bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Evolution, theory of
Authors: Lloyd Elisabeth A. 
Published: September 2018

The biological theory of evolution advances the view that the variety and forms of life on earth are the result of descent with modification from the earliest forms of life. Evolutionary theory does not attempt to explain the origin of life itself, that is, how the earliest forms of life came to exist, nor does it apply to the history of changes of the non-biological parts of the universe, which are also often described as ’evolutionary’. The mechanisms of natural selection, mutation and speciation are used in evolutionary theory to explain the relations and characteristics of all life forms. Modern evolutionary theory explains a wide range of natural phenomena, including the deep resemblances among organisms, the diversity of life forms, organisms’ possession of vestigial organs and the good fit or ’adaptedness’ between organisms and their environment.
Often summarized as ’survival of the fittest’, the mechanism of natural selection actually includes several distinct processes. There must be variation in traits among the members of a population; these traits must be passed on from parents to offspring; and the different traits must confer differential advantage for reproducing successfully in that environment. Because evidence for each of these processes can be gathered independently of the evolutionary claim, natural selection scenarios are robustly testable. When a trait in a population has arisen because it was directly selected in this fashion, it is called an adaptation.
Genetic mutation is the originating source of variation, and selection processes shape that variation into adaptive forms; random genetic drift and various levels and forms of selection dynamic developed by geneticists have been integrated into a general theory of evolutionary change that encompasses natural selection and genetic mutation as complementary processes. Detailed ecological studies are used to provide evidence for selection scenarios involving the evolution of species in the wild.
Evolutionary theory is supported by an unusually wide range of scientific evidence, gaining its support from fields as diverse as geology, embryology, molecular genetics, palaeontology, climatology and functional morphology. Because of tensions between an evolutionary view of homo sapiens and some religious beliefs, evolutionary theory has remained controversial in the public sphere far longer than no less well-supported scientific theories from other sciences.
Experiment
Authors: Morrison Margaret C. 
Published: September 2018

Experiment, as a specific category of scientific activity, did not emerge until the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Seen primarily as an arbiter in theory choice, there was little, if any, analysis of experimental techniques or, the ways in which data become transformed into established facts. Philosophical analysis of experiment was typically simplistic, focusing on the role of observation alone as the foundation for experimental facts. This was challenged by Thomas Kuhn who stressed the importance of background theory and beliefs in all perception, including (its role in) scientific experiment. This interconnection between theory and experiment severely undermined the idea that experiment could stand as an independent and objective criterion for judging the merits of one theory over another.
In the 1980s new philosophical analyses of experiment began to emerge, emphasizing the ways in which experiment could be seen to have a life of its own embodying activities that could supposedly be understood without recourse to theory. Factors important in the evaluation of experimental results as well as the ways in which laboratory science differs from its theoretical counterpart became the focus for a new history and philosophy of experiment. Consequently, further debates arose regarding the relationship of experiment to theory, and whether it is possible to provide a methodological framework within which experimental practice can be evaluated.
Gender and science
Authors: Harding Sandra G. 
Published: September 2018

Gender-based analyses of philosophies of science have arisen at the conjunction of two other movements. First, in the 1960s it became increasingly the accepted position that scientific claims failed to reflect only an external reality. Scientific processes are not transparent; they necessarily permit cultural and social values and interests to contribute to the descriptions and explanations of nature’s order. Thus gender values and interests, too, could have shaped scientific practices and claims. Second, women’s movements developed powerful gender analyses of all other aspects of social relations. What resources could such accounts provide to illuminate also the practices and cultures of the sciences?
Consequently, diverse analyses have appeared showing how sexist and androcentric values and interests have shaped scientific projects, and shaped them with unfortunate results not only for gender relations, but also for the advance of both sciences and philosophy. They also examine how other values and interests, ones that are gender-neutral and ones that draw on resources found in women’s lives, can have beneficial effects. Concern has been raised in the following issues. Is correcting ‘bad science’ sufficient to eliminate sexist and androcentric results of research? How has the exclusion of women from those groups that select what will count as scientific problems resulted in narrow and distorted representations of nature’s order? How has excessive reliance on gendered meanings of nature, the scientist, and scientific method – gender coding – shaped scientific claims? If the subject of science remains coded masculine, how can women claim positions as speakers/authors of scientific research – as scientific subjects? In what ways have research procedures (technologies) been gender-coded and how has their use directed the development of subsequent sexist and androcentric technologies and applications of science? Why have standards for maximizing objectivity and good method been too weak to prevent knowledge-decreasing values and interests from shaping the results of research?
Laws, natural
Authors: Hooker C.A. 
Published: September 2018

