Search Results

This chapter explores the relationship between sociology and ideology, drawing on the work of M. N. Srinivas, and argues that sociology and ideology must be kept apart. It considers sociology as being inclusive of social anthropology and contends that it is an empirical science rather than a normative discipline, although opinions differ as to the relationship between value judgements and judgements of reality. The chapter also insists that scholarship and partisanship make uneasy bedfellows and examines Srinivas’s advocacy of the ‘field view’ as against the ‘book view’ of Indian society. It concludes by analysing the sociological approach to the study of religion and discusses whether the argument in favour of detachment, objectivity, and value-neutrality can be extended from the field of religion to other fields of sociological enquiry and analysis.

This chapter aims to show how to reconcile defeasibility with hypothetico-deductivism. It describes how the logic of proof-based assertion in mathematics coincides with the logic of refutation-based scientific testing and provides a constructive account of falsifiable empirical theorizing that saves all the logico-linguistic and methodological appearances. It suggests that the same canon of constructive and reflective inference suffices both for empirical science and for intuitionistic mathematics.

This chapter briefly sets out the reasons for analyzing data. The simplest need for data analysis arises most naturally in disciplines addressing phenomena that are, in all likelihood, inherently nondeterministic (e.g., feelings and psychology or stock market behavior). Since such fields of knowledge are not governed by known fundamental equations, the only way to generalize disparate observations into expanded knowledge is to analyze those observations. A more general rationale for analyzing data stems from the complementary relationship of empirical and theoretical science and dominates contexts and disciplines in which the studied phenomena have, at least in principle, fully knowable and usable fundamental governing dynamics. In these contexts, best exemplified by physics, theory and observations both vie for the helm.

Metaphysical naturalism is the thesis that everything real is natural: there is no room for the supernatural in nature—or anywhere else for that matter. Methodological naturalism is the thesis that only the methods of empirical science produce worthwhile knowledge, so these are the methods we must pursue if we seek knowledge; non-scientific methods of inquiry must be abandoned altogether and must be replaced by scientific methods. This chapter looks at the issue of whether conceptual analysis is in conflict with naturalism of either variety, and if it is, whether that matters.

This chapter attempts to develop a more precise understanding of the relation between Niels Bohr's philosophy of science and Max Delbrück's biological research program. It is argued here that Delbrück's biological research program was reductionist in the sense that it pursued physical and chemical explanations for biological phenomena. Bohr's primary concern was with fundamental features of empirical natural science that implied a radical difference between physics and biology, however successful reductionism might be. He found that Delbrück's reductionist program did not contradict his own philosophical view, but he did not involve himself in empirical biological research. Daniel McKaughan has argued, in apparent contradiction to this claim, that “Bohr and Delbrück shared an antireductionist outlook” and that Delbrück hoped to demonstrate a legitimate role for “teleological concepts” in biological science.

This chapter is mainly a discussion on the materialization of the historical and debate origins of today's sexual identity issues. The concept of social constructionism has branched into two distinguished terms namely weak and strong social constructionism. The key aspect of the social constructionist approach is frequently ignored in a lot of the research on sexuality; yet it has always been a good challenge to empirical science and psychology. Examples of essentialist research regarding homosexuality are described in the chapter to help establish this theory. As of now, resolving the argument between essentialism and social constructionism is seen as impossible but its implications are significant to the debate for gay and lesbian politics and considered very useful for the future of psychological researches on gay and lesbian issues.

This chapter examines some of the earliest attempts at synthesizing theological speculation with the methods of the empirical sciences, drawing special attention to the epistemic and moral consequences of such syntheses. It also considers the neglected influence of Spiritism and psychical research among Iranian intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter first discusses the role of Mirza Khalil Khan Saqafi in bringing Spiritism to Iran and Spiritists' method of communication with disembodied souls, which they claimed were the fruit of modern scientific discovery. It then explores how experimental spirit science atracted interest from outside the network of commited Spiritists, focusing on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's views on hypnotism and séances with disembodied spirits. Finally, it shows how the Spiritists promoted empirical observation as a reliable means for verifying the existence of souls.

The question of how to understand and respond to naturalism has been of concern to phenomenology since its very commencement. How should one assess recent attempts to naturalize phenomenology? Chapter 5 argues that it very much depends on what one means by naturalism, and that Husserl’s own response is less straightforward than one might assume and directly linked to the conception of transcendental philosophy he ended up defending. I first discuss the proposal according to which a naturalization of phenomenology entails abandoning the latter’s transcendental aspirations, and contrast this with Husserl’s well known anti-naturalism. I then introduce the more modest proposal that a naturalization of phenomenology simply entails the attempt to further a productive cross-fertilization between phenomenology and the sciences. I conclude by considering to what extent Husserl might have been willing to fundamentally rethink the very relation between the transcendental and the natural, between the constituting and the constituted.

This chapter examines the role of empirical science in elucidating free will and argues that empirical research can address the dispute between libertarianism and the positions of hard determinism and compatibilism, but not the dispute between compatibilism and incompatibilism. It views the problem of free will as the problem of whether we control our actions. It also considers quantum indeterminacy, along with Robert Kane’s notion of naturalized libertarianism and introspection.

There is a general consensus that music is capable of arousing deep and significant emotion in those who interact with it. These experiences deserves a more central position in the psychology of music than it currently enjoys because such experiences are widespread and seem to be important motivators for engagement with music. This chapter explores how empirical science may study this type of phenomenon and to summarise some of what is known about it. In a previously unpublished study, regular listeners to music described in their own words the nature of their most valued emotional experiences of music. Although every account was different in detail, some common themes emerged. The most commonly mentioned concept was that of music as change agent. Common to these examples is the characterisation of music as offering an alternative perspective on a person's situation, allowing him or her to construe things differently.

