Scientific realism and antirealism

By Fine, Arthur

Traditionally, scientific realism asserts that the objects of scientific knowledge exist independently of the minds or acts of scientists and that scientific theories are true of that objective ...

Conventionalism

By Horwich, Paul

How is it known that every number has a successor, that straight lines can intersect each other no more than once, that causes precede their events, and that ...

Idealizations

By Laymon, Ronald

Scientific analyses of particular phenomena are invariably simplified or idealized. The universe does not contain only two bodies as assumed in Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws, or only ...

Maxwell, James Clerk (1831–79)

By Everitt, C.W.F.

For his two achievements of unifying electricity, magnetism and light, and of inventing statistical dynamics, Maxwell stands as the founding mind of modern theoretical physics. More than any ...

Computer simulations in science

Since the advent of digital computers around 1950, the method of computer simulation (simulation, for short) has enriched the repertoire of scientific methods. A computer simulation traces the ...

Demarcation problem

By Achinstein, Peter

The problem of demarcation is to distinguish science from nonscientific disciplines that also purport to make true claims about the world. Various criteria have been proposed by philosophers ...

Genetics

By Darden, Lindley

Genetics studies the problem of heredity, namely why offspring resemble their parents. The field emerged in 1900 with the rediscovery of the 1865 work of Gregor Mendel. William ...

Nagel, Ernest (1901–85)

By Levi, Isaac

Ernest Nagel was arguably the pre-eminent American philosopher of science from the mid 1930s to the 1960s. He taught at Columbia University for virtually his entire career. Although ...

Putnam, Hilary (1926–2016)

By Ben-Menahem, Yemima

Putnam’s work spans a broad spectrum of philosophical interests, yet nonetheless reflects thematic unity in its concern over the question of realism. A critic of logical positivism, Putnam ...

Reichenbach, Hans (1891–1953)

By Salmon, Wesley C.

Philosophy of science flourished in the twentieth century, partly as a result of extraordinary progress in the sciences themselves, but mainly because of the efforts of philosophers who ...

Fictionalism

By Fine, Arthur

‘Fictionalism’ generally refers to a pragmatic, antirealist position in the debate over scientific realism. The use of a theory or concept can be reliable without the theory being ...

Copernicus, Nicolaus (1473–1543)

By McMullin, Ernan

Copernicus argued that the earth is a planet revolving around the sun, as well as rotating on its own axis. His work marked the culmination of a tradition ...

Inference to the best explanation

By Vogel, Jonathan

Inference to the best explanation is the procedure of choosing the hypothesis or theory that best explains the available data. The factors that make one explanation better than ...

Kuhn, Thomas Samuel (1922–96)

By Hoyningen-Huene, Paul

The early 1960s saw substantial turmoil in the philosophy of science, then dominated by logical empiricism. Most important was the confrontation of the prevailing philosophical tradition with the ...

Latour, Bruno (1947–)

By Harman, Graham

Bruno Latour is a French philosopher whose work and influence have been mainly in the social sciences, and he is one of the world’s most cited authors in ...

Poincaré, Jules Henri (1854–1912)

By Stump, David J.

Although primarily a mathematician, Henri Poincaré wrote and lectured extensively on astronomy, theoretical physics, philosophy of science and philosophy of mathematics at the turn of the century. In ...

Smart, John Jamieson Carswell (1920–2012)

By Jackson, Frank

J.J.C. (Jack) Smart was born in England and studied at Glasgow and Oxford universities before moving to Australia to take up the Chair of Philosophy at Adelaide University. ...

Time

By Sklar, Lawrence

Time is the single most pervasive component of our experience and the most fundamental concept in our physical theories. For these reasons time has received intensive attention from ...

Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig (1858–1947)

By Howard, Don

Planck was a German theoretical physicist and leader of the German physics community in the first half of the twentieth century. Famous for his introduction of the quantum ...

Putnam, Hilary (1926–2016)

Putnam’s work spans a broad spectrum of philosophical interests, yet nonetheless reflects thematic unity in its concern over the question of realism. The dynamic nature of Putnam's thought ...

Metaphysics

By Craig, Edward

Metaphysics is a broad area of philosophy marked out by two types of inquiry. The first aims to be the most general investigation possible into the nature of ...

Natural kinds

Natural kinds are widely understood to be the real classifications of things that actually exist in the world. Natural kinds are the categories we tend to aim for ...

Occasionalism

By Hasker, William

Occasionalism is often thought of primarily as a rather desperate solution to the problem of mind–body interaction. Mind and body, it maintains, do not in fact causally affect ...

Eudoxus (c.390–c.340 BC)

By Taub, Liba

Eudoxus of Cnidos was a Greek mathematician with wide-ranging philosophical and scientific interests. He was known in antiquity for his mathematical astronomy and his philosophical hedonism, and placed, ...

Archaeology, philosophy of

By Wylie, Alison

Questions about the scientific status of archaeology have been central to field-defining debates since the late nineteenth century and have frequently involved appeals to philosophical sources. With the ...