Not since Ernest Nagel’s 1939 monograph on the theory of probability has there been a comprehensive elementary survey of the philosophical problems of probablity and induction. This is an authoritative and up-to-date treatment of the subject, and yet it is relatively brief and nontechnical. Hume’s skeptical arguments regarding the justification of induction are taken as a point of departure, and a variety of traditional and contemporary ways of dealing with this problem are considered. The author then sets forth his own (...) criteria of adequacy for interpretations of probability. Utilizing these criteria he analyzes contemporary theories of probability, as well as the older classical and subjective interpretations. (shrink)

Review of T. S. Kuhn's The Essential Tension.

This book presents a clear and critical view of the orthodox logical empiricist tradition, pointing the way to significant developments for the understanding of science both as research and as culture.

This book is Dewey's most fully developed treatment of logic as the theory of Inquiry. It is a later work which reflects, in part, Dewey's readings of C.S. Peirce during the 1930's. -/- Reprinted in Series: The collected works of John Dewey / ed. by Jo Ann Boydston, 3,12.; The later works, 1925 - 1953, Vol. 12.

The Description for this book, Theory and Evidence, will be forthcoming.

I. The Metaphysics Behind the New Idealism. My remarks in this paper focus on the question of the connection between thought and the world from the perspective of recent critical discussions of the correspondence theory of truth. In some of these discussions, the notion of the world has been branded a will o’ the wisp. The plain implication of these discussions is the reintroduction of something like “objective idealism” back into the philosophical arena. For, the world is countenanced only in (...) a sense that ties it closely to a common set of beliefs, while it is rejected in the sense that would make it other than thought. There is no attempt, within the new idealism, to eliminate familiar physical objects or to insist that the set of beliefs are those of the first person. And so neither of the important characteristics of “subjective idealism” are present. (shrink)

In this 1958 book, Professor Hanson turns to an equally important but comparatively neglected subject, the philosophical aspects of research and discovery.

(This insularity was further promoted by the guileless duplicity of scholars in other fields, who were all too prepared to bequeath "the problem of ...

Introductory Abstract Philosophers of science, in the course of making a sharp distinction between the tasks of the philosopher and those of the scientist, have pointed to the possibility of an empirical science of induction. A comparative psychology of knowledge processes is offered as one aspect of this potential enterprise. From fragments of such a psychology, methodological suggestions are drawn relevant to several chronic problems in the social sciences, including the publication of negative results from novel explorations, the operational diagnosis (...) of dispositions, the status of aggregates of persons as social entities, and the validation of psychological tests. (shrink)

The essays in this volume represent an approach to human knowledge that has had a profound influence on many recent thinkers. Popper breaks with a traditional commonsense theory of knowledge that can be traced back to Aristotle. A realist and fallibilist, he argues closely and in simple language that scientific knowledge, once stated in human language, is no longer part of ourselves but a separate entity that grows through critical selection.

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Feyerabrend argues that intellectual progress relies on the creativity of the scientist, against the authority of science.

Since its first publication in 1976, Alan Chalmers's highly regarded and widely read work--translated into eighteen languages--has become a classic introduction to the scientific method, known for its accessibility to beginners and its value as a resource for advanced students and scholars. -- Amazon.com.

Rom Harré's proposed Copernican Revolution in the philosophy of science is a very ambitious undertaking. It challenges established views, proposes a radically new model for scientific explanation, and forces a rethinking of the foundations of the field. In his treatment of the natural sciences, Harré rejects all deductivist accounts of scientific explanation basically on the grounds that such accounts seriously distort the methods of explanation actually operative in science. In the social sciences Harré, in collaboration with Secord, rejects mechanistic, positivistic, (...) and behavioristic accounts of human behavior [5]. In place of these discarded interpretations he substitutes a new realism which stresses the role that models play in supplying accounts of observed patterns of phenomena in terms of the things and processes whose interactions are responsible for the manifest phenomena. This revolution, if successfully carried out, would indeed be a valuable contribution to the philosophy of science. (shrink)