Polish Essays in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences

Modern philosophy has benefited immensely from the intelligence and sensitivity, the creative and critical energies, and the lucidity of Polish scholars. Their investigations into the logical and methodological founda tions of mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, ethics and esthetics, psychology, linguistics, economics and jurisprudence, and the social sciences - all are marked by profound and imaginative work. To the centers of empiricist philosophy of science in Vienna, Berlin and Cambridge during the first half of this century, one always added the great school of analytic and methodological studies in Warsaw and Lw6w. To the world centers of Marxist theoretical practice in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Rome and elsewhere, one must add the Poland of the same era, from Ludwig Krzywicki (1859-1941) onward. (From our preface to Wiatr [1979p. Other movements also have been distinctive in Poland. Phenomenology was developed in the impressive school of Roman Ingarden at Cracow, semiotics from the early work of the philosopher and psychologist Kazimierz Twardowski at Lw6w in the 1890's, with masterful develop ment by his disciples Kotarbinski and Ajdukiewicz onward, conceptual foundations of physics in the incisive methodological reflections of Marian Smoluchowski, and mathematical logic from Jan I:.ukasiewicz and Stanislaw Lesniewski to Tarski, Mostowski, and many others.

Inhalt
I. General Methodological Problems.- Reflections on Science and Rationality.- The Epistemological and Methodological Sense of the Concept of Rationality.- On Two Kinds of Conventionalism with Respect to Empirical Sciences.- Realism and Instrumentalism: On A Priori Conditions of Science.- Once More about Empirical Support.- The Context of Discovery and the Context of Justification: A Reappraisal.- Continuity and Anticumulative Changes in the Growth of Science.- Some Remarks in Defense of the Incommensurability Thesis.- Marxism and the Controversy over the Development of Science.- Are there Definitively Falsifying Procedures in Science?.- The Pluralistic Approach to Empirical Testing and the Special Forms of Experiment.- Dialectical Correspondence and Essential Truth.- Testing Idealizational Laws.- Practical Idealization.- II. Formal Analysis.- An Interpretation of a Concept in Science by a Set of Operational Procedures.- A Formal Definition of the Concept of Simplicity.- Characteristics of Additive Quantities.- III. Ontological Problems.- On the Concept of Matter.- Time Separation.- Four Conceptions of Causation.- IV. Philosophy of Mathematics and Information Theory.- On the Philosophy of Mathematics.- Information, Regulation, Negentropy.- Information and Signal.- V. Philosophy of Physics.- Principles of Physics as Meta-laws.- Structural Laws in Physics.- Controversial Problems of the Probabilistic Interpretation of Quantum Phenomena.- Quantum Mechanics and the Structure of Physical Theories.- Difficulties with the Reduction of Classical to Relativistic Mechanics.- VI. Philosophy of Biology and Linguistics.- Genetic and Historical Explanation in Biology.- The Idealizational Status of Theoretical Biology.- Chomsky's Inconsistencies in his Critique of EvolutionaryConceptions of Language.- VII. Other Papers.- The Problem of the Chemical Organization of Matter in the Light of a Closed Development Model.- An Outline of a Simulation Model of Science as a Part of the Model of Action.- The Notion of Technological Research and its Place among other Informational Activities.- Difficulties with Absolutism: The Case of Von Weizsäcker's Philosophy.- Bibliographies.- Abbreviations used in the Bibliographies.- Bibliography of Polish Philosophy of Natural Science.- Bibliography of Non-Polish Authors Cited.- List of Contributors.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.