ENGLISH

Science and Partial Truth: A Unitary Approach to Models and Scientific Reasoning (Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science)

By Steven French , Newton C. A. da Costa

Book information

Year
2003
ISBN
019515651X, 9780195156515, 9781423762881
Open Library ID
OL7390307M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
940 kB (962905 bytes)
Pages
270\270
Topic
Education
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

In the past thirty years, two fundamental issues have emerged in the philosophy of science. One concerns the appropriate attitude we should take towards scientific theories--whether we should regard them as true or merely empirically adequate, for example. The other concerns the nature of scientific theories and models and how these might best be represented.In this ambitious book, da Costa and French bring these two issues together by arguing that theories and models should be regarded as partially rather than wholly true. They adopt a framework that sheds new light on issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate. The new machinery of "partial structures" that they develop offers a new perspective from which to view the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development. Their conclusions will be of wide interest to philosophers and historians of science.

Similar books