Buy new:

$137.32

Select delivery location

Only 1 left in stock.

US imports may differ from local products. Additional terms apply. Learn More.

$$137.32 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon US

Ships from

Amazon US

Sold by

Amazon US

Sold by

Amazon US

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$188.98
& FREE Delivery

Sold by: Smaller World Future AU

Follow the author

Martin Curd

Follow

Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues Paperback – 17 March 1998

by J. A. Cover (Author), Martin Curd (Author)

36

See all formats and editions

There is a newer edition of this item:

Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues
$105.95
(80)
Only 1 left in stock.

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$137.32","priceAmount":137.32,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"137","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"32","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"GMz3rVN%2Fp3zjnxRIH3zbG7h%2Fif%2F7XnCjPHtGcFDSc4YItKYV3Fu5SVuXVPoK1Nh1Mfcy6Q9oTob5zdTAkWswh3lNQNIEBcEV8hNfq81IY0j742c80IvwruGl%2B0uqZig2HRDGR12J9iiaYj18Rdr4DrmgC6%2FVk2CxwN3rAPF5yiGI5LqZETQpDp18S58pIOn%2B","locale":"en-AU","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

An anthology of 50 texts. It is divided into nine sections, each of which is followed by a detailed commentary enabling students to understand the main philosophical points and unfamiliar terms and theories.

Report an issue with this product

Print length

1398 pages
Language

English
Publisher

*Norton agency titles
Publication date

17 March 1998
Dimensions

14.22 x 4.32 x 23.62 cm
ISBN-10

0393971759
ISBN-13

978-0393971750
See all details

Frequently bought together

$137.32

Get it 1 - 9 May

Only 1 left in stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon US.

+

$60.06

In stock

Ships from and sold by Amazon AU.

Total Price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

One of these items ships sooner than the other.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

J. A. Cover
80
Paperback
8 offers from $87.95

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ *Norton agency titles; 1st edition (17 March 1998)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1398 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393971759
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393971750
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.22 x 4.32 x 23.62 cm

Customer Reviews:
36

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Martin Curd

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs, and more

Review this product

Write a customer review

Top reviews from other countries

person

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 February 2017

Verified Purchase

Clear summary

Sara

I'm surprised

Reviewed in the United States on 22 January 2013

Verified Purchase

This product is from the 90's, and yet there's no writing in it, and it had a minimal amount of writing in it. I'm really glad I got it instead of the newer version, especially because of how much money I saved!

2 people found this helpful

Blair

Alice’s Adventures in Science Wonderland

Reviewed in Canada on 30 June 2015

Verified Purchase

Chapter One: Down the Philosophical Rabbit Hole
------------------------------------------------------------------

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the science textbook her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversation?”

Then she spotted a Philosophical Rabbit running by. “Maybe he can help make sense of this,” she thought. Burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. Down went Alice after it. Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.

Chapter Two: The Reduction
--------------------------------------

At the bottom she saw a tiny door. “How ever can I get through that?” she wondered. Nearby there was a large mushroom growing, with a caterpillar on top of it. It got down and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter. We call that a 'reduction' in Wonderland.” Alice nibbled the left side of the mushroom, and sure enough she became small enough to fit through the door.

On the other side she was greeted by some of the strange inhabitants of Wonderland. "I am sure glad that reduction let me fit through the little door,” Alice said.

A mouse named Quine replied, “Reductionism is the doctrine that every meaningful synthetic statement is logically equivalent to some sentence containing only experiential terms joined together with logical connectives.”
Alice was confused. “Can you,” she asked, “explain that to me?”
“Certainly,” he replied. “An explanans gives an explanation about an explanandum.”

“No, no,” interrupted Nagel, a curious looking mole, “that is a homogeneous reduction because disparate phenomena are reduced to a single set of laws.”
Alice thought that seemed more like a unification, but because she had just arrived she said nothing.

