What is commonly known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, regarded as representing a unitary Copenhagen point of view, differs significantly from Bohr's complementarity interpretation, which does not employ wave packet collapse in its account of measurement and does not accord the subjective observer any privileged role in measurement. It is argued that the Copenhagen interpretation is an invention of the mid‐1950s, for which Heisenberg is chiefly responsible, various other physicists and philosophers, including Bohm, Feyerabend, Hanson, and Popper, having (...) further promoted the invention in the service of their own philosophical agendas. (shrink)

more on the history of the Vienna Circle and its allies, see Coffa 1991; Friedman 1983; Hailer 1982, 1985; Kraft 1950; and Proust 1986, 1989). Without question, however, the crucial, formative, early intellectual experience of at least Schlick, Reichenbach, and Carnap, the experience that did most to give form and content to their emergent philosophies of science, was their engagement with relativity theory. Thus, after a few early writings on more general philosophical themes, Schlick first caught the attention of a (...) broader philosophical public with his 1915 essay, "Die philosophische Bedeutung des.. (shrink)

— Niels Bohr, 19231 “There must be quite definite and clear grounds, why you repeatedly declare that one must interpret observations classically, which lie absolute ly in thei r essenc e. . . . It must belong to your deepest conviction—and I cannot understand on what you base it.”.

Based upon the proceedings of the First International Conference on the History of General Relativity, held at Boston University's Osgood Hill Conference Center, North Andover, Massachusetts, 8-11 May 1986, this volume brings together essays by twelve prominent historians and philosophers of science and physicists. The topics range from the development of general relativity (John Norton, John Stachel) and its early reception (Carlo Cattani, Michelangelo De Maria, Anne Kox), through attempts to understand the physical implications of the theory (Jean Eisenstaedt, Peter (...) Havas) and to quantize it (Peter G. Bergmann), to elaborations of the theory into a unified theory of electromagnetism and gravitation (Vladimir P. Vizgin, Michel Biezunski), and considerations of its cosmological extensions (Pierre Kerszberg, George F.R. Ellis). This is the first volume to survey many of the most important questions in the history of general relativity, with many of the contributions drawing upon such original resources as the Einstein Archive. It is hoped that it will stimulate much-needed further research in this hitherto neglected area. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem's often unrecognized influence on twentieth-century philosophy of science is illustrated by an analysis of his significant if also largely unrecognized influence on Albert Einstein. Einstein's first acquaintance with Duhem's La Théorie physique, son objet et sa structure around 1909 is strongly suggested by his close personal and professional relationship with Duhem's German translator, Friedrich Adler. The central role of a Duhemian holistic, underdeterminationist variety of conventionalism in Einstein's thought is examined at length, with special emphasis on Einstein's deployment (...) of Duhemian arguments in his debates with neo-Kantian interpreters of relativity and in his critique of the empiricist doctrines of theory testing advanced by Schlick, Reichenbach, and Carnap. Most striking is Einstein's 1949 criticism of the verificationist conception of meaning from a holistic point of view, anticipating by two years the rather similar, but more famous criticism advanced independently by Quine in Two Dogmas of Empiricism. (shrink)

Neo-positivism is dead. Let that imperfect designation stand for the project that dominated and defined the philosophy of science, especially in its Anglophone form, during the fifty or so years following the end of the Second World War. While its critics were many,1 its death was slow, and some think still to find a pulse.2 But die it did in the cul-de-sac into which it was led by its own faulty compass.

What is Albert Einstein’s place in the history of twentieth-century philosophy of science? Were one to consult the histories produced at mid-century from within the Vienna Circle and allied movements (e.g., von Mises 1938, 1939, Kraft 1950, Reichenbach 1951), then one would find, for the most part, two points of emphasis. First, Einstein was rightly remembered as the developer of the special and general theories of relativity, theories which, through their challenge to both scientific and philosophical orthodoxy made vivid the (...) need for a new kind of empiricism (Schlick 1921) whereby one could defend the empirical integrity of the theory of relativity against challenges 1 coming mainly from the defenders of Kant. Second, the special and general theories of relativity were wrongly cited as straightforwardly validating central tenets of the logical empiricist program, such as verificationism, and Einstein was wrongly represented as having, himself, explicitly endorsed those same philosophical principles. As we now know, logical empiricism was not the monolithic philosophical movement it was once taken to have been. Those associated with the movement disagreed deeply about fundamental issues concerning the structure and interpretation of scientific theories, as in the protocol sentence debate, and about the overall aims of the movement, as in the debate between the left and right wings 2 of the Vienna Circle over the role of politics in science and philosophy. Along with such differences went subtle differences in the assessment of Einstein’s legacy to logical empiricism. Philipp Frank–himself a dissenter from central points of right-wing Vienna Circle doctrine–deserves.. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the development of the general theory of relativity coincided with a shift in Einstein’s philosophy of science from a kind of Machian positivism to a form of scientific realism. This article criticizes that view, arguing that a kind of realism was present from the start but that Einstein was skeptical all along about some of the bolder metaphysical and epistemological claims made on behalf of what we now would call scientific realism. If we read Einstein’s (...) philosophy of science in its proper late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century philosophical context, we find that a kind of Duhemian under determinationist holism and conventionalism was more important to Einstein than either positivism or realism. And, reading his philosophy of science in its proper scientific. (shrink)

