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  1. Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change.Joseph LaPorte - 2003 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    According to the received tradition, the language used to to refer to natural kinds in scientific discourse remains stable even as theories about these kinds are refined. In this illuminating book, Joseph LaPorte argues that scientists do not discover that sentences about natural kinds, like 'Whales are mammals, not fish', are true rather than false. Instead, scientists find that these sentences were vague in the language of earlier speakers and they refine the meanings of the relevant natural-kind terms to make (...)
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  • 4 What is a medical theory?Paul Thagard - unknown
    Modern medicine has produced many successful theories concerning the causes of diseases. For example, we know that tuberculosis is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and that scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. This chapter discusses the nature of medical theories from the perspective of the philosophy, history, and psychology of science. I will review prominent philosophical accounts of what constitutes a scientific theory, and develop a new account of medical theories as representations of mechanisms that explain (...)
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  • (1 other version)Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World.Wesley C. Salmon - 1984 - Princeton University Press.
    The philosophical theory of scientific explanation proposed here involves a radically new treatment of causality that accords with the pervasively statistical character of contemporary science. Wesley C. Salmon describes three fundamental conceptions of scientific explanation--the epistemic, modal, and ontic. He argues that the prevailing view is untenable and that the modal conception is scientifically out-dated. Significantly revising aspects of his earlier work, he defends a causal/mechanical theory that is a version of the ontic conception. Professor Salmon's theory furnishes a robust (...)
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  • The philosophical writings of Descartes.René Descartes - 1984 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Volumes I and II provided a completely new translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. Volume III contains 207 of Descartes' letters, over half of which have previously not been translated into English. It incorporates, in its entirety, Anthony Kenny's celebrated translation of selected philosophical letters, first published in 1970. In conjunction with Volumes I and II it is designed to meet the widespread demand for a comprehensive, authoritative and accurate edition (...)
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  • (6 other versions)The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.Thomas S. Kuhn - 1962 - Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Ian Hacking.
    Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.
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  • (4 other versions)Intelligent design: The bridge between science and theology.William A. Dembski - 2002
    Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause? To see what’s at stake, consider Mount Rushmore. The evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design is direct—eyewitnesses saw the sculptor Gutzon Borglum spend the better part of his life designing and building this structure. But what if there were no direct evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design? What if humans went extinct and (...)
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  • Coherence, Truth, and the Development of Scientific Knowledge.Paul Thagard - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (1):28-47.
    What is the relation between coherence and truth? This paper rejects numerous answers to this question, including the following: truth is coherence; coherence is irrelevant to truth; coherence always leads to truth; coherence leads to probability, which leads to truth. I will argue that coherence of the right kind leads to at least approximate truth. The right kind is explanatory coherence, where explanation consists in describing mechanisms. We can judge that a scientific theory is progressively approximating the truth if it (...)
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  • Thinking about mechanisms.Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden & Carl F. Craver - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (1):1-25.
    The concept of mechanism is analyzed in terms of entities and activities, organized such that they are productive of regular changes. Examples show how mechanisms work in neurobiology and molecular biology. Thinking in terms of mechanisms provides a new framework for addressing many traditional philosophical issues: causality, laws, explanation, reduction, and scientific change.
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  • The Computer And The Brain.John Von Neumann - 1958 - New Haven: Yale University Press.
    This book represents the views of one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century on the analogies between computing machines and the living human brain.
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  • (1 other version)The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (2nd edition).David J. Chalmers - 1996 - Oxford University Press.
    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 (...)
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  • Natural Kinds and Conceptual Change.Joseph Laporte - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (221):672-674.
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  • Explanation: a mechanist alternative.William Bechtel & Adele Abrahamsen - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2):421-441.
    Explanations in the life sciences frequently involve presenting a model of the mechanism taken to be responsible for a given phenomenon. Such explanations depart in numerous ways from nomological explanations commonly presented in philosophy of science. This paper focuses on three sorts of differences. First, scientists who develop mechanistic explanations are not limited to linguistic representations and logical inference; they frequently employ diagrams to characterize mechanisms and simulations to reason about them. Thus, the epistemic resources for presenting mechanistic explanations are (...)
