Tychomancy

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Tychomancy

Author : Michael Strevens
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674076028
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Tychomancy by : Michael Strevens

Download or read book Tychomancy written by Michael Strevens and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tychomancy—meaning “the divination of chances”—presents a set of rules for inferring the physical probabilities of outcomes from the causal or dynamic properties of the systems that produce them. Probabilities revealed by the rules are wide-ranging: they include the probability of getting a 5 on a die roll, the probability distributions found in statistical physics, and the probabilities that underlie many prima facie judgments about fitness in evolutionary biology. Michael Strevens makes three claims about the rules. First, they are reliable. Second, they are known, though not fully consciously, to all human beings: they constitute a key part of the physical intuition that allows us to navigate around the world safely in the absence of formal scientific knowledge. Third, they have played a crucial but unrecognized role in several major scientific innovations. A large part of Tychomancy is devoted to this historical role for probability inference rules. Strevens first analyzes James Clerk Maxwell’s extraordinary, apparently a priori, deduction of the molecular velocity distribution in gases, which launched statistical physics. Maxwell did not derive his distribution from logic alone, Strevens proposes, but rather from probabilistic knowledge common to all human beings, even infants as young as six months old. Strevens then turns to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the statistics of measurement, and the creation of models of complex systems, contending in each case that these elements of science could not have emerged when or how they did without the ability to “eyeball” the values of physical probabilities.

Tychomancy

Author : Michael Strevens
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674075986
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Tychomancy by : Michael Strevens

Download or read book Tychomancy written by Michael Strevens and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Strevens makes three claims about rules for inferring physical probability. They are reliable. They constitute a key part of the physical intuition that allows us to navigate the world safely in the absence of scientific knowledge. And they played a crucial role in scientific innovation, from statistical physics to natural selection.

Thinking Off Your Feet

Author : Michael Strevens
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674989708
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis Thinking Off Your Feet by : Michael Strevens

Download or read book Thinking Off Your Feet written by Michael Strevens and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-07 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an original defense of armchair philosophy, Michael Strevens seeks to restore philosophy to its traditional position as an essential part of the quest for knowledge, by reshaping debates about the nature of philosophical thinking. His approach explores experimental philosophy’s methodological implications and the cognitive science of concepts.

Time and Chance

Author : David Z Albert
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674020138
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Time and Chance by : David Z Albert

Download or read book Time and Chance written by David Z Albert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.

Science-Mart

Author : Philip Mirowski
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674061136
Total Pages : 463 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Science-Mart by : Philip Mirowski

Download or read book Science-Mart written by Philip Mirowski and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II. Science-Mart attributes this decline to a powerful neoliberal ideology in the 1980s which saw the fruits of scientific investigation as commodities that could be monetized, rather than as a public good.

Science in Action

Author : Bruno Latour
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674792913
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (929 download)

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Book Synopsis Science in Action by : Bruno Latour

Download or read book Science in Action written by Bruno Latour and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From weaker to stronger rhetoric : literature - Laboratories - From weak points to strongholds : machines - Insiders out - From short to longer networks : tribunals of reason - Centres of calculation.

Depth

Author : Michael Strevens
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674062574
Total Pages : 537 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Depth by : Michael Strevens

Download or read book Depth written by Michael Strevens and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean for scientists to truly understand, rather than to merely describe, how the world works? Michael Strevens proposes a novel theory of scientific explanation and understanding that overhauls and augments the familiar causal approach to explanation. What is replaced is the test for explanatorily relevant causal information: Strevens discards the usual criterion of counterfactual dependence in favor of a criterion that turns on a process of progressive abstraction away from a fully detailed, physical causal story. The augmentations include the introduction of a new, non-causal explanatory relevance relation—entanglement—and an independent theory of the role of black-boxing and functional specification in explanation. The abstraction-centered notion of difference-making leads to a rich causal treatment of many aspects of explanation that have been either ignored or handled inadequately by earlier causal approaches, including the explanation of laws and other regularities, with particular attention to the explanation of physically contingent high-level laws, idealization in explanation, and probabilistic explanation in deterministic systems, as in statistical physics, evolutionary biology, and medicine. The result is an account of explanation that has especially significant consequences for the higher-level sciences: biology, psychology, economics, and other social sciences.

Making Sense of Science

Author : Cornelia Dean
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067497896X
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis Making Sense of Science by : Cornelia Dean

Download or read book Making Sense of Science written by Cornelia Dean and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cornelia Dean draws on her 30 years as a science journalist with the New York Times to expose the flawed reasoning and knowledge gaps that handicap readers when they try to make sense of science. She calls attention to conflicts of interest in research and the price society pays when science journalism declines and funding dries up.

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

Author : Michael Strevens
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1631491385
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (314 download)

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Book Synopsis The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by : Michael Strevens

Download or read book The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science written by Michael Strevens and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.

Galileo in Pittsburgh

Author : Clark Glymour
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674051034
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Galileo in Pittsburgh by : Clark Glymour

Download or read book Galileo in Pittsburgh written by Clark Glymour and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did the trial of Galileo share with the trial for fraud of the foremost investigator of the effects of lead exposure on children’s intelligence? In the title essay of this rollicking collection on science and education, Clark Glymour argues that fundamentally both were disputes over what methods are legitimate and authoritative. From testing the expertise of NASA scientists to discovering where software goes to die to turning educational research upside down, Glymour’s reports from the front lines of science and education read like a blend of Rachel Carson and Hunter S. Thompson. Contrarian and original, he criticizes the statistical arguments against Teach for America, argues for teaching the fallacies of Intelligent Design in high school science, places contemporary psychological research in a Platonic cave dug by Freud, and gives (and rejects) a fair argument for a self-interested, nationalist response to climate change.One of the creators of influential new statistical methods, Glymour has been involved in scientific investigations on such diverse topics as wildfire prediction, planetary science, genomics, climate studies, psychology, and educational research. Now he provides personal reports of the funny, the absurd, and the appalling in contemporary science and education. More bemused than indignant, Galileo in Pittsburgh is an ever-engaging call to rethink how we do science and how we teach it.