Then Nickles the Turtle interjected, “That is a Reduction 1, the achievement of postulational and ontological economy obtained by derivational reduction. On the other hand, Reduction 2 is a varied collection of intertheoretic relations rather than a single, distinctive logical or mathematical relation.”
“But that is what I mean by an inhomogeneous reduction,” said Nagel.
“Not really,” Nickles retorted. “All your reductions amount to domain combining.”

Alice was wondering why none of them described reduction the way scientists do when a Mad Hatter named Tom arrived on the scene.

Chapter Three: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Parties
------------------------------------------------------------

The Mad Hatter took Alice by the hand and told her, “Let me explain the structure of all this scientific thinking to you.” He led her to the house of the Ptolemy Hare. There was a circular table set out under a tree in front of the house, with a tea party in progress. Alice exclaimed, “I love tea parties!”
The Mad Hatter replied, “We call them 'paradigms' in Wonderland.”

There was a teapot at the center of the table and teacups all around it. The table was spinning around and around.
Ptolemy Hare, who was seated at the table, noticed Alice. “Welcome to my paradigm. Have you noticed that everything goes in circles?”
“Oh, yes, so many things do that here. Even the logic sometimes,” replied Alice.
The Hare then told Alice that all the circles must revolve around him, because, after all, it is his paradigm.
The Mad Hatter muttered under his breath, “Just like the philosophy of science revolves around me ever since I wrote my book.”

The Hare added, “I can tell where all the cups are by inventing epicycles that go around the circles the table is making.”
Alice asked if that was not a complicated way to find the cups. The Hare replied “Young lady, we have been doing it this way for a thousand years, so by now we have it all figured out.”

This all made Alice’s head spin. She left the table and spun round and round until she came to another tea party, or paradigm she supposed, in progress.

Chapter Four: Alice Shifts to a New Paradigm
------------------------------------------------------------

The Mad Hatter explained to Alice that her revolutions had led her to a 'paradigm shift'. Alice thought to herself that so many revolutions would soon make her dizzy. At this party the table was also spinning, with the teacups going around the teapot at the center. The Mad Hatter introduced Alice to Copernicus, who was seated and quietly watching the cups go around. He said, “You can clearly see the cups are revolving around the central teapot. This is a much simpler way to find the teacups.”

“I do think this is a rather more sensible tea party than that of the Hare,” Alice said. “But he did have a very pretty teacup over there. Can I bring it here?”
“No!” replied the Mad Hatter emphatically. “A teacup in one paradigm is not the same as one in another. What one takes to be facts depends on the theory that describes them. It is as if they are speaking a different language at the other party. One cannot even hold both paradigms in mind together and compare them.”
“But any language can be translated into any other one,” thought Alice. “And surely a teacup is still a teacup.”

The Mad Hatter continued, “There is no reason to think that successive theories approximate more and more closely to the truth. The notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its ‘real’ counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. The appeal of the Copernicus tea party is aesthetic rather than pragmatic.”
Alice’s head was beginning to hurt. Surely the Copernicus tea party had the better explanation. But good explanations did not seem to matter much around here.

The Mad Hatter then pointed out that there were many more tea parties, hosted by creatures called Newton and Einstein, among others. But he had studied the Copernicus party first, and as it was very revolutionary compared to Ptolemy Hare’s, it must follow that all the other parties are equally revolutionary.
“Well, revolutions were oh so very popular in the sixties when you wrote that stuff,” thought Alice. But she said, “I remember learning about that in my cognitive psychology lessons. They called it ‘priming’. The way you interpret later events is filtered on the basis of your first experience.”
From the look the Mad Hatter gave her, Alice realized one does not mention such things in Wonderland.

