About the Book
The sequel to The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science, this book addresses the epistomological questions unexamined in the first work. The empiricist approach is directly challenged, and shown to be internally incoherent and incompatible with actual scientific practice.
Table of Contents:
Critical: prevalent views of science - the popular view, philosophical views; induction - disclaimer of necessity for justification, induction and probability, the pragmatic justification of induction, instrumentalism, new puzzles for old, the unreasonableness of induction; the empiricist treatment of deduction and necessity - conventionalism, deduction and explanation, counterfactual conditionals, conclusion; empiricist reformers - dilution of empiricism, Kneale on necessity, perception and consilience, Popper on Falsification, (a) basic statements, (b) hypothetico-deductive method. Historical: non-empirical aspects of scientific procedure - the Copernican revolution, (a) Copernicus, (b) Tycho Brahe, (c) Kepler, (d) Galileo, (e) Newton, Dalton and chemical combination, the conservation of mass and energy, relativity; "deduction from phenomena" - case histories; kepler's determination of the orbit of Mars, Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, Newton's experiments, Lavoisierand combustion, Darwin's defence of the evolution hypothesis, the discovery of the positron, findings; scientific advance - conceptual systems, recognition of observed data, articulation and proliferation of schemata, the origins of change, the transition process, innovation and conservatism, system and development. Epistemological: perception - the epistomological crux, common views of perception, sense-data, critique and merits of sense-data theories, achievement, discrepancy between "data" and percept, schemata, context, innate and acquired schemata, influence of past experience, interpretation, degrees of organization, perception and science; question and answer - science and common sense, question and presupposition, the origins of hypotheses, analogy and enumeration, abduction, confirmation, note - what is meant by "discovery"?; the logic of construction - the concept of structure, formalism, logic and psychology, systematic thinking, necessity and causality, probability, induction and deduction, science as a system; the dialectic of progress - comprehensiveness and consistency as marks of adequacy, objections and criticisms, science as a scale, dialectic, the unity of science, hierarchy, agreement of results; science and truth - objectivity, science and reality, criticism and defence, knowlwdge and its object, validity and progress, science and metaphysics, science and religion.
