Critical Rationalism has become an influential philosophy in many areas including a great number of scientific disciplines. Yet only few studies have been devoted to the role of the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper in the vast field of education. This volume undertakes to fill this gap. Leading scholars in the educational science and in the philosophy of education have critically written for this volume in an attempt to elaborate Popper's methodological and socio-political views and confront them with a globally (...) relevant spectrum of scientific objectives and cultural values. Among the topics discussed are moral values, education for freedom and its consequences for the student, and the critical attitude in political education. Attention is also paid to the historiography of this significant philosophical movement. Regarding pedagogical research, the empirical paradigm, the falsificatory approach to educational research, the complex relationship between educational theory and practice as well as the problem of value-neutrality in educational science are objects of critical analysis. (shrink)

English summary: This volume contains controversial views and discussions on the purpose, function, analysis and justification of value judgments and norms in the social sciences and humanities.

In diesem Aufsatz werden acht Grundprinzipien kritisch-rationalen Denkens von Karl Popper aufgelistet und ihre Anwendung auf verschiedene Themen der Erziehungswissenschaft beschrieben: Begriff der Erziehung, Aufgabe der Erziehungswissenschaft, Gedanken zum Lehrenden, zum Lernenden, zu Schuladministration und Schulpolitik. Einige Kommentare dazu bilden den Abschluss des Überblicks.

In diesem Beitrag werden zunächst die Begriffe "Norm”, "pädagogische Norm" und "Begründung” geklärt. Im Lichte dieser deflatorischen Präzisierungen wird herausgearbeitet, was die Philosophie zur Begründung pädagogischer Normen beitragen kann. Die Diskussion bezieht sich dabei auf meta-ethische Erörterungen, auf logische Klärungen, auf den Begriff der Gültigkeit von Normen sowie schließlich auf das sog. Zweck-Mittel-Denken Im Begründungszusammenhang erzieherisch gemeinter Sollensforderungen. Insgesamt wird damit auch zu zeigen versucht, was die Philosophie bei der Begründung pädagogischer Normen nicht zu leisten Imstande ist, d.h. welche Aufgaben (...) hiebei der Pädagogik selbst zufallen. (shrink)

Dieser Bericht schildert die derzeitige Lage der Wissenschaftstheorie an den österreichischen Universitäten in Wien, Salzburg , Graz und Innsbruck. Da es in Österreich noch kaum Lehrstühle für Wissenschaftstheorie gibt, werden hauptsächlich jene Professoren, Dozenten und Assistenten besprochen, die unter anderem auch mit Arbeiten über wissenschaftslogische Themen an die Öffentlichkeit treten. Entsprechend muß die angeschlossene Bibliographie gesehen werden, die nicht Gesamtschriftenverzeichnisse der genannten Philosophen bietet, sondern lediglich Arbeiten wissenschaftstheoretischen bzw. logischen Inhalts.

Among the methodological rules of the social sciences we find the principles of value-neutrality and the principle of criticism. Both principles are of vital importance in the social sciences, but both seem to conflict with one another. The principle of criticism excludes value-judgments from the social sciences, because they cannot be empirically tested. Hence, criticism methodologically implies value-neutrality. Yet there is the opposing view that it is precisely the critical social researcher who looks beyond mere 'social facts' taking into account (...) the value framework of the society. Thus, criticism does not lead to value-freedom, but points to the value impact of the so-called social facts. In this paper, the two principles are stated. Then it is shown how and why they are incompatible. Finally, several suggestions are discussed to resolve this methodological conflict. (shrink)

Publications of Austrian philosophers of science.

Fundamental to Sir Karl Popper’s oeuvre was the insight that humans err — and that we can learn from our mistakes. Critique is therefore valuable in all human endeavours. Although this stance is most famously seen in Popper’s claim that to be scientific a theory or hypothesis has to be falsifiable, Popper adopted a critical approach extensively in his work towards whatever crossed his path. Yet he never developed or suggested a general method of criticism. In this paper we present (...) and explain a method of criticism consistent with Popper’s approach and applicable to every rationally accessible part of human life including management theory and practice. Managers of course already know the importance of learning from mistakes. But what we propose here in our Model of Rational Criticism places the emphasis on learning before we actually make the mistakes by seeking to eradicate errors of reasoning, thus reducing the chance of costly errors in implementation. We conclude by exploring some of the implications of our model for managers. (shrink)

INITIAL PROBABILITIES: A PREREQUISITE FOR ANY VALID INDUCTION* * I. INDUCTIVE REASONING AND ITS UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS Experience does not tell us anything ...

