The Nature of Scientific Thinking [electronic resource] : On Interpretation, Explanation and Understanding /
Faye, J.author.
Scientific thinking must be understood as an activity. The acts of interpretation, representation, and explanation are the cognitive processes by which scientific thinking leads to understanding. The book explores the nature of these processes and describes how scientific thinking can only be grasped from a pragmatic perspective.
Cover; Half-Title; Title ; Copyright; Contents; Preface and Acknowledgements; 1 Forms of Understanding; 1 A subjective feature of explanation; 2 The unification view; 3 The causal-mechanical view; 4 The visualization view; 2 Understanding as Organized Beliefs; 1 The content view; 2 Skills and intelligibility; 3 The organization view; 4 Embodied and embedded understanding; 5 Levels of understanding; 6 Norms of understanding?; 7 Cognitive schemata; 3 On Interpretation; 1 Two notions of interpretation; 2 Interpretations in the natural sciences; 3 Roads to interpretation
4 Interpretation and the discovery of scientific hypothesis5 Interpretation and the construction of scientific concepts; 4 Representations; 1 What is a representation?; 2 Representing and understanding; 3 What do laws represent?; 4 The linguistic approach to theories; 5 Models as focal points of scientific explanation; 5 Scientific Explanation; 1 Nomic explanations; 2 The Hempelian view; 3 The received criticism; 6 Causal Explanations; 1 From embodiment to modal reflections; 2 Causal explanation as reflective understanding; 3 Causation in physics; 4 Causation in biology
5 Causal beliefs about causal facts6 Context-dependent relations and context-dependent descriptions; 7 Other Types of Explanations; 1 Types of explanations; 2 Structural explanations; 3 Functional explanations or evolutionary explanations?; 8 The Pragmatics of Explanation; 1 Why is explanation a matter of pragmatics?; 2 The contrastive dimension of why-questions; 3 van Fraassen on explanation; 4 Critiques of van Fraassen; 9 Not Just Why-questions; 1 Why-questions in science; 2 The paradigm argument; 3 The relation argument; 4 The reason argument; 5 The translation argument
6 The contrast-class argument7 The relevance argument; 10 A Rhetorical Approach to Explanation; 1 The problem context; 2 Individual cognitive interests; 3 Explanation as speech act; 4 Explanation as a rhetorical means of communication; 5 The rhetorical situation; 6 Explanatory relevance; 7 Explanatory force; 11 Pluralism and the Unity of Science; 1 The epistemological issue; 2 The methodological issue; 3 The ontological issue; 4 Conclusion; Notes; Literature; Index
Includes index.
Scientific thinking must be understood as an activity. The acts of interpretation, representation, and explanation are the cognitive processes by which scientific thinking leads to understanding. The book explores the nature of these processes and describes how scientific thinking can only be grasped from a pragmatic perspective.
Philosophy and science.
Epistemology.
Philosophy of Science.
Epistemology.