Duhem used historical arguments to draw philosophical conclusions about the aim and structure of physical theory. He argued against explanatory theories and in favor of theories that provide natural classifications of the phenomena. This paper presents those arguments and, with the benefit of hindsight, uses them as a test case for the prevalent contemporary use of historical arguments to draw philosophical conclusion about science. It argues that Duhem provides us with an illuminating example of philosophy of science developing as a (...) contingent, though natural, response to problems arising in a particular scientific context and under a particular understanding of the history of science in that context. It concludes that the history of science provides little support for interesting theses about the present or future state of science. (shrink)

This article focuses on the conventions that sustain social interaction and argues that they are central to Simon's decision-making theory. Simon clearly identifies two kinds of coordination by convention: behavioral mores that shape human actions, and shared mental models that govern human perceptions. This article argues that Poincaré–Carnap's conventionalism provides powerful support for Simon's theory; it contends that this theory offers a more convincing account of decision and coordination than Lewis' concept of convention. Simon's approach to applying conventionalist logic to (...) social interaction emphasizes the normative role played by mental models in solving coordination problems and considers rationality in terms of both cognitive and moral considerations. By connecting conventional phenomena to social identifications, Simon stresses the resulting complexity of coordination problems. (shrink)

Born in 1918 in New York, awarded a doctorate in analytical chemistry (1944), Leonard K. Nash enjoyed a distinguished career at Harvard, holding a chair of chemistry from 1959 to 1986. Conducting research in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Nash authored successful textbooks, some of which remain in print (e.g. Elements of Chemical Thermodynamics, and Elements of Statistical Thermodynamics).This essay describes the theory of science that Nash developed in a book he published in 1963, The Nature of the Natural Sciences. The (...) present author is of the view that Nash's neglected theory is worth retrieving, as one that is likely to kindle the interest of historians of metascience on several counts. Part of .. (shrink)

What do mathematicians mean when they use terms such as ‘deep’, ‘elegant’, and ‘beautiful’? By applying empirical methods developed by social psychologists, we demonstrate that mathematicians' appraisals of proofs vary on four dimensions: aesthetics, intricacy, utility, and precision. We pay particular attention to mathematical beauty and show that, contrary to the classical view, beauty and simplicity are almost entirely unrelated in mathematics.

The aim of the article is to contribute to the conceptualization of creativity in education. The article makes use of the self-Bildung perspective, which is an up-to-date version of the Neo-humanistic notion of the formation of the personality in order to interpret the original notion of the 'four stages' of the creative process. The conclusion is that in this perspective creativity can be understood as a state of transcendence and a practice of taste. Finally, the article seeks to sketch out (...) a suggestion of the creative capacities that are important to cultivate in education. (shrink)

In 1907 Borel published a remarkable essay on the paradox of the Heap (“Un paradoxe économique: le sophisme du tas de blé et les vérités statistiques”), in which Borel proposes what is likely the first statistical account of vagueness ever written, and where he discusses the practical implications of the sorites paradox, including in economics. Borel’s paper was integrated in his book Le Hasard, published 1914, but has gone mostly unnoticed since its publication. One of the originalities of Borel’s essay (...) is that it puts forward a model of vagueness as imprecision, making particular use of the Gaussian law of measurement errors to model categorization. The aim of our paper is to give a presentation of the historical context of Borel’s essay, to spell out the mathematical details of his model, and to provide a critical assessment of his theory. Three aspects of Borel’s account are particularly discussed: the first concerns the comparison between Borel’s statistical account and posterior degree-theoretic accounts of vagueness. The second concerns the anti-epistemicist flavor of Borel’s approach, whereby the idea of statistical fluctuation is used to undermine the notion of sharp boundary for vague predicates. The third concerns the problematic link between Borel’s model of vagueness as imprecision and the notion of semantic indeterminacy. An English translation of Borel’s original essay is appended to this paper (Erkenntnis, this issue). (shrink)