It is widely supposed that science aims to identify ’natural laws’. But what are laws of nature? How, if at all, do statements of laws differ from ’mere’ general truths which include generalizations true only ’accidentally’? Suppose, for example, it happens to be true that all iron spheres (past, present and future) are less than 1 km in diameter. Contrast this with the truth of ’all electrons are negatively charged’. There seems to be a clear intuitive distinction between these two truths, but is there any principled distinction between them that can be drawn and defended?
This has been the traditional focus of philosophical attention concerning laws of nature, and basically two mutually opposed philosophical accounts have been developed. According to the first account, there are real necessities in nature, over and above the regularities that they allegedly produce (whether or not these regularities are held to be observable), and law-statements are descriptions of these necessities. According to the second account, there are no necessities but only regularities (correlations, patterns) and laws are descriptions of regularities (though perhaps not of any regularity but only of the most basic or most general ones). There are significantly different variants of each account; and also positions that altogether deny the existence of general laws (or deny that science should aim to describe them).
Any one of these accounts, if it is ultimately to be coherent and defensible, has to successfully address four interrelated issues: the meaning of a law statement – the semantic issue; the fact to which a law statement refers and which makes it true – the metaphysical issue; the basis on which claims to know a law are justified – the epistemological issue; the capacity to explain adequately the variety and roles of scientific laws – the explanatory issue.
In attempting this task, each of the available accounts faces its own distinct difficulties. For example, if there are necessities in nature, as the first account claims, how exactly do we identify them: how can we tell which of the inductively confirmed regularities are laws? On the other hand, if there are only regularities, as the second account claims, does this mean that our intuitions and scientific practices are awry and that there really is no distinction between laws and accidental generalizations?
The difficulties facing all extant accounts become even more marked when we face up squarely to the surprisingly wide variety of (putative) laws supplied by current science and to the complexity of the relations between those putative laws and regularities and causes.
Measurement, theory of
Authors: Suppes Patrick 
Published: September 2018

