Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality

✍ Scribed by Thomas Nickles (auth.), Thomas Nickles (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1980
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 388
• Series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 56
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

It is fast becoming a cliche that scientific discovery is being rediscovered. For two philosophical generations (that of the Founders and that of the Followers of the logical positivist and logical empiricist movements), discovery had been consigned to the domain of the intractable, the ineffable, the inscrutable. The philosophy of science was focused on the so-called context of justification as its proper domain. More recently, as the exclusivity of the logical reconstruc­ tion program in philosophy of science came under question, and as the critique of justification developed within the framework of logical and epistemological analysis, the old question of scientific discovery, which had been put on the back burner, began to emerge once again. Emphasis on the relation of the history of science to the philosophy of science, and attention to the question of theory change and theory replacement, also served to legitimate a new concern with the origins of scientific change to be found within discovery and invention. How welcome then to see what a wide range of issues and what a broad representation of philosophers and historians of science have been brought together in the present two volumes of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science! For what these volumes achieve, in effect, is the continuation of a tradition which had once been strong in the philosophy of science - namely, that tradition which addressed the question of scientific discovery as a central question in the understanding of science.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xii
Introductory Essay: Scientific Discovery and the Future of Philosophy of Science....Pages 1-59
The Character of Scientific Change....Pages 61-116
Discovery and Rule-Books....Pages 117-137
Analysis as a Method of Discovery During the Scientific Revolution....Pages 139-157
The Method of Analysis in Mathematics....Pages 159-172
Why was the Logic of Discovery Abandoned?....Pages 173-183
The Rationality of Discovery....Pages 185-199
The Logic of Discovery: An Analysis of Three Approaches....Pages 201-219
The Logic of Invention....Pages 221-234
Scientific Discoveries as Growth of Understanding: The Case of Newton’s Gravitation....Pages 235-255
The Vanishing Context of Discovery: Newton’s Discovery of Gravity....Pages 257-265
The Role of Models in Theory Construction....Pages 267-283
Can Scientific Constraints be Violated Rationally?....Pages 285-315
Why Philosophers should not Despair of Understanding Scientific Discovery....Pages 317-336
Productive Reasoning and the Structure of Scientific Research....Pages 337-354
Structural Explanations in Social Science....Pages 355-373
Back Matter....Pages 375-388

✦ Subjects

Philosophy of Science; History; Philosophy of the Social Sciences