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57Davidson on explanationPhilosophical Studies 31 (February): 141-145. 1977.Davidson's defective defense of the consistency of (1) the causal interaction of mental and physical events, (2) the backing law thesis on causation, (3) the impossibility of lawfully explaining mental events is repaired by closer attention to the description-Relativity of explanation. Davidson wrongly allows that particular mental events are explainable when particular identities to physical events are known. The author argues that such identities are powerless to affect what features a given l…Read more
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47Thomas Kuhn (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2002.Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes to many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is probably the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science of the last 25 years, and has become something of a cultural icon. His concepts of paradigm, paradigm change and incommensurability have changed the way we think about science. This volume offers an introduc…Read more
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755Modeling and Inferring in ScienceIn Emiliano Ippoliti, Fabio Sterpetti & Thomas Nickles (eds.), Models and Inferences in Science, Springer. pp. 1-9. 2016.Science continually contributes new models and rethinks old ones. The way inferences are made is constantly being re-evaluated. The practice and achievements of science are both shaped by this process, so it is important to understand how models and inferences are made. But, despite the relevance of models and inference in scientific practice, these concepts still remain contro-versial in many respects. The attempt to understand the ways models and infer-ences are made basically opens two roads.…Read more
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60Scientific Problems and ConstraintsPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978. 1978.In this paper the relation between scientific problems and the constraints on their solutions is explored. First the historical constraints on the solution to the blackbody radiation problem are set out. The blackbody history is used as a guide in sketching a working taxonomy of constraints, which distinguishes various kinds of reductive and nonreductive constraints. Finally, this discussion is related to some work in erotetic logic. The hypothesis that scientific problems can be identified with…Read more
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16John Lukacs. At the End of an Age. x + 230 pp., table, index. New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 2002. $22.95 (review)Isis 94 (2): 407-408. 2003.
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Scientific Discovery, Logic and Rationality. . Scientific Discovery : Case StudiesTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 44 (1): 169-170. 1982.
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1From natural philosophy to metaphilosophy of scienceIn P. Achinstein & R. Kagon (eds.), Kelvin’s Baltimore Lectures and Modern Theoretical Physics, Mit Press. pp. 507--541. 1987.
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12Review of Gary L. Hardcastle (ed.), Alan W. Richardson (ed.), Logical Empiricism in North America: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, XVIII (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (7). 2004.
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5Criticism and the History of Science: Kuhn's, Lakatos's, and Feyerabend's Criticisms of Critical Rationalism. Gunnar Andersson (review)Isis 87 (2): 396-397. 1996.
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41Truth or Consequences? Generative versus Consequential Justification in SciencePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988. 1988.Pure consequentialists hold that all theoretical justification derives from testing the consequences of hypotheses, while generativists maintain that reasoning (some feature of) the hypothesis from we already know is an important form of justification. The strongest form of justification (they claim) is an idealized discovery argument. In the guise of H-D methodology, consequentialism is widely supposed to have defeated generativism during the 19th century. I argue that novel prediction fails to…Read more
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23Positive Science and DiscoverabilityPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.Although seriously defective, 17th-century ideas about discovery, justification, and positive science are not as hopeless, useless, and out of date as many philosophers assume. They appear to underlie modern scientific practice. The generationist view of justification interestingly links justification with discovery issues while employing a concept of empirical support quite foreign to the modern, consequentialist concept, which identifies empirical evidence with favorable test results (predicti…Read more
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79Life at the frontier: The relevance of heuristic appraisal to policy (review)Axiomathes 19 (4): 441-464. 2009.Economic competitive advantage depends on innovation, which in turn requires pushing back the frontiers of various kinds of knowledge. Although understanding how knowledge grows ought to be a central topic of epistemology, epistemologists and philosophers of science have given it insufficient attention, even deliberately shunning the topic. Traditional confirmation theory and general epistemology offer little help at the frontier, because they are mostly retrospective rather than prospective. No…Read more
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22Scientific Discovery: Case StudiesTaylor & Francis. 1980.The history of science is articulated by moments of discovery. Yet, these 'moments' are not simple or isolated events in science. Just as a scientific discovery illuminates our understanding of nature or of society, and reveals new connections among phenomena, so too does the history of scientific activity and the analysis of scientific reasoning illuminate the processes which give rise to moments of discovery and the complex network of consequences which follow upon such moments. Understanding …Read more
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419Models and Inferences in Science (edited book)Springer. 2016.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 …Read more
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79Beyond divorce: Current status of the discovery debatePhilosophy of Science 52 (2): 177-206. 1985.Does the viability of the discovery program depend on showing either (1) that methods of generating new problem solutions, per se, have special probative weight (the per se thesis); or, (2) that the original conception of an idea is logically continuous with its justification (anti-divorce thesis)? Many writers have identified these as the key issues of the discovery debate. McLaughlin, Pera, and others recently have defended the discovery program by attacking the divorce thesis, while Laudan ha…Read more
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26On the independence of singular causal explanation in social science: ArchaeologyPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 7 (2): 163-187. 1977.
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36Scientific Problems: Three Empiricist ModelsPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980. 1980.One component of a viable account of scientific inquiry is a defensible conception of scientific problems. This paper specifies some logical and conceptual requirements that an acceptable account of scientific problems must meet as well as indicating some features that a study of scientific inquiry indicates scientific problems have. On the basis of these requirements and features, three standard empiricist models of problems are examined and found wanting. Finally a constraint inclusion-model o…Read more