Until recently, psychologists have conceptualised and studied trust in God (TIG) largely in isolation from contemporary work in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies that has examined the topic with increasing clarity. In this article, we first review the primary ways that psychologists have conceptualised and measured TIG. Then, we draw on conceptualizations of TIG outside the psychology of religion to provide a conceptual map for how TIG might be related to theorised predictors and outcomes. Finally, we provide a research (...) agenda for future empirical work in this area, as well as practical applications for counsellors and religious leaders. (shrink)

This paper begins by summarizing the chief, original contributions to technology ethics in Shannon Vallor’s recent book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, highlighting especially the book’s distinctive inclusion of not only the western virtue ethics tradition but also the analogous traditions in Buddhist and Confucian ethics. But the main point of the paper is to suggest that the theoretical framework developed in the book be extended to include an analysis of the distinctive civic (...) virtues that are crucial to the well functioning of communities of makers, marketers, consumers, and regulators of technology, constituting, as it were, technomoral civic virtue ethics. It is suggested that prominent among these civic virtues is what is dubbed “Socratism,” the habit of regular querying of community aims and practices for the purpose of keeping community action focused on the goods internal to community practice, and the goods of the larger communities in which these local communities are embedded. (shrink)

The physics and metaphysics of identity and individuality Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9463-7 Authors Don Howard, Department of Philosophy and Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA Bas C. van Fraassen, Philosophy Department, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA Otávio Bueno, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA Elena Castellani, Department of Philosophy, University of Florence, Via Bolognese 52, (...) 50139 Florence, Italy Laura Crosilla, Department of Pure Mathematics, School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT UK Steven French, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Décio Krause, Department of Philosophy, Federal University of Santa Catarina, 88040-900 Campus Trindade, Florianópolis, SC Brazil Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

as the chief novelty in the quantum description of nature, Einstein for having found vindication in 3 relativity theory for either positivism or realism, depending upon whom one asks. Famous as is each in his own domain, they are famous also, together, for their decades-long disagreement over the future of fundamental physics, their respective embrace and rejection of quantum indeterminacy being only the most widely-known point of contention.

This paper proposes a model for an artificial autonomous moral agent (AAMA), which is parsimonious in its ontology and minimal in its ethical assumptions. Starting from a set of moral data, this AAMA is able to learn and develop a form of moral competency. It resembles an “optimizing predictive mind,” which uses moral data (describing typical behavior of humans) and a set of dispositional traits to learn how to classify different actions (given a given background knowledge) as morally right, wrong, (...) or neutral. When confronted with a new situation, this AAMA is supposedly able to predict a behavior consistent with the training set. This paper argues that a promising computational tool that fits our model is “neuroevolution,” i.e. evolving artificial neural networks. (shrink)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-4317-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8229-4317-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Science — Philosophy. 2. Science — Social aspects. 3. Values. 4. Science and civilization. I. Carrier, Martin. II. Howard, Don, professor. III. Kourany ...

Such are those thick & gloomie shadows dampe Oft seene in charnel vaults, & sepulchers, Lingering, & sitting by a new made grave, As loath to leave the bodie that it lov'd, & link’t it selfe by carnall sensualtie To a degenerate, & degraded state.

Steven French and Décio Krause have written what bids fair to be, for years to come, the definitive philosophical treatment of the problem of the individuality of elementary particles in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. The book begins with a long and dense argument for the view that elementary particles are most helpfully regarded as non-individuals, and it concludes with an earnest attempt to develop a formal apparatus for describing such non-individual entities better suited to the task than our (...) customary set theory. Along the way one is treated to a compendious philosophical history of quantum statistics and a well-nigh exhaustive (I’m tempted to say, “exhausting”) analytical history of philosophical responses to the quantum theory’s prima facie challenge to classical notions of particle individuality. The book is also a salvo from the headquarters artillery company of the “pro” side in the contemporary structuralism wars, and an essay in metaphysical naturalism. Whew! There are too many places where the friendly critic wants to engage the argument, and few where the authors have not already anticipated such engagement. I take this as my excuse, then, for offering not any systematic response to the whole project, but just some questions and observations about several points that caught my attention. (shrink)

