bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Explanation
Authors: Kitcher Philip 
Published: September 2018

Philosophical reflections about explanation are common in the history of philosophy, and important proposals were made by Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Mill. But the subject came of age in the twentieth century with the provision of detailed models of scientific explanation, prominently the covering-law model, which takes explanations to be arguments in which a law of nature plays an essential role among the premises. In the heyday of logical empiricism, philosophers achieved a consensus on the covering law model, but, during the 1960s and 1970s, that consensus was challenged through the recognition of four major kinds of difficulty: first, a problem about the relation between idealized arguments and the actual practice of explaining; second, the difficulty of characterizing the underlying notion of a law of nature; third, troubles in accounting for the asymmetries of explanation; and, four, recalcitrant problems in treating statistical explanations.
Appreciation of these difficulties has led to the widespread abandonment of the covering-law model, and currently there is no consensus on how to understand explanation. The main contemporary view seeks to characterize explanation in terms of causation, that is, explanations are accounts that trace the causes of the events (states, conditions) explained. Other philosophers believe that there is no general account of explanation, and offer pragmatic theories. A third option sees explanation as consisting in the unification of the phenomena. All of these approaches have associated successes, and face particular anomalies.
Although the general character of explanation is now a subject for philosophical debate, some particular kinds of explanation seem to be relatively well understood. In particular, functional explanations in biology, which logical empiricists found puzzling, now appear to be treated quite naturally by supposing them to make tacit reference to natural selection.
French philosophy of science
Authors: Gutting Gary 
Published: September 2018

A distinctively French tradition in the philosophy of science began with Descartes, continued through the Enlightenment in works such as D’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire and the Encyclopédie, and flowered in the ninteenth and the early twentieth century with the work of Comte, Duhem, Meyerson and Poincaré. Throughout the twentieth century, the dominant fashions in French philosophy derived more and more from German influences, especially idealism and phenomenology (Hegel to Heidegger). But amidst these developments, there persisted an essentially autonomous tradition of French philosophy of science that offered an indigenous alternative to the Germanic imports. Here the key figure was Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), for many years professor at the Sorbonne and director of the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques. His work was continued and modified by Georges Canguilhem (1904–95), his successor at the Institute, who himself was an important influence on philosophers such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Michel Serres. Jean Cavaillès’ critique of Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics and his effort to develop a neo-Hegelian alternative to it had deep affinities with Bachelard’s work and was also an important influence on Canguilhem.
The most important general features of twentieth-century French philosophy of science appear if we contrast it with its two major rivals: existential phenomenology and logical positivism. Existential phenomenology is a ‘philosophy of the subject’, maintaining that ultimate truth resides in the immediacy of lived experience. Bachelard and his followers, by contrast, proposed a ‘philosophy of the concept’, for which experiential immediacy is subordinate to and corrected by concepts produced by rational reflection. This process of rational reflection is, moreover, embodied in science, which is not, as existential phenomenology maintains, a derivative and incomplete form of knowing, but the very paradigm of knowledge. In giving science a privileged epistemic position, the French philosophers of science are like the logical positivists. But, unlike the positivists, they treat science as essentially historical, irreducible in either method or content to the rigour of a formal system. They also opposed the positivists’ effort to find the foundations of scientific knowledge in sense experience, maintaining that there are no simply given data and that all experience is informed by conceptual interpretation.
Genetics
Authors: Darden Lindley 
Published: September 2018

Genetics studies the problem of heredity, namely why offspring resemble their parents. The field emerged in 1900 with the rediscovery of the 1865 work of Gregor Mendel. William Bateson called the new field ‘genetics’ in 1905, and W. Johannsen used the term ‘gene’ in 1909. By analysing data about patterns of inheritance of characters, such as yellow and green peas, Mendelian geneticists infer the number and type of hypothetical genes. The major components of the theory of the gene, which proposed the model of genes as beads on a string, were in place by the 1920s. In the 1930s, the field of population genetics emerged from the synthesis of results from Mendelian genetics with Darwinian natural selection. Population geneticists study the distribution of genes in the gene pool of a population and changes caused by selection and other factors. The 1940s and 1950s saw the development of molecular genetics, which investigates problems about gene reproduction, mutation and function at the molecular level.
Philosophical issues arise: the question about the evidence for the reality of hypothetical genes, and the status of Mendel’s laws, given that they are not universal generalizations. Debates have occurred about the nature of the relation between Mendelian and molecular genetics. Population genetics provides the perspective of the gene as the unit of selection in evolutionary theory. Molecular genetics and its accompanying technologies raise ethical issues about humans’ genetic information, such as the issue of privacy of information about one’s genome and the morality of changing a person’s genes. The nature–nurture debate involves the issue of genetic determinism, the extent to which genes control human traits and behaviour.
Heideggerian philosophy of science
Authors: Rouse Joseph 
Published: September 2018

