This book presents a collection of studies by Romanian philosophers, addressing foundational issues currently debated in contemporary philosophy of science. It offers a historical survey of the tradition of scientific philosophy in Romania. It examines some problems in the foundations of logic, mathematics, linguistics, the natural and social sciences. Among the more specific topics, it discusses scientific explanation, models, and mechanisms, as well as memory, artifacts, and rules of research. The book is useful to those interested in the philosophy of (...) real science, but also to those interested in Romanian philosophy. (shrink)

Dutch book arguments have been applied to beliefs about the outcomes of measurements of quantum systems, but not to beliefs about quantum objects prior to measurement. In this paper, we prove a quantum version of the probabilists' Dutch book theorem that applies to both sorts of beliefs: roughly, if ideal beliefs are given by vector states, all and only Born-rule probabilities avoid Dutch books. This theorem and associated results have implications for operational and realist interpretations of the logic of a (...) Hilbert lattice. In the latter case, we show that the defenders of the eigenstate-value orthodoxy face a trilemma. Those who favor vague properties avoid the trilemma, admitting all and only those beliefs about quantum objects that avoid Dutch books. (shrink)

According to quantum mechanics, statements about the future made by sentient beings like us are, in general, neither true nor false; they must satisfy a many-valued logic. I propose that the truth value of such a statement should be identified with the probability that the event it describes will occur. After reviewing the history of related ideas in logic, I argue that it gives an understanding of probability which is particularly satisfactory for use in quantum mechanics. I construct a lattice (...) of future-tense propositions, with truth values in the interval [0, 1], and derive logical properties of these truth values given by the usual quantum-mechanical formula for the probability of a history. (shrink)