Merrilee Salmon

A reprint of the Prentice-Hall edition of 1992. Prepared by nine distinguished philosophers and historians of science, this thoughtful reader represents a cooperative effort to provide an introduction to the philosophy of science focused on cultivating an understanding of both the workings of science and its historical and social context. Selections range from discussions of topics in general methodology to a sampling of foundational problems in various physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences. Each chapter contains a list of suggested readings and study questions.

Coauthored with Merrilee Salmon, addresses archaeologists and other anthropologists interested in the nature of scientific explanation. A group called the new archaeologists, concerned to assure the scientific status of archaeology, had become convinced that a sine qua non of science is the construction of explanations conforming to Hempel's D‐N model. The authors aim was to show that a much wider class of covering law models of explanation is available, and that others in this set are more suitable than the D‐N model for archaeology and anthropology. At the same time, they show that the so‐called systems approach, advocated by other archaeologists, has all of the shortcomings of the D‐N model without offering improvements in exchange.

This work is divided into two parts. Part I contains sixteen critical es says by prominent philosophers and computer scientists. Their papers offer insightful, well-argued contemporary views of a broad range of topics that lie at the heart of philosophy in the second half of the twen tieth century: semantics and ontology, induction, the nature of prob ability, the foundations of science, scientific objectivity, the theory of naming, the logic of conditionals, simulation modeling, the relatiOn be tween minds and machines, and the nature of rules that guide be havior. In this volume honoring Arthur W. Burks, the philosophical breadth of his work is thus manifested in the diverse aspects of that work chosen for discussion and development by the contributors to his Festschrift. Part II consists of a book-length essay by Burks in which he lays out his philosophy of logical mechanism while responding to the papers in Part I. In doing so, he provides a unified and coherent context for the range of problems raised in Part I, and he highlights interesting relationships among the topics that might otherwise have gone un noticed. Part II is followed by a bibliography of Burks's published works.

In every poll asking the public to rank professions by prestige, scientists excel. They command great respect and earn high marks for trustworthiness. They consistently compare well to judges and rank much higher than lawmakers. Scientists also outrank polltakers, which I suppose reveals the public’s view that polls are not scientific. In democratic societies, however, despite general esteem for scientists, political authorities and members of the public often ignore or override what scientists have to say about science. In what follows, I want to consider three major roles that experts play in democratic societies, and to take a brief look at how experts handle some cases when their authority is challenged.

Designed for students with no prior training in logic, INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC AND CRITICAL THINKING offers an accessible treatment of logic that enhances understanding of reasoning in everyday life. The text begins with an introduction to arguments. After some linguistic preliminaries, the text presents a detailed analysis of inductive reasoning and associated fallacies. This order of presentation helps to motivate the use of formal methods in the subsequent sections on deductive logic and fallacies. Lively and straightforward prose assists students in gaining facility with the sometimes challenging concepts of logic. By combining a sensitive treatment of ordinary language arguments with a simple but rigorous exposition of basic principles of logic, the text develops students' understanding of the relationships between logic and language, and strengthens their skills in critical thinking. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

This work discusses an empirical study of reasoning as it occurs in conversations. Reasoning in this context has features not usually accounted for in standard methods for describing argumentation (e.g., Toulmin, (1964), Toulmin, Rieke, and Janik (1984)). For example, insufficient attention has been paid to challenges which can be used to shift the ground of an argument and to the development of multiple conversational grounds. Moreover, even though the value of cooperative efforts in building arguments is widely recognized, more needs to be said about analyzing co-constructed arguments. This empirical work was primarily descriptive and concerned with how people construct arguments in conversations, but one goal of the study was to lay groundwork for comparing the quality of reasoning in conversations which differ with respect to whether the arguments they contain are primarily the contributions of individuals or are genuinely co-constructed arguments

Most discussions of causal explanations of behavior focus on the problem of whether it makes sense to regard reasons as causes of human behavior, whether there can be laws connecting reasons with behavior, and the like. This essay discusses explanations of human behavior that do not appeal to reasons. Such explanations can be found in several areas of the social sciences. Moreover, these explanations are both causal and non-reductionist. Historical linguists, for example, offer causal explanations of changes in how words are pronouncedand linguistic change in generalwithout appealing to human intentions. I use examples from linguistics, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology to discuss the importance of this sort of explanation and to examine its compatibility with recent philosophical accounts of causation.