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65Handbook of Epistemology (edited book)Kluwer Academic. 2004.The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook, all by leading experts in the field, provide the most extensive treatment of various epistemological problems, ...
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77Realism in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (edited book)Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2003.Realism in Action is a selection of essays written by leading representatives in the fields of action theory and philosophy of mind, philosophy of the social sciences and especially the nature of social action, and of epistemology and philosophy of science. Practical reason, reasons and causes in action theory, intending and trying, and folk-psychological explanation are some of the topics discussed by these leading participants. A particular emphasis is laid on trust, commitments and social ins…Read more
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34Abduction with Dialogical and Trialogical MeansLogic Journal of the IGPL 14 (2): 137-150. 2006.In this paper we maintain that abductive inferential processes should be embedded to a more general outlook on human cognition. Abduction has clear a.nities to the so-called interrogative model of inquiry in which inquiry and reasoning are conceptualized as a dialogue. We think, in addition, that dialogicality must be broadened to a “trialogical” framework which means a threefold relationship with mediating artefacts where the inquirer, other inquirers , and the object of knowledge are inextrica…Read more
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15Approaching truth: essays in honour of Ilkka Niiniluoto (edited book)College Publications. 2007.Ilkka Niiniluoto, a distinguished philosopher of science, has been a tirelesspokesman for scientific realism and reason more generally. Trained in the tradition of the Finnish school of inductive logic he has refined the notion of truthlikeness (verisimilitude) to make the realist idea scientific progress mathematically exact. Niiniluotos main technical works are included in his books Is Science Progressive? (1984) and Truthlikeness (1987), but his most recent general defense of scientific reali…Read more
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Eino Kaila on the Aristotelian and Galilean traditions in scienceIn Ilkka Niiniluoto & Sami Pihlström (eds.), Reappraisals of Eino Kaila's philosophy, Philosophical Society of Finland. 2012.
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Structuralism and the Interrogative Model of InquiryIn Wolfgang Balzer & Carles Ulises Moulines (eds.), Structuralist theory of science: focal issues, new results, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 45--47. 1996.
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4Realism in Archaeology – A Philosophical PerspectiveIn Wenceslao J. Gonzalez (ed.), New Approaches to Scientific Realism, De Gruyter. pp. 365-388. 2020.
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1The Socratic Tradition: Questioning as Philosophy and as Method. Texts in philosophy (edited book)College Publications. 2010.
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12Argument, Inference and Reasoning — Integrating Induction and DeductionVienna Circle Institute Yearbook 11 121-133. 2004.In the middle of a conference on the logic of science, an eminent biologist once said: “Does it not bother you guys that we scientists do not use any logic at all.” This statement was meant to be a friendly provocation, but there also was a serious message. Scientists often say that the logical analyses are exercises in formal logic and fail to illuminate what the scientists are doing, actual scientific practice. This recurring complaint, although not completely as I will suggest, has not gone u…Read more
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54On the Logic of Why-QuestionsPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.The paper explores two ways in which the logic of questions might aid in the understanding of explanations. First, the "logic" of question-answer sequences imposes constraints on what answers are acceptable for an inquirer. Secondly, there are field- specific type-requirements built into questions. There is always more to a question than meets the potential answerer's ear. It is argued that, since there are nonepistemic presuppositions of why-questions, there are no interesting necessary and suf…Read more
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32How to Put Questions to NatureRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 27 267-284. 1990.In this paper I propose to examine, and in part revive, a time-honoured perspective to inquiry in general and scientific explanation in particular. The perspective is to view inquiry as a search for answers to questions. If there is anything that deserves to be called a working scientist's view of his or her daily work, it surely is that he or she phrases questions and attempts to find satisfactory answers to them
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42Darwin's long and short argumentsPhilosophy of Science 57 (4): 677-689. 1990.Doren Recker has criticized the prevailing accounts of Darwin's argument for the theory of natural selection in the Origin of Species. In this note I argue that Recker fails to distinguish between a deductive short argument for the principle of natural selection, and a non-deductive, long argument which aims at establishing that the principle has explanatory power in the various domains of application. I shall try to show that the semantic view of theories, especially in its structuralist form, …Read more
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1The Interrogative Model of Inquiry in Evolutionary StudiesActa Philosophica Fennica 49 473-487. 1990.
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59Reasoning to hypotheses: Where do questions come?Foundations of Science 9 (3): 249-266. 2004.Detectives and scientists are in the business of reasoning from observations to explanations. This they often do by raising cunning questionsduring their inquiries. But to substantiate this claim we need to know how questions arise and how they are nurtured into more specific hypotheses. I shall discuss what the problem is, and then introduce the so-called interrogative model of inquiry which makes use of an explicit logic of questions. On this view, a discovery processes can be represented as a…Read more
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20Knowing and MakingGrazer Philosophische Studien 49 (1): 121-134. 1994.Jaakko Hintikka's Kantianism in philosophy of logic and mathematics is known to go further than Kant's own, for he argues that mathematical reasoning involves the "language-games" of seeking and finding. Therefore, logic mirrors the structure of this activity. But Hintikka also pushes the Copemican Revolution further to epistemology and philosophy of science. He agrees that "reason has insight only into what which it produces after a plan of ist own", but gives the idea a new logical turn. Kant …Read more
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11Explanation: The Fifth DecadePoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 51 225-238. 1997.
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37The interrogative model of inquiry and computer-supported collaborative learningScience & Education 11 (1): 25-43. 2002.
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19Separating problems from their backgrounds: a question-theoretic proposalCommunication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 18 (1-2). 1985.
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37In Search of Explanations: from Why-questions to Shakespearean QuestionsPhilosophica 51 (1): 55-81. 1993.
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16Two Interrogative Models of Scientific InquiryPhilosophie Et Culture: Actes du XVIIe Congrès Mondial de Philosophie 4 777-780. 1988.
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15Selectivity and Theory ChoicePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986. 1986.Several writers have maintained that the Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science amounts, in part, to an increased appreciation of the role of value judgments and decisions in theory appraisal. This paper argues that, Laudan's recent skeptical remarks notwithstanding, recourse to subjective criteria in the application and weighing of shared choice criteria makes good sense. The paper also shows how the structuralist theory-notion, which should be congenial to Kuhn on independent grounds, hel…Read more
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31Matti Sintonen, Review of Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge by Deborah Mayo (review)Philosophy of Science 65 (2): 370-372. 1998.
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From the Science of Logic to the Logic of SciencePoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 51 1-4. 1997.
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University of HelsinkiDepartment of Philosophy (Theoretical Philosophy, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy in Swedish)Retired faculty