A conceptual analysis of measurement can properly begin by formulating the two fundamental problems of any measurement procedure. The first problem is that of representation, justifying the assignment of numbers to objects or phenomena. We cannot literally take a number in our hands and ’apply’ it to a physical object. What we can show is that the structure of a set of phenomena under certain empirical operations and relations is the same as the structure of some set of numbers under corresponding arithmetical operations and relations. Solution of the representation problem for a theory of measurement does not completely lay bare the structure of the theory, for there is often a formal difference between the kind of assignment of numbers arising from different procedures of measurement. This is the second fundamental problem, determining the scale type of a given procedure.
Counting is an example of an absolute scale. The number of members of a given collection of objects is determined uniquely. In contrast, the measurement of mass or weight is an example of a ratio scale. An empirical procedure for measuring mass does not determine the unit of mass. The measurement of temperature is an example of an interval scale. The empirical procedure of measuring temperature by use of a thermometer determines neither a unit nor an origin. In this sort of measurement the ratio of any two intervals is independent of the unit and zero point of measurement.
Still another type of scale is one which is arbitrary except for order. Moh’s hardness scale, according to which minerals are ranked in regard to hardness as determined by a scratch test, and the Beaufort wind scale, whereby the strength of a wind is classified as calm, light air, light breeze, and so on, are examples of ordinal scales.
A distinction is made between those scales of measurement which are fundamental and those which are derived. A derived scale presupposes and uses the numerical results of at least one other scale. In contrast, a fundamental scale does not depend on others.
Another common distinction is that between extensive and intensive quantities or scales. For extensive quantities like mass or distance an empirical operation of combination can be given which has the structural properties of the numerical operation of addition. Intensive quantities do not have such an operation; typical examples are temperature and cardinal utility.
A widespread complaint about this classical foundation of measurement is that it takes too little account of the analysis of variability in the quantity measured. One important source is systematic variability in the empirical properties of the object being measured. Another source lies not in the object but in the procedures of measurement being used. There are also random errors which can arise from variability in the object, the procedures or the conditions surrounding the observations.
Medicine, philosophy of
Authors: Schaffner Kenneth F. , Engelhardt H. Tristram 
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of medicine can be generally defined as encompassing those issues in epistemology, axiology, logic, methodology and metaphysics generated by or related to medicine. Issues have frequently focused on the nature of the practice of medicine, on concepts of health and disease, and on understanding the kind of knowledge that physicians employ in diagnosing and treating patients.
The history of philosophical reflections concerning medicine reaches back to ancient Greece. Medical knowledge took a further step in the nineteenth century with the introduction of clinical pathological correlations, statistical methods, and systematic experimentation, out of which grew substantive literature exploring the character of medical reasoning and the framing of diagnoses. Debates also developed over contrasting physiological, ontological, nominalist and realist accounts of disease entities.
Contemporary philosophy of medicine has been concerned with the nature of medicine in an increasingly scientific context, a concern that has generated several models of medicine, including George Engel’s biopsychosocial model, as well as analyses of the nature of the physician–patient interaction. The longstanding debate over the ontological status of health and disease has been recapitulated and extended by a number of authors, favouring an objective, statistically-based account, while others argue for an irreducible social and valuational element in these concepts. Several approaches to diagnostic logic, including Bayesian and computer-based analyses, have been developed, and sophisticated methods of determining disease causation and therapeutic efficacy, including analyses of the randomized clinical trial, have also been explored. Whether the philosophy of medicine is a distinct discipline or a branch of the philosophy of science has provoked vigorous arguments.
Naturalized philosophy of science
Authors: Giere Ronald N. 
Published: September 2018

Naturalized philosophy of science is part of a general programme of naturalism in philosophy. Naturalists reject all forms of supernaturalism, holding that reality, including human life and culture, is exhausted by what exists in the causal order of nature. Naturalists also reject any claims to a priori knowledge, including that of principles of inference, holding instead that all knowledge derives from human interactions with the natural world. Philosophically, naturalists identify most closely with empiricism or pragmatism. David Hume was a naturalist. So was John Dewey. The logical empiricists were naturalists regarding fundamental ontological categories such as space, time and causality, but non-naturalists about scientific inference, which they came to regard as a branch of logic. Most naturalists now dismiss searches for ’philosophical foundations’ of the special sciences, treating the basic principles of any science as part of scientific theory itself.
The main objection to naturalism has been at the level of general methodological principles, particularly those regarding scientific inference. Here non-naturalists object that, being limited to ’describing’ how science is in fact practised, naturalists cannot provide norms for legitimate scientific inferences. And providing such norms is held to be one of the main goals of the philosophy of science. Naturalists reply that the only norms required for science are those connecting specific means with the assumed goals of research. These connections can be established only through further scientific research. And the choice of goals is, for naturalists, not a scientific question but a matter of practical choice guided by an empirical understanding of what can in fact be achieved.
Among naturalists, the main differences concern the relative importance of various aspects of the practice of science. These aspects exist at different levels: neurological, biological, psychological, personal, computational, methodological, social and cultural. Each of these levels has its champions among contemporary naturalists, some insisting that everything ultimately be reduced to their favourite level. Perhaps the wisest approach is to allow that influences at all levels are operative in any scientific context, while admitting that some influences may be more important than others in particular cases, depending on what one seeks to understand. There may be no simple, one-level, naturalistic theory of science.
Science, 19th century philosophy of
Authors: Butts Robert E. 
Published: September 2018

