Objectivity Invariance And Convention

Author : Talal A. Debs
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674022980
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.8X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Objectivity, Invariance, and Convention written by Talal A. Debs and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most observers agree that modern physical theory attempts to provide objective representations of reality. However, the claim that these representations are based on conventional choices is viewed by many as a denial of their objectivity. As a result, objectivity and conventionality in representation are often framed as polar opposites. Offering a new appraisal of symmetry in modern physics, employing detailed case studies from relativity theory and quantum mechanics, Objectivity, Invariance, and Convention contends that the physical sciences, though dependent on convention, may produce objective representations of reality. Talal Debs and Michael Redhead show that both realists and constructivists have recognized important elements of an understanding of science that may not be contradictory. The position—“perspectival invariantism”—introduced in this book highlights the shortcomings of existing approaches to symmetry in physics, and, for the constructivist, demonstrates that a dependence on conventions in representation reaches into the domain of the most technical sciences. For the realist, it stands as evidence against the claim that conventionality must undermine objectivity. We can be committed to the existence of a single real ontology while maintaining a cultural view of science.

Author : Talal A. Debs
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674034136
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Objectivity, Invariance, and Convention written by Talal A. Debs and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Publisher: "What does it mean to be lonely?" Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare's King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness-how it is a response to the problem of the "missing mother." Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience-Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts-Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson's "Experience," to name a few-with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare-an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us

Author : Robert Nozick
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674006317
Total Pages : 444 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Invariances written by Robert Nozick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Casting cultural controversies in a whole new light, an eminent philosopher presents bold, new theories that take into account scientific advances in physics, evolutionary biology, economics, and cognitive neurosience.

Author : Lorraine Daston
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1942130619
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Objectivity written by Lorraine Daston and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences — and show how the concept differs from alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences — from anatomy to crystallography — are those featured in scientific atlases: the compendia that teach practitioners of a discipline what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Atlas images define the working objects of the sciences of the eye: snowflakes, galaxies, skeletons, even elementary particles. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology. As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity — or truth-to-nature or trained judgment — is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to any one interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity — and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

Author : Franz M. Wuketits
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9400971273
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Concepts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology written by Franz M. Wuketits and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume brings together current interdisciplinary research which adds up to an evolutionary theory of human knowledge, Le. evolutionary epistemology. It comprises ten papers, dealing with the basic concepts, approaches and data in evolutionary epistemology and discussing some of their most important consequences. Because I am convinced that criticism, if not confused with mere polemics, is apt to stimulate the maturation of a scientific or philosophical theory, I invited Reinhard Low to present his critical view of evolutionary epistemology and to indicate some limits of our evolutionary conceptions. The main purpose of this book is to meet the urgent need of both science and philosophy for a comprehensive up-to-date approach to the problem of knowledge, going beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries of scientific and philosophical thought. Evolutionary epistemology has emerged as a naturalistic and science-oriented view of knowledge taking cognizance of, and compatible with, results of biological, psychological, anthropological and linguistic inquiries concerning the structure and development of man's cognitive apparatus. Thus, evolutionary epistemology serves as a frame work for many contemporary discussions of the age-old problem of human knowledge.

Author : Robert Batterman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199908354
Total Pages : 704 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics written by Robert Batterman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-04 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Oxford Handbook provides an overview of many of the topics that currently engage philosophers of physics. It surveys new issues and the problems that have become a focus of attention in recent years. It also provides up-to-date discussions of the still very important problems that dominated the field in the past. In the late 20th Century, the philosophy of physics was largely focused on orthodox Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Theory. The measurement problem, the question of the possibility of hidden variables, and the nature of quantum locality dominated the literature on the quantum mechanics, whereas questions about relationalism vs. substantivalism, and issues about underdetermination of theories dominated the literature on spacetime. These issues still receive considerable attention from philosophers, but many have shifted their attentions to other questions related to quantum mechanics and to spacetime theories. Quantum field theory has become a major focus, particularly from the point of view of algebraic foundations. Concurrent with these trends, there has been a focus on understanding gauge invariance and symmetries. The philosophy of physics has evolved even further in recent years with attention being paid to theories that, for the most part, were largely ignored in the past. For example, the relationship between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics---once thought to be a paradigm instance of unproblematic theory reduction---is now a hotly debated topic. The implicit, and sometimes explicit, reductionist methodology of both philosophers and physicists has been severely criticized and attention has now turned to the explanatory and descriptive roles of "non-fundamental,'' phenomenological theories. This shift of attention includes "old'' theories such as classical mechanics, once deemed to be of little philosophical interest. Furthermore, some philosophers have become more interested in "less fundamental'' contemporary physics such as condensed matter theory. Questions abound with implications for the nature of models, idealizations, and explanation in physics. This Handbook showcases all these aspects of this complex and dynamic discipline.

