Scientific Understanding And Representation

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Scientific Understanding and Representation

Author : Insa Lawler,Kareem Khalifa,Elay Shech
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 429 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2022-12-13
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781000782035

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Scientific Understanding and Representation by Insa Lawler,Kareem Khalifa,Elay Shech Pdf

This volume assembles cutting-edge scholarship on scientific understanding, scientific representation, and their delicate interplay. Featuring several articles in an engaging ‘critical conversation’ format, the volume integrates discussions about understanding and representation with perennial issues in the philosophy of science, including the nature of scientific knowledge, idealizations, scientific realism, scientific inference, and scientific progress. In the philosophy of science, questions of scientific understanding and scientific representation have only recently been put in dialogue with each other. The chapters advance these discussions from a variety of fresh perspectives. They range from case studies in physics, chemistry, and neuroscience to the representational challenges of machine learning models; from special forms of representation such as maps and topological models to the relation between understanding and explanation; and from the role of idealized representations to the role of representation and understanding in scientific progress. Scientific Understanding and Representation will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of mathematics, and epistemology.

Models

Author : Marx W. Wartofsky
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 422 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Science
ISBN : 9789400993570

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Models by Marx W. Wartofsky Pdf

Marx Wartofsky has been working for many years within an unusual confluence of philosophical problems. He brings to these intersecting problems his comprehensive intelligence, at once imaginative and rigorous, analytic and historical. He is a philosopher's philosopher, but also Everyman's. Wartofsky is philosopher of the natural and the social sciences, of perception, esthetics and the creative arts, of the 18th century French and the 19th century Germans, of politics and morality, ofthe methods and morals of medicine, and it is plain, of all human existence. To a colleague, he seems Jack-of-all-philosophical-trades, and master of them too. The reader soon will learn that Wartofsky is a genial, lucid and relaxed philosophical companion, deeply serious but without noticeable anxiety. I need not highlight these selected epistemological papers gathered as, and about, Models, since Wartofsky's own introductory remarks are helpful and stimulating in that respect. I need only, after 21 years of friendship and collaboration with him, warn the reader to beware of how profound and provocative these papers will show themselves to be beneath their good-humored and swiftly-flowing surface. And I must publicly note the pleasure with which I welcome Marx Wartofsky's volume to our Boston Studies. Boston University R.S.C. Center for the Philosophy and History of Science September 1979 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL PREFACE VII xi AC K NOWLEDGEMENTS xiii INTRODUCTION The Model Muddle: Proposals for an Immodest Realism 1.

Representation and Understanding

Author : Jerry Bobrow
Publisher : Elsevier
Page : 427 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2014-06-28
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9781483299150

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Representation and Understanding by Jerry Bobrow Pdf

Representation and Understanding

Scientific Representation

Author : James Nguyen,Roman Frigg
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2022-09-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781009007344

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Scientific Representation by James Nguyen,Roman Frigg Pdf

This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the notion of scientific representation. It does so by focussing on an important class of scientific representations, namely scientific models. Models are important in the scientific process because scientists can study a model to discover features of reality. But what does it mean for something to represent something else? This is the question discussed in this Element. The authors begin by disentangling different aspects of the problem of representation and then discuss the dominant accounts in the philosophical literature: the resemblance view and inferentialism. They find them both wanting and submit that their own preferred option, the so-called DEKI account, not only eschews the problems that beset these conceptions, but further provides a comprehensive answer to the question of how scientific representation works. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Bas van Fraassen’s Approach to Representation and Models in Science

Author : Wenceslao J. Gonzalez
Publisher : Springer
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2016-09-03
Category : Science
ISBN : 9402402039

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Bas van Fraassen’s Approach to Representation and Models in Science by Wenceslao J. Gonzalez Pdf

