Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology, and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics, and Geographic Information Science (GIS). Effective scientific theories magnify understanding, help supply legitimate explanations, and assist in formulating predictions. Moving from their (...) knowledge-producing representational functions to their interventional roles (Hacking 1983), theories are integral to building technologies used within consumer, industrial, and scientific milieus. -/- This entry explores the structure of scientific theories from the perspective of the Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Views. Each of these views answers questions such as the following in unique ways. What is the best characterization of the composition and function of scientific theory? How is theory linked with world? Which philosophical tools can and should be employed in describing and reconstructing scientific theory? Is an understanding of practice and application necessary for a comprehension of the core structure of a scientific theory? How are these three views ultimately related? (shrink)

In earlier publications Jaakko Hintikka has introduced the interrogative model of inquiry and studied some of its applications.1 At its simplest, the interrogative model takes the form of a game between a player known as the Inquirer and a source of information we call Nature. The inquirer is trying to derive a conclusion C from a given set of premises T by standard deductive means augmented by additional information gained from Nature. (We can think of C as a set of (...) formulas related disjunctively to each other.) The inquirer may obtain this additional information by means of questions put to Nature. The answers to these questions, when available, are then added to the premise set T. When a question is answerable but no true answer is available, Nature may respond with a false answer.The deductive steps employed are subject to certain limitations. For instance, if the derivation is being carried out in a Beth-style tableau system, we require that the deductive steps obey the subformula principle.2. (shrink)

In the twentieth century, no person epitomized more dramatically the “Renaissance mind” than Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001). In aworking life spanning over 60 years, Simon made seminal contributions to administrative theory, axiomatic foundations of physics, economics, sociology, econometrics, cognitive psychology, logic of scientific discovery, and artificial intelligence. Simon's life of the mind, thus, affords nothing less than a “laboratory” in which to observe and examine at close quarters the phenomenon ofmultidisciplinary creativity. In this paper, we attempt to shed some light (...) on the nature of Simon's creativity and the nature of his particular Renaissance mind. In particular, we have attempted here to articulate thecognitive styleunderlying Simon's multidisciplinary creativity. (shrink)