Author: Bas C. Van Fraassen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198244271
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories.

Author: James Nguyen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009007343
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the notion of scientific representation. It does so by focussing on an important class of scientific representations, namely scientific models. Models are important in the scientific process because scientists can study a model to discover features of reality. But what does it mean for something to represent something else? This is the question discussed in this Element. The authors begin by disentangling different aspects of the problem of representation and then discuss the dominant accounts in the philosophical literature: the resemblance view and inferentialism. They find them both wanting and submit that their own preferred option, the so-called DEKI account, not only eschews the problems that beset these conceptions, but further provides a comprehensive answer to the question of how scientific representation works. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Author: Bas C. van Fraassen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300127960
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, and second in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy.

Author: Bas C. van Fraassen
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191519995
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists do so in terms of symmetry and invariance. This book argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. The author analyses and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe that there are. He argues that we should discard the idea of law as an inadequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the book develops the empiricist view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. Concepts of symmetry, transformation, and invariance illuminate the structure of such models. A central role is played in science by symmetry arguments, and it is shown how these function also in the philosophical analysis of probability. The advocated approach presupposes no realism about laws or necessities in nature.

Author: Bas C. Van Fraassen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198239802
Category : Quantum theory
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
The author argues that quantum theory admits a plurality of interpretations, each aiding further understanding of the theory, but also advocating specifically the Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation. That variant is applied to topics like the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and the problem of 'identical' particles.

Author: Bradley John Monton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199218846
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Thirteen specially written essays discuss topics from the work of the leading philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen. The unifying theme is empiricism. Included is an extensive and intriguing reply by van Fraassen, in which he develops his views further, and offers new insights into the nature of science, empiricism, and philosophy itself.

Author: Bas C. Van Fraassen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226106543
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Churchland and Hooker have collected ten papers by prominent philosophers of science which challenge van Fraassen's thesis from a variety of realist perspectives. Together with van Fraassen's extensive reply . . . these articles provide a comprehensive picture of the current debate in philosophy of science between realists and anti-realists."—Jeffrey Bub and David MacCallum, Foundations of Physics Letters

Author: Hans Halvorson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107110998
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Reconsiders the role of formal logic in the analytic approach to philosophy, using cutting-edge mathematical techniques to elucidate twentieth-century debates.

Author: Andreas Berg-Hildebrand
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110326221
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
"Participation in the Münstersche Vorlesungen zur Philosophie 2005 was an honor and a genuine intellectual pleasure for me. The symposium, with all its contributions by the Münster faculty and students, was a wonderfully valuable experience. I can hardly do justice to its spirit of free discussion, or adequately express my thanks, by these short replies. But I think that they will testify clearly to the stimulation the symposium provided and to how much I learned from this exchange." Bas van Fraassen

Author: Isabelle F. Peschard
Publisher: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science
ISBN: 9781517905347
Category : Experimental design
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
An innovative, multifaceted approach to scientific experiments as designed by and shaped through interaction with the modeling process The role of scientific modeling in mediation between theories and phenomena is a critical topic within the philosophy of science, touching on issues from climate modeling to synthetic models in biology, high energy particle physics, and cognitive sciences. Offering a radically new conception of the role of data in the scientific modeling process as well as a new awareness of the problematic aspects of data, this cutting-edge volume offers a multifaceted view on experiments as designed and shaped in interaction with the modeling process. Contributors address such issues as the construction of models in conjunction with scientific experimentation; the status of measurement and the function of experiment in the identification of relevant parameters; how the phenomena under study are reconceived when accounted for by a model; and the interplay between experimenting, modeling, and simulation when results do not mesh. Highlighting the mediating role of models and the model-dependence (as well as theory-dependence) of data measurement, this volume proposes a normative and conceptual innovation in scientific modeling--that the phenomena to be investigated and modeled must not be precisely identified at the start but specified during the course of the interactions arising between experimental and modeling activities. Contributors: Nancy D. Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Anthony Chemero, U of Cincinnati; Ronald N. Giere, U of Minnesota; Jenann Ismael, U of Arizona; Tarja Knuuttila, U of South Carolina; Andrea Loettgers, U of Bern, Switzerland; Deborah Mayo, Virginia Tech; Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan U; Paul Teller, U of California, Davis; Michael Weisberg, U of Pennsylvania; Eric Winsberg, U of South Florida.