Scientific Knowledge And The Deep Past
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| Author | : Adrian Currie |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : |
| Release | : 2019-08-31 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 1108605028 |
Historical sciences like paleontology and archaeology have uncovered unimagined, remarkable and mysterious worlds in the deep past. How should we understand the success of these sciences? What is the relationship between knowledge and history? In Scientific Knowledge and the Deep Past: History Matters, Adrian Currie examines recent paleontological work on the great changes that occurred during the Cretaceous period - the emergence of flowering plants, the splitting of the mega-continent Gondwana, and the eventual fall of the dinosaurs - to analyse the knowledge of historical scientists, and to reflect upon the nature of history. He argues that distinctively historical processes are 'peculiar': they have the capacity to generate their own highly specific dynamics and rules. This peculiarity, Currie argues, also explains the historian's interest in narratives and stories: the contingency, complexity and peculiarity of the past demands a narrative treatment. Overall, Currie argues that history matters for knowledge.
| Author | : Kareem Khalifa |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 265 |
| Release | : 2017-10-05 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 1107195632 |
The first comprehensive exploration of the nature and value of understanding, addressing burgeoning debates in epistemology and philosophy of science.
| Author | : Adrian Currie |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 384 |
| Release | : 2018-02-16 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 0262037262 |
An argument that we should be optimistic about the capacity of “methodologically omnivorous” geologists, paleontologists, and archaeologists to uncover truths about the deep past. The “historical sciences”—geology, paleontology, and archaeology—have made extraordinary progress in advancing our understanding of the deep past. How has this been possible, given that the evidence they have to work with offers mere traces of the past? In Rock, Bone, and Ruin, Adrian Currie explains that these scientists are “methodological omnivores,” with a variety of strategies and techniques at their disposal, and that this gives us every reason to be optimistic about their capacity to uncover truths about prehistory. Creative and opportunistic paleontologists, for example, discovered and described a new species of prehistoric duck-billed platypus from a single fossilized tooth. Examining the complex reasoning processes of historical science, Currie also considers philosophical and scientific reflection on the relationship between past and present, the nature of evidence, contingency, and scientific progress. Currie draws on varied examples from across the historical sciences, from Mayan ritual sacrifice to giant Mesozoic fleas to Mars's mysterious watery past, to develop an account of the nature of, and resources available to, historical science. He presents two major case studies: the emerging explanation of sauropod size, and the “snowball earth” hypothesis that accounts for signs of glaciation in Neoproterozoic tropics. He develops the Ripple Model of Evidence to analyze “unlucky circumstances” in scientific investigation; examines and refutes arguments for pessimism about the capacity of the historical sciences, defending the role of analogy and arguing that simulations have an experiment-like function. Currie argues for a creative, open-ended approach, “empirically grounded” speculation.
| Author | : Alex Csiszar |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 389 |
| Release | : 2018-06-25 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 022655337X |
Not since the printing press has a media object been as celebrated for its role in the advancement of knowledge as the scientific journal. From open communication to peer review, the scientific journal has long been central both to the identity of academic scientists and to the public legitimacy of scientific knowledge. But that was not always the case. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, academies and societies dominated elite study of the natural world. Journals were a relatively marginal feature of this world, and sometimes even an object of outright suspicion. The Scientific Journal tells the story of how that changed. Alex Csiszar takes readers deep into nineteenth-century London and Paris, where savants struggled to reshape scientific life in the light of rapidly changing political mores and the growing importance of the press in public life. The scientific journal did not arise as a natural solution to the problem of communicating scientific discoveries. Rather, as Csiszar shows, its dominance was a hard-won compromise born of political exigencies, shifting epistemic values, intellectual property debates, and the demands of commerce. Many of the tensions and problems that plague scholarly publishing today are rooted in these tangled beginnings. As we seek to make sense of our own moment of intense experimentation in publishing platforms, peer review, and information curation, Csiszar argues powerfully that a better understanding of the journal’s past will be crucial to imagining future forms for the expression and organization of knowledge.
| Author | : Derek Turner |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 195 |
| Release | : 2007-07-05 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 1139465058 |
Scientists often make surprising claims about things that no one can observe. In physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, scientists can at least experiment on those unobservable entities, but what about researchers in fields such as paleobiology and geology who study prehistory, where no such experimentation is possible? Do scientists discover facts about the distant past or do they, in some sense, make prehistory? In this book Derek Turner argues that this problem has surprising and important consequences for the scientific realism debate. His discussion covers some of the main positions in philosophy of science - realism, social constructivism, empiricism, and the natural ontological attitude - and shows how they relate to issues in paleobiology and geology. His original and thought-provoking book will be of wide interest to philosophers and scientists alike.
