bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Optics
Authors: Jones Roger 
Published: September 2018

Optics as physics concerned with the manipulation and study of light and, more recently, the general study of electromagnetic radiation, has a history back to ancient Egypt, and systematic study to classical Greece. But physics has proved better able to manipulate light than to explain its fundamental nature.
‘Geometrical optics’ treats light as a bundle of discrete rays, tracing their rectilinear paths reflected from surfaces and refracted through transparent media. ‘Physical optics’ treats light as a wave. It explains the dispersion of white light into spectral colours, the bands and colour patterns of diffraction phenomena, and aspects of the absorption and scattering of light. Characterizing the way in which the physical aspects of light become the perceptual aspects of shape and colour joins physics, physiology and philosophy in the perennial question of the correspondence of our perceptions to the physical world itself.
A modern view of light describes it in terms of massless particulate photons. This ‘quantum optics’ treats the absorption and emission of light by matter; providing precise knowledge of matter’s inner structure, and the technology of lasers. Philosophically, quantum optics has led to the fundamental question: what is light? What is this natural entity which is created and destroyed in a particle-like way and yet propagates through space – and lenses, holes and slits – in a wave-like way? Experiments in which individual photons interfere with themselves make it hard to think of them as having unique paths. Experiments involving the correlation of photon properties threaten attempts to describe photons as having individual properties and interacting only locally.
Randomness
Authors: Dembski William A. 
Published: September 2018

The fundamental intuition underlying randomness is the absence of order or pattern. To cash out this intuition philosophers and scientists employ five approaches to randomness.
(1) Randomness as the output of a chance process. Thus an event is random if it is the output of a chance process. Moreover, a sequence of events constitutes a random sample if all events in the sequence derive from a single chance process and no event in the sequence is influenced by the others.
(2) Randomness as mimicking chance. Statisticians frequently wish to obtain a random sample (in the sense of (1)) according to some specified probability distribution. Unfortunately, a chance process corresponding to this probability distribution may be hard to come by. In this case a statistician may employ a computer simulation to mimic the desired chance process (for example, a random number generator). Randomness qua mimicking chance is also known as pseudo-randomness.
(3) Randomness via mixing. Consider the following situation: particles are concentrated in some corner of a fluid; forces act on the fluid so that eventually the particles become thoroughly mixed throughout the fluid, reaching an equilibrium state. Here randomness is identified with the equilibrium state reached via mixing.
(4) Randomness as a measure of computational complexity. Computers are ideally suited for generating bit strings. The length of the shortest program that generates a given bit string, as well as the minimum time it takes for a program to generate the string, both assign measures of complexity to the strings. The higher the complexity, the more random the string.
(5) Randomness as pattern-breaking. Given a specified collection of patterns, an object is random if it breaks all the patterns in the collection. If, on the other hand, it fits at least one of the patterns in the collection, then it fails to be random.
Risk assessment
Authors: Shrader-Frechette Kristin 
Published: September 2018

Probabilistic or quantitative risk assessment (QRA) aims to identify, estimate and evaluate a variety of threats to human health and safety. These threats arise primarily from particular technologies (such as commercial nuclear fission) or from environmental impacts (such as deforestation). Defined in terms of the probability that some consequence will occur, ‘risk’ typically is expressed as the average annual probability of fatality that a particular activity imposes on one individual. For example, because of normal lifetime exposure to dichloromethane (DCM), a multipurpose solvent, the average member of the public has an annual probability of dying from cancer of 0.0000041 or (4.1×10−6). Or, for every million persons exposed to DCM throughout their lifetimes, on average the chemical will cause four cancer deaths each year.
Although risks may be individual (such as those from consuming saturated fats) or societal (such as those from liquified natural gas facilities), government typically regulates only societal risks. By definition, they are largely involuntarily imposed, whereas individual risks affect only the persons voluntarily choosing them. Most QRAs address societal risks, either because a government seeks a scientific basis for particular risk regulations, because some industry wishes to determine possible liability for its processes or products, or because actual or potential victims want to protect themselves or to allocate risks by means other than market mechanisms.
Philosophical contributions to QRA are of three main types: assessments of particular risks, criticisms of existing assessments, and clarifications of important QRA concepts, methods or theories. Such contributions usually focus on either epistemology (including philosophy of science) or ethics. Epistemological analyses address, for example, the adequacy and appropriateness of some scientific, probabilistic or policy technique used in QRA; the status of a specific causal hypothesis about risk; or the rationality of alternative decision rules for evaluating risks. Ethical analyses investigate, for instance, the equity of the risk distributions presupposed in a specific QRA or by general QRA methodology; the degree to which a particular method of risk evaluation accounts for crucial social values, such as free informed consent and due process; and the extent to which a given QRA technique, such as discounting the future (see Parfit 1983), begs important ethical questions such as rights of future generations.
Scientific method
Authors: Hatfield Gary 
Published: September 2018