This book analyzes Bas van Fraassen’s characterization of representation and models in science. In this regard, it presents the philosophical coordinates of his approach and pays attention to his structural empiricism as a framework for his views on scientific representations and models. These are developed here through two new contributions made by van Fraassen. In addition, there are analyses of the relation between models and reality in his approach, where the complexity of this conception is considered in detail. Furthermore, there is an examination of scientific explanation and epistemic values judgments. This volume includes a wealth of bibliographical information on his philosophy and relevant philosophical issues. Bas van Fraassen is a key figure in contemporary philosophy of science, as the prestigious Hempel Award shows. His views on scientific representation offer new ideas on how it should be characterized, and his conception of models shows a novelty that goes beyond other empiricists’ approaches of recent times. Both aspects — the characterization of scientific representation and the conception of models in science — are part of a deliberate attempt to forge a “structural empiricism,” an alternative to structural realism based on an elaborated version of empiricism.

Mathematics and Scientific Representation

Author : Christopher Pincock
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2012-01-13
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780190208578

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Mathematics and Scientific Representation by Christopher Pincock Pdf

Mathematics plays a central role in much of contemporary science, but philosophers have struggled to understand what this role is or how significant it might be for mathematics and science. In this book Christopher Pincock tackles this perennial question in a new way by asking how mathematics contributes to the success of our best scientific representations. In the first part of the book this question is posed and sharpened using a proposal for how we can determine the content of a scientific representation. Several different sorts of contributions from mathematics are then articulated. Pincock argues that each contribution can be understood as broadly epistemic, so that what mathematics ultimately contributes to science is best connected with our scientific knowledge. In the second part of the book, Pincock critically evaluates alternative approaches to the role of mathematics in science. These include the potential benefits for scientific discovery and scientific explanation. A major focus of this part of the book is the indispensability argument for mathematical platonism. Using the results of part one, Pincock argues that this argument can at best support a weak form of realism about the truth-value of the statements of mathematics. The book concludes with a chapter on pure mathematics and the remaining options for making sense of its interpretation and epistemology. Thoroughly grounded in case studies drawn from scientific practice, this book aims to bring together current debates in both the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and to demonstrate the philosophical importance of applications of mathematics.

Understanding Representation

Author : Jen Webb
Publisher : SAGE
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2008-12-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781446246535

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Understanding Representation by Jen Webb Pdf

"This is an extraordinarily lucid book. I am not sure that there is anyone who can do this sort of thing better than Jen Webb. It is a gift to students; extremely accessible yet complex and sophisticated in its treatment of theories and concepts of representation." - Jim McGuigan, Loughborough University Understanding Representation offers a contemporary, coherent and genuinely interdisciplinary introduction to the concept of representation. Drawing together the full range of ideas, practices, techniques and disciplines associated with the subject, this book locates them in a historical context, presents them in a readable fashion, and shows their relevance to everyday life in an engaging and accessible manner. Readers will be shown how to develop a sophisticated attitude to meaning, and understand the relationship to truth and identity that is brought into focus by communicative practices. With chapters on linguistic and political representation, art and media, and philosophical and cognitive approaches, this book: Guides readers through complex theoretical terrain with a highly readable and refreshing writing style. Explains the techniques and perspectives offered by semiotics, discourse analysis, poetics, politics, narratology, visual culture, cognitive theory, performance theory and theories of embodied subjectivity. Covers the new ideas and practices that have emerged since the work of Barthes, Eco and Foucault - especially communication and meaning-making in the digital environment, and the new paradigms of understanding associated with cognitive theories of identity and language. Teaches readers how to interpret and interrogate the world of signs in which they live. Understanding Representation provides students across the social sciences and humanities with an invaluable introduction to what is meant by 'representation'.

