Patrick Suppes: Scientific Philosopher

Patrick Suppes: Scientific Philosopher
Author: P. Humphreys
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1994-09-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780792325529

Patrick Suppes is a philosopher and scientist whose contributions range over probability and statistics, mathematical and experimental psychology, the foundations of physics, education theory, the philosophy of language, measurement theory, and the philosophy of science. He has also been a pioneer in the area of computer assisted instruction. In each of these areas, Suppes has provided seminal ideas that in some cases led to shaping the direction of research in the field. The papers contained in this collection were commissioned with the mandate of advancing research in their respective fields rather than retrospectively surveying the contributions that Suppes himself has made. The authors form an interesting mixture of researchers in both formal philosophy of science and science itself all of whom have been inspired by his ideas. To maintain the spirit of constructive dialogue that characterizes Suppes's intellectual style, he has written individual responses to each article. In Volume 1: Probability and Probabilistic Causality, nineteen distinguished philosophers and scientists focus their attention on probabilistic issues. In Part I the contributors explore axiomatic representations of probability theory including qualitative and interval valued probabilities as well as traditional point valued probabilities. Belief structures and the dynamics of belief are also treated in detail. In Part II the rapidly growing field of probabilistic causation is assessed from both formal and empirical viewpoints. For probability theorists, statisticians, economists, philosophers of science, psychologists and those interested in the foundations of mathematical social science. In Volume 2: Philosophy of Physics, Theory Structure, and Measurement Theory, fifteen distinguished philosophers and scientists cover a wide variety of topics. Part III covers issues in quantum theory, geometry, classical mechanics, and computational physics. Part IV explores Suppes's well known set-theoretic account of scientific theories which has served him well throughout his career. Suppes's contributions to measurement theory have been widely used in mathematical psychology and elsewhere, and this material is the subject of Part V. For physicists, logicians, workers in mathematical social sicence, and philosophers of science. In Volume 3: Philosophy of Language and Logic, Learning and Action Theory, fourteen distinguished philosophers and scientists explore issues in the philosophy of language, logic, and philosophical psychology. Suppes's suggestions that quantum theory requires a rethinking of classical logic form a particularly sharp account of that controversial thesis, and Part VI deals with this issue together with topics in the philosophy of language and logic, including relational grammars and anaphora. Part VII deals with issues in psychology, action theory, and robotics, while Part VIII concludes with a general survey of Suppes's views in the philosophy of science. A comprehensive chronological and topical bibliography of Suppes's writings is included in this volume. For philosophers of language, theoretical linguists, logicians, workers in mathematical social sciences, and philosophers of science.

Introduction to Logic

Introduction to Logic
Author: Patrick Suppes
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2012-07-12
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0486138054

Part I of this coherent, well-organized text deals with formal principles of inference and definition. Part II explores elementary intuitive set theory, with separate chapters on sets, relations, and functions. Ideal for undergraduates.

Axiomatic Set Theory

Axiomatic Set Theory
Author: Patrick Suppes
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2012-05-04
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0486136876

Geared toward upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, this treatment examines the basic paradoxes and history of set theory and advanced topics such as relations and functions, equipollence, more. 1960 edition.

Life Atomic

Life Atomic
Author: Angela N. H. Creager
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2013-10-02
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 022601794X

After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. Even as the atomic bomb became the focus of Cold War anxiety, radioisotopes represented the government’s efforts to harness the power of the atom for peace—advancing medicine, domestic energy, and foreign relations. In Life Atomic, Angela N. H. Creager tells the story of how these radioisotopes, which were simultaneously scientific tools and political icons, transformed biomedicine and ecology. Government-produced radioisotopes provided physicians with new tools for diagnosis and therapy, specifically cancer therapy, and enabled biologists to trace molecular transformations. Yet the government’s attempt to present radioisotopes as marvelous dividends of the atomic age was undercut in the 1950s by the fallout debates, as scientists and citizens recognized the hazards of low-level radiation. Creager reveals that growing consciousness of the danger of radioactivity did not reduce the demand for radioisotopes at hospitals and laboratories, but it did change their popular representation from a therapeutic agent to an environmental poison. She then demonstrates how, by the late twentieth century, public fear of radioactivity overshadowed any appreciation of the positive consequences of the AEC’s provision of radioisotopes for research and medicine.