Summary of the argument, background, methods and approach as "philosophy of science in practice". The introduction articulates what is revolutionary and novel about the current turn to "data-centric science", and why it is important to develop an epistemological analysis of data-centric science.

The motivation of Hegel’s philosophy of religion developed in reaction to the religious situation that he found himself in at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This chapter and the next sketch the main issues stemming from the Enlightenment to which Hegel was reacting. This chapter focuses on the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion specifically in the fields of theology and biblical studies. Through much of the Middle Ages, the dogmas of the Christian religion were regarded collectively as a field of scholarly study alongside the sciences. However, with the rapid development of the empirical sciences, religion suddenly appeared to be based on a dubious foundation. The thinkers of the Enlightenment wanted merely to hold firm to what they regarded as rational, while purging religion of what they took to be superstitious, childish views without foundation. After rejecting Christianity, the philosophes ended up with Deism, that is, a simple, very general belief in a Supreme Being. Hegel takes one of the main negative aspects of the Enlightenment to be its dismissal of the traditional Christian dogmas. The result is an empty abstraction that is meaningless from a religious point of view. An account is given of Voltaire’s Deism in his work God and Human Beings. A brief overview is provided of the scepticism about the veracity of the sacred texts in the field of biblical studies. This is exemplified by a reading of Hermann Samuel Reimarus so-called ‘Wolfenbüttel Fragments’ that were published by Lessing.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between deflationism and the arithmetical nonconservativeness of the compositional theory of truth. Deflationists insist that truth is somehow an “insubstantial” notion, which does not carry much ontological weight. In simpler terms, some deflationists hold that the notion of truth is argumentatively weak. It is believed by some that deflationism is inevitably linked to claims of conservativeness; they contend that a reasonable truth theory should be conservative over an underlying reasonable philosophical theory. This underlying theory and its determination, assuming that this view is accepted, are discussed in detail in this chapter, including conservativeness over logic, conservativeness over arithmetic, and conservativeness over empirical science and metaphysics. The role that the concept of truth plays in specific philosophical disciplines such as epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics is also described here.

This chapter argues that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was meant to provide a new logic, a transcendental logic capable of moving beyond the merely analytic conclusions of syllogistic reasoning and capable of securing the claims reached by way of induction. For these reasons, Kant secured Bacon’s inductive practices. The choice of Bacon—father of the “New Science”—was, in fact, a case of subversive appropriation on Kant’s part and that what it announced, more than anything else, was his specific intention with respect to a redefinition of empirical science altogether.

This introduction explains the concept of emergence and examines how it is treated in contemporary philosophy and science. Emergence relates to phenomena which arise from and depend on some more basic phenomena yet are simultaneously autonomous from that base. This introduction provides examples of evident emergent phenomena, calls attention to a few methodological subtleties, and then highlights some central open questions about emergence that the chapters in this book collectively address. Understanding emergence entails the consideration of widely cited core examples of apparent emergent phenomena, which involve a wide variety of cases. One group of examples focuses on certain properties of physical systems, while another focuses on the collective behavior of human agents. Ultimately, the goal is to gain an understanding of emergence that is both philosophically rigorous and useful in empirical science.

This essay examines Immanuel Kant’s systematic diagnosis of a certain kind of illusion to which we are prone when we try to think about the world as a whole, an idea reminiscent of what theoretical physicists describe as a “theory of everything.” At the beginning of the Antinomy chapter in the Dialectic of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims to show how our naive reasoning leads us into apparently contradictory claims. This essay analyzes Kant’s thought and its implications for contemporary cosmological theorizing, and whether modern science can throw any light on his dark musings. It considers the contradictory propositions in the First Antinomy as well as the arguments for them that Kant offers, specifically about the whole material world, the universe, the sum total of all the matter and energy in space and all the changes occurring in time. It also addresses Kant’s distinction between empirical science and philosophy in his diagnosis of what goes wrong in our antinomial thinking. Finally, it links Kant’s transcendental idealism to the Theory of Everything espoused by theoretical physicists such as Stephen Hawking.

The fourth chapter brings out how empirical sciences, particularly ethnology, merged with historically specific interests in the hills, and how various settler and government claims, through ethnological treatment of people, justified the acquisition of land. Thus the Nilgiris was made into a racially divided space. It was subsequently incorporated into the elaboration of legal rights, to be reinterpreted in terms of the specific rights acknowledged for each racially defined community. Liberal political thought and race theory combined in this way to create law, which then became particularistic rather than universal. The chapter shows the close relationship between the early ethnographers reporting on the communities in the hills and the scientists who developed increasingly complex racial paradigms of the human in natural history. It also elaborates in detail how the development of ethnology and race theory entered into the legal domain and how the two reflected the increasingly strong hold of the colonial authorities of the Nilgiris. Ethnographical arguments were regularly used in the administrators’ arguments for or against absolute rights in land for the Toda.

This concluding chapter discusses the history of the line. The modern line of drawing and thinking has at least two genealogies, a Cartesian-deductive one and an inductive one associated with the rise of the empirical sciences. The Modernists spiritualized or dematerialized the line in an attempt to represent essential forces, but the movement attributed to their lines remained linear as it were progressive and ruthless. The line that surfaces in representations is rhythmically underpinned. There was little sense that the line had a history, or a lining, that it was the formalization of a field of traces rather than the outline of a past, present, or future object.