Heidegger’s importance in the philosophy of science stems less from his scattered remarks about science than from the larger conception of intentionality and ontology that informs them. Heidegger’s earliest major work, Being and Time (1927), displayed everyday practical purposive activity as the most fundamental setting for the disclosure of things in the world. Heidegger claimed that the traditional epistemological conception of a subject who represents objects was derivative from and dependent upon such ongoing everyday practical engagement with one’s surroundings. Science was then supposed to be the practice that allows things to show themselves shorn of their significance within the ’in-order-to-for-the-sake-of’ structure of everyday activity; nevertheless, the sense of scientific claims remained dependent upon the everyday interactions from which they were abstracted.
Shortly after writing Being and Time, Heidegger revised his project in ways that also transformed his account of science. His overall project shifted from describing the transcendental structure of the meaning of being, to interpreting the ’history of being’. Science was reinterpreted as an activity (’research’) closely allied with machine technology, and oriented towards more extensive and intensive manipulation and ordering of things. Understood as such, science for Heidegger was an essential manifestation of the modern age. Whereas, earlier, he thought that science presupposed a philosophical ontology, he eventually portrayed science and technology as the conclusion of the philosophical tradition. While philosophical metaphysics and epistemology were thus naturalized, Heidegger was concerned with the possibility of a way of thinking outside this convergence of scientific and philosophical metaphysics.
Idealizations
Authors: Laymon Ronald 
Published: September 2018

Scientific analyses of particular phenomena are invariably simplified or idealized. The universe does not contain only two bodies as assumed in Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws, or only one body as assumed in Schwarzschild’s relativistic update; real economic agents do not act exclusively to maximize expected utilities, the surfaces of ordinary plate condensers are not infinitely extended planes, and the sine of an angle is not equal in measure to the angle itself. There are many reasons for the use of such misdescriptions. First and foremost is the need to achieve mathematical tractability. Science gets nowhere unless numbers, or numerical constraints, are produced that can form the basis of predictions and explanations. Idealizations may also be required because of the unavailability of certain data or because of the absence of necessary auxiliary theories.
The philosophical problem is to make normative sense of this common but complex scientific practice. For example, how can theories be tested given that they connect to the world only through the intermediary of idealized descriptions? In what sense can there be scientific explanations if what is to be explained must be misdescribed before theory can be brought to bear? The fact that idealizations can often be improved, with corresponding salutary effect on the accuracy of prediction or usefulness of explanation, suggests that idealizations should be understood as part of some sort of convergent process.
Inductive inference
Authors: Maher Patrick 
Published: September 2018

According to a long tradition, an inductive inference is an inference from a premise of the form ‘all observed A are B’ to a conclusion of the form ‘all A are B‘. Such inferences are not deductively valid, that is, even if the premise is true it is possible that the conclusion is false, since unobserved As may differ from observed ones. Nevertheless, it has been held that the premise can make it reasonable to believe the conclusion, even though it does not guarantee that the conclusion is true.
It is now generally allowed that there are many other patterns of inference that can also provide reasonable grounds for believing their conclusions, even though their premises do not guarantee the truth of their conclusions. In current usage, it is common to call all such inferences inductive. It has been widely thought that all knowledge of matters of fact that we have not observed must be based on inductive inferences from what we have observed. In particular, all knowledge of the future is, on this view, based on induction.
Information theory
Authors: Sayre Kenneth M. 
Published: September 2018

