Styles of Thinking in Science and Technology

Styles of Thinking in Science and Technology
Author: Hermann Hunger
Publisher: Austrian Academy of Sciences
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-04-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9783700168461

In 1994 the late Alistair Crombie published his monumental work Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition. He distinguished between six styles of inquiry, demonstration and explanation diversified by their subject-matters, by their general conceptions of nature, and by scientific experience (publishers prospectus): postulation, the experimental argument, hypothetical modelling, taxonomy, probabilistic and statistical analysis, historical derivation. Fourteen years later it is time to reconsider this fascinating topical subject, in order to broaden earlier, Eurocentric approaches. Which philosophical, cultural, religious, political, economic influences can be identified that led to certain styles of thinking in science and technology all over the world and that influenced their further development? Cross-cultural influences and interrelations are of special interest. How are such traditions of thinking transmitted to later generations, to other cultures? How are they modified in the course of history? The Third Conference of the European Society for the History of Science would like to give a platform to all historians and philosophers of science and technology who are interested in these questions. Vienna with its scientific and cultural institutions that played a crucial role in the history of science is an ideal city for such an event.

Styles of Knowing

Styles of Knowing
Author: Chunglin Kwa
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2011-06-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780822961512

Now available in English, Styles of Knowing explores the development of various scientific reasoning processes in cultural-historical context. Influenced by historian Alistair Crombie’s Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition, Chunglin Kwa organizes his book according to six distinct styles: deductive, experimental, analytical-hypothetical, taxonomic, statistical, and evolutionary. Instead of featuring individual scientific disciplines in different chapters, each chapter explains the historical applications of each style’s unique criterion for good science. Kwa shows also how styles have influenced each other and transformed over time. In a chapter written especially for American audiences, Kwa examines how changes in engineering and technology during the twentieth century affected the balance among the various styles of science. Based on extensive research in Greek and Latin primary sources and numerous modern secondary sources, Kwa demonstrates the heterogeneous nature of scientific discovery. This accessible and innovative introduction to scientific change provides a foundational history for the classroom, historians, and nonspecialists.

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought
Author: A. C. Crombie
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 533
Release: 1990-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826431623

The author sees the history of Western Science as the history of a vision and an argument, initiated by the ancient Greeks in their search for principles at once of nature and of argument itself. This scientific vision explored and controlled by argument, and the diversification of both vision and argument by scientific experience and by interaction with the wider contexts of intellectual culture, constitute the long history of European scientific thought. Underlying that development have been specific commitments to conceptions of nature and of science and its intellectual and moral assumptions, accompanied by a recurrent critique; their diversification has generated a series of different styles of scientific thinking and of making theoretical and practical decisions which the work describes.

Science, Optics, and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought

Science, Optics, and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought
Author: Alistair Cameron Crombie
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 508
Release: 1990-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780907628798

A.C. Crombie is one of the best known writers on the history of Science. Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought brings together a coherent body of essays that complement his books and are of independent value. A.C. Crombie traces general themes in the development of Science: the Aristotelian inheritance and the importance of the search for logical explanation in the middle ages; the ambitions and limitations of experiment and quantification; changing attitudes to scientific progress; the relations between Science and the Arts, and between Mathematics, Music and Medical Science; and the study of the senses. In particular he shows how the mechanistic hypothesis stimulated the experimental and philosophical study of vision.

Handbook for the Historiography of Science

Handbook for the Historiography of Science
Author: Mauro L. Condé
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2023-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 3031275101

This book aims to perform a critical and broad assessment of the historiography of science produced from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It presents its main authors, concepts, ideas, conceptions, and schools. It also analyzes the historical circumstances of the rise of the discipline history of science and the relations of the historiography of science with related areas. These chapters do not understand the historiography of science as a mere description or record of the history of science. Instead, they understand the historiography of science from the epistemological criteria and choices that guided the writing of the history of science in its different contexts. In other words, more than describing the record of the various possibilities of historiographical approaches to science, the chapters carry out an epistemological reflection to assess the bases, possibilities, scope, and limits of different historiographical conceptions, authors, and traditions that have established the writing of the history of science. This book can be conceived as a reference work not only for professional historians and philosophers but also for academics from different backgrounds who are initiating themselves in the universe of history and philosophy of science, be they scientists from different fields or young researchers from different backgrounds who want to start studying the history and philosophy of science.