Procedures for attaining scientific knowledge are known as scientific methods. These methods include formulating theories and testing them against observation or experiment. Ancient and medieval thinkers called any systematic body of knowledge a ‘science’, and their methods were aimed at knowledge in general. According to the most common model for scientific knowledge, formulated by Aristotle, induction yields universal propositions from which all knowledge in a field can be deduced. This model was refined by medieval and early modern thinkers, and further developed in the nineteenth century by Whewell and Mill.
As Kuhn observed, idealized accounts of scientific method must be distinguished from descriptions of what scientists actually do. The methods of careful observation and experiment have been in use from antiquity, but became more widespread after the seventeenth century. Developments in instrument making, in mathematics and statistics, in terminology, and in communication technology have altered the methods and the results of science.
Scientific realism and antirealism
Authors: Fine Arthur 
Published: September 2018

Traditionally, scientific realism asserts that the objects of scientific knowledge exist independently of the minds or acts of scientists and that scientific theories are true of that objective (mind-independent) world. The reference to knowledge points to the dual character of scientific realism. On the one hand it is a metaphysical (specifically, an ontological) doctrine, claiming the independent existence of certain entities. On the other hand it is an epistemological doctrine asserting that we can know what individuals exist and that we can find out the truth of the theories or laws that govern them.
Opposed to scientific realism (hereafter just ‘realism’) are a variety of antirealisms, including phenomenalism and empiricism. Recently two others, instrumentalism and constructivism, have posed special challenges to realism. Instrumentalism regards the objects of knowledge pragmatically, as tools for various human purposes, and so takes reliability (or empirical adequacy) rather than truth as scientifically central. A version of this, fictionalism, contests the existence of many of the objects favoured by the realist and regards them as merely expedient means to useful ends. Constructivism maintains that scientific knowledge is socially constituted, that ‘facts’ are made by us. Thus it challenges the objectivity of knowledge, as the realist understands objectivity, and the independent existence that realism is after. Conventionalism, holding that the truths of science ultimately rest on man-made conventions, is allied to constructivism.
Realism and antirealism propose competing interpretations of science as a whole. They even differ over what requires explanation, with realism demanding that more be explained and antirealism less.
Sociobiology
Authors: Rosenberg Alex 
Published: September 2018

Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. The combination of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory, which did so much to substantiate the theory of evolution in the life sciences, however, has made recurrent adoption of a biological approach to the social sciences controversial. Excesses and errors in social Darwinism, eugenics and mental testing have repeatedly exposed evolutionary approaches in the human sciences to criticism.
Sociobiology is the version of Darwinism in social and behavioural science that became prominent in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Philosophical problems of sociobiology include challenges to the explanatory relevance of Darwinian theory for human behaviour and social institutions, controversies about whether natural selection operates at levels of organization above or below the individual, questions about the meaning of the nature–nurture distinction, and disputes about Darwinism’s implications for moral philosophy.
Statistics
Authors: Woodward James 
Published: September 2018

The discipline of statistics encompasses an extremely broad and heterogeneous set of problems and techniques. We deal here with the problems of statistical inference, which have to do with inferring from a body of sample data (for example, the observed results of tossing a coin or of drawing a number of balls at random from an urn containing balls of different colours) to some feature of the underlying distribution from which the sample is drawn (for example, the probability of heads when the coin is tossed, or the relative proportion of red balls in the urn).
There are two conflicting approaches to the foundations of statistical inference. The classical tradition derives from ideas of Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson and embodies the standard treatments of hypothesis testing, confidence intervals and estimation found in many statistics textbooks. Classicists adopt a relative-frequency conception of probability and, except in special circumstances, eschew the assignment of probabilities to hypotheses, seeking instead a rationale for statistical inference in facts about the error characteristics of testing procedures. By contrast, the Bayesian tradition, so-called because of the central role it assigns to Bayes’ theorem, adopts a subjective or degree-of-belief conception of probability and represents the upshot of a statistical inference as a claim about how probable a statistical hypothesis is in the light of the evidence.
Taxonomy
Authors: Hull David L. 
Published: September 2018

