Polish Essays in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of...

Modern philosophy has benefited immensely from the intelligence and sensitivity, the creative and critical energies, and the lucidity of Polish scholars. Their investigations into the logical and methodological foundations of mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, ethics and esthetics, psychology, linguistics, economics and jurisprudence, and the social sciences -all are marked by profound and imaginative work. To the centers of empiricist philosophy of science in Vienna, Berlin and Cambridge during the first half of this century, one always added the great school of analytic and methodological studies in Warsaw and Lw6w. To the world centers of Marxist theoretical practice in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Rome and elsewhere, one must add the Poland of the same era, from Ludwig Krzywicki (1859-1941) onward. (From our preface to Wiatr [1979p. Other movements also have been distinctive in Poland. Phenomenology was developed in the impressive school of Roman Ingarden at Cracow, semiotics from the early work of the philosopher and psychologist Kazimierz Twardowski at Lw6w in the 1890's, with masterful development by his disciples Kotarbinski and Ajdukiewicz onward, conceptual foundations of physics in the incisive methodological reflections of Marian Smoluchowski, and mathematical logic from Jan I:.ukasiewicz and Stanislaw Lesniewski to Tarski, Mostowski, and many others. For this volume of papers on the critical understanding of the natural sciences, our friend and colleague, Wladislaw Krajewski, has invited three dozen of the younger Polish philosophers to contribute results of their quite recent investigations, mainly from the last decade. We hope that this book will fill the gap remaining among the admirable English language collections of modern Polish philosophy edited by Pelc [1978], Przelecki and W 6 jcicki [1977], andWiatr [1979]. Other works of individual scholars are also available in English, such as Giedymin's edition of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz's principal papers [1978], and Ajdukiewicz's Pragmatic Logic [1974], and our edition of Henry Mehlberg's 1935 'Essai sur la tbeorie causale du temps' in the collection of his writings Time, Causality and the Quantum Theory (Boston Studies 19, 1980). Professor Krajewski has introduced the book with a useful survey of Polish philosophy of science, from the extraordinary Witelo's Perspectiva v Front Matter....Pages i-xxviii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Reflections on Science and Rationality....Pages 3-17 The Epistemological and Methodological Sense of the Concept of Rationality....Pages 19-30 On Two Kinds of Conventionalism with Respect to Empirical Sciences....Pages 31-42 Realism and Instrumentalism: On a Priori Conditions of Science....Pages 43-50 Once More about Empirical Support....Pages 51-62 The Context of Discovery and the Context of Justification: A Reappraisal....Pages 63-74 Continuity and Anticumulative Changes in the Growth of Science....Pages 75-90 Some Remarks in Defense of the Incommensurability Thesis....Pages 91-102 Marxism and the Controversy over the Development of Science....Pages 103-111 Are there Definitively Falsifying Procedures in Science?....Pages 113-126 The Pluralistic Approach to Empirical Testing and the Special Forms of Experiment....Pages 127-133 Dialectical Correspondence and Essential Truth....Pages 135-146 Testing Idealizational Laws....Pages 147-151 Practical Idealization....Pages 153-165 Front Matter....Pages 167-167 An Interpretation of a Concept in Science by a Set of Operational Procedures....Pages 169-185 A Formal Definition of the Concept of Simplicity....Pages 187-195 Characteristics of Additive Quantities....Pages 197-207 Front Matter....Pages 209-209 On the Concept of Matter....Pages 211-214 Time Separation....Pages 215-222 Four Conceptions of Causation....Pages 223-235 Front Matter....Pages 237-237 On the Philosophy of Mathematics....Pages 239-248 Information, Regulation, Negentropy....Pages 249-264 Information and Signal....Pages 265-273 Front Matter....Pages 275-275 Principles of Physics as Metalaws....Pages 277-285 Structural Laws in Physics....Pages 287-297 Controversial Problems of the Probabilistic Interpretation of Quantum Phenomena....Pages 299-308 Quantum Mechanics and the Structure of Physical Theories....Pages 309-317 Difficulties with the Reduction of Classical to Relativistic Mechanics....Pages 319-332 Front Matter....Pages 333-333 Genetic and Historical Explanation in Biology....Pages 335-351 The Idealizational Status of Theoretical Biology....Pages 353-364 Chomsky’s Inconsistencies in his Critique of Evolutionary Conceptions of Language....Pages 365-373 Front Matter....Pages 375-375 The Problem of the Chemical Organization of Matter in the Light of a Closed Development Model....Pages 377-390 An Outline of a Simulation Model of Science as a Part of the Model of Action....Pages 391-405 The Notion of Technological Research and its Place among other Informational Activities....Pages 407-412 Difficulties with Absolutism: The Case of Von Weizsäcker’s Philosophy....Pages 413-430 Back Matter....Pages 431-491