Chapter Five: Newton’s Vacuous Party
---------------------------------------------------

The Mad Hatter then led Alice to Professor Newton’s party. But on the way they met a duck named Mellor, who told them, “Don’t waste your time going there. Their talk is all vacuous.”
“How so?” asked Alice.
Mellor replied, “Newton’s first law of motion says bodies not acted on by other forces will move at a constant speed in a straight line. But his gravitational theory says all bodies exert gravitational forces on each other, meaning there cannot be a body without other forces acting on it. Thus the law is about something that cannot exist, therefore it is vacuous.”
“But if we subtract the gravitational forces the law of inertia will apply!” exclaimed Alice.

Alice turned toward the Duchess Nancy, who had just joined them. “So ladies can come to these tea parties too?” she asked.
“As long as we are even more obtuse than the gentlemen,” she replied, “That is the only way we can get tenure at this party.”

To demonstrate this, she explained, “It is not valid to use vector arithmetic to subtract the gravitational forces because vectors are not real things. A result based on something that is not real cannot itself be real.”
Alice asked, “Could we use this as an opening to explore the relationship between mathematics and science?”
“Not in Wonderland,” was her reply. “We just use it to prove science does not describe reality.”

“So this is yet another meaning of reduction,” thought Alice, “Reducing everything to vacuous nonsense.”

Chapter Six: Therapy for Reverend Bayes
--------------------------------------------------------

At that moment, a Mr. Horwich joined the gathering. He announced, “Consider the hypothesis that all ravens are black.”
“Well,” said Alice, “I have never seen a white one.”
Mr. Horwich replied, “Ah, but your shoe is white. That shows a non-black object is a non-raven.”
“What does a shoe have to do with a raven?” asked Alice, thinking such logic is non-sense.

“Let me explain,” Mr. Horwich continued. “Wittgenstein regarded philosophy as therapeutic: its goal is to dissolve problems and resolve paradoxes by untying the knots in our thinking. A good philosophical theory is one that unravels and connects the misleading assumptions that have led us into confusion and error.”

“You see,” he added, “In Wonderland we love to lift a sentence from Wittgenstein to support our argument.”
“And then you argue the opposite,” said Alice, pleased with herself for learning the ways of Wonderland.
“Not necessarily, my dear,” he responded, “You are assuming we have some idea of what he was talking about in the first place.”

“But let me continue. Therapeutic Bayesianism uses probability theory to shed light on problems with theory verification. Let H be the hypothesis that all ravens are black, and E is the evidence of your white shoe. The factor by which the rational degree of belief in H is enhanced by E is indicated by the ratio of subjective probabilities, P(H|E) / P(H), for a rational person…” He then wrote a whole page of Bayesian probability notation on the blackboard to illustrate his point.

“But all you did is bury the assumption that there is little connection between shoes and birds in all that math!” cried Alice. “You only created confusion by tying everything up in notational knots. I could use some therapy for the headache you have given me.”

Chapter Seven: The Trial
---------------------------------

Alice was still recovering from her Bayesian headache when a cry of “The trial is beginning!” was heard in the distance. “Come on!” cried the Mad Hatter, and taking Alice by the hand they hurried off. The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their thrones when they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about them. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look at them— “I wish they'd get the trial done,” she thought, “and hand round the refreshments!”

'Herald, read the accusation!' said the King.

“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!”

The King thanked the Herald, and said, “We must find the cause for the condition we find ourselves in. After all, a cause is an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition. I thereby call the first witness, Professor Fire Bend!”

The professor took the stand and began, “First, we must consider the phrase ‘he stole those tarts’. We must not attach too great an importance to ‘what we mean’ by a phrase, and we must be prepared to change whatever little we have said concerning this meaning as soon as the need arises. Flexibility and even sloppiness in semantic matters is a prerequisite of scientific progress.”

“Hear, Hear!” cried some of the audience.

“It is important to have as many alternative hypotheses as possible,” he continued. “It is bound to happen that the alternatives do not share a single statement with the theories they criticize. The exist also facts which cannot be unearthed except with the help of alternatives to the theory to be tested and which become unavailable as soon as such alternatives are excluded.”

