Knowing Science

Knowing Science

Author: Alexander Bird

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-22

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0192606832

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Knowing Science, Alexander Bird presents an epistemology of science that rejects empiricism and gives a central place to the concept of knowledge. Science aims at knowledge and progresses when it adds to the stock of knowledge. That knowledge is social knowing—it is known by the scientific community as a whole. Evidence is that from which knowledge can be obtained by inference. From this, it follows that evidence is knowledge, and is not limited to perception, nor to observation. Observation supplies evidence that is basic relative to a field of enquiry and can be highly non-perceptual. Theoretical knowledge is typically gained by inference to the only explanation, in which competing plausible hypotheses are falsified by the evidence. In cases where not all competing hypotheses are refuted, scientific hypotheses are not known but instead possess varying degrees of plausibility. Plausibilities in the light of the evidence are probabilities and link eliminative explanationism to Bayesian conditionalization. Bird argues that scientific realism and anti-realism as global metascientific claims should be rejected-the track record gives us only local metascientific claims.


The Theater of Experiment

The Theater of Experiment

Author: Al Coppola

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-08-19

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0190627263

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take. By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance.


You Can Be The Next Einstein

You Can Be The Next Einstein

Author: George Jaroszkiewicz

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2020-01-06

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 9811211140

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Have you ever wondered how Einstein, a regular man, can come up with radical ideas that shape the world to be what it is today?Albert Einstein is a familiar name to many in the scientific and non-scientific community due to his revolutionary ideas such as the Theory of Relativity, Special Relativity and significant contributions to the development of Quantum Mechanics. As such, many aspire to be like him and wonder how they can do that. The author believes that one needs to condition his/her mind to be able to think like the world-renowned Mathematical Physicist, Albert Einstein. The road to being successful can be challenging and it requires grit, confidence and guidance from the right people. Hence, this book is as a must-have guide to readers who wish to be one of the best scientists in the world!Related Link(s)


The Experimental Imagination

The Experimental Imagination

Author: Tita Chico

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1503606457

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Challenging the "two cultures" debate, The Experimental Imagination tells the story of how literariness came to be distinguished from its epistemological sibling, science, as a source of truth about the natural and social worlds in the British Enlightenment. Tita Chico shows that early science relied on what she calls literary knowledge to present its experimental findings. More radically, she contends that science was made intellectually possible because its main discoveries and technologies could be articulated in literary terms. While early scientists deployed metaphor to describe the phenomena they defined and imagination to cast themselves as experimentalists, literary writers used scientific metaphors to make the case for the epistemological superiority of literary knowledge. Drawing on literature as well as literary language, tropes, and interpretive methods, literary knowledge challenges our dominant narrative of the scientific revolution as the sine qua non of epistemological innovation in the British Enlightenment. With its recourse to imagination as a more reliable source of truth than any empirical account, literary knowledge facilitates a redefinition of authority and evidence, as well as of the self and society, implicitly articulating the difference that would come to distinguish the arts and sciences.


The Language of Science

The Language of Science

Author: Carol Reeves

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 9780415346351

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With more and more scientific language being applied -and misapplied- in our daily lives, this title from the Intertext series explores the use of scientific terms through hot topics from the MMR vaccine to AIDS and biological weapons


Researching and Applying Metaphor

Researching and Applying Metaphor

Author: Graham Low

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1999-02-11

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780521649643

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book demonstrates how metaphor needs to be researched using multiple methods of investigation.


The Names of Science

The Names of Science

Author: Helge Kragh

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-07-04

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0198917465

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The history of science is echoed in the development of its language and the names chosen for its technical terms. The Names of Science examines in detail how, over time, new words have entered the scientific lexicon and how some of them, but far from all, have survived to the present. Why is a transistor called a transistor and not something else? Why was the term 'scientist' only coined in 1834, and why was the name regarded as controversial for a long time afterwards? There is a story behind every scientific word we use today. In this work, Helge Kragh tells many of these stories, taking a broad historical perspective from the Renaissance to the present. By combining elements of linguistics with the history of the natural sciences including physics, chemistry, and astronomy, this book offers a new and innovative perspective on the historical development of the natural sciences. Following an introductory list of useful linguistic terms, the book is structured in six chapters, which cover important phases in the history of science, dealing with a vast range of scientific terminology from physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, to cosmology. It also considers, if only briefly, how English - and not, say, Latin or French - developed to become the internationally accepted language of science. Contrary to other works dealing with the subject, The Names of Science pays serious attention to the historical dimension of scientific language, and to the way in which scientists have, sometimes unconsciously, acted as linguists and neologists in their research work.


Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Science Education

Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Science Education

Author: W.W. Cobern

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9401152241

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Global science education is a reality at the end of the 20th century - albeit an uneven reality - because of tremendous technological and economic pressures. Unfortunately, this reality is rarely examined in the light of what interests the everyday lives of ordinary people rather than the lives of political and economic elites. The purpose of this book is to offer insightful and thought-provoking commentary on both realities. The tacit question throughout the book is `Whose interests are being served by current science education practices and policies?' The various chapters offer critical analysis from the perspectives of culture, economics, epistemology, equity, gender, language, and religion in an effort to promote a reflective science education that takes place within, rather than taking over, the important cultural lives of people. The target audience for the book includes graduate students in education, science education and education policy professors, policy and government officials involved with education.


Words, Science And Learning

Words, Science And Learning

Author: Sutton, Clive

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)

Published: 1992-06-01

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 0335099564

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Despite the power of words to move minds, appreciating the written or spoken word is rarely thought to be the essence of teaching and learning science and much more effort goes into organizing practical work. There is an exaggerated confidence in the value of the direct experience of things as opposed to "mere words", and a corresponding neglect of how words are actually involved in developing anyone's scientific understanding. Clive Sutton does not wish to deny the value of first hand scientific understanding, and shows that they cannot just be taken for granted while we busy ourselves in the organization of practical work. He explores the role of language in the growth of science itself, in the growth of learners' ideas, and in classroom practice; and how these relate, for instance, to some pupils' alienation from science and the isolation of science in the curriculum.