This book is the one to put into the hands of those who have been over-impressed by Austin 's critics....[Warnock's] brilliant editing puts everybody who is concerned with philosophical problems in his debt.

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)

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

[1] The rise of modern paganism.--v. 2. The science of freedom.

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

This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment setting are (...) themselves epistemically quite suspect. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

When it was published in France, this book shocked the philosophers of the Left Bank with its plain-speaking attack on some of France's greatest minds.

Cultural critics say that 'science is politics by other means,' arguing that the results of scientific inquiry are profoundly shaped by the ideological agendas of powerful elites. Physicist Alan Sokal recently poked fun at these claims, touching off a still-unabated torrent of heated discussion. This hard-hitting collection picks up where Sokal left off, offering crisp, detailed critiques of case studies presented by cultural critics as evidence that scientific results tell us more about social context than they do about the natural (...) world. Comprising new essays by distinguished scholars of history, philosophy, and science, this book raises a lively debate to a new level of seriousness. (shrink)

The book is an extended study of the problem of consciousness. After setting up the problem, I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible , and that if one takes consciousness seriously, one has to go beyond a strict materialist framework. In the second half of the book, I move toward a positive theory of consciousness with fundamental laws linking the physical and the experiential in a systematic way. Finally, I use the ideas and arguments developed earlier to defend (...) a form of strong artificial intelligence and to analyze some problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Originally published in 1974. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory centres on the problem of explaining the manifest variety and contrast in the beliefs about nature held in different groups and societies. It maintains that the sociologist should treat all beliefs symmetrically and must investigate and account for allegedly "correct" or "scientific" beliefs just as he would "incorrect" or "unscientific" ones. From this basic position a study of scientific beliefs is constructed. The sociological interest of such beliefs is illustrated and a (...) sociological perspective upon scientific change is developed. (shrink)

Robert Kane provides a critical overview of debates about free will of the past half century, relating this recent inquiry to the broader history of the free will issue and to vital currents of twentieth century thought. Kane also defends a traditional libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will, employing arguments that are both new to philosophy and that respond to contemporary developments in physics and biology, neuro science, and the cognitive and behavioral sciences.

The first edition of this book profoundly challenged and divided students of philosophy, sociology, and the history of science when it was published in 1976. In this second edition, Bloor responds in a substantial new Afterword to the heated debates engendered by his book.

This book is a balanced and up-to-date introduction to the philosophy of science. It covers all the main topics in the area, as well as introducing the student to the moral and social reality of science. The author's style is free from jargon, and although he makes use of scientific examples, these should be intelligible to those without much scientific background. At the same time the questions he raises are not merely abstract, so the book will be of interest and (...) concern to scientists as well as philosophers.The author discusses the growth of knowledge of science, the status of scientific theories and their relationship to observational data, the extent to which scientific theories rest on unprovable paradigms, and the nature of scientific explanations. In later chapters he considers probability, scientific reductionism, the relationship between science and technology, and the relationship between scientific and other values. (shrink)