Tomasz Jarmużek - Böcker

This book focuses on the different and complementary components of scientific hypothetical thinking as a multifaceted phenomenon in order to shed light on its crucial role in scientific development. It is now a common view that hypotheses play important roles in science, that they can bring order to data. However, the exact nature of their roles deserves more careful and systematic scrutiny. This book’s novelty consists in being directly focused on the fact that hypotheses can provide suggestive clues for further scientific studies. That is, they can play a more constructive and creative role. Furthermore, it answers not only “why” hypotheses are so important, but also “how” they work within scientific context. The contributions are written by renowned philosophers of science, specifically for this volume, ensuring it is an important read for both philosophers and scientists.

This book is devoted to the problem of the Master Argument – a historical argument of the Greek philosopher Diodorus Cronus. Since the original argument was lost, many contemporary logicians have tried to recreate it, using modern tools of logic. The objective of Diodorus’ argument was to evidence the correctness of the temporarily defined modalities: necessity and probability. They took a deterministic form and challenged the indeterministic approach of Aristotle included in the Sea-Battle Tomorrow. In this study, the author shows that some of the reconstructions of the Master Argument allowed for the branched time structures. This is the crowning argument to prove that despite the acceptance of Diodorus’ notions, the Aristotelian Sea-Battle Tomorrow may still not happen, or may as well happen.