27 Result(s)
within
Social Sciences
History of Science
Philosophy of Science
Chapter
English
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Chapter
Primitive Beliefs, Classical Theories, Early Practices
It is likely that our distant ancestors believed all nature to be animate; rivers, mountains and natural objects along with animals and plants would have been credited with thoughts, feelings and desires analo...
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The Appeal to Physical Explanations
We have seen that the revival of interest in magic during the Renaissance also encouraged direct observation and reduced the influence of ‘authorities’. In the seventeenth century magic and mysticism played a ...
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Arguments and Counter-arguments: The Creation
By the eighteenth century few educated people would have regarded explanations that appealed to the activities of vital spirits as anything more than metaphorical, but it did not follow that mechanism and mate...
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Natural Selection and Progress
Until 1859 theories of transmutation of species had been based on the assumption that there was an inherent capacity to develop, possibly stimulated by external circumstances; this has been called the developm...
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Molecular Biology and a New Teleology
Since the nineteenth century it has been known that cells were basic to all living organisms. Nearly all cells contain a principal inner structure, the nucleus (see p. 00) in which there are particles called c...
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From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance: from scholasticism to the study of nature
Although much of the philosophy of Ancient Greece was lost to the Christian West in the so-called Dark Ages (c. 500–1000) many writings survived in Constantinople and in the Arabic and Persian Empires. Abu Sina, ...
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Interactions — Fact and Theory
We saw in Chapter 3 that explanation in terms of physical causes became acceptable in the seventeenth century and there was growing appreciation of the importance of observation and experiment. At the same tim...
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Idealism and Materialism
Nature-philosophy originated in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century; it emerged as a reaction to the reliance on rational analysis and mechanistic explanations which had come to be associated wit...
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Secular Beliefs — Suppositions and Presuppositions
Like the word ‘science’, the word ‘biology’ first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century1 and the science of biology emerged from natural history at that time. From the 1820s onwards, biology was ...
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Explaining the Success of Science: Beyond Epistemic Realism and Relativism
Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, scientific opinion concerning the structure of the cosmos was deeply polarized; numerous “systems of the world” found their advocates among prominent natura...
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The Paradox of Scientific Subjectivity
It has often been said that the revolution in consciousness that gave rise to modern science was felt first, not in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century experimental philosophy, but in fifteenth-century represent...
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Four Models for the Dynamics of Science
“We must explain why science — our surest example of sound knowledge — progresses as it does, and we must first find out how in fact it does progress” (Kuhn, 1970, p. 20). Many answers have been proposed to th...
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Ethical Problems in Using Science in the Regulatory Process
This article provides a framework for considering ethical issues in the use of science in the regulatory process. The science in question includes both the assessment of technological risk — from chemicals, co...
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Beyond the Fact/Value Dichotomy
Several years ago I was a guest at a dinner party at which the hostess made a remark that stuck in my mind. It was just after the taking of the American embassy in Iran, and we were all rather upset and worrie...
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Science as a Vocation
… Scientific work is chained to the course of progress; whereas in the realm of art there is no progress in the same sense. It is not true that the work of art of a period that has worked out new technical mea...
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Introduction
We live in a world dominated by scientific consciousness, not only in the practicalities of our everyday lives, but with respect to our most basic notions of reality and objectivity, not to mention how we rega...
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The Age of the World Picture
In metaphysics reflection is accomplished concerning the essence of what is and a decision takes place regarding the essence of truth.1 Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of wha...
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The Development of Philosophical Ideas since Descartes in Comparison with the New Situation in Quantum Theory
In the two thousand years that followed the culmination of Greek science and culture in the fifth and fourth centuries BC the human mind was to a large extent occupied with problems of a different kind from th...
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Experimentation and Scientific Realism
Experimental physics provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. Entities that in principle cannot be observed are regularly manipulated to produce new phenomena and to investigate other aspects of...
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Theories of Scientific Change
The writing of science history may itself be regarded as a scientific enterprise, involving evidence, hypotheses, theories, and models. I wish here to investigate several historiographic models and their varia...
