Understanding Perspectivism PDF Download

Author: Michela Massimi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351383396
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
This edited collection is the first of its kind to explore the view called perspectivism in philosophy of science. The book brings together an array of essays that reflect on the methodological promises and scientific challenges of perspectivism in a variety of fields such as physics, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and cancer research, just as a few examples. What are the advantages of using a plurality of perspectives in a given scientific field and for interdisciplinary research? Can different perspectives be integrated? What is the relation between perspectivism, pluralism, and pragmatism? These ten new essays by top scholars in the field offer a polyphonic journey towards understanding the view called ‘perspectivism’ and its relevance to science.

Author: Ronald N. Giere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226292142
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Many people assume that the claims of scientists are objective truths. But historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have long argued that scientific claims reflect the particular historical, cultural, and social context in which those claims were made. The nature of scientific knowledge is not absolute because it is influenced by the practice and perspective of human agents. Scientific Perspectivism argues that the acts of observing and theorizing are both perspectival, and this nature makes scientific knowledge contingent, as Thomas Kuhn theorized forty years ago. Using the example of color vision in humans to illustrate how his theory of “perspectivism” works, Ronald N. Giere argues that colors do not actually exist in objects; rather, color is the result of an interaction between aspects of the world and the human visual system. Giere extends this argument into a general interpretation of human perception and, more controversially, to scientific observation, conjecturing that the output of scientific instruments is perspectival. Furthermore, complex scientific principles—such as Maxwell’s equations describing the behavior of both the electric and magnetic fields—make no claims about the world, but models based on those principles can be used to make claims about specific aspects of the world. Offering a solution to the most contentious debate in the philosophy of science over the past thirty years, Scientific Perspectivism will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of science.

Author: Ana-Maria Crețu
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030270416
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
This open access book – as the title suggests – explores some of the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of perspectivism. Perspectivism has recently emerged in philosophy of science as an interesting new position in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. But there is a lot more to perspectivism than discussions in philosophy of science so far have suggested. Perspectivism is a much broader view that emphasizes how our knowledge (in particular our scientific knowledge of nature) is situated; it is always from a human vantage point (as opposed to some Nagelian "view from nowhere"). This edited collection brings together a diverse team of established and early career scholars across a variety of fields (from the history of philosophy to epistemology and philosophy of science). The resulting nine essays trace some of the seminal ideas of perspectivism back to Kant, Nietzsche, the American Pragmatists, and Putnam, while the second part of the book tackles issues concerning the relation between perspectivism, relativism, and standpoint theories, and the implications of perspectivism for epistemological debates about veritism, epistemic normativity and the foundations of human knowledge.

Author: Bo Mou
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048126231
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
I have been thinking about the philosophical issue of truth for more than two decades. It is one of several fascinating philosophical issues that motivated me to change my primary re ective interest to philosophy after receiving BS in mathem- ics in 1982. Some serious academic work in this connection started around the late eighties when I translated into Chinese a dozen of Donald Davidson’s representative essays on truth and meaning and when I assumed translator for Adam Morton who gave a series of lectures on the issue in Beijing (1988), which was co-sponsored by my then institution (Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Science). I have loved the issue both for its own sake (as one speci c major issue in the phil- ophy of language and metaphysics) and for the sake of its signi cant involvement in many philosophical issues in different subjects of philosophy. Having been attracted to the analytic approach, I was then interested in looking at the issue both from the points of view of classical Chinese philosophy and Marxist philosophy, two major styles or frameworks of doing philosophy during that time in China, and from the point of view of contemporary analytic philosophy, which was then less recognized in the Chinese philosophical circle.

Author: Jeff Malpas
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262632478
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has made major contributions to aesthetic theory, Plato and Hegel studies, humanistic studies, and the philosophy of history. A student of Martin Heidegger, Gadamer took up and developed a number of central Heideggerian insights. He also had productive public debates with contemporaries such as Emilio Betti and Jürgen Habermas. The shape of contemporary hermeneutics is due almost entirely to Gadamer's influence, and his magnum opus, Truth and Method, is considered one of the great philosophical works of the twentieth century.This book is dedicated to Gadamer in honor of his hundredth birthday, in 2000. The essays provide a measure of the classical character of Gadamer's work by showing the breadth of engagement his ideas have provoked. As in Gadamer's own life and work, dialogue and conversation figure as important themes in all of the essays. While they encompass a diversity of philosophical perspectives, interests, and styles, the essays also suggest the ever-present possibility of dialogue across language and tradition and of the formation of new modes of discourse and philosophizing.