Author : Stuart A. Rice
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119165172
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Advances in Chemical Physics written by Stuart A. Rice and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Advances in Chemical Physics series provides the chemical physics field with a forum for critical, authoritative evaluations of advances in every area of the discipline. This volume explores the following topics: Thermodynamic Perturbation Theory for Associating Molecules Path Integrals and Effective Potentials in the Study of Monatomic Fluids at Equilibrium Sponteneous Symmetry Breaking in Matter Induced by Degeneracies and Pseudogeneracies Mean-Field Electrostatics Beyond the Point-Charge Description First Passage Processes in Cellular Biology Theoretical Modeling of Vibrational Spectra and Proton Tunneling in Hydroen-Bonded Systems

Author : Quan Zhang
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 9811016879
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pacific Rim Objective Measurement Symposium (PROMS) 2015 Conference Proceedings written by Quan Zhang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-06 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects and organizes the original studies presented at PROMS 2015 conference on theories and applications of Rasch model. It provides useful examples of the Rasch model used to address practical measurement problems across a range of different disciplines including Item Response Theory (IRT), philosophy of measurement, dimensionality, the role of fit statistics and residuals, application, educational application, language testing, health-related research, business and industrial application and Rasch-based computer software. PROMS 2015 (Pacific Rim Objective Measurement Symposium) was held from August 20-24th 2015, in Fukuoka, Japan. The goal of this conference is to bring together the researchers from academia, universities, hospitals, industry, management sector as well as practitioners to share ideas, problems and solutions relating to the multifaceted aspects of Rasch Model.

Author : Quan Zhang
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 9811081387
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Pacific Rim Objective Measurement Symposium (PROMS) 2016 Conference Proceedings written by Quan Zhang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers original studies presented at the PROMS 2016 conference on Rasch theories and Rasch-based applications. It provides significant examples used to address practical measurement problems across a range of disciplines, including: Classic Testing Theory (CTT), Item Response Theory (IRT), philosophy of measurement, dimensionality, the role of fit statistics and research, business and industrial applications, health-related research and the latest Rasch-based computer software. PROMS welcomes empirical and theoretical studies and workshops, preferably with an emphasis on the Rasch model. Special attention is paid to manuscripts submitted by non-native English-speaking authors from Pacific Rim countries, regions and beyond. PROMS 2016 (Pacific Rim Objective Measurement Symposium) was held July 30-August 3, 2016 in Xi’an, China. The goal of the conference was to bring together researchers, scholars and professors from research institutes, universities, hospitals, business and management sectors, as well as professional practitioners, to exchange and share ideas, problems and solutions regarding the multifaceted aspects of the Rasch model and on the much debated yet highly topical issues of objective assessment.

Author : Elaine Landry
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9400725795
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Structural Realism written by Elaine Landry and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structural realism has rapidly gained in popularity in recent years, but it has splintered into many distinct denominations, often underpinned by diverse motivations. There is, no monolithic position known as ‘structural realism,’ but there is a general convergence on the idea that a central role is to be played by relational aspects over object-based aspects of ontology. What becomes of causality in a world without fundamental objects? In this book, the foremost authorities on structural realism attempt to answer this and related questions: ‘what is structure?’ and ‘what is an object?’ Also featured are the most recent advances in structural realism, including the intersection of mathematical structuralism and structural realism, and the latest treatments of laws and modality in the context of structural realism. The book will be of interest to philosophers of science, philosophers of physics, metaphysicians, and those interested in foundational aspects of science.