Information theory was established in 1948 by Claude Shannon as a statistical analysis of factors pertaining to the transmission of messages through communication channels. Among basic concepts defined within the theory are information (the amount of uncertainty removed by the occurrence of an event), entropy (the average amount of information represented by events at the source of a channel), and equivocation (the ‘noise’ that impedes faithful transmission of a message through a channel). Information theory has proved essential to the development of space probes, high-speed computing machinery and modern communication systems.
The information studied by Shannon is sharply distinct from information in the sense of knowledge or of propositional content. It is also distinct from most uses of the term in the popular press (‘information retrieval’, ‘information processing’, ‘information highway’, and so on). While Shannon’s work has strongly influenced academic psychology and philosophy, its reception in these disciplines has been largely impressionistic. A major problem for contemporary philosophy is to relate the statistical conceptions of information theory to information in the semantic sense of knowledge and content.
Kuhn, Thomas Samuel (1922–96)
Authors: Hoyningen-Huene Paul 
Published: September 2018

The early 1960s saw substantial turmoil in the philosophy of science, then dominated by logical empiricism. Most important was the confrontation of the prevailing philosophical tradition with the history of science. Whereas the philosophy of science was mainly normatively oriented, that is it tried to delineate what good science should look like, historical studies seemed to indicate that the practice of science both past and present did not follow those prescriptions.
Thomas S. Kuhn was educated as a theoretical physicist but soon turned to the history and philosophy of science. In 1962, he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR). This book was the single most important publication advancing the confrontation between the history and the philosophy of science; it is now a classic in science studies. SSR was most influential not only in the discussion within philosophy but also in various other fields, especially the social sciences. The central concepts of SSR, like scientific revolution, paradigm shift and incommensurability, have been in the focus of philosophical discussion for many years, and the term ‘paradigm’ has even become a household word (although mostly not in Kuhn’s intended sense). After SSR, Kuhn continued to develop his theory; apart from minor modifications it is mainly the explication of SSR’s more intricate philosophical topics, especially of incommensurability, which is characteristic of his later work.
Logical positivism
Authors: Friedman Michael 
Published: September 2018

Logical positivism (logical empiricism, neo-positivism) originated in Austria and Germany in the 1920s. Inspired by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutions in logic, mathematics and mathematical physics, it aimed to create a similarly revolutionary scientific philosophy purged of the endless controversies of traditional metaphysics. Its most important representatives were members of the Vienna Circle who gathered around Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna (including Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Kurt Gödel, Hans Hahn, Karl Menger, Otto Neurath and Friedrich Waismann) and those of the Society for Empirical Philosophy who gathered around Hans Reichenbach at the University of Berlin (including Walter Dubislav, Kurt Grelling and Carl Hempel). Although not officially members of either group, the Austrian philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper were, at least for a time, closely associated with logical positivism.
The logical positivist movement reached its apogee in Europe in the years 1928–34, but the rise of National Socialism in 1933 marked the effective end of this phase. Thereafter, however, many of its most important representatives emigrated to the USA. Here logical positivism found a receptive audience among such pragmatically, empirically and logically minded American philosophers as Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel and W.V. Quine. Thus transplanted to the English-speaking world of ‘analytic’ philosophy it exerted a tremendous influence – particularly in philosophy of science and the application of logical and mathematical techniques to philosophical problems more generally. This influence began to wane around 1960, with the rise of a pragmatic form of naturalism due to Quine and a historical-sociological approach to the philosophy of science due mainly to Thomas Kuhn. Both of these later trends, however, developed in explicit reaction to the philosophy of logical positivism and thereby attest to its enduring significance.
Marxist philosophy of science
Authors: Miller Richard W. 
Published: September 2018

Marx’s approach to science is an intriguing combination of respect for the natural sciences and empirical inquiry, determination to go beyond the description of regularities among observable phenomena, and insistence on the inevitable impact of social circumstances on scientific inquiry. Marx thought that the human sciences and the natural sciences are governed by essentially the same methods, that natural-scientific theories give us enhanced insight into mind-independent reality, and that our most fundamental views are subject to revision through scientific inquiry. Yet Marx rejected the ideal of scientific method according to which rational scientific belief is tied to observational data through a canon of rules as general, timeless and complete as the rules of logical deduction. While traditional empiricists emphasize the economical description of empirical regularities which could, in principle, be used to predict the occurrence of observable phenomena, Marx emphasizes the description of underlying causal structures, employing concepts that are typically irreducible to the vocabulary of mere observation, and causal hypotheses that sometimes do not even sketch means of prediction. Similarly, though Marx shared the optimistic view that science gives rise to long-term improvement in our insight into underlying causes, he disagreed with many epistemic optimists in his insistence that scientific inquiry is inevitably and deeply affected by social interests and relations of social power.
Since Marx’s general comments on scientific method are few and scattered, a ‘Marxist philosophy of science’ consists of the further development of this intriguing mixture.
Mechanics, Aristotelian
Authors: Franklin Allan 
Published: September 2018