The Restless Clock

The Restless Clock
Author: Jessica Riskin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2016-03-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022630292X

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena. "The Restless Clock" examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals--dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency. "The Restless Clock "reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology.

First Course in Mathematical Logic

First Course in Mathematical Logic
Author: Patrick Suppes
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0486150941

Rigorous introduction is simple enough in presentation and context for wide range of students. Symbolizing sentences; logical inference; truth and validity; truth tables; terms, predicates, universal quantifiers; universal specification and laws of identity; more.

Foundations of Probability with Applications

Foundations of Probability with Applications
Author: Patrick Suppes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1996-11-13
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9780521568357

This is an important collection of essays by a leading philosopher, dealing with the foundations of probability.

Foundations and Methods from Mathematics to Neuroscience

Foundations and Methods from Mathematics to Neuroscience
Author: Colleen Crangle
Publisher: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publica Tion
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Logic, Symbolic and mathematical
ISBN: 9781575867441

During his long and continuing scholarly career, Patrick Suppes contributed significantly both to the sciences and to their philosophies. The volume consists of papers by an international group of Suppes colleagues, collaborators, and students in many of the areas of his expertise, building on or adding to his insights. Michael Friedman offers an overview of Suppes accomplishments and of his unique perspective on the relation between science and philosophy. Paul Humphreys, Stephen Hartmann, and Tom Ryckman present essays in the philosophy of physics. Jens-Erik Fenstad, Harvey Friedman, and Jaako Hintikka consider problems in the foundations of mathematics, while the late Duncan Luce, Jean-Claude Falmagne, Brian Skyrms, and Hannes Leitgeb have contributed essays in theory of measurement, decision theory and probability. Foundations of economics and political theory are addressed by Adolfo Garcia de la Sienra, Russell Hardin, and Kenneth Arrow. Psychology, language, and philosophy of language are addressed by Elizabeth Loftus, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Willem Levelt, Dagfinn Follesdal, and Marcos Perreau-Guimares and some of Suppes most recent research in neurobiology is addressed in essays by Colleen Crangle, Acadio de Barros and Claudio Carvalhes. Finally Nancy Cartwright and Alexandre Marcelles consider the alignment (or misalignment) of method and policy. Each of the essays is accompanied by a response from Suppes."

Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures

Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures
Author: Patrick Suppes
Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study
Total Pages: 536
Release: 2002
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9781575863337

A fundamental reason for using formal methods in the philosophy of science is the desirability of having a fixed frame of reference that may be used to organize the variety of doctrines at hand. This book—Patrick Suppes's major work, and the result of several decades of research—examines how set-theoretical methods provide such a framework, covering issues of axiomatic method, representation, invariance, probability, mechanics, and language, including research on brain-wave representations of words and sentences. This is a groundbreaking, essential text from a distinguished philosopher.

Patrick Suppes, Economics, and Economic Methodology

Patrick Suppes, Economics, and Economic Methodology
Author: John B. Davis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351381644

Patrick Suppes (1922–2014) was an extraordinarily wide-ranging scholar. Although best known as a philosopher of science, Suppes made substantial contributions to a remarkably wide range of different fields of research including many relevant to economics: decision theory, philosophy of economics, modeling theory, foundations of measurement, philosophy of psychology (and thus what is now behavioral economics), and many other fields. This collection recognizes Suppes’s contributions to economics and economic methodology with a symposium of papers that examine, build on, and/or assess Suppes’s research in these areas. The authors include philosophers, economists, game theorists, historians of economics, and many whose research combine these fields. This book honors Patrick Suppes, while at the same time, exhibiting the richness of contemporary philosophy of economics. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology.