Explaining science's success : understanding how scientific knowledge works / John Wright.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wright, John (John N.), author.

Series:

Acumen research editions.

Acumen research editions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science--Philosophy.

Science.

Science--Methodology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (v, 199 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Acumen Publishing, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Paul Feyeraband famously asked, what's so great about science? One answer is that it has been surprisingly successful in getting things right about the natural world, more successful than non-scientific or pre-scientific systems, religion or philosophy. Science has been able to formulate theories that have successfully predicted novel observations. It has produced theories about parts of reality that were not observable or accessible at the time those theories were first advanced, but the claims about those inaccessible areas have since turned out to be true. And science has, on occasion, advanced on more or less a priori grounds theories that subsequently turned out to be highly empirically successful. In this book the philosopher of science, John Wright delves deep into science's methodology to offer an explanation for this remarkable success story.

Contents:

Some surprising phenomena

Some unsatisfactory explanations of the phenomena

Defeasible a priori justification of induction

Independence of theory from data

Some more success-conducive properties of theories

Newton's laws of motion and law of gravitation

Special relativity

Mendelian genetics.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-196) and index.

Description based on metadata supplied by the publisher and other sources.

ISBN:

1-317-54488-9

1-315-72909-1

1-317-54489-7

1-84465-533-4

9781315729091

OCLC:

890531438