The central feature of Aristotle’s mechanics is his discussion of local motion, a change of place, which he categorizes as either natural or violent. He further divides natural motion into celestial motion, which is uniform, circular and eternal, and terrestrial motion, which is rectilinear (straight up or down), and finite in both time and distance. All motions which are not natural are classified as violent.
For all motion Aristotle required a force in direct contact with the object being moved. We may represent the Aristotelian law of motion by the modern formula: Velocity = Force (motive power)/Resistance, or V=kF/R. In applying this law of motion to falling bodies, Aristotle associated the weight of the body with the force, and the resistance of the air (or other medium) with the resistance. Thus, Aristotle believed that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones.
The problem of what force is actually in contact with the body, and causes it to fall, posed a serious difficulty for Aristotle. Aristotle concluded that elements were created with a tendency to move to their natural place, barring any hindrance or interference. Projectile motion posed a similar problem for Aristotle. In the case of a thrown object, the force was provided by the hand of the thrower as long as the object was in contact with the hand. But one needed an explanation of why the object continued to move once it had left the thrower’s hand. Aristotle concluded that the medium through which the projectile moved provided the force that kept it moving.
Aristotle also regarded both the existence of a void or any motion in it as impossible. A void contains nothing that could sustain the motion of a projectile once it left the projector. In addition, because a void can provide no resistance, the speed of an object in a void would be infinite.
Mechanics, classical
Authors: Wilson Mark 
Published: September 2018

Understood at its most general, ‘classical mechanics’ covers the approach to physical phenomena that dominated science from roughly the time of Galileo until the early decades of the twentieth century. The approach is usually characterized by the assumption that bodies carry an inherent mass and well-defined positions and velocities. Bodies subsist within a three-dimensional absolute space and influence one another through reciprocal forces. These objects obey the three laws of motion articulated by Isaac Newton in 1686 in a deterministic manner: once a mechanical system is assembled, its future behaviour is rigidly fixed. Such ‘classical’ assumptions were eventually rejected by Einstein’s theory of relativity, where the assumption of a three-dimensional Euclidean space is abandoned, and by quantum mechanics, where determinism and well-defined positions and velocity are eschewed.
Classical mechanics is frequently characterized as ‘billiard ball mechanics’ or ‘the theory of mechanism’ on the grounds that the science treats its materials in the manner of colliding particles, or clockwork. Such stereotypes should be approached with caution because the basic framework of classical mechanics has long been subject to divergent interpretations that unpack the content of Newton’s ‘three laws’ in remarkably different ways. These differing interpretations provide incompatible catalogues of the basic objects that are supposed to comprise the ‘classical world’ – are they point masses, rigid bodies or flexible substances? Or, as many writers have suggested, should mechanics not be regarded as ‘about’ the world at all, but merely as a source of useful but fictitious idealizations of reality?
These foundational disagreements explain why classical mechanics has often found itself entangled in metaphysics. Much of modern philosophy of science is characterized by attitudes that were originally articulated during the nineteenth century’s attempts to clarify the grounds of classical mechanics.
Models
Authors: Lloyd Elisabeth A. 
Published: September 2018

Of the many kinds of things that serve as ‘models’, all function fundamentally as representations of what we wish to understand or to be or to do. Model aeroplanes and other scale models share selected structural properties with their originals, while differing in other properties, such as construction materials and size. Analogue models, which resemble their originals in some aspect of structure or internal relations, are important in the sciences, because they can facilitate inferences about complicated or obscure natural systems. A collection of billiard balls in random motion is an analogue model of an ideal gas; the interactions and motions of the billiard balls are taken to represent – to be analogous to – the interactions and motions of molecules in the gas.
In mathematical logic, a model is a structure – an arrangement of objects – which represents a theory expressed as a set of sentences. The various terms of the sentences of the theory are mapped onto objects and their relations in the structure; a model is a structure that makes all of the sentences in the theory true. This specialized notion of model has been adopted by philosophers of science; on a ‘structuralist’ or ‘semantic’ conception, scientific theories are understood as structures which are used to represent real systems in nature. Philosophical debates have arisen regarding the precise extent of the resemblances between scientific models and the natural systems they represent.