In the nineteenth century, science was organized, it tested and confirmed positive knowledge of the natural world and achieved remarkable theoretical development and hitherto unimagined practical application. Science drove industry and free enterprise, and became a powerful catalyst in the battle between defenders of knowledge as power and advocates of knowledge as love.
Fruitful scientific theories and observations were plentiful. Darwin, Wallace and Spencer caused a revolution in biology. Faraday, Maxwell and Hertz contributed seminal ideas in electromagnetic theory. Hermann von Helmholtz studied the physiology of tones and discovered a principle of the conservation of force. Lyell’s efforts established geology as a science. Ernst Mach argued for the elimination of absolute space in favour of a space and time consisting of observable relations between things, thus providing incentive for Einstein’s theory of relativity. Sir John Herschel added many observed double stars to the growing catalogue of celestial bodies.
These and other observational, theoretical and applied achievements in nineteenth-century science were replete with philosophical consequences. Until the nineteenth century natural philosophy and science coexisted as a single discipline. Now science and traditional philosophy drew apart. Some held that henceforth science would deal with the world revealed in experience, and philosophy with the world existing (if any does) beyond what we experience. Others (including prominent scientists) were unwilling to yield to philosophy licence to speculate beyond the limits of what could be ascertained by means of observation and experimentation: even if science and philosophy were no longer one unified intellectual enterprise, philosophy had a substantial role to play in philosophizing about science.
To satisfy changing expectations, a new intellectual discipline was created in the nineteenth century: the philosophy of science. Unlike previous philosophy, whose subject matter was everything that is (or is not), the philosophy of science had a distinct and determinate subject matter: theoretical texts and experimental and observational reports of scientists (the word ‘scientist’ having been invented by William Whewell).
Theoretical scientific systems and their logical structure were one focus of attention. Science was also said to discover laws. Were such laws timeless and exceptionless truths about nature, or simply convenient, economical ways of cataloguing information? These laws were discovered (or invented) generalizations that provided tested information about nature. This discovery and confirmation relied upon the method of induction – thought by most nineteenth-century philosophers of science to have a logic – to involve decisions concerning the validity or invalidity of inferences based on knowledge from experience. Was this alleged logic trustworthy? These questions exemplify the complex problems concerning the epistemic reliability of scientific explanation.
Geology, philosophy of
Authors: Laudan Rachel 
Published: September 2018

In the mid-1960s, geology underwent a conceptual revolution. Prior to that time, most geologists believed that the continents and oceans were fixed and permanent, the basic features of the earth’s crust. Subsequently they came to agree that the earth was covered by rigid plates, thin in relation to the earth’s diameter, in which the continents were embedded like logs in icebergs. It was the creation, movement and destruction of these plates that were responsible for the mid-ocean ridges, the areas of mountain building and earthquake activity, and the deep ocean trenches.
This conceptual revolution also marks a shift in the philosophy of geology. From the early nineteenth century, the chief philosophical question posed by geology was whether a historical science encountered special epistemic problems, a question that was usually answered by invoking the principle of uniformitarianism. In its strict form this stated that the only kind and intensities of causes that could be used to explain past geological phenomena were those that could be directly observed. Many sloppier formulations were invoked under the same name. Since the revolution, philosophers have turned to geology chiefly to use the revolution to exemplify or challenge one or another theory of scientific change.
Quantum mechanics, interpretation of
Authors: Stairs Allen 
Published: September 2018

Quantum mechanics developed in the early part of the twentieth century in response to the discovery that energy is quantized, that is, comes in discrete units. At the microscopic level this leads to odd phenomena: light displays particle-like characteristics and particles such as electrons produce wave-like interference patterns. At the level of ordinary objects such effects are usually not evident, but this generalization is subject to striking exceptions and puzzling ambiguities.
The fundamental quantum mechanical puzzle is ’superposition of states’. Quantum states can be added together in a manner that recalls the superposition of waves, but the effects of quantum superposition show up only probabilistically in the statistics of many measurements. The details suggest that the world is indefinite in odd ways; for example, that things may not always have well-defined positions or momenta or energies. However, if we accept this conclusion, we have difficulty making sense of such straightforward facts as that measurements have definite results.
Interpretations of quantum mechanics are, in one way or another, attempts to understand the superposition of quantum states. The range of interpretations stretches from the metaphysically daring to the seemingly innocuous. But, so far, no single interpretation has commanded anything like universal agreement.