‘unity as intersubjectivity’. This conception has a theological root : Thomas Aquinas' interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity. The modern view of unity as an intersubjective unity of a plurality can be understood as a completion of the transcendental conception of the one. The transcendent conception of the One and the transcendental conception have common traits. Thinking of the one is always a transcending movement. Moreover, it implies the task of a union, for it deals with a unity that is not yet, but must be. (shrink)

This article proposes to model and empirically study social networks as emerging, stabilizing, and changing in the process of communication. Rather than starting from actors, communicative events are conceptualized as the basic units. In the sequence of communication, these events are attributed to actors, together with underlying dispositions. Relational expectations about the behavior of actors towards others result, effectively structuring communication and making for the regularities of communication we observe as relationships and networks. Not only individuals, but also collective and (...) corporate actors can feature as nodes in social networks – as long as action is attributed to them, and relational expectations about their behavior to other actors develop. The approach combines recent developments in the theory of social networks by Harrison White and others with Niklas Luhmann’s theory of communication. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We propose a combination of a fragment of four-valued logic and process algebra. This fragment is geared to a simple relation with process algebra via the conditional guard construct, and can easily be extended to a truth-functionally complete logic. We present an operational semantics in SOS-style, and a completeness result for ACP with conditionals and four- valued logic. Completeness is preserved under the restriction to some other non-classical logics.

The valencies of the lanthanides vary more than was once thought. In addition to valencies associated with a half-full shell, there are valencies associated with a quarter- and three-quarter-full shell. This can be explained on the basis of Slater’s theory of many-electron atoms. The same theory explains the variation in complexing constants in the trivalent state. Valency in metallic and organometallic compounds is also discussed.

This is a revised version of a paper delivered in the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, on February 5th, 1998, under the auspices of the North Atlantic Missiology Project, co-ordinated by the University of Cambridge and financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Additionally, this paper was delivered in the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, Oxford, at (...) February 6th, 1998. (shrink)