The fundamental elements of any classification are its theoretical commitments, basic units and the criteria for ordering these basic units into a classification. Two fundamentally different sorts of classification are those that reflect structural organization and those that are systematically related to historical development.
In biological classification, evolution supplies the theoretical orientation. The goal is to make the basic units of classification (taxonomic species) identical to the basic units of biological evolution (evolutionary species). The principle of order is supplied by phylogeny. Species splitting successively through time produce a phylogenetic tree. The primary goal of taxonomy since Darwin has been to reflect these successive splittings in a hierarchical classification made up of species, genera, families, and so on.
The major point of contention in taxonomy is epistemological. A recurrent complaint against classifications that attempt to reflect phylogeny is that phylogeny cannot be ‘known’ with certainty sufficient to warrant using it as the object of classification. Instead, small but persistent groups of taxonomists have insisted that classifications be more ‘operational’. Instead of attempting to reflect something as difficult to infer as phylogeny, advocates of this position contend that systematists should stick more closely to observational reality.
Technology, philosophy of
Authors: Kroes Peter 
Published: September 2018

The philosophy of technology deals with the nature of technology and its effects on human life and society. The increasing influence of modern technology on human existence has triggered a growing interest in a philosophical analysis of technology. Nevertheless, the philosophy of technology as a coherent field of research does not yet exist. The subject covers studies from almost every branch of thinking in philosophy and deals with a great variety of topics because of a lack of consensus about the primary meaning of the term ‘technology’, which may, among others, refer to a collection of artifacts, a form of human action, a form of knowledge or a social process.
Among the most fundamental issues are two demarcation problems directly related to the definition of technology. The first concerns the distinction between technological (artificial) and natural objects. It involves the relation between man, nature and culture. The second pertains to the distinction between science and technology as types of knowledge. The science–technology relationship has become of central importance because of the widespread assumption that the distinguishing feature of modern technology, as compared to traditional forms of technology, is that it is science-based. Another much discussed issue is the autonomy of technology. It deals with the question of whether technology follows its own inevitable course of development, irrespective of its social, political, economic and cultural context.
Thermodynamics
Authors: Sklar Lawrence 
Published: September 2018

Thermodynamics began as the science that elucidated the law-like order present in the behaviour of heat and in its transformations to and from mechanical work. It became of interest to philosophers of science when the nature of heat was discovered to be that of the hidden energy of motion of the microscopic constituents of matter.
Attempts at accounting for the phenomenological laws of heat that make up thermodynamics on the basis of the so-called kinetic theory of heat gave rise to the first fundamental introduction into physics of probabilistic concepts and of probabilistic explanation. This led to so-called statistical mechanics.
Some of the issues of thermodynamics with importance to philosophers are: the meaning of the probabilistic claims made in statistical mechanics; the nature of the probabilistic explanations it proffers for the observed macroscopic phenomena; the structure of the alleged reduction of thermodynamic theory to the theory of the dynamics of the underlying microscopic constituents of matter; the place of cosmological posits in explaining the behaviour of local systems; and the alleged reducibility of our very notion of the asymmetry of time to thermodynamic asymmetries of systems in time.
Cultural evolution
Authors: Mameli Matteo , Sterelny Kim 
Published: September 2018

Cultural traits are those phenotypic traits whose development depends on social learning. These include practices, skills, beliefs, desires, values, and artefacts. The distribution of cultural traits in the human species changes over time. But this is not enough to show that culture evolves. That depends on the mechanisms of change. In the cultural realm, one can often observe something similar to biology’s ‘descent with modification’: cultural traits are sometimes modified, their modifications are sometimes retained and passed on to others through social learning, until new modifications are added. In this way, new modifications are piled on top of old modifications, generating cumulative change. But, again, this is not enough to show that culture evolves. For culture to evolve, cumulative change must be the result of hidden-hand mechanisms similar to those that explain cumulative biological change. If cumulative cultural change cannot be explained in these terms, the analogy between cultural change and biological evolution is unhelpful. The best-known biological mechanism is natural selection. There are reasons to think that cultural change is at least sometimes due to natural-selection-like mechanisms. The adaptive fit often found between cultural traits and the environment in many cases has been built gradually and in a way that involves natural selection operating at the cultural level. The parallel with morphological adaptation is compelling. No complete and universally accepted account of natural-selection-like processes operating at the cultural level exists at this stage. But at least three kinds of processes seem possible:
- A natural-selection-like process can be generated by culturally heritable differences in fitness between individuals.
- A natural-selection-like process can be generated by culturally heritable differences in fitness between groups.
- A natural-selection-like process can operate at the level of cultural variants themselves, independently of the effects that cultural variants have on the fitness of individuals or groups.
The theory of memes (initially presented by Dawkins and then developed by Dennett) is one possible account of how (iii) might work; but other accounts exist too.
Mechanism, in modern philosophy
Authors: MacIntosh Jack 
Published: September 2018