Understanding Scientific Understanding

Author : Henk W. de Regt
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2017-07-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780190652937

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Understanding Scientific Understanding by Henk W. de Regt Pdf

It is widely acknowledged that a central aim of science is to achieve understanding of the world around us, and that possessing such understanding is highly important in our present-day society. But what does it mean to achieve this understanding? What precisely is scientific understanding? These are philosophical questions that have not yet received satisfactory answers. While there has been an ongoing debate about the nature of scientific explanation since Carl Hempel advanced his covering-law model in 1948, the related notion of understanding has been largely neglected, because most philosophers regarded understanding as merely a subjective by-product of objective explanations. By contrast, this book puts scientific understanding center stage. It is primarily a philosophical study, but also contains detailed historical case studies of scientific practice. In contrast to most existing studies in this area, it takes into account scientists' views and analyzes their role in scientific debate and development. The aim of Understanding Scientific Understanding is to develop and defend a philosophical theory of scientific understanding that can describe and explain the historical variation of criteria for understanding actually employed by scientists. The theory does justice to the insights of such famous physicists as Werner Heisenberg and Richard Feynman, while bringing much-needed conceptual rigor to their intuitions. The scope of the proposed account of understanding is the natural sciences: while the detailed case studies derive from physics, examples from other sciences are presented to illustrate its wider validity.

Leveraging Distortions

Author : Collin Rice
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2021-08-17
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780262542616

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Leveraging Distortions by Collin Rice Pdf

An examination of how scientists deliberately and justifiably use pervasive distortions of relevant features to explain and understand natural phenomena. A fundamental rule of logic is that in order for an argument to provide good reasons for its conclusion, the premises of the argument must be true. In this book, Collin Rice shows how the practice of science repeatedly, pervasively, and deliberately violates this principle. Rice argues that scientists strategically use distortions that misrepresent relevant features of natural phenomena in order to explain and understand--and that they use these distortions deliberately and justifiably in order to discover truths that would be otherwise inaccessible. Countering the standard emphasis on causation, accurate representation, and decomposition of science into its accurate and inaccurate parts, Rice shows that science's epistemic achievements can still be factive despite their being produced through the use of holistically distorted scientific representations. Indeed, he argues, this distortion is one of the most widely employed and fruitful tools used in scientific theorizing. Marshalling a range of case studies, Rice contends that many explanations in science are noncausal, and he presents an alternate view of explanation that captures the variety of noncausal explanations found across the sciences. He proposes an alternative holistic distortion view of idealized models, connecting it to physicists' concept of a universality class; shows how universality classes can overcome some of the challenges of multiscale modeling; and offers accounts of explanation, idealization, modeling, and understanding.

Scientific Understanding

Author : Henk W. de Regt,Sabina Leonelli,Kai Eigner
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780822971245

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Scientific Understanding by Henk W. de Regt,Sabina Leonelli,Kai Eigner Pdf

To most scientists, and to those interested in the sciences, understanding is the ultimate aim of scientific endeavor. In spite of this, understanding, and how it is achieved, has received little attention in recent philosophy of science. Scientific Understanding seeks to reverse this trend by providing original and in-depth accounts of the concept of understanding and its essential role in the scientific process. To this end, the chapters in this volume explore and develop three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice. Earlier philosophers, such as Carl Hempel, dismissed understanding as subjective and pragmatic. They believed that the essence of science was to be found in scientific theories and explanations. In Scientific Understanding, the contributors maintain that we must also consider the relation between explanations and the scientists who construct and use them. They focus on understanding as the cognitive state that is a goal of explanation and on the understanding of theories and models as a means to this end. The chapters in this book highlight the multifaceted nature of the process of scientific research. The contributors examine current uses of theory, models, simulations, and experiments to evaluate the degree to which these elements contribute to understanding. Their analyses pay due attention to the roles of intelligibility, tacit knowledge, and feelings of understanding. Furthermore, they investigate how understanding is obtained within diverse scientific disciplines and examine how the acquisition of understanding depends on specific contexts, the objects of study, and the stated aims of research.

