Thomas Nickles

The last forty years have produced a dramatic reversal in leading accounts of science. Once thought necessary to (explain) scientific progress, a rigid method of science is now widely considered impossible. Study of products yields to study of processes and practices, .unity gives way to diversity, generality to particularity, logic to luck, and final justification to heuristic scaffolding. I sketch the story, from Bacon and Descartes to the present, of the decline and fall of traditional scientific method, conceived as The Central Planning Bureau for Science or as Rationality Czar. I defend a deflationary account of method and of rational judgment,. with emphasis on heuristic appraisal and cognitive economy.

The book answers long-standing questions on scientific modeling and inference across multiple perspectives and disciplines, including logic, mathematics, physics and medicine. The different chapters cover a variety of issues, such as the role models play in scientific practice; the way science shapes our concept of models; ways of modeling the pursuit of scientific knowledge; the relationship between our concept of models and our concept of science. The book also discusses models and scientific explanations; models in the semantic view of theories; the applicability of mathematical models to the real world and their effectiveness; the links between models and inferences; and models as a means for acquiring new knowledge. It analyzes different examples of models in physics, biology, mathematics and engineering. Written for researchers and graduate students, it provides a cross-disciplinary reference guide to the notion and the use of models and inferences in science.

Reduction was once a central topic in philosophy of science. I claim that it remains important, especially when applied to problems and problem-solutions rather than only to large theory-complexes. Without attempting a comprehensive classification, I discuss various kinds of problem reductions and similar relations, illustrating them, inter alia, in terms of the blackbody problem and early quantization problems. Kuhn's early work is suggestive here both for structuralist theory of science and for the line I prefer to take. My central claims in the paper are (1) that problem reduction is important in its own right and does not "reduce" to theory reduction and (2) that problem reduction is generally more important than theory reduction to methodology as the "control theory" of inquiry.