You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book uses the formal semantics of counterfactual conditionals to analyze the problem of non-locality in quantum mechanics. Counterfactual conditionals (subjunctive conditionals) enter the analysis of quantum entangled systems in that they enable us to precisely formulate the locality condition that purports to exclude the existence of causal interactions between spatially separated parts of a system. They also make it possible to speak consistently about alternative measuring settings, and to explicate what is meant by quantum property attributions. The book develops the possible-world semantics of quantum counterfactuals using David Lewis’s famous approach as a starting point but mod...
This book provides a thorough and up-to-date introduction to the philosophy of quantum physics. Although quantum theory is renowned for its spectacular empirical successes, controversial discussion about how it should be understood continue to rage today. In this volume, the authors provide an overview of its numerous philosophical challenges: Do quantum objects violate the principle of causality? Are particles of the same type indistinguishable and therefore not individual entities? Do quantum objects retain their identity over time? How does a compound quantum system relate to its parts? These questions are answered here within different interpretational approaches to quantum theory. Finally, moving to Quantum Field Theory, we find that the problem of non-locality is exacerbated. Philosophy of quantum physics is aimed at philosophers with an interest in physics, while also serving to familiarize physicists with many of the essential philosophical questions of their subject.
In this major new study in the sociology of scientific knowledge, social theorist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi reports having unriddled the so-called ‘quantum enigma.’ This book opens the lid of the Schrödinger’s Cat box of the ‘quantum enigma’ after decades and finds something both odd and familiar: Not only the cat is both alive and dead, it has morphed into an elephant in the room in whose interpretation Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, and others were each both right and wrong because the enigma has acquired both localized and spread-out features whose unriddling requires both physics and sociology amid both transdisciplinary and transcultural contexts. The book offers, in a transdisciplinary an...
Thanks to their heterogeneity, the nine essays in this volume offer a clear testimony of Donald Davidson's authority, and they undoubtedly show how much his work - even if it has raised many doubts and criticisms - has been, and still is, highly influential and significant in contemporary analytical philosophy for a wide range of subjects. Moreover, the various articles not only critically and carefully analyze Davidson's theses and arguments (in particular those concerning language and knowledge), but they also illustrate how such theories and ideas, despite their unavoidable difficulties, are still alive and potentially fruitful. Davidon's work is indeed an important and provocative starting point for discussing the future progress of philosophy.
Philosophy of science studies the methods, theories and concepts used by scientists. This book addresses both general philosophy of science and specific questions raised by logic, mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, cognitive science, linguistics, social sciences, and economics.
We humans are collectively driven by a powerful - yet not fully explained - instinct to understand. We would like to see everything established, proven, laid bare. The more important an issue, the more we desire to see it clarified, stripped of all secrets, all shades of gray. What could be more important than to understand the Universe and ourselves as a part of it? To find a window onto our origin and our destiny? This book examines how far our modern cosmological theories - with their sometimes audacious models, such as inflation, cyclic histories, quantum creation, parallel universes - can take us towards answering these questions. Can such theories lead us to ultimate truths, leaving nothing unexplained? Last, but not least, Heller addresses the thorny problem of why and whether we should expect to find theories with all-encompassing explicative power.
Conservative Reductionism sets out a new theory of the relationship between physics and the special sciences within the framework of functionalism. It argues that it is wrong-headed to conceive an opposition between functional and physical properties (or functional and physical descriptions, respectively) and to build an anti-reductionist argument on multiple realization. By contrast, (a) all properties that there are in the world, including the physical ones, are functional properties in the sense of being causal properties, and (b) all true descriptions (laws, theories) that the.
Recently there has been a revival of interest in structuralist approaches to science. Taking their lead from scientific structuralists such as Henri Poincaré, Ernst Cassirer, and Bertrand Russell, some contemporary philosophers and scientists have argued that the most fruitful approach to solving many problems in the philosophy of science lies in focusing on the structural features of our scientific theories. Much of the work in scientific structuralism to date has been focused on the problem of scientific realism, where it has been argued that even in cases of radical theory change the most important structural features of predecessor theories are preserved. These structural realists argue...
Obwohl der Stringansatz als Versuch einer nomologisch vereinheitlichten Erfassung aller Wechselwirkungen, inklusive der Gravitation, schon über drei Jahrzehnte existiert, sind die ihm zugrundeliegenden physikalischen Prinzipien noch völlig unklar; und es gibt nicht die geringste empirisch überprüfbare, quantitative Vorhersage. Ohne empirische Daten, die mit den etablierten Theorien - quantenfeldtheoretischem Standardmodell und Allgemeiner Relativitätstheorie - unvereinbar wären, liefert nur die konzeptionelle Inkompatibilität beider, gemeinsam mit der Vereinheitlichungsidee, eine Motivation für den Stringansatz. Mit diesem droht jedoch die Physik, unter konsequenter Weiterführung ihrer bisher erfolgreichen Strategien, den methodologischen Rahmen der empirischen Wissenschaften zu überschreiten.
Die Wertfreiheit der Wissenschaft gilt als Bedingung ihrer Objektivität. Eine Analyse des entsprechenden Wertfreiheitsideals zeigt jedoch, dass dieses auf einer Reihe von Voraussetzungen beruht – wie der Trennbarkeit kognitiver von anderen Werten und der epistemischen Unabhängigkeit der Rechtfertigung – die sich als problematisch erweisen. Eine Fallstudie zur Frauengesundheitsforschung untermauert zudem, dass die Möglichkeiten für Werteinflüsse in der Wissenschaft weit komplexer sind, als dieses Ideal zu erfassen vermag. Daher bietet ein sozialepistemologischer Ansatz, der auf Wertvielfalt statt Wertfreiheit setzt, die bessere Grundlage für Objektivität: Epistemische Vertrauenswürdigkeit erfordert nicht Neutralität, sondern einen pluralistischen und konsensorientierten kritischen Prozess.