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This article situates Jadid al-Islam’s work within the context of the history of the genre of the “signs of the prophecy”. The chapter provides a general overview of the history as well as the tropes and rhetorical conventions of the genre. It then concentrates on examples of how Jadid al-Islam’s work adapted these tropes to its own Shiʿi and Iranian context, emphasizing the use of the trope of “scriptural falsification” applied to the Latin Vulgata.

This chapter presents an overview of the philosophy of science. why study this philosophy? Here is my justification. we know that the software process is a transformation from the identification of a need in-the-world into a set of computer programs that operate in-the-computer. The process begins with an idea, a concept, something that may defy a complete description, and it ends with the delivery of a formal model that executes in the computer. As we have seen, there is a fundamental tension in this transformation, a tension between what we want and how we make it work, between the requirements in-the-world and their realization in-the-computer, between the subjective and the objective, the conceptual and the formal. This book seeks to resolve that tension. Science faces a similar problem, and so I start by examining its solutions. Science begins with something very complex and poorly represented—the real world—and its goal is to describe aspects of that reality with theories and models. we know that science is successful. It is reasonable to look, therefore, into its strengths and limitations for insight into resolving the software process’ central tension. To gain this insight, I turn to the philosophy of science because it constitutes a kind of meta-science. It examines the nature of science from a theoretical perspective; it helps us appreciate what is knowable and what can be represented formally. I note at the outset, this is not my area of expertise. Moreover, the philosophers of science have not reached a consensus. Philosophical inquiry is, by its very nature, controversial and argumentative, and the theme of this chapter is the underlying controversies regarding the nature of science and scientific knowledge. If we are to find “scientific foundations,” then we must first understand what science is (and is not)—the topic of what follows. I warn the reader that this chapter conforms to truth in labeling; as its title indicates, it literally is about the philosophy of science. There are a few explanatory comments that tie the material to the immediate needs of a software engineer, but this really is a chapter about philosophy.

AFTER I HAD BEEN in graduate school for several months, I decided to work in a group that studied photochemical reactions, those that are initiated by ultraviolet or visible light. My research advisor was interested in discovering new reactions and deducing experimentally how they occurred—the reaction mechanism. I remember my first group meeting where the topic of discussion was the ring-opening of cyclobutenes (compounds with four carbon atoms in a ring opening up to form compounds with no rings). I still recall people describing the potential ways in which the ring-openings occurred as domino and antidomino (today called conrotatory and disrotatory). Thermally induced reactions, that is, those initiated by heat, occurred one way and photochemically induced reactions, the other. Even though these reactions had been studied thoroughly, the reaction mechanisms were considered incomplete because nobody could explain the dichotomy between the thermally- and photochemically induced reactions. Why these reactions occurred in the manner they did was unknown. When quantum mechanical explanations were later proposed to explain the ring-opening reactions, the reaction mechanisms might be said to be complete, although the related question of the cause of the reactions—in other words, why they happen at all—still had to be addressed. Reaction mechanisms consist in more than merely knowing the pathways by which reactants are converted into products. Until all related questions are answered satisfactorily, a mechanism may be considered incomplete. The evolution of modern chemistry from its origin in the late eighteenth century to its present day power and sophistication is remarkable (Brock 1992, Greenberg 2000, Bensaude-Vincent and Simon 2008, Chalmers 2011). Space limitations preclude more than a very brief summer of this history; references are included for the interested reader. Oxidation was weaned from its alchemical origins and the first elements and gases synthesized during the early decades of modern chemistry (Smartt Bell 2005, Thorpe 2007, Holmes 2008, Jay 2009). Additional elements were then discovered and their properties measured and compared (Scerri 2007). Methodology, laboratory technique, and apparatus were developed to carry out these new tasks, primarily in the nineteenth century (Faraday 1960, Buckingham 2004).