Dynamic Knowledge Representation in Scientific Domains

Author : Cyril Pshenichny,Paolo Diviacco,Dmitry Mouromtsev
Publisher : Engineering Science Reference
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2017-12-15
Category : Communication in science
ISBN : 1522552618

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Dynamic Knowledge Representation in Scientific Domains by Cyril Pshenichny,Paolo Diviacco,Dmitry Mouromtsev Pdf

"This book focuses on the IT field from the outlook of industry professionals and covers multidisciplinary themes such as human resource management, sociology, psychology, and management along with technology itself. It links theory with application or critically analyzing cases with the objective of identifying good practice in the management of IT human capital"--

Models, Simulations, and Representations

Author : Paul Humphreys,Cyrille Imbert
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2013-03-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781136668494

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Models, Simulations, and Representations by Paul Humphreys,Cyrille Imbert Pdf

Although scientific models and simulations differ in numerous ways, they are similar in so far as they are posing essentially philosophical problems about the nature of representation. This collection is designed to bring together some of the best work on the nature of representation being done by both established senior philosophers of science and younger researchers. Most of the pieces, while appealing to existing traditions of scientific representation, explore new types of questions, such as: how understanding can be developed within computational science; how the format of representations matters for their use, be it for the purpose of research or education; how the concepts of emergence and supervenience can be further analyzed by taking into account computational science; or how the emphasis upon tractability--a particularly important issue in computational science--sheds new light on the philosophical analysis of scientific reasoning.

Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures

Author : Patrick Suppes
Publisher : Stanford Univ Center for the Study
Page : 536 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Science
ISBN : 1575863332

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Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures by Patrick Suppes Pdf

A fundamental reason for using formal methods in the philosophy of science is the desirability of having a fixed frame of reference that may be used to organize the variety of doctrines at hand. This book—Patrick Suppes's major work, and the result of several decades of research—examines how set-theoretical methods provide such a framework, covering issues of axiomatic method, representation, invariance, probability, mechanics, and language, including research on brain-wave representations of words and sentences. This is a groundbreaking, essential text from a distinguished philosopher.

Constructing Representations to Learn in Science

Author : Russell Tytler,Vaughan Prain,Peter Hubber,Bruce Waldrip
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2013-04-20
Category : Education
ISBN : 9789462092037

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Constructing Representations to Learn in Science by Russell Tytler,Vaughan Prain,Peter Hubber,Bruce Waldrip Pdf

Constructing Representations to Learn in Science Current research into student learning in science has shifted attention from the traditional cognitivist perspectives of conceptual change to socio-cultural and semiotic perspectives that characterize learning in terms of induction into disciplinary literacy practices. This book builds on recent interest in the role of representations in learning to argue for a pedagogical practice based on students actively generating and exploring representations. The book describes a sustained inquiry in which the authors worked with primary and secondary teachers of science, on key topics identified as problematic in the research literature. Data from classroom video, teacher interviews and student artifacts were used to develop and validate a set of pedagogical principles and explore student learning and teacher change issues. The authors argue the theoretical and practical case for a representational focus. The pedagogical approach is illustrated and explored in terms of the role of representation to support quality student learning in science. Separate chapters address the implications of this perspective and practice for structuring sequences around different concepts, reasoning and inquiry in science, models and model based reasoning, the nature of concepts and learning, teacher change, and assessment. The authors argue that this representational focus leads to significantly enhanced student learning, and has the effect of offering new and productive perspectives and approaches for a number of contemporary strands of thinking in science education including conceptual change, inquiry, scientific literacy, and a focus on the epistemic nature of science.

Critical Graphicacy

Author : Wolff-Michael Roth,Lilian Pozzer-Ardenghi,Jae Young Han
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2005-11-10
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781402033766

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Critical Graphicacy by Wolff-Michael Roth,Lilian Pozzer-Ardenghi,Jae Young Han Pdf

This book explores reading and interpretation practices related to visual materials - here referred to as inscriptions - that accompany texts. Guiding questions include: ‘What practices are required for reading inscriptions?’ and ‘Do textbooks allow students to develop graphicacy skill required to critically read scientific texts?’ The book reveals what it takes to interpret, read, and understand visual materials, and what it takes to engage inscriptions in a critical way.