Thomas J Hickey – författare

This concise and accessible book is a synthesis of the basic principles of the contemporary pragmatist philosophy of science.It discusses the aim of basic science, the methods of scientific discovery, the criteria for scientific criticism, and the nature of scientific explanation. Included is a description of a newly emergent specialty called "computational philosophy of science", in which computerized discovery systems create and test new scientific theories.It also examines the essentials of the underlying pragmatist philosophy of language that ahs made philosophy of science a coherent and analytical discipline, and that has given new meaning to such concepts as theory, observation and explanation.

History of twentieth-century philosophy of science opens with an introduction to contemporary philosophy of science as of the beginning of the twenty-first century, and describes the new specialty of computational philosophy of science. Seven chapters describing the philosophies of several major philosophers of science follow this introductory chapter. These major philosophers include Ernst Mach and Pierre Duhem, Rudolf Carnap and Willard Van Quine, Werner Heisenberg, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, Norwood Russell Hanson, and Paul Thagard and Herbert Simon. The book concludes with a large bibliography.

This concise and accessible book is a synthesis of the basic principles of the contemporary realistic neopragmatist philosophy of science. It discusses the aim of basic science, the methods of scientific discovery, the criteria for scientific criticism, and the nature of scientific explanation. Included is a description of a newly emergent specialty called computational philosophy of science, in which computerized discovery systems create and test new scientific theories.It also examines the essentials of the underlying realistic neopragmatist philosophy of language that has made philosophy of science a coherent and analytical discipline, and that has given new meaning to such key terms as "theory", "observation" and "explanation".