Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Scientific Representation
Bas C. van Fraassen presents an original exploration of how we represent the world. He investigates the nature of representation in both science and art; he defends a distinctive position in contemporary philosophy of science; and he illuminates the complex relationship between appearance and reality.
The Scientific Image
In this book van Fraassen develops an alternative to scientific realism by constructing and evaluating three mutually reinforcing theories.
The Empirical Stance
What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, and second in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy.
Laws and Symmetry
Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists do so in terms of symmetry and invariance. This book argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. The author analyses and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe that there are. He argues that we should discard the idea of law as an inadequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the book develops the empiricist view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. Concepts of symmetry, transformation, and invariance illuminate the structure of such models. A central role is played in science by symmetry arguments, and it is shown how these function also in the philosophical analysis of probability. The advocated approach presupposes no realism about laws or necessities in nature.
Quantum Mechanics
The author argues that quantum theory admits a plurality of interpretations, each aiding further understanding of the theory, but also advocating specifically the Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation. That variant is applied to topics like the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and the problem of 'identical' particles.
Images of Science
"Churchland and Hooker have collected ten papers by prominent philosophers of science which challenge van Fraassen's thesis from a variety of realist perspectives. Together with van Fraassen's extensive reply . . . these articles provide a comprehensive picture of the current debate in philosophy of science between realists and anti-realists."—Jeffrey Bub and David MacCallum, Foundations of Physics Letters
Images of Empiricism
Thirteen specially written essays discuss topics from the work of Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of science. The central and unifying theme of the volume is empiricism, an approach which van Fraassen developed most fully in The Scientific Image and The Empirical Stance. Thirteen of the world's leading experts in the field examine van Fraassen's defence of scientific anti-realism (which he sees as a core tenet of empiricism), as well as his claim that adopting a philosophical position like empiricism does not consist in holding a particular set of beliefs, but is rather a matter of taking a stance. Images of Empiricism concludes with an extensive and intriguing reply by van Fraassen, in which he develops and corrects his old views, and offers new insights into the nature of science, empiricism, and philosophy itself.
Bas C. Van Fraassen
Without doubt Bas C. van Fraassen is among the most distinguished and celebrated philosophers of science of our days. His fields of expertise range from logic and semantics to epistemology and philosophy of physics. Several of his monographs belong to the standard literature of these disciplines. It was already in 1980 when his The Scientific Image brilliantly entered the philosophical scene. The exposition of constructive empiricism, especially (van Fraassen's favored philosophy of science as well as his alternative to scientific realism), launched an intensive and highly controversial debate on the aim and status of science which has still not been settled. In his Terry Lectures at Yale Un...
The Logic in Philosophy of Science
Reconsiders the role of formal logic in the analytic approach to philosophy, using cutting-edge mathematical techniques to elucidate twentieth-century debates.
The Experimental Side of Modeling
An innovative, multifaceted approach to scientific experiments as designed by and shaped through interaction with the modeling process The role of scientific modeling in mediation between theories and phenomena is a critical topic within the philosophy of science, touching on issues from climate modeling to synthetic models in biology, high energy particle physics, and cognitive sciences. Offering a radically new conception of the role of data in the scientific modeling process as well as a new awareness of the problematic aspects of data, this cutting-edge volume offers a multifaceted view on experiments as designed and shaped in interaction with the modeling process. Contributors address s...