Author: Michela Massimi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197555624
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
"What does it mean to be a realist about science if one takes seriously the view that scientific knowledge is always perspectival, namely historically and culturally situated? In this book, Michela Massimi articulates an original answer to this question. The book begins with an exploration of how scientific communities often resort to several models and a plurality of practices in some areas of inquiry, drawing on examples from nuclear physics, climate science, and developmental psychology. Taking this plurality in science as a starting point, Massimi explains the perspectival nature of scientific representation, the role of scientific models as inferential blueprints, and the variety of scientific realism that naturally accompanies such a view. Perspectival realism is realism about phenomena (rather than about theories or unobservable entities). The book defends this novel realist view, which places epistemic communities and their situated knowledge center stage. The result is a portrait of scientific knowledge as a collaborative inquiry, where the reliability of science is made possible by a plurality of historically and culturally situated scientific perspectives. Along the way, Massimi offers insights into the nature of scientific modelling, scientific knowledge qua modal knowledge, data-to-phenomena inferences, and natural kinds as sortal concepts. Perspectival realism is ultimately realism that takes the multicultural nature of science seriously and couples it with cosmopolitan duties about how one ought to think about scientific knowledge and the distribution of the benefits resulting from scientific advancements"--

Author: M. Chirimuuta
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262378639
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
An exciting, new framework for interpreting the philosophical significance of neuroscience. All science needs to simplify, but when the object of research is something as complicated as the brain, this challenge can stretch the limits of scientific possibility. In fact, in The Brain Abstracted, an avowedly “opinionated” history of neuroscience, M. Chirimuuta argues that, due to the brain’s complexity, neuroscientific theories have only captured partial truths—and “neurophilosophy” is unlikely to be achieved. Looking at the theory and practice of neuroscience, both past and present, Chirimuuta shows how the science has been shaped by the problem of brain complexity and the need, in science, to make things as simple as possible. From this history, Chirimuuta draws lessons for debates in philosophy of science over the limits and definition of science and in philosophy of mind over explanations of consciousness and the mind-body problem. The Brain Abstracted is the product of a historical rupture that has become visible in the twenty-first century, between the “classical” scientific approach, which seeks simple, intelligible principles underlying the manifest complexity of nature, and a data-driven engineering approach, which dispenses with the search for elegant, explanatory laws and models. In the space created by this rupture, Chirimuuta finds grounds for theoretical and practical humility. Her aim in The Brain Abstracted is not to reform neuroscience, or offer advice to neuroscientists, but rather to interpret their work—and to suggest a new framework for interpreting the philosophical significance of neuroscience.

Author: Collin Rice
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262365839
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
An examination of how scientists deliberately and justifiably use pervasive distortions of relevant features to explain and understand natural phenomena. A fundamental rule of logic is that in order for an argument to provide good reasons for its conclusion, the premises of the argument must be true. In this book, Collin Rice shows how the practice of science repeatedly, pervasively, and deliberately violates this principle. Rice argues that scientists strategically use distortions that misrepresent relevant features of natural phenomena in order to explain and understand--and that they use these distortions deliberately and justifiably in order to discover truths that would be otherwise inaccessible. Countering the standard emphasis on causation, accurate representation, and decomposition of science into its accurate and inaccurate parts, Rice shows that science's epistemic achievements can still be factive despite their being produced through the use of holistically distorted scientific representations. Indeed, he argues, this distortion is one of the most widely employed and fruitful tools used in scientific theorizing. Marshalling a range of case studies, Rice contends that many explanations in science are noncausal, and he presents an alternate view of explanation that captures the variety of noncausal explanations found across the sciences. He proposes an alternative holistic distortion view of idealized models, connecting it to physicists' concept of a universality class; shows how universality classes can overcome some of the challenges of multiscale modeling; and offers accounts of explanation, idealization, modeling, and understanding.

Author: André Lecours
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9789052014876
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Although nationalism and ethnicity have long been associated with minority populations, an emerging literature looks at how the state and/or a majority group interact with minorities, and how, behind the expression of the nation promoted by the state, there is often an ethnic core. This book contributes to this emerging literature on dominant nationalism and dominant ethnicity by presenting multidisciplinary contributions that center on how states deploy their own nationalism, and how the state's nation-building and nation-consolidating processes are very often spearheaded by a specific ethnocultural group. It focuses on the interrelated issues of identity, federalism and democracy. Dominant nationalism and ethnicity involve the projection, the promotion, and sometimes the imposition by the state and/or a dominant group of an identity, which can be challenged, negotiated and/or resisted by minority groups. This brings questions for democratic practices, since it raises the issue of self-rule. Since dominant nationalism and ethnicity are shaped by ideas and institutions relating to the territorial division of power, federalism is crucial for understanding these phenomena. The book is amongst the first to look at dominant nationalism and ethnicity from historical, theoretical, empirical and normative perspectives.

Author: José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031446119
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This comprehensive volume discusses the patterns and processes analyzed in macroecology with a distinct look at the theoretical and methodological issues underlying the discipline as well as deeper epistemological matters. The book serves as a synthesis of macroecological literature that has been published since Brown and Maurer proposed and defined the term “macroecology” in 1989. Author José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho draws from the different disciplines and branches (ecology, evolutionary biology, physiology, behavioral sciences, climatology, and paleontology) that make up macroecology to present a full, holistic picture of where the discipline stands. Through ten chapters, Diniz-Filho moves from a discussion of what macroecology actually is to macroecological modeling to the more applied side of the discipline, covering topics such as richness and diversity patterns and patterns in body size. The book concludes with a synthesis of how macroecological research is done in a theoretical and operational sense as well as unifying explanations for each of the macroecological patterns discussed, moving on to evaluate which theories and models are still useful and which ones can be abandoned. The book is intended for academics, young researchers and students interested in macroecology and conservation biogeography. In addition, because of the integrative nature of macroecology and the theoretical and methodological background in the book, it can be of interest to researchers working in related fields including but not limited to ecology and evolutionary biology.