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Scientific Understanding and Representation
This volume assembles cutting-edge scholarship on scientific understanding, scientific representation, and their delicate interplay. Featuring several articles in an engaging ‘critical conversation’ format, the volume integrates discussions about understanding and representation with perennial issues in the philosophy of science, including the nature of scientific knowledge, idealizations, scientific realism, scientific inference, and scientific progress. In the philosophy of science, questions of scientific understanding and scientific representation have only recently been put in dialogue with each other. The chapters advance these discussions from a variety of fresh perspectives. They...
Rethinking Metaphysics
In Rethinking Metaphysics, Amie Thomasson aims to change how we think about metaphysics: what it can do, and why it matters. Traditional metaphysics has aimed to discover deep truths about the world. But this has led to rivalries with science, epistemological mysteries, and a despairing scepticism about how we could gain knowledge in metaphysics. Thomasson argues that the problems with prior approaches to metaphysics arise from a problematic assumption that all discourse functions in the same way. Drawing on work in linguistics, she shows how to develop a richer view of linguistic functions that enables us to see why this assumption leads us astray. By better understanding the plurality of l...
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement
Disagreement is one of the deepest and most pervasive topics in philosophy; arguably its very bedrock, and is an ever-increasing feature of politics, ethics, public policy, science and many other areas. Despite the omnipresence of disagreement, the topic itself has received relatively little sustained examination. This outstanding handbook examines the philosophy of disagreement and how it extends to debates in public policy and science. Comprising 41 chapters by an international team of highly distinguished contributors, the Handbook is divided into six clear parts: Philosophy of Disagreement Epistemology of Disagreement Disagreement in Science Moral Disagreement Political Disagreement Disa...
Constructions in Use
Semantics is one of the core disciplines of philosophy of language. There are basically two strands of established theories: use-based and truth-conditional, with the latter being the dominant variety. This dominance has been questioned recently by linguists who embrace a research paradigm that is known as construction grammar. As construction grammar is use-based, it seems natural to suppose that its success is indirect support for use-based semantics in philosophy. This is true. But there's still a lot to do. Although there are use-based theories that fit quite well with current research in linguistics, they are far from being perfect. In particular, the most popular theory in that area is still tied to some of the main motivations behind truth-conditional semantics. ‘Constructions in Use’ offers an alternative by proposing to let this legacy go. Instead, it argues that philosophical semantics is best off if it goes for an entirely use-based theory.
Bertrand’s Paradox and the Principle of Indifference
Events between which we have no epistemic reason to discriminate have equal epistemic probabilities. Bertrand’s chord paradox, however, appears to show this to be false, and thereby poses a general threat to probabilities for continuum sized state spaces. Articulating the nature of such spaces involves some deep mathematics and that is perhaps why the recent literature on Bertrand’s Paradox has been almost entirely from mathematicians and physicists, who have often deployed elegant mathematics of considerable sophistication. At the same time, the philosophy of probability has been left out. In particular, left out entirely are the philosophical ground of the principle of indifference, th...
The Brain Abstracted
Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Book Prize from The Royal Institute of Philosophy An exciting, new framework for interpreting the philosophical significance of neuroscience. All science needs to simplify, but when the object of research is something as complicated as the brain, this challenge can stretch the limits of scientific possibility. In fact, in The Brain Abstracted, an avowedly “opinionated” history of neuroscience, M. Chirimuuta argues that, due to the brain’s complexity, neuroscientific theories have only captured partial truths—and “neurophilosophy” is unlikely to be achieved. Looking at the theory and practice of neuroscience, both past and present, Chirimuuta shows ho...
True Enough
The development of an epistemology that explains how science and art embody and convey understanding. Philosophy valorizes truth, holding that there can never be epistemically good reasons to accept a known falsehood, or to accept modes of justification that are not truth conducive. How can this stance account for the epistemic standing of science, which unabashedly relies on models, idealizations, and thought experiments that are known not to be true? In True Enough, Catherine Elgin argues that we should not assume that the inaccuracy of models and idealizations constitutes an inadequacy. To the contrary, their divergence from truth or representational accuracy fosters their epistemic funct...
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling
Models and modeling have played an increasingly important role in philosophy, going back to the nineteenth century. While philosophical interest in models has been remarkably lively over the last two decades, there are still many underexplored questions. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Scientific Modeling is an outstanding reference source and guide to this fast-growing area and is the first volume of its kind. Comprised of 40 specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors, the Handbook is organized into five clear parts: Historical and General Perspectives Philosophical Accounts of Modeling Methodological Aspects: Model Construction, Evaluation, and Calibra...
The Knowledge Argument
A cutting-edge and groundbreaking set of new essays by top philosophers on key topics related to the ever-influential knowledge argument.
New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress
This collection of original essays offers a comprehensive examination of scientific progress, which has been a central topic in recent debates in philosophy of science. Traditionally, debates over scientific progress have focused on different methodological approaches, notably the epistemic and semantic approaches. The chapters in Part I of the book examine these two traditional approaches, as well as the newly revived functional and newly developed noetic approaches. Part II features in-depth case studies of scientific progress from the history of science. The chapters cover individual sciences including physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, seismology, psychology, sociology, economics,...
