Polish Essays in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences

Abstract

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 Evolutionary Conceptions 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 Weizsacker'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.