Analysis and Interpretation in the Exact Sciences

The essays in this volume concern the points of intersection between analytic philosophy and the philosophy of the exact sciences. More precisely, it concern connections between knowledge in mathematics and the exact sciences, on the one hand, and the conceptual foundations of knowledge in general. Its guiding idea is that, in contemporary philosophy of science, there are profound problems of theoretical interpretation-- problems that transcend both the methodological concerns of general philosophy of science, and the technical concerns of philosophers of particular sciences. A fruitful approach to these problems combines the study of scientific detail with the kind of conceptual analysis that is characteristic of the modern analytic tradition. Such an approach is shared by these contributors: some primarily known as analytic philosophers, some as philosophers of science, but all deeply aware that the problems of analysis and interpretation link these fields together.

Inhalt

1 Analysis and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Modern Physics; Robert DiSalle.- Part I Perception, Language, and Realism.- 2 Seeing Things Move; Michael Dummett.- 3 A Critical Examination of Sellars's Theory of Perception; Anil Gupta.- 4 Long Ago, in a Context Far Away; Mark Wilson.- 5 Vagueness, Ambiguity, and the Sound of Meaning; Sylvain Bromberger.- 6 Carnap's Philosophical Neutrality Between Realism and Instrumentalism; Michael Friedman.- Part II Foundations of Mathematics.- 7 Frege and Benacerraf's Problem; Crispin Wright.- 8 More on Frege and Hilbert; Michael Hallett.- 9 The Axiom of Choice in an Elementary Theoryof Operations and Sets; John L. Bell.- Part III Foundations of Physics.- 10 Quantum Mechanics and Ontology; Hilary Putnam.- 11 Betting on the Outcomes of Measurements: A Bayesian Theory of Quantum Probability; Itamar Pitowsky.- 12 Is Information the Key?; Jeffrey Bub.- 13 Correlations and Counterfactuals: The EPR Illusion; Allen Stairs.- 14 A Remark About the Geodesic Principle in General Relativity; David B. Malament.- Bibliography of the Publications of William Demopoulos to 2011.- Doctoral Theses to 2011.- Index.