A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra offers a fresh philosophical account of properties. How is it that two different things (such as two red roses) can share the same property (redness)? According to resemblance nominalism, things have their properties in virtue of resembling other things. This unfashionable view is championed with clarity and rigor.

Gardeners, poets, lovers, and philosophers are all interested in the redness of roses; but only philosophers wonder how it is that two different roses can share the same property. Are red things red because they resemble each other? Or do they resemble each other because they are red? Since the 1970s philosophers have tended to favour the latter view, and held that a satisfactory account of properties must involve the postulation of either universals or tropes. But Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra revives the (...) dormant alternative theory of resemblance nominalism, showing first that it can withstand the attacks of such eminent opponents as Goodman and Armstrong, and then that there are reasons to prefer it to its rival theories. The clarity and rigour of his arguments will challenge metaphysicians to rethink their views on properties. (shrink)

In philosophy of science two questions become central in the discussion of the nature of empirical science: 1) What is a theory, i.e. how is it built up, how does it work? And: 2) How does a theory relate to its corresponding experiential basis? To deal with these two questions modern philosophy of science has devised various ‘models’ on the nature and working of scientific theories. Some aspects of these models are widely held within the community of philosophers of science, (...) but others are still being discussed quite controversially. In this paper, we will consider both kinds of aspects. Particularly, we will analyze how the meaning of scientific concepts is determined; the axiomatic construction of a scientific theory; the idea of model building views as a bridge between theory and experience; the holistic semantic thesis of science; the question about the true of scientific theories; and, finally, the hierarchic structure of theories.En filosofía de la ciencia, dos cuestiones resultan centrales en la discusión acerca de la naturalezade la ciencia empírica: 1) ¿qué es una teoría ?, es decir, ¿cómo estáconstituida y cómo funciona? y 2) ¿cómo se relaciona una teoría con su correspondientebase experiencial? Para tratar estas dos cuestiones, la moderna filosofía de la ciencia ha desarrolladovarios “modelos” sobre la naturaleza y el funcionamiento de lasteorías científicas. Algunos aspectos de estos modelos son ampliamente aceptados por lacomunidad de filósofos de la ciencia, mientras que otros son todavía discutidos de manerabastante controvertida. En este trabajo, consideraremos ambos tipos de aspectos. En particular,analizaremos cómo se determina el significado de los conceptos teóricos, la construcción axiomática de una teoría científica, la idea de las concepciones sobre la construcción de modelos como puente entre la teoría y la experiencia, la tesis semántica holista de la ciencia, la cuestión acerca de la verdad de las teorías científicas y, finalmente, la estructura jerárquica de las teorías. (shrink)