Barry Commoner has argued that the environmental failure of modern technology is due in large part to the reductionistic character ofmodern science, especially its biological component where the reductionist approach has triumphed in molecular biology. I claim, first, that Commoner has confused reduction in the sense of the reduction of one theory to another with what is better called analysis, or the strategy of breaking a whoie into its parts in order to understand the properties of the whole, this latter (...) being the actual target of his attack. I then argue that his criticisms of molecular biology fail since each of the properties of the cell which he claims cannot be understood in an analytic fashion, such as reproduction, development and inheritance, can be so understood, and that, in fact, each of his putatively nonanalytic accounts of these properties is the result of analysis. Similarly, Commoner’s claim that ecosystenls possess properties that cannot be understood analytically is refuted by comparing ecosystems with automobiles, which Commoner acknowledges are susceptible to analysis, and by showing that there are no essential differences between the two. FinaIly, l observe that while it is false that ecosystems canna! be understood in analytic terms, it is true that they are not usually thus understood, and that the explanation for this is not that scientists subscribe to amistaken philosophy, but that our social institutions for the teaching and application of science do not adequately stress the importance of exploring the connections between the parts of such complex wholes. (shrink)

Barry Commoner has argued that the environmental failure of modern technology is due in large part to the reductionistic character ofmodern science, especially its biological component where the reductionist approach has triumphed in molecular biology. I claim, first, that Commoner has confused reduction in the sense of the reduction of one theory to another with what is better called analysis, or the strategy of breaking a whoie into its parts in order to understand the properties of the whole, this latter (...) being the actual target of his attack. I then argue that his criticisms of molecular biology fail since each of the properties of the cell which he claims cannot be understood in an analytic fashion, such as reproduction, development and inheritance, can be so understood, and that, in fact, each of his putatively nonanalytic accounts of these properties is the result of analysis. Similarly, Commoner’s claim that ecosystenls possess properties that cannot be understood analytically is refuted by comparing ecosystems with automobiles, which Commoner acknowledges are susceptible to analysis, and by showing that there are no essential differences between the two. FinaIly, l observe that while it is false that ecosystems canna! be understood in analytic terms, it is true that they are not usually thus understood, and that the explanation for this is not that scientists subscribe to amistaken philosophy, but that our social institutions for the teaching and application of science do not adequately stress the importance of exploring the connections between the parts of such complex wholes. (shrink)

The question of philosophy’s relevance to extra-academic concerns is much with us today. Plato tells us that, once the philosopher has seen the truth in the full light of the sun, she must return to the cave, there to put knowledge to work in making a better world, even though, being temporarily unaccustomed to the dark, she risks ridicule from those still in thrall to illusion. This paper reflects upon the life and career of Otto Neurath as a modern exemplification (...) of this ideal of philosophical engagement. In spite of, or, perhaps, because of his never having held an academic appointment, Neurath made a difference for the good in human affairs. The key components of what I term Neurath’s “philosophy of science in action” are explicated in order to understand how that could be. Foregrounded are Neurath’s socialism, his own version of the thesis of the empirical underdetermination of theory by evidence, his anti-metaphysical stance, and his commitment to physicalism and the unity of science. The paper concludes with a discussion of the contemporary relevance of Neurath’s model of engaged philosophy of science. (shrink)

On Saturday, August 26, 1893, thirteen-year-old Edith Low Babson was swimming in her favorite swimming hole on the Annisquam river in her home town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Though she was a strong swimmer, something went wrong, and she drowned. A tragedy like all such. But this drowning had unusual consequences. Edith’s older brother was Roger W. Babson, who grew up to become one of America’s most prominent businessmen of the early twentieth century. A statistician, prolific author, philanthropist, founder of Babson (...) College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the Prohibition Patry’s Presidential candidate in 1940, Roger Babson was deeply affected by his sister’s death, as he was again many years later, in 1947, by the death of his grandson, Michael, who drowned while saving the life of a companion who had been knocked off of a sailboat in Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire. But Roger Babson was a man of action, not one quietly to acquiesce when confronted by suffering inflicted by a seemingly impersonal and uncaring nature. One year after his grandson’s death, Babson dedicated a significant part of his vast personal wealth to the establishment of the Gravity Research Foundation in New Boston, New Hampshire, which thereafter awarded an annual prize for theoretical research on gravitation, a prize whose winners include the likes of Stephen Hawking. Why? As Babson explained in a pamphlet published by the new foundation, “Gravity: Our Enemy Number One” (Babson 1948), the goal was to alleviate the suffering for which gravity was responsible, the gravity that seized his sister “like a dragon and.. (shrink)

(STARS Conference, Cancún, January 2007).