According to metaphysical tensism, there is an objective, albeit ever changing, present moment corresponding to our phenomenal experiences :635–642, 2013). One of the principle objections to metaphysical tensism has been Einstein’s argument from special relativity, which says that given that the speed of light is constant, there is no absolute simultaneity defined in terms of observations of light rays . In a recent paper, Brogaard and Marlow :635–642, 2013) argue that this objection fails. We argue that Brogaard and Marlow’s argument (...) fails to show that special relativity does not pose a threat to metaphysical tensism. (shrink)

This piece is a commentary on a precis of Maggie Boden's book "The creative mind" published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

The big news about chaos is supposed to be that the smallest of changes in a system can result in very large differences in that system's behavior. The so-called butterfly effect has become one of the most popular images of chaos. The idea is that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Argentina could cause a tornado in Texas three weeks later. By contrast, in an identical copy of the world sans the Argentinian butterfly, no such storm would have arisen (...) in Texas. The mathematical version of this property is known as sensitive dependence. However, it turns out that sensitive dependence is somewhat old news, so some of the implications flowing from it are perhaps not such “big news” after all. Still, chaos studies have highlighted these implications in fresh ways and led to thinking about other implications as well. -/- In addition to exhibiting sensitive dependence, chaotic systems possess two other properties: they are deterministic and nonlinear (Smith 2007). This entry discusses systems exhibiting these three properties and what their philosophical implications might be for theories and theoretical understanding, confirmation, explanation, realism, determinism, free will and consciousness, and human and divine action. (shrink)

Mark Balaguer ha elaborado una peculiar variante del platonismo matemático –denominada ‘full-blooded platonism’ o ‘FBP’– para solucionar el problema de Benacerraf sobre la inaccesibilidad de las entidades abstractas. Según FBP, todos los objetos matemáticos consistentemente caracterizables existen, aunque de modo contingente. En este trabajo quisiera mostrar que la plenitud ontológica y la contingencia modal no pueden converger en una teoría de objetos matemáticos filosóficamente respetable. Para esto argumento que FBP no cubre algunos factores elementales de confiabilidad epistémica y que envuelve (...) un criterio de plenitud tanto matemática como metafísicamente implausible. (shrink)

Mathematicians often speak of conjectures, yet unproved, as probable or well-confirmed by evidence. The Riemann Hypothesis, for example, is widely believed to be almost certainly true. There seems no initial reason to distinguish such probability from the same notion in empirical science. Yet it is hard to see how there could be probabilistic relations between the necessary truths of pure mathematics. The existence of such logical relations, short of certainty, is defended using the theory of logical probability (or objective Bayesianism (...) or non-deductive logic), and some detailed examples of its use in mathematics surveyed. Examples of inductive reasoning in experimental mathematics are given and it is argued that the problem of induction is best appreciated in the mathematical case. (shrink)

How was Poincaré’s conventionalism connected to his relationism? How, in other words, is it the case that the basic principles of geometry and mechanics are, ultimately, freely chosen conventions and that, at the same time, science reveals to us the structure of the world? This lengthy study aims to address these questions by setting Poincaré’s philosophy within its historical context and by examining in detail Poincaré’s developing views about the status and role of conventions in science and the status and (...) role of relations in science. It is argued that Poincaré was a neither a rampant conventionalist nor a pure structuralist. But he was both a conventionalist and a relationist, aiming to delineate a position which allowed room for both freely, but not arbitrarily, chosen constitutive principles of science and the acquisition of objective, though, relational knowledge of the natural world. (shrink)

The relationship between individuals' creativity and their ethical ideologies appears to be complex. Applying Forsyth's (1980, 1992) personal moral philosophy model which consists of two independent ethical ideology dimensions, idealism and relativism, we hypothesized and found support for a positive relationship between creativity and relativism. It appears that creative people are less likely than non-creative people to follow universal rules in their moral decision making. However, contrary to our hypothesis and the general stereotype that creative people are less caring about (...) others, we found a positive relationship between creativity and idealism. These findings indicate that highly creative people are likely to be what Forsyth called "situationists," individuals with both an ethic of caring and a pragmatic moral decision-making style. The finding that creative individuals tend to be situationists, and particularly that they tend to be high in idealism, appears to refute the line of reasoning that argues for a "creative personality" characterized in part by social insensitivity. Understanding the relationship between creativity and ethical ideologies has important implications for researchers, managers and teachers. (shrink)

