This book is the first of two volumes devoted to the work of Theo Kuipers, a leading Dutch philosopher of science. Philosophers and scientists from all over the world, thirty seven in all, comment on Kuipers' philosophy, and each of their commentaries is followed by a reply from Kuipers. The present volume focuses on Kuipers' views on confirmation, empirical progress, and truth approximation, as laid down in his From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism (Kluwer, 2000). In this book, Kuipers offered a synthesis of Carnap's and Hempel's confirmation theory on the one hand, and Popper's theory of truth approximation on the other. The key element of this synthesis is a sophisticated methodology, which enables the evaluation of theories in terms of their problems and successes (even if the theories are already falsified), and which also fits well with the claim that one theory is closer to the truth than another. Ilkka Niiniluoto, Patrick Maher, John Welch, Gerhard Schurz, Igor Douven, Bert Hamminga, David Miller, Johan van Benthem, Sjoerd Zwart, Thomas Mormann, Jesús Zamora Bonilla, Isabella Burger & Johannes Heidema, Joke Meheus, Hans Mooij, and Diderik Batens comment on these ideas of Kuipers, and many present their own account. The present book also contains a synopsis of From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism. It can be read independently of the second volume of Essays in Debate with Theo Kuipers, which is devoted to Kuipers' Structures in Science (2001).

This monograph presents new ideas in nomic truth approximation. It features original and revised papers from a (formal) philosopher of science who has studied the concept for more than 35 years. Over the course of time, the author's initial ideas evolved. He discovered a way to generalize his first theory of nomic truth approximation, viz. by dropping an unnecessarily strong assumption. In particular, he first believed to have to assume that theories were maximally specific in the sense that they did not only exclude certain conceptual possibilities, but also that all non-excluded possibilities were in fact claimed to be nomically possible. Now, he argues that the exclusion claim alone, or for that matter the inclusion claim alone, is sufficient to motivate the formal definition of being closer to the nomic truth. The papers collected here detail this generalized view of nomic truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Besides this, the book presents, in adapted form, the relation with several other topics, such as, domain revision, aesthetic progress, abduction, inference to the best explanation, pragmatic aspects, probabilistic methods, belief revision and epistemological positions, notably constructive realism. Overall, the volume presents profound insight into nomic truth approximation. This idea seeks to determine how one theory can be closer to, or more similar to, the truth about what is nomically, e.g. physically, chemically, biologically, possible than another theory. As a result, it represents the ultimate goal of theory oriented empirical science. Theo Kuipers is the author of Studies in Inductive Probability and Rational Expectation (1978), From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism (2000) and Structures in Science (2001). He is the volume-editor of the Handbook on General Philosophy of Science (2007). In 2005 there appeared two volumes of Essays in Debate with Theo Kuipers, entitled Confirmation, Empirical Progress, and Truth Approximation and Cognitive Structures in Scientific Inquiry.

This book is the second of two volumes devoted to the work of Theo Kuipers, a leading Dutch philosopher of science. Philosophers and scientists from all over the world, thirty seven in all, comment on Kuipers’ philosophy, and each of their commentaries is followed by a reply from Kuipers. The present volume is devoted to Kuipers’ neo-classical philosophy of science, as laid down in his Structures in Science (Kluwer, 2001). Kuipers defends a dialectical interaction between science and philosophy in that he views philosophy of science as a meta-science which formulates cognitive structures that provide heuristic patterns for actual scientific research, including design research. In addition, Kuipers pays considerable attention to the computational approaches to philosophy of science as well as to the ethics of doing research. Thomas Nickles, David Atkinson, Jean-Paul van Bendegem, Maarten Franssen, Anne Ruth Mackor, Arno Wouters, Erik Weber & Helena de Preester, Eric Scerri, Adam Grobler & Andrzej Wisniewski, Alexander van den Bosch, Gerard Vreeswijk, Jaap Kamps, Paul Thagard, Emma Ruttkamp, Robert Causey, Henk Zandvoort comment on these ideas of Kuipers, and many present their own account. The present book also contains a synopsis of Structures in Science. It can be read independently of the first volume of Essays in Debate with Theo Kuipers, which is devoted to Kuipers’ From Instrumentalism to Constructive Realism (2000).

