Maria Carla Galavotti - Böcker

The book is a collection of essays on various issues in philosophy of science, with special emphasis on the foundations of probability and statistics, and quantum mechanics. The main topics, addressed by some of the most outstanding researchers in the field, are subjective probability, Bayesian statistics, probability kinematics, causal decision making, probability and realism in quantum mechanics.

The essays in this volume cover a wide array of topics related to the work of Merrilee and Wesley Salmon. It includes discussions of scientific explanation, rationality, inference and induction, social behaviour, philosophy of physics and biology. Some of the essays have been written with an historical perspective. The volume is completed by a long commentary on the papers, written by Merrilee and Wesley Salmon. The book should appeal to scholars and researchers in such fields as philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of the natural and social sciences, history of contemporary philosophy, and inductive logic.

Traditionally, philosophers of science have distinguished between a "context of justification" and a "context of discovery". The first was conceived as the proper field of application of philosophy of science, while the second was regarded as concerning scientists, not philosophers. Contemporary thought believes that the context of justification forms a continuum with the context of discovery and, as a result, that observation and experimentation have become an important field of inquiry. This volume is meant as a contribution to the ongoing debate on this topic. It is meant for researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science, and for natural and social scientists interested in foundational topics. It combines the viewpoint of philosophers and scientists and casts a new interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of observation and experimentation. It spans a wide range of disciplines, including physics, economics and psychology.

The papers collected here focus on probabilistic causality, addressing topics such as the search for causal mechanisms, epistemic and metaphysical views of causality, Bayesian nets and causal dependence, and causation in the special sciences. Some papers stress the statistical analysis of probabilistic data; others address causal issues in physics, with an emphasis on physical processes that are also probabilistic—i.e., stochastic processes.

This volume broadens our concept of reasoning and rationality to allow for a more pluralistic and situational view of human thinking as a practical activity. Drawing on contributors across disciplines including philosophy, economics, psychology, statistics, computer science, engineering, and physics, "Reasoning, Rationality, and Probability" argues that the search for strong theories should leave room for the construction of context-sensitive conceptual tools. Both science and everyday life, the authors argue, are too complex and multifaceted to be forced into ready-made schemata.

This volume combines the theoretical and historical perspective focusing on the specific features of a European philosophy of science. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Institute Vienna Circle the Viennese roots and influences will be addressed, in addition. There is no doubt that contemporary philosophy of science originated mainly in Europe beginning in the 19th century and has influenced decisively the subsequent development of globalized philosophy of science, esp. in North America. Recent research in this field documents some specific characteristics of philosophy of science covering the natural, social, and also cultural sciences in the European context up to the destruction and forced migration caused by Fascism and National Socialism. This European perspective with the integration of history and philosophy of science and the current situation in the philosophy of science after the transatlantic interaction and transformation, and the “return” after World War II raises the question of contemporary European characteristics in the philosophy of science. The role and function of the renowned Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism and its impact and influence on contemporary philosophy of science is on the agenda, too. Accordingly, the general topic is dealt with in two parallel sessions representing systematic-formal as well as genetic-historical perspectives on philosophy of science in a European context up to the present.​

This European perspective with the integration of history and philosophy of science and the current situation in the philosophy of science after the transatlantic interaction and transformation, and the “return” after World War II raises the question of contemporary European characteristics in the philosophy of science.

This volume sheds light on still unexplored issues and raises new questions in the main areas addressed by the philosophy of science. The areas examined in the book are: formal methods, the philosophy of the natural and life sciences, the cultural and social sciences, the physical sciences and the history of the philosophy of science.

The essays in this volume cover a wide array of topics related to the work of Merrilee and Wesley Salmon. It includes discussions of scientific explanation, rationality, inference and induction, social behaviour, philosophy of physics and biology. Some of the essays have been written with an historical perspective. The volume is completed by a long commentary on the papers, written by Merrilee and Wesley Salmon. Audience: Scholars and researchers in such fields as philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of the natural and social sciences, history of contemporary philosophy, and inductive logic.

According to a long tradition in philosophy of science, a clear cut distinction can be traced between a context of discovery and a context of justification. This tradition dates back to the birth of the discipline in connection with the Circles of Vienna and Berlin, in the twenties and thirties of last century. Convicted that only the context of justification is pertinent to philosophy of science, logical empiricists identified its goal with the “rational reconstruction” of scientific knowledge, taken as the clarification of the logical structure of science, through an analysis of its language and methods. Stressing justification as the proper field of application of philosophy of science, logical empiricists intended to leave discovery out of its remit. The context of discovery was then discarded from philosophy of science and left to sociology, psychology and history. The distinction between context of discovery and context of justification goes hand in hand with the tenet that the theoretical side of science can – and should – be kept separate from its observational and experimental components. Further, the final, abstract formulation of theories should be analysed apart from the process behind it, resulting from a tangle of context-dependent factors. This conviction is reflected by the distinction between theoretical and observational sentences underpinning the Hempelian view of theories as nets, whose knots represent theoretical terms, floating on the plane of observation, to which it is anchored by rules of interpretation.