He then concluded, “The first step will therefore be the formulation of fairly general assumptions that are not yet directly connected with observations; this means the first step will be the invention of a new metaphysics.” To much cheering, the professor returned to his seat.

The King said, “Indeed, we must consider all verification-transcendent truth-conditions. Call the next witness.”
The Mad Hatter stood up and said, “If some of these hypotheses are different paradigms, there may be no meaningful correspondence between them. Recall that the choice of paradigm is a matter of aesthetics.”
Eddington the Bear interjected, “For example, which tarts are really there: the solid ones we can taste, or those composed of speeding electric charges and are therefore mostly emptiness?”
“If the meaning is empty,” said the King, “that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. But let me call the first witness for the prosecution.”

Musgrave the Muskrat took the stand. “Realists,” he began, “think science explains facts about the world and they think a realist philosophy of science explains facts about science.”
A murmur of disapproval rose from the crowd. He continued, “Can you not all see the tarts in question? A real explanation does not remove one mystery by postulating another one.”

The Duchess cried out, “Take off your glasses. What do you see now?”
The Muskrat removed his thick spectacles, and replied, “I can’t see a thing. Everything is a blur.”
The Duchess exclaimed, “Then the tarts are clearly a consequence of the instrument with which you observe them. The instrument is based on theory, as is the existence of the tarts. The tarts, your spectacles, indeed all of our language is thoroughly theory-laden, or theory-infected, even theory-impregnated.”

“That is not entirely appropriate language for a children’s book,” the King of Hearts warned. “However, if one cannot prove the reality of the Knave or the tarts, and it is not possible to distinguish between alternate hypotheses, I must find the Knave innocent. Court dismissed!”

“Everything is getting curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice. “This whole thing is nothing but a house of cards!”

Final Chapter: The Awakening
----------------------------------------

At this the whole pack of cards rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister. “Wake up, Alice dear!” said her sister; “Why, what a long sleep you've had!”

“Oh, I've had such a curious dream!” said Alice. “I was in a very strange world. For a place called Wonderland there was little sense of wonder about the mystery and beauty of science. All the creatures were obsessed with staking out intellectual territory for themselves based on a selective interpretation of the meaning of words. They love to talk about how science is underdetermined…”

“You mean that there are no definitive proofs?” asked her sister.

“Yes,” replied Alice, “But philosophy is even more underdetermined. You can never prove objects or theories represent real things, any more than you can prove any particular philosophy is correct. It makes more sense to ask how the choice of a certain philosophy affects the practice of science. Maybe instrumentalists and realists have different biases, and it is simply best to have some of each.”

“Instead we get a lot of talk about reductionism, while they all reduce science into arbitrary collections of components,” Alice continued. “And not once did they mention the concept of emergent properties, which are rather fundamental to understanding science.”

Her sister tried to console her, “It all sounds like a bit of a nightmare.”

“Yeah,” Alice sighed, “If we ever applied the demarcation problem to philosophy, the results might not be pretty.”

New Unicorn

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 April 2015

Verified Purchase

Very informative well written book.

Alan A. Keith

Curd and Cover

Reviewed in the United States on 29 December 2012

Verified Purchase

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the Philosophy of science. The book is bulku, but that is what you expect in a college text.

2 people found this helpful

See more reviews

Buy new:

$137.32

Amazon Global Store

Other Sellers on Amazon

Image Unavailable

Follow the author

Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues Paperback – 17 March 1998

There is a newer edition of this item:

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

Customers also viewed

Product details

About the author

Martin Curd

Customer reviews

Review this product

Top reviews from Australia

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new: $137.32

Amazon Global Store

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the author

Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues Paperback – 17 March 1998

There is a newer edition of this item:

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

Customers also viewed

Product details

About the author

Martin Curd

Customer reviews

Review this product

Top reviews from Australia

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$137.32