Online research in philosophy

In times of modern information technology, the world of science is becoming smaller. Does this mean that there will be no more provinces? We do not think so. Setting out from Leszek Nowak's thought “province is where one thinks not on one's own account but on account of another,“ we indicate a number of processes (both internal and external to the sciences) that perpetuate provinces. These processes are driven by specific access to scientific knowledge, by education, by new forms of (...) communication, by shortage of financial support and the concentration of resources. We look at the interplay between criteria of theory choice and location on the scientific map. Next, we explore the connection between geo-social and scientific provinces, taking into consideration political and cultural parameters. The conceptual framework of metropolises and provinces in science turns out to be, though not all-embracing, an extremely fruitful one. (shrink)

This volume presents a wide-ranging overview of the contemporary debate and includes some of its foremost participants.

Scientific explanations arc subject to the occurrence of inconsistencies. To rule them out in many cases demands the construction of new theories. As the examples of complementary explanations show, that may take a while. Furthermore, even if possible in principle, it is not always reasonable to eliminate inconsistencies immediately, e.g., by bringing in a more sophisticated formal language. After all, under some circumstances a provisional, not fully coherent explanation may be better than none. In any case, we need a logically (...) controlled approach to such inconsistencies. Modern logic provides the tools which are necessary to solve this task. We will mention two alternative approaches. (shrink)

The author points out that in some cases there are two distinct descriptions of the same phenomenon. The first one by means of the theory of chaos, the second - by the theory of causal relationship. The thesis is that these descriptions are not inconsistent but appear at different levels of abstraction.

Both logic and philosophy of science investigate formal aspects of scientific discourse, i.e. properties of (non-monotonic) consequence operations for discursive logic. In the present paper we handle two of them: paraconsistency and enthymematycity.

Causality is a concept which is sometimes claimed to be easy to illustrate, but hard to explain. It is not quite clear whether the former part of this claim is as obvious as the latter one. I will not present any specific theory of causation. Our aim is much less ambitious; to investigate the formal counterparts of causal relations between events, i.e. to propose a formal framework which enables us to construct metamathematical counterparts of causal relations between singular events. This (...) should be a good starting point to define formal counterparts for concepts like causal law, causal explanation and so on. (shrink)