Mechanism is the view that the material world is composed of small particles (corpuscles, or atoms), whose motion, size, shape, and various arrangements and clusterings provide the theoretical background for the explanation of all happenings in the physical universe. Early modern authors, whether mechanists or not, assumed that the matter composing these particles was one and the same throughout the universe. With very few exceptions, they also assumed that there were immaterial entities such as human minds (or souls) and angels.
This view, which became the dominant one during the seventeenth century, had earlier precursors, both in classical times and in the Renaissance period, but the major earlier view, following Aristotle, explained the behaviour of material things in virtue of their form or nature: snow was white because it was the kind of thing that was white: it was the nature of snow to be white.
By this ‘way of dispatching difficulties, they make it very easy to solve All the Phænomena of Nature in Generall, but make men think it impossible to explicate almost Any of them in Particular’, said Robert Boyle, adding that it was only the ‘Comprehensive Principles of the Corpuscularian Philosophy’ which would allow unmysterious explanations of physical phenomena (Boyle 1999, 5: 300–1).
However, many of the things mechanism was invoked to explain – gravity and magnetism, for example – remained inexplicable on simple mechanistic accounts. Nonetheless, one important and lasting result of ‘the mechanical philosophy’ was the acceptance of the requirement that all explanations be understandable, that is, explicable in terms of elementary particles and their motion. In the hands of thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton this led to a reliance on experience and experiment, often controlled and quantified experiments, in place of the older, Aristotelian, model which viewed science as involving the deduction of necessary, universal, truths, from premises which were themselves necessary.
History, philosophy of
Authors: Graham Gordon 
Published: September 2018

Philosophy of history is the application of philosophical conceptions and analysis to history in both senses, the study of the past and the past itself. Like most branches of philosophy its intellectual origins are cloudy, but they lie in a refinement of ‘sacred’ histories, especially those of Judaism and Christianity. The first major philosopher to outline a scheme of world history was Immanuel Kant in The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), and German Idealism also produced Hegel’sLectures on the Philosophy of World History (1837), a much longer and more ambitious attempt to make philosophical sense of the history of the world as a whole. According to Hegel, history is rational, the working out, in fact, of philosophical understanding itself.
The accelerating success of natural science in the nineteenth century gave rise to a powerful combination of empiricism and logical positivism which produced a philosophical climate highly unfavourable to Hegelian philosophy of history. The belief became widespread among philosophers that Hegel, and Marx after him, had developed a priori theories that ignored historical contingency in favour of historical necessity, and which were empirically unfalsifiable. Karl Popper’s philosophy of science was especially influential in converting philosophy of history to a new concern with the methods of historical study rather than with the shape of the past. Two rival conceptions of historical method existed. One tried to model explanation in history on what they took to be the form of explanation in science, and argued for the existence of ‘covering laws’ by which historians connect the events they seek to explain. The other argued for a distinctive form of explanation in history, whose object was the meaning of human action and whose structure was narrative rather than deductive.
Neither side in this debate was able to claim a convincing victory, with the result that philosophers gradually lost interest in history and began to concern themselves more generally with the nature of human action. This interest, combined with a revival of nineteenth-century German hermeneutics, the study of texts in their social and cultural milieu, in turn revived interest among analytical philosophers in the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche. The impact of continental influences in philosophy, art criticism and social theory was considerable, and reintroduced a historical dimension that had been largely absent from twentieth-century analytical philosophy. In particular, the formation of fundamental philosophical ideas began to be studied as a historical process. The Enlightenment came to be seen as a crucial period in the development of philosophy, and of modernity more generally, and with this understanding came the belief that the contemporary Western world is postmodern. In this way, social theory and the philosophy of culture in fact returned, albeit unawares, to the ‘grand narrative’ tradition in philosophy of history.