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Thomas Nickles
University of Nevada, Reno
  1. Two concepts of intertheoretic reduction.Thomas Nickles - 1973 - Journal of Philosophy 70 (April):181-201.
  2. What is a problem that we may solve it.Thomas Nickles - 1981 - Synthese 47 (1):85 - 118.
  3.  14
    Scientific Discovery: Case Studies.Thomas Nickles - 1980 - Taylor & Francis.
    The history of science is articulated by moments of discovery. Yet, these 'moments' are not simple or isolated events in science. Just as a scientific discovery illuminates our understanding of nature or of society, and reveals new connections among phenomena, so too does the history of scientific activity and the analysis of scientific reasoning illuminate the processes which give rise to moments of discovery and the complex network of consequences which follow upon such moments. Understanding discovery has not been, until (...)
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  4.  50
    Beyond divorce: Current status of the discovery debate.Thomas Nickles - 1985 - Philosophy of Science 52 (2):177-206.
    Does the viability of the discovery program depend on showing either (1) that methods of generating new problem solutions, per se, have special probative weight (the per se thesis); or, (2) that the original conception of an idea is logically continuous with its justification (anti-divorce thesis)? Many writers have identified these as the key issues of the discovery debate. McLaughlin, Pera, and others recently have defended the discovery program by attacking the divorce thesis, while Laudan has attacked the discovery program (...)
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  5.  54
    Thomas Kuhn.Thomas Nickles (ed.) - 2002 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes to many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is probably the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science of the last 25 years, and has become something of a cultural icon. His concepts of paradigm, paradigm change and incommensurability have changed the way we think about science. This volume offers an introduction to Kuhn's life and (...)
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  6.  18
    Science and Hypothesis.Thomas Nickles - 1984 - Erkenntnis 21 (3):433-438.
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  7. Scientific Discovery, Logic and Rationality.Thomas Nickles - 1982 - Mind 91 (363):468-470.
  8.  61
    Alien Reasoning: Is a Major Change in Scientific Research Underway?Thomas Nickles - 2020 - Topoi 39 (4):901-914.
    Are we entering a major new phase of modern science, one in which our standard, human modes of reasoning and understanding, including heuristics, have decreasing value? The new methods challenge human intelligibility. The digital revolution inspires such claims, but they are not new. During several historical periods, scientific progress has challenged traditional concepts of reasoning and rationality, intelligence and intelligibility, explanation and knowledge. The increasing intelligence of machine learning and networking is a deliberately sought, somewhat alien intelligence. As such, it (...)
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  9.  33
    Heuristic Appraisal: Context of Discovery or Justification?Thomas Nickles - 2006 - In Jutta Schickore & Friedrich Steinle (eds.), Revisiting Discovery and Justification. Springer. pp. 159--182.
  10.  51
    Remarks on the use of history as evidence.Thomas Nickles - 1986 - Synthese 69 (2):253 - 266.
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  11. Models and Inferences in Science.Emiliano Ippoliti, Fabio Sterpetti & Thomas Nickles (eds.) - 2016 - Cham: Springer.
    The book answers long-standing questions on scientific modeling and inference across multiple perspectives and disciplines, including logic, mathematics, physics and medicine. The different chapters cover a variety of issues, such as the role models play in scientific practice; the way science shapes our concept of models; ways of modeling the pursuit of scientific knowledge; the relationship between our concept of models and our concept of science. The book also discusses models and scientific explanations; models in the semantic view of theories; (...)
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  12. Scientific revolutions.Thomas Nickles - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  13. Lakatosian heuristics and epistemic support.Thomas Nickles - 1987 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2):181-205.
  14.  53
    Selectivity and Discord: Two Problems of Experiment.Thomas Nickles - 2004 - Mind 113 (450):344-347.
  15.  40
    Discovery Logics.Thomas Nickles - 1990 - Philosophica 45 (1):7-32.
  16.  4
    Science and Hypothesis.Thomas Nickles - 1982 - Philosophy of Science 49 (4):653-655.
  17.  67
    The Problem of Demarcation: History and Future.Thomas Nickles - 2013 - In Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry (eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University of Chicago Press. pp. 101.
  18.  57
    Heuristic appraisal: A proposal.Thomas Nickles - 1989 - Social Epistemology 3 (3):175 – 188.
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  19.  29
    Perspectivism Versus a Completed Copernican Revolution.Thomas Nickles - 2016 - Axiomathes 26 (4):367-382.
    I discuss changes of perspective of four kinds in science and about science. Section 2 defends a perspectival nonrealism—something akin to Giere’s perspectival realism but not a realism—against the idea of complete, “Copernican” objectivity. Section 3 contends that there is an inverse relationship between epistemological conservatism and scientific progress. Section 4 casts doubt on strong forms of scientific realism by taking a long-term historical perspective that includes future history. Section 5 defends a partial reversal in the status of so-called context (...)
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  20. Problem of demarcation.Thomas Nickles - 2006 - In J. Pfeifer & Sahotra Sarkar (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia. Psychology Press. pp. 1--188.