Proceedings and Discussion of the 1968 Salzburg Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science.

"This book represents a continuation of the research project in philosophy of language and semantics represented in the journal "Protosociology" at the J. W. ...

Giuseppe Gallis konsequentes Streben nach einer angemessenen Berücksichtigung beider Pole, des Subjektpols ebenso wie des Objektpols, sowohl in der Forschung als auch in allen Bereichen des menschlichen Lebens kommt im vorliegenden Sammelband in allen Arbeiten zum Tragen. Galli eröffnet damit auch neue Felder f8r die gestalttheoretische Forschungs- und Anwendungspraxis. Er erschließt Themen, die nicht zuletzt auch f8r die medizinischen, philosophischen, psychologischen und psychotherapeutischen Aufgabenstellungen zentral sind. Er plädiert nicht nur allgemein für einen dialogischen Ansatz in der zwischenmenschlichen Begegnung, er führt (...) in einer Reihe von Aufsätzen in diesem Sammelband auch sehr konkret die Fruchtbarkeit eines solchen Dialogs mit der Gedankenwelt eines Norbert Elias, Szvetan Todorovic und Paul Ricoeur für eine Bereicherung und Weiterentwicklung der Gestalttheorie vor Augen. (shrink)

Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together ten new philosophical essays that address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind (...) of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states.The theories of the Big Four of collective intentionality -- Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and Margaret Gilbert -- and the Big Five of Social Ontology -- which in addition to the Big Four includes Philip Pettit -- play a central role in almost all of these essays. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including dynamical systems theory, economics, and psychology, the contributors develop existing theories, criticize them, or provide alternatives to them.Several essays challenge the idea that there is a straightforward dichotomy between individual and collective level rationality, and explore the interplay between these levels in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between them. These contributions make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is a discrepancy. Some go as far as arguing that on closer inspection the alleged discontinuities dissolve. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to answer the following question: Does it make sense to speak of thought experiments not only in physics, but also in mathematics, to refer to an authentic type of activity? One may hesitate because mathematics as such is the exercise of reasoning par excellence, an activity where experience does not seem to play an important role. After reviewing some results of the research on thought experiments in the natural sciences, we turn our attention to (...) experiments and thought experiments in mathematics, especially in fundamental mathematics, and investigate what thought experiments can teach us there. If we accept the principle that mathematical practice can sometimes be best described by a pragmatist approach where the concept of experience in mathematics is considered from a new perspective, thought experiments can in some cases be a useful instrument different from both ‘mathematical experiments’ and ‘formal’ proofs: they are mathematical experiments using deviant methods. (shrink)

This open access book examines the many contributions of Paul Lorenzen, an outstanding philosopher from the latter half of the 20th century. It features papers focused on integrating Lorenzen's original approach into the history of logic and mathematics. The papers also explore how practitioners can implement Lorenzen’s systematical ideas in today’s debates on proof-theoretic semantics, databank management, and stochastics. Coverage details key contributions of Lorenzen to constructive mathematics, Lorenzen’s work on lattice-groups and divisibility theory, and modern set theory and Lorenzen’s (...) critique of actual infinity. The contributors also look at the main problem of Grundlagenforschung and Lorenzen’s consistency proof and Hilbert’s larger program. In addition, the papers offer a constructive examination of a Russell-style Ramified Type Theory and a way out of the circularity puzzle within the operative justification of logic and mathematics. Paul Lorenzen's name is associated with the Erlangen School of Methodical Constructivism, of which the approach in linguistic philosophy and philosophy of science determined philosophical discussions especially in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. This volume features 10 papers from a meeting that took place at the University of Konstanz. (shrink)

ArgumentAccording to Hermann von Helmholtz, free mobility of bodies seemed to be an essential condition of geometry. This free mobility can be interpreted either as matter of fact, as a convention, or as a precondition making measurements in geometry possible. Since Henri Poincaré defined conventions as principles guided by experience, the question arises in which sense experiential data can serve as the basis for the constitution of geometry. Helmholtz considered muscular activity to be the basis on which the form of (...) space could be construed. Yet, due to the problem of illusion inherent in the subject’s self-assessment of muscular activity, this solution yielded new difficulties, in that if the manifold is abstracted from rigid bodies which serve as empirical justification of the geometrical notion of space, then illusionary bodies will produce fictive manifolds. The present article is meant to disentangle these difficulties. (shrink)

In this paper first order theories for nonmonotone inductive definitions are introduced, and a proof-theoretic analysis for such theories based on combined operator forms a la Richter with recursively inaccessible and Mahlo closure ordinals is given.