The aim of this book is to present essays centered upon the subjects of Formal Ontology and Logical Philosophy. The idea of investigating philosophical problems by means of logical methods was intensively promoted in Torun by the Department of Logic of Nicolaus Copernicus University during last decade. Another aim of this book is to present to the philosophical and logical audience the activities of the Torunian Department of Logic during this decade. The papers in this volume contain the results concerning Logic and Logical Philosophy, obtained within the confines of the projects initiated by the Department of Logic and other research projects in which the Torunian Department of Logic took part.

This volume documents a lively exchange between five philosophers of mathematics. It also introduces a new voice in one central debate in the philosophy of mathematics. Non-realism, i.e., the view supported by Hugly and Sayward in their monograph, is an original position distinct from the widely known realism and anti-realism. Non-realism is characterized by the rejection of a central assumption shared by many realists and anti-realists, i.e., the assumption that mathematical statements purport to refer to objects. The defense of their main argument for the thesis that arithmetic lacks ontology brings the authors to discuss also the controversial contrast between pure and empirical arithmetical discourse. Colin Cheyne, Sanford Shieh, and Jean Paul Van Bendegem, each coming from a different perspective, test the genuine originality of non-realism and raise objections to it. Novel interpretations of well-known arguments, e.g., the indispensability argument, and historical views, e.g. Frege, are interwoven with the development of the authors’ account. The discussion of the often neglected views of Wittgenstein and Prior provide an interesting and much needed contribution to the current debate in the philosophy of mathematics.

This volume compares the western ideas of knowledge with the African. It aims at creating a mirror through which the western knowledge culture can look at itself through an unusual and interesting angle. The culture of Sub-Saharan Africa is the substance from which we, in this book, have tried to construe an epistemological mirror.

Ethics is a wide field which has contradicting argumentation. This book tries to open the foundations of ethics by the means of philosophical reasoning. It bridges the gap between the argumentation of ethics and the discussions in the philosophy of science.

The articles in this volume deal with the main inferential methods that can be applied to different kinds of experimental evidence. These contributions - accompanied with critical comments - by renowned scholars in the field of philosophy of science aim at removing the traditional opposition between inductivists and deductivists. They explore the different methods of explanation and justification in the sciences in different contexts and with different objectives. The volume contains contributions on methods of the sciences, especially on induction, deduction, abduction, laws, probability and explanation, ranging from logic, mathematics, natural to the social sciences. They present a highly topical pluralist re-evaluation of methodological and foundational procedures and reasoning, e.g. focusing in Bayesianism and Artificial Intelligence. They document the second international conference in Vienna on "Induction and Deduction in the Sciences" as part of the Scientific Network on "Historical and Contemporary Perspectives of Philosophy of Science in Europe", funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF).

Surprisingly, modified versions of the confirmation theory (Carnap and Hempel) and truth approximation theory (Popper) turn out to be smoothly sythesizable. The glue between the two appears to be the instrumentalist methodology, rather than that of the falsificationalist. The instrumentalist methodology, used in the separate, comparative evaluation of theories in terms of their successes and problems (hence, even if already falsified), provides in theory and practice the straight road to short-term empirical progress in science ( à la Laudan). It is also argued that such progress is also functional for all kinds of truth approximation: observational, referential, and theoretical. This sheds new light on the long-term dynamics of science and hence on the relation between the main epistemological positions, viz., instrumentalism (Toulmin, Laudan), constructive empiricism (Van Fraassen), referential realism (Hacking, Cartwright), and theory realism of a non-essentialist nature (constructive realism à la Popper). Readership: Open minded philosophers and scientists. The book explains and justifies the scientist's intuition that the debate among philosophers about instrumentalism and realism has almost no practical consequences.

Scientific realism is at the core of the contemporary philosophical debate on science. This book analyzes new versions of scientific realism. It makes explicit the advantages of scientific realism over alternatives and antagonists, contributes to deciding which of the new approaches better meets the descriptive and the prescriptive criteria, and expands the philosophico-methodological field to take in new topics and disciplines.