  21.  27
    6 Some Puzzles about Kuhn's Exemplars.Thomas Nickles - 2012 - In Vasō Kintē & Theodore Arabatzis (eds.), Kuhn's the Structure of Scientific Revolutions Revisited. Routledge. pp. 112.
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  22.  34
    Truth or Consequences? Generative versus Consequential Justification in Science.Thomas Nickles - 1988 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988:393 - 405.
    Pure consequentialists hold that all theoretical justification derives from testing the consequences of hypotheses, while generativists maintain that reasoning (some feature of) the hypothesis from we already know is an important form of justification. The strongest form of justification (they claim) is an idealized discovery argument. In the guise of H-D methodology, consequentialism is widely supposed to have defeated generativism during the 19th century. I argue that novel prediction fails to overcome the logical weakness of consequentialism or to render generative (...)
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  23.  32
    Scientific Problems: Three Empiricist Models.Thomas Nickles - 1980 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980:3 - 19.
    One component of a viable account of scientific inquiry is a defensible conception of scientific problems. This paper specifies some logical and conceptual requirements that an acceptable account of scientific problems must meet as well as indicating some features that a study of scientific inquiry indicates scientific problems have. On the basis of these requirements and features, three standard empiricist models of problems are examined and found wanting. Finally a constraint inclusion-model of scientific problems is proposed.
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  24.  20
    A multi-pass conception of scientific inquiry.Thomas Nickles - 1997 - Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 32 (1):11-44.
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  25.  71
    Life at the frontier: The relevance of heuristic appraisal to policy. [REVIEW]Thomas Nickles - 2009 - Axiomathes 19 (4):441-464.
    Economic competitive advantage depends on innovation, which in turn requires pushing back the frontiers of various kinds of knowledge. Although understanding how knowledge grows ought to be a central topic of epistemology, epistemologists and philosophers of science have given it insufficient attention, even deliberately shunning the topic. Traditional confirmation theory and general epistemology offer little help at the frontier, because they are mostly retrospective rather than prospective. Nor have philosophers been highly visible in the science and technology policy realm, despite (...)
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  26. Twixt method and madness.Thomas Nickles - 1987 - In Nancy J. Nersessian (ed.), The Process of Science: Contemporary Philosophical Approaches to Understanding Scientific Practice. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
     
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  27.  3
    The crowbar model of method and its implications.Thomas Nickles - 2019 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 34 (3):357-372.
    There is a rough, long-term tradeoff between rate of innovation and degree of strong realism in scientific practice, a point reflected in historically changing conceptions of method as they retreat from epistemological foundationism to a highly fallibilistic, modeling perspective. The successively more liberal, innovation-stimulating methods open up to investigation deep theoretical domains at the cost, in many cases, of moving away from strong realism as a likely outcome of research. The crowbar model of method highlights this tension, expressed as the (...)
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  28.  54
    Scientific Problems and Constraints.Thomas Nickles - 1978 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1978:134 - 148.
    In this paper the relation between scientific problems and the constraints on their solutions is explored. First the historical constraints on the solution to the blackbody radiation problem are set out. The blackbody history is used as a guide in sketching a working taxonomy of constraints, which distinguishes various kinds of reductive and nonreductive constraints. Finally, this discussion is related to some work in erotetic logic. The hypothesis that scientific problems can be identified with structured sets of constraints is interesting; (...)
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  29.  34
    Methods of Discovery.Thomas Nickles - 1997 - Biology and Philosophy 12 (1):127-140.
  30. From natural philosophy to metaphilosophy of science.Thomas Nickles - 1987 - In P. Achinstein & R. Kagon (eds.), Kelvin's Baltimore Lectures and Modern Theoretical Physics. MIT Press. pp. 507--541.
     
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  31.  7
    Do Cognitive Illusions Make Scientific Realism Deceptively Attractive?Thomas Nickles - 2020 - In Wenceslao J. Gonzalez (ed.), New Approaches to Scientific Realism. De Gruyter. pp. 104-130.
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  32.  50
    Davidson on explanation.Thomas Nickles - 1977 - Philosophical Studies 31 (February):141-145.
    Davidson's defective defense of the consistency of (1) the causal interaction of mental and physical events, (2) the backing law thesis on causation, (3) the impossibility of lawfully explaining mental events is repaired by closer attention to the description-Relativity of explanation. Davidson wrongly allows that particular mental events are explainable when particular identities to physical events are known. The author argues that such identities are powerless to affect what features a given law can explain. Thus a great intelligence knowing all (...)
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  33.  42
    Questioning and problems in philosophy of science: Problem-solving versus directly truth-seeking epistemologies.Thomas Nickles - 1988 - In Michel Meyer (ed.), Questions and Questioning. W. De Gruyter. pp. 43--67.
  34.  54
    Deflationary Methodology and Rationality of Science.Thomas Nickles - 1996 - Philosophica 58 (2).