| Author | : Davis Baird |
| Publisher | : Univ of California Press |
| Total Pages | : 297 |
| Release | : 2004-02-10 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 0520928202 |
Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, Thing Knowledge demands that we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more.
| Author | : National Research Council |
| Publisher | : National Academies Press |
| Total Pages | : 153 |
| Release | : 2011-09-02 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 0309209153 |
There is little dispute within the scientific community that humans are changing Earth's climate on a decadal to century time-scale. By the end of this century, without a reduction in emissions, atmospheric CO2 is projected to increase to levels that Earth has not experienced for more than 30 million years. As greenhouse gas emissions propel Earth toward a warmer climate state, an improved understanding of climate dynamics in warm environments is needed to inform public policy decisions. In Understanding Earth's Deep Past, the National Research Council reports that rocks and sediments that are millions of years old hold clues to how the Earth's future climate would respond in an environment with high levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Understanding Earth's Deep Past provides an assessment of both the demonstrated and underdeveloped potential of the deep-time geologic record to inform us about the dynamics of the global climate system. The report describes past climate changes, and discusses potential impacts of high levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases on regional climates, water resources, marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and the cycling of life-sustaining elements. While revealing gaps in scientific knowledge of past climate states, the report highlights a range of high priority research issues with potential for major advances in the scientific understanding of climate processes. This proposed integrated, deep-time climate research program would study how climate responded over Earth's different climate states, examine how climate responds to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and clarify the processes that lead to anomalously warm polar and tropical regions and the impact on marine and terrestrial life. In addition to outlining a research agenda, Understanding Earth's Deep Past proposes an implementation strategy that will be an invaluable resource to decision-makers in the field, as well as the research community, advocacy organizations, government agencies, and college professors and students.
| Author | : Jerome R. Ravetz |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 417 |
| Release | : 2020-09-10 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1000159841 |
Science is continually confronted by new and difficult social and ethical problems. Some of these problems have arisen from the transformation of the academic science of the prewar period into the industrialized science of the present. Traditional theories of science are now widely recognized as obsolete. In Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems (originally published in 1971), Jerome R. Ravetz analyzes the work of science as the creation and investigation of problems. He demonstrates the role of choice and value judgment, and the inevitability of error, in scientific research. Ravetz's new introductory essay is a masterful statement of how our understanding of science has evolved over the last two decades.
| Author | : Carl Sagan |
| Publisher | : Penguin |
| Total Pages | : 316 |
| Release | : 2006-11-02 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 1101201835 |
“Ann Druyan has unearthed a treasure. It is a treasure of reason, compassion, and scientific awe. It should be the next book you read.” —Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith “A stunningly valuable legacy left to all of us by a great human being. I miss him so.” —Kurt Vonnegut Carl Sagan's prophetic vision of the tragic resurgence of fundamentalism and the hope-filled potential of the next great development in human spirituality The late great astronomer and astrophysicist describes his personal search to understand the nature of the sacred in the vastness of the cosmos. Exhibiting a breadth of intellect nothing short of astounding, Sagan presents his views on a wide range of topics, including the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, creationism and so-called intelligent design, and a new concept of science as "informed worship." Originally presented at the centennial celebration of the famous Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 1985 but never published, this book offers a unique encounter with one of the most remarkable minds of the twentieth century.
| Author | : Chris Haufe |
| Publisher | : MIT Press |
| Total Pages | : 347 |
| Release | : 2022-11-01 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 026237160X |
An argument that the development of scientific practice and growth of scientific knowledge are governed by Darwin’s evolutionary model of descent with modification. Although scientific investigation is influenced by our cognitive and moral failings as well as all of the factors impinging on human life, the historical development of scientific knowledge has trended toward an increasingly accurate picture of an increasing number of phenomena. Taking a fresh look at Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in How Knowledge Grows Chris Haufe uses evolutionary theory to explain both why scientific practice develops the way it does and how scientific knowledge expands. This evolutionary model, claims Haufe, helps to explain what is epistemically special about scientific knowledge: its tendency to grow in both depth and breadth. Kuhn showed how intellectual communities achieve consensus in part by discriminating against ideas that differ from their own and isolating themselves intellectually from other fields of inquiry and broader social concerns. These same characteristics, says Haufe, determine a biological population’s degree of susceptibility to modification by natural selection. He argues that scientific knowledge grows, even across generations of variable groups of scientists, precisely because its development is governed by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, he supports the claim that this susceptibility to modification through natural selection helps to explain the epistemic power of certain branches of modern science. In updating and expanding the evolutionary approach to scientific knowledge, Haufe provides a model for thinking about science that acknowledges the historical contingency of scientific thought while showing why we nevertheless should trust the results of scientific research when it is the product of certain kinds of scientific communities.
