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  1. Scientific perspectivism.Ronald N. Giere - 2006 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    Many people assume that the claims of scientists are objective truths. But historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have long argued that scientific claims reflect the particular historical, cultural, and social context in which those claims were made. The nature of scientific knowledge is not absolute because it is influenced by the practice and perspective of human agents. Scientific Perspectivism argues that the acts of observing and theorizing are both perspectival, and this nature makes scientific knowledge contingent, as Thomas Kuhn (...)
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  • (1 other version)Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference.Judea Pearl - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Causality offers the first comprehensive coverage of causal analysis in many sciences, including recent advances using graphical methods. Pearl presents a unified account of the probabilistic, manipulative, counterfactual and structural approaches to causation, and devises simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections, statistical associations, actions and observations. The book will open the way for including causal analysis in the standard curriculum of statistics, artificial intelligence, business, epidemiology, social science and economics.
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  • An agent-based conception of models and scientific representation.Ronald N. Giere - 2010 - Synthese 172 (2):269–281.
    I argue for an intentional conception of representation in science that requires bringing scientific agents and their intentions into the picture. So the formula is: Agents (1) intend; (2) to use model, M; (3) to represent a part of the world, W; (4) for some purpose, P. This conception legitimates using similarity as the basic relationship between models and the world. Moreover, since just about anything can be used to represent anything else, there can be no unified ontology of models. (...)
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  • Approximate truth and scientific realism.Thomas Weston - 1992 - Philosophy of Science 59 (1):53-74.
    This paper describes a theory of accuracy or approximate truth and applies it to problems in the realist interpretation of scientific theories. It argues not only that realism requires approximate truth, but that an adequate theory of approximation also presupposes some elements of a realist interpretation of theories. The paper distinguishes approximate truth from vagueness, probability and verisimilitude, and applies it to problems of confirmation and deduction from inaccurate premises. Basic results are cited, but details appear elsewhere. Objections are surveyed, (...)
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  • Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference.Judea Pearl - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):201-202.
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  • Explaining Chaos.Peter Smith - 1998 - Cambridge University Press.
    Chaotic dynamics has been hailed as the third great scientific revolution in physics this century, comparable to relativity and quantum mechanics. In this book, Peter Smith takes a cool, critical look at such claims. He cuts through the hype and rhetoric by explaining some of the basic mathematical ideas in a clear and accessible way, and by carefully discussing the methodological issues which arise. In particular, he explores the new kinds of explanation of empirical phenomena which modern dynamics can deliver. (...)
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  • Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism.Herman Cappelen & Ernest Lepore - 2005 - Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by Ernest LePore.
    _Insensitive Semantics_ is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one. Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language Defends a distinctive (...)
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  • Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought.Peter Gärdenfors - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):180-181.
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  • Unification, explanation, and the composition of causes in Newtonian mechanics.Malcolm R. Forster - 1988 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 19 (1):55-101.
    William Whewell’s philosophy of scientific discovery is applied to the problem of understanding the nature of unification and explanation by the composition of causes in Newtonian mechanics. The essay attempts to demonstrate: the sense in which ”approximate’ laws successfully refer to real physical systems rather than to idealizations of them; why good theoretical constructs are not badly underdetermined by observation; and why, in particular, Newtonian forces are not conventional and how empiricist arguments against the existence of component causes, and against (...)
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  • (1 other version)Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism.Herman Cappelen & Ernie Lepore - 2006 - Linguistics and Philosophy 29 (1):1-26.
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  • The causal and unification approaches to explanation unified—causally.Michael Strevens - 2004 - Noûs 38 (1):154–176.
    The two major modern accounts of explanation are the causal and unification accounts. My aim in this paper is to provide a kind of unification of the causal and the unification accounts, by using the central technical apparatus of the unification account to solve a central problem faced by the causal account, namely, the problem of determining which parts of a causal network are explanatorily relevant to the occurrence of an explanandum. The end product of my investigation is a causal (...)
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  • Violated Laws, Ceteris Paribus Clauses, and Capacities.Sheldon Smith - 2002 - Synthese 130 (2):235-264.
    It is often claimed that the bulk of the laws of physics –including such venerable laws as Universal Gravitation– are violated in many (or even all) circumstances because they havecounter-instances that result when a system is not isolated fromother systems. Various accounts of how one should interpretthese (apparently) violated laws have been provided. In thispaper, I examine two accounts of (apparently) violated laws, thatthey are merely ceteris paribus laws and that they aremanifestations of capacities. Through an examination of theprimary example (...)
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  • The Semantic Conception of Theories and Scientific Realism.Frederick Suppe - 1989 - University of Illinois Press.
    Frederick Suppe has come to enjoy a position of undisputed leadership in the post-positivistic philosophy of science.
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  • The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy. [REVIEW]Geoffrey Nunberg - 1979 - Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (2):143 - 184.
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  • Insensitive Semantics. A Defence of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism.Herman Cappelen & Ernest Lepore - 2008 - Critica 40 (120):148-152.
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  • Higher-dimensional algebra and planck-scale physics.John Baez - unknown - In Craig Callender & Nicholas Huggett (eds.), Physics meets philosophy at the planck scale. pp. 177-95.
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  • Who’s Afraid of C eteris-Paribus Laws? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Them.Marc Lange - 2002 - Erkenntnis 57 (3):407-423.
    Ceteris-paribus clauses are nothing to worry about; aceteris-paribus qualifier is not poisonously indeterminate in meaning. Ceteris-paribus laws teach us that a law need not be associated straightforwardly with a regularity in the manner demanded by regularity analyses of law and analyses of laws as relations among universals. This lesson enables us to understand the sense in which the laws of nature would have been no different under various counterfactual suppositions — a feature even of those laws that involve no ceteris-paribus (...)
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  • Theories, approximations, and idealizations.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1990 - Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 16:9-57.
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  • Induction, Conceptual Spaces and AI.Peter Gärdenfors - 1990 - Philosophy of Science 57 (1):78 - 95.
    A computational theory of induction must be able to identify the projectible predicates, that is to distinguish between which predicates can be used in inductive inferences and which cannot. The problems of projectibility are introduced by reviewing some of the stumbling blocks for the theory of induction that was developed by the logical empiricists. My diagnosis of these problems is that the traditional theory of induction, which started from a given (observational) language in relation to which all inductive rules are (...)
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  • Twilight of the perfect model model.Paul Teller - 2001 - Erkenntnis 55 (3):393-415.
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  • Idealization in Quantum Field Theory.Stephan Hartmann - 1990 - In Niall Shanks (ed.), Idealization in Contemporary Physics. pp. 99-122.
    This paper explores various functions of idealizations in quantum field theory. To this end it is important to first distinguish between different kinds of theories and models of or inspired by quantum field theory. Idealizations have pragmatic and cognitive functions. Analyzing a case-study from hadron physics, I demonstrate the virtues of studying highly idealized models for exploring the features of theories with an extremely rich structure such as quantum field theory and for gaining some understanding of the physical processes in (...)
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  • Explaining Chaos.Peter Smith - 2000 - Philosophical Quarterly 50 (198):126-128.
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  • Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach. [REVIEW]Jeffrey S. Poland - 1988 - Philosophical Review 100 (4):653-656.
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