The Scientific Image

1. INTRODUCTION 1
2. ARGUMENTS CONCERNING SCIENTIFIC
REALISM 6
§1. Scientific Realism and Constructive Empiricism 6
§1.1 Statement of Scientific Realism 6
§1.2 Alternatives to Realism 9
§1.3 Constructive Empiricism II
§2. The Theory/Observation \'Dichotomy\' 13
§3. Inference to the Best Explanation 19
§4. Limits of the Demand for Explanation 23
§5. The Principle of the Common Cause 25
§6. Limits to Explanation: a Thought Experiment 31
§7. Demons and the Ultimate Argument
3. TO SAVE THE PHENOMENA 41
§1. Models 41
§2. Apparent Motion and Absolute Space 44
§3. Empirical Content of Newton\'s Theory 46
§4. Theories and their Extensions 47
§5. Extensions: Victory and Qualified Defeat 50
§6. Failure of the Syntactic Approach 53
§7. The Hermeneutic Circle 56
§8. Limits to Empirical Description 59
§9. A New Picture of Theories 64
4. EMPIRICISM AND SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY 70
§1. Empiricist Epistemology and Scepticism 71
§2. Methodology and Experimental Design 73
§2.1 The Roles of Theory 73
§2.2 Measuring the Charge of the Electron 74
§2.3 Boyd on the Philosophical Explanation of
Methodology 77
§2.4 Phenomenology of Scientific Activity 80
§3. The Conjunction Objection 83
§4. Pragmatic Virtues and Explanation 87
§4.1 The Other Virtues 87
§4.2 The Incursion of Pragmatics 89
§4.3 Pursuit of Explanation 92
5. THE PRAGMATICS OF EXPLANATION 97
§1. The Language of Explanation 97
#1.1 Truth and Grammar 97
§1.2 Some Examples 101
§2. A Biased History 103
§2.1 Hempel: Grounds for Belief 103
§2.2 Salmon: Statistically Relevant Factors 106
§2.3 Global Properties of Theories 109
§2.4 The Difficulties: Asymmetries and Rejections 111
§2.5 Causality: the Conditio Sine Qua Non 112
§2.6 Causality: Salmon\'s Theory 118
§2.7 The Clues of Causality 123
§2.8 Why-questions 126
§2.9 The Clues Elaborated 129
§3. Asymmetries of Explanation : A Short Story 130
§3.1 Asymmetry and Context: the Aristotelian Sieve 130
§3.2 The Tower and the Shadow\' 132
§4. A Model for Explanation 134
§4.1 Contexts and Propositions 134
§4.2 Questions 137
§4.3 A Theory of Why-questions 141
§4.4 Evaluation of Answers 146
§4.5 Presupposition and Relevance Elaborated 151
§5. Conclusion 153
6. PROBABILITY: THE NEW MODALITY OF SCIENCE 158
§1. Statistics in General Science 159
§2. Classical Statistical Mechanics 161
§2.1 The Measure of Ignorance 161
§2.2 Objective and Epistemic Probability
Disentangled 164
§2.3 The Intrusion of Infinity 167
§3. Probability in Quantum Mechanics 169
§3.1 The Disanalogies with the Classical Case 170
§3.2 Quantum Probabilities as Conditional 175
§3.3 Virtual Ensembles of Measurements 177
§4. Towards an Empiricist Interpretation of Probability 178
§4.1 Probability Spaces as Models of Experiments 178
§4.2 The Strict Frequency Interpretation 181
§4.3 Propensity and Virtual Sequences 187
§4.4 A Modal Frequency Interpretation 190
§4.5 Empirical Adequacy of Statistical Theories 194
§5. Modality: Philosophical Retrenchment 196
§5.1 Empiricism and Modality 196
§5.2 The Language of Science 198
§5.3 Modality without Metaphysics 201
7, GENTLE POLEMICS 204
NOTES 216
INDEX 231