As teorias historicistas da racionalidade científica são produtos relativamente recentes da filosofia da ciência. Adequando-se aos dados extraídos da história da ciência, elas diferem de abordagens mais abstratas ou normativas da atividade científica que predominaram na primeira metade do século vinte. As teorias historicistas, contudo, são desafiadas pela dificuldade de conciliar a adequação empírica à história da ciência com a atribuição de racionalidade aos cientistas eles mesmos, especialmente quando escolhem entre hipóteses científicas rivais. Este artigo discute três influentes teorias historicistas (...) da racionalidade científica, devidas a Kuhn, Lakatos e Laudan, analisando como cada uma trata da racionalidade dessas escolhas, e argumenta em favor de análises de tipo kuhniana, que exploram o papel dos valores nas escolhas científicas e não as concebem como guiadas exclusivamente por regras de aplicação unívoca ou universal. Palavras-chave: Kuhn; valores; regras; teorias historicistas; racionalidade científica. (shrink)

We advance a theory of the representational role of Euclidean diagrams according to which they are samples of co-exact features. We contrast our theory with two other conceptions, the instantial conception and Macbeth’s iconic view, with respect to how well they accommodate three fundamental constraints on theories of the Euclidean diagrammatic practice— that Euclidean diagrams are used in proofs whose results are wholly general, that Euclidean diagrams indicate the co-exact features that the geometer is allowed to infer from them and (...) that Euclidean diagrams play the same role in both direct proofs and indirect proofs by reductio—and argue that our view is the one best suited to account for them. We conclude by illustrating the virtues of our conception of Euclidean diagrams as samples by means of an analysis of Saccheri’s quadrilateral. (shrink)

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2012v16n2p345.

ABSTRACT We review Danielle Macbeth's book Realizing Reason, published by Oxford University Press in 2014. This extensive book is composed by nine chapters in which Macbeth critically presents the development of mathematical practices in the Western world - from its founding in Ancient Greece's diagrammatic practices to the apogee of mathematical logic in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries - while offering a revaluation of its present stage by means of a reconsideration of Gottlob Frege's philosophical contributions. In this review, we present (...) a summary of each chapter's contents and make general considerations about them. (shrink)