    The last forty years have produced a dramatic reversal in leading accounts of science. Once thought necessary to (explain) scientific progress, a rigid method of science is now widely considered impossible. Study of products yields to study of processes and practices, .unity gives way to diversity, generality to particularity, logic to luck, and final justification to heuristic scaffolding. I sketch the story, from Bacon and Descartes to the present, of the decline and fall of traditional scientific method, conceived as The (...)
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  35.  15
    Theory Generalization, Problem Reduction and the Unity of Science.Thomas Nickles - 1974 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1974:33 - 75.
  36. Modeling and Inferring in Science.Emiliano Ippoliti, Thomas Nickles & Fabio Sterpetti - 2016 - In Emiliano Ippoliti, Fabio Sterpetti & Thomas Nickles (eds.), Models and Inferences in Science. Springer. pp. 1-9.
    Science continually contributes new models and rethinks old ones. The way inferences are made is constantly being re-evaluated. The practice and achievements of science are both shaped by this process, so it is important to understand how models and inferences are made. But, despite the relevance of models and inference in scientific practice, these concepts still remain contro-versial in many respects. The attempt to understand the ways models and infer-ences are made basically opens two roads. The first one is to (...)
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  37.  18
    Positive Science and Discoverability.Thomas Nickles - 1984 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984:13 - 27.
    Although seriously defective, 17th-century ideas about discovery, justification, and positive science are not as hopeless, useless, and out of date as many philosophers assume. They appear to underlie modern scientific practice. The generationist view of justification interestingly links justification with discovery issues while employing a concept of empirical support quite foreign to the modern, consequentialist concept, which identifies empirical evidence with favorable test results (predictive/explanatory success). In the generationist sense, justification amounts to potential discovery or "discoverability". A partial defense of (...)
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  38.  1
    Integrating the science studies disciplines.Thomas Nickles - 1989 - In Steve Fuller (ed.), The Cognitive Turn: Sociological and Psychological Perspectives on Science. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  39. Justification as Discoverability II.Thomas Nickles - 1984 - Philosophia Naturalis 21 (2/4):563-576.
     
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  40. The Discovery-Justification (DJ) Distinction and Professional Philosophy of Science: Comments on the First Day's Five Papers.Thomas Nickles - 2002 - In Schickore J. & Steinle F. (eds.), Revisiting Discovery and Justification. Max-Planck-Institut. pp. 67--78.
     
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  41.  67
    The methodological study of creativity and discovery -- some background.Joke Meheus & Thomas Nickles - 1999 - Foundations of Science 4 (3):231-235.
  42.  12
    On the independence of singular causal explanation in social science: Archaeology.Thomas Nickles - 1977 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 7 (2):163-187.
  43.  40
    Covering law explanation.Thomas Nickles - 1971 - Philosophy of Science 38 (4):542-561.
    A serious problem for covering law explanation is raised and its consequences for the Hempelian theory of explanation are discussed. The problem concerns an intensional feature of explanations, involving the manner in which theoretical law statements are related to the events explained. The basic problem arises because explanations are not of events but of events under descriptions; moreover, in a sense, our linguistic descriptions outrun laws. One form of the problem, termed the problem of weak intensionality, is apparently solved by (...)
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  44. At the End of an Age. [REVIEW]Thomas Nickles - 2003 - Isis 94:407-408.
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  45. Discovery.Thomas Nickles - 2017 - In W. H. Newton‐Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. pp. 85–96.
    We begin with some questions. What constitutes a scientific discovery? How do we tell when a discovery has been made and whom to credit? Is making a discovery (always) the same as solving a problem? Is it an individual psychological event (an ahal experience), or something more articulated such as a logical argument or a mathematical derivation? May discovery require a long, intricate social process? Could it be an experimental demonstration? How do we tell exactly what has been discovered, given (...)
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  46. Historicism and Scientific Practice I. [REVIEW]Thomas Nickles - 1989 - Isis 80:665-669.
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  47. Review of Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch: The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science[REVIEW]Thomas Nickles - 1995 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (2):261-266.
  48. Lakatos.Thomas Nickles - 2017 - In W. H. Newton‐Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. pp. 207–212.
    Imre Lakatos (9 November 1922–2 February 1974) is the most important philosopher of mathematics and one of the most influential philosophers of science since the mid‐twentieth century. A Hungarian, Lakatos changed his name from Lipschitz to Molnar during the Nazi era and then to Lakatos (“locksmith”). After the war he remained politically active, as secretary in the Hungarian Ministry of Education. Later he was imprisoned as a dissident, and escaped to the West during the revolt of 1956. He studied at (...)
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  49. Metodologia, euristica e razionalità.Thomas Nickles - 1985 - In Marcello Pera & Joseph C. Pitt (eds.), I Modi del progresso: teorie e episodi della razionalità scientifica. Il Saggiatore.
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  50. Relativism and Realism in ScienceRobert Nola.Thomas Nickles - 1990 - Isis 81 (3):614-615.
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