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics

Author : Eleanor Knox
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317227131
Total Pages : 1223 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics by : Eleanor Knox

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics written by Eleanor Knox and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 1223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the state of the art in the philosophy of physics. It comprisess 54 self-contained chapters written by leading philosophers of physics at both senior and junior levels, making it the most thorough and detailed volume of its type on the market – nearly every major perspective in the field is represented. The Companion’s 54 chapters are organized into 12 parts. The first seven parts cover all of the major physical theories investigated by philosophers of physics today, and the last five explore key themes that unite the study of these theories. I. Newtonian Mechanics II. Special Relativity III. General Relativity IV. Non-Relativistic Quantum Theory V. Quantum Field Theory VI. Quantum Gravity VII. Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics VIII. Explanation IX. Intertheoretic Relations X. Symmetries XI. Metaphysics XII. Cosmology The difficulty level of the chapters has been carefully pitched so as to offer both accessible summaries for those new to philosophy of physics and standard reference points for active researchers on the front lines. An introductory chapter by the editors maps out the field, and each part also begins with a short summary that places the individual chapters in context. The volume will be indispensable to any serious student or scholar of philosophy of physics.

Imagined Worlds

Author : Freeman J. Dyson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674539099
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (39 download)

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Book Synopsis Imagined Worlds by : Freeman J. Dyson

Download or read book Imagined Worlds written by Freeman J. Dyson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapters have such headings as: Stories, Science, Technology, Evolution, and Ethics.

One of Us

Author : Alice Domurat Dreger
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674018259
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (182 download)

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Book Synopsis One of Us by : Alice Domurat Dreger

Download or read book One of Us written by Alice Domurat Dreger and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-31 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Us views conjoined twinning and other “abnormalities” from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics. This deeply thought-provoking and compassionate work exposes the extent of the social frame upon which we construct the “normal.”

Philosophy of Probability and Statistical Modelling

Author : Mauricio Suárez
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108983847
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis Philosophy of Probability and Statistical Modelling by : Mauricio Suárez

Download or read book Philosophy of Probability and Statistical Modelling written by Mauricio Suárez and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element has two main aims. The first one (sections 1-7) is an historically informed review of the philosophy of probability. It describes recent historiography, lays out the distinction between subjective and objective notions, and concludes by applying the historical lessons to the main interpretations of probability. The second aim (sections 8-13) focuses entirely on objective probability, and advances a number of novel theses regarding its role in scientific practice. A distinction is drawn between traditional attempts to interpret chance, and a novel methodological study of its application. A radical form of pluralism is then introduced, advocating a tripartite distinction between propensities, probabilities and frequencies. Finally, a distinction is drawn between two different applications of chance in statistical modelling which, it is argued, vindicates the overall methodological approach. The ensuing conception of objective probability in practice is the 'complex nexus of chance'.

The Causal Structure of Natural Selection

Author : Charles H. Pence
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108687423
Total Pages : 142 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (86 download)

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Book Synopsis The Causal Structure of Natural Selection by : Charles H. Pence

Download or read book The Causal Structure of Natural Selection written by Charles H. Pence and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent arguments concerning the nature of causation in evolutionary theory, now often known as the debate between the 'causalist' and 'statisticalist' positions, have involved answers to a variety of independent questions – definitions of key evolutionary concepts like natural selection, fitness, and genetic drift; causation in multi-level systems; or the nature of evolutionary explanations, among others. This Element offers a way to disentangle one set of these questions surrounding the causal structure of natural selection. Doing so allows us to clearly reconstruct the approach that some of these major competing interpretations of evolutionary theory have to this causal structure, highlighting particular features of philosophical interest within each. Further, those features concern problems not exclusive to the philosophy of biology. Connections between them and, in two case studies, contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of physics demonstrate the potential value of broader collaboration in the understanding of evolution.

Chance in Evolution

Author : Grant Ramsey
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022640191X
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Chance in Evolution by : Grant Ramsey

Download or read book Chance in Evolution written by Grant Ramsey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating volume explores the effects of chance on evolution, covering diverse perspectives from scientists, philosophers, and historians. The evolution of species, from single-celled organisms to multicellular animals and plants, is the result of a long and highly chancy history. But how profoundly has chance shaped life on earth? And what, precisely, do we mean by chance? Bringing together biologists, philosophers of science, and historians of science, Chance in Evolution is the first book to untangle the far-reaching effects of chance, contingency, and randomness on the evolution of life. The book begins by placing chance in historical context, starting with the ancients and moving through Darwin to contemporary biology. It documents the shifts in our understanding of chance as Darwin’s theory of evolution developed into the modern synthesis, and how the acceptance of chance in Darwinian theory affected theological resistance to it. Other chapters discuss how chance relates to the concepts of genetic drift, mutation, and parallel evolution—as well as recent work in paleobiology and the experimental evolution of microbes. By engaging in collaboration across biology, history, philosophy, and theology, this book offers a comprehensive overview both of the history of chance in evolution and of our current understanding of the impact of chance on life.

Bigger than Chaos

Author : Michael Strevens
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674044061
Total Pages : 430 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Bigger than Chaos by : Michael Strevens

Download or read book Bigger than Chaos written by Michael Strevens and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Strevens shows how simplicity can co-exist with the tangled interconnections within complex systems. By looking at the foundations of statistical reasoning about complex systems (gases, ecosystems and even social systems) he provides an understanding of how simplicity emerges from complexity.