Causal theory of knowledge has been used by some theoreticians who, dealing with the philosophy of mathematics, touched the subject of mathematical knowledge. Some of them discuss the necessity of the causal condition for justification, which creates the grounds for renewing the old conflict between empiricists and rationalists. Emphasizing the condition of causality as necessary for justifiability, causal theory has provided stimulus for the contemporary empiricists to venture on the so far unquestioned cognitive foundations of mathematics. However, in what sense (...) can we speak about the justifiability as causality when it comes to mathematical knowledge? Can we justify the mathematical statement 2+2=4 by means of causality-perceptibility? Do we need perceptibility, a visual image of apples and marbles we add up in our first mathematics lesson, in order to know that statement? Does the same go with the statement that any two points can be joined by a straight line, and that the sum of angles in any triangle is the angle the measure of which equals the sum of the measures of the two right angles? Even though the major part of this article offers a review of the attitudes of various authors who endeavor to discuss the application of the causal theory to the problem of understanding of mathematical knowledge, it advocates the idea that knowledge expressed in a mathematical statement is acquired and transmitted by evidence. Evidence is by itself a guarantee of truth. It convinces us of the accuracy of mathematical truths. Proving, we find out. The greatest part of what we know is based on evidence of the previous knowledge . Due to the previous knowledge, we can say that knowledge in mathematics is in itself different from the knowledge in empirical sciences, i.e. it does not require causal relation that is considered necessary condition of knowing in those sciences.Uzročna teorija znanja iskorištena je od strane nekih teoretičara koji su se, baveći se filozofijom matematike, dotakli teme matematičkog znanja. Neki od njih govore o nužnosti uzročnog uvjeta za opravdanje, čime se stvaraju uvjeti za obnavljanje starog sukoba empirista i racionalista. Uzročna teorija je, isticanjem uvjeta uzročnosti kao nužnog za opravdanost, dala poticaj suvremenim empiristima da krenu čak i na do tada nedodirljive spoznajne temelje matematike. Međutim, u kom smislu možemo govoriti o opravdanosti kao uzročnosti kad je riječ o matematičkom znanju? Da li uzročnošću-čulnošću možemo opravdati matematički iskaz 2+2=4? Je li nam za znanje tog iskaza neophodna čulnost, vizualna predodžba jabuka ili klikera koje zbrajamo na našim prvim satovima matematike u školi? Stoje li stvari isto i s iskazom da se kroz bilo koje dvije točke može povući točno jedan pravac, ili da je zbroj kutova bilo kojeg trokuta kut čija je mjera jednaka zbroju mjera dvaju pravih kutova? Iako je u ovom radu, uglavnom, dan pregled stavova autora koji pokušavaju govoriti o primjeni uzročne teorije u shvaćanju matematičkog znanja, ideja koja se podržava u njemu jest da je znanje, iskazano matematičkim tvrđenjem, dobiveno i preneseno dokazom. Dokaz, sam po sebi, jamac je istine. On nas uvjerava u točnost matematičkih tvrdnji. Dokazujući spoznajemo. Najveći dio onoga što znamo zasnovano je dokazom na prethodnim znanjima . Zbog prethodnog možemo reći da je znanje u matematici po svojoj prirodi drugačije od znanja u empirijskim znanostima, to jest da ne iziskuje uzročnu vezu koja se smatra nužnim uvjetom za znanje u tim znanostima. (shrink)

The objective of this dissertation is to write the first pages of the biography of paleobiological data. I will focus on i) the genesis of this kind of data as it emerged in German stratigraphy and paleontology between the mid 19th and the early 20th centuries and ii) how the conceptualization of the paleontological data was reformulated and taken as the starting point for studying the patterns of the diversity of life in deep time between the 1940s and 70s. This (...) is the turning point that marks the ‘coming into being’ of specifically paleobiological data. I will reconstruct in detail how it was possible to transform an incomplete and misleading material object — the fossil record that can be admired in a museum —into a no longer misleading source of knowledge. I will namely describe the genesis of the paleobiological practice by retracing the encounter of two different approaches to the fossil record between the mid 19th and early 20th centuries in German academia and their later diffusion into English-speaking countries. (shrink)