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  • The Emotional Coherence of Religion.Paul Thagard - 2005 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 5 (1-2):58-74.
    This paper uses a psychological/computational theory of emotional coherence to explain several aspects of religious belief and practice. After reviewing evidence for the importance of emotion to religious thought and cognition in general, it describes psychological and social mechanisms of emotional cognition. These mechanisms are relevant to explaining the acquisition and maintenance of religious belief, and also shed light on such practices as prayer and other rituals. These psychological explanations are contrasted with ones based on biological evolution.
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  • Conceptual Revolutions.Paul Thagard - 1992 - Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    In this path-breaking work, Paul Thagard draws on history and philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and the field of artificial intelligence to develop a ...
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  • How do Scientists Think? Capturing the Dynamics of Conceptual Change in Science.Nancy Nersessian - 1992 - In R. Giere & H. Feigl (eds.), Cognitive Models of Science. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 3--45.
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  • Discovering Complexity.William Bechtel, Robert C. Richardson & Scott A. Kleiner - 1996 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 18 (3):363-382.
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  • Introduction to positive philosophy.Auguste Comte - 1970 - Indianapolis,: Bobbs-Merrill. Edited by Frederick Ferré.
    I THE NATURE AND IMPORTANCE OF THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY In order to explain properly the true nature and peculiar character of the positive philosophy, ...
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  • The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History.Marjorie Grene & David Depew - 2004 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by David J. Depew.
    Is life different from the non-living? If so, how? And how, in that case, does biology as the study of living things differ from other sciences? These questions are traced through an exploration of episodes in the history of biology and philosophy. The book begins with Aristotle, then moves on to Descartes, comparing his position with that of Harvey. In the eighteenth century the authors consider Buffon and Kant. In the nineteenth century the authors examine the Cuvier-Geoffroy debate, pre-Darwinian geology (...)
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  • An Integrated Theory of the Mind.John R. Anderson, Daniel Bothell, Michael D. Byrne, Scott Douglass, Christian Lebiere & Yulin Qin - 2004 - Psychological Review 111 (4):1036-1060.
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  • Why wasn't O.J. convicted? Emotional coherence in legal inference.Paul Thagard - 2003 - Cognition and Emotion 17 (3):361-383.
    This paper evaluates four competing psychological explanations for why the jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial reached the verdict they did: explanatory coherence, Bayesian probability theory, wishful thinking, and emotional coherence. It describes computational models that provide detailed simulations of juror reasoning for explanatory coherence, Bayesian networks, and emotional coherence, and argues that the latter account provides the most plausible explanation of the jury's decision.
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  • Elements of a theory of human problem solving.Allen Newell, J. C. Shaw & Herbert A. Simon - 1958 - Psychological Review 65 (3):151-166.
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  • Review of The Computational Brain by Patricia S. Churchland and Terrence J. Sejnowski. [REVIEW]Brian P. McLaughlin - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (1):137-139.
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  • (1 other version)World Changes. Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science.Paul Horwich - 1994 - Erkenntnis 40 (3):411-415.
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  • Pathways to biomedical discovery.Paul Thagard - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (2):235-254.
    A biochemical pathway is a sequence of chemical reactions in a biological organism. Such pathways specify mechanisms that explain how cells carry out their major functions by means of molecules and reactions that produce regular changes. Many diseases can be explained by defects in pathways, and new treatments often involve finding drugs that correct those defects. This paper presents explanation schemas and treatment strategies that characterize how thinking about pathways contributes to biomedical discovery. It discusses the significance of pathways for (...)
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  • How Scientists Explain Disease.Paul Thagard - 1999 - Princeton University Press.
    "This is a wonderful book! In "How Scientists Explain Disease," Paul Thagard offers us a delightful essay combining science, its history, philosophy, and sociology.
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  • Thagard’s coherentism. [REVIEW]Majid Amini - 2000 - Philosophical Books 43 (2):136-140.
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  • (1 other version)World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science.Paul Horwich, Paul Hoyningen-Huene & A. Levin - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (3):923-926.
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