Craig Dilworth, born and raised in Canada, received his PhD in Sweden in 1981. He is presently Reader in Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University. While he is fundamentally a philosopher, Dilworth is at the same time a true generalist. He has been engaged in a wide variety of environmental projects on the local level, while at the same time developing his intellectual interests in the philosophy of science, human ecology, theoretical physics, theoretical biology, and the social sciences. He is the author of two major works in the philosophy of science, Scientific Progress and The Metaphysics of Science, and an earlier book in environmental science, Sustainable Development and Decision Making. He has spent the past 15 years researching the present book.

Springer Book Archives

1. The Deductive Model.- 2. The Basis of the Logical Empiricist Conception of Science.- 3. The Basis of the Popperian Conception of Science.- 4. The Logical Empiricist Conception of Scientific Progress.- 5. The Popperian Conception of Scientific Progress.- 6. Popper, Lakatos, and the Transcendence of the Deductive Model.- 7. Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Incommensurability.- 8. The Gestalt Model.- 9. The Perspectivist Conception of Science.- 10. Development of the Perspectivist Conception in the Context of the Kinetic Theory of Gases.- 11. The Set-Theoretic Conception of Science.- 12. Application of the Perspectivist Conception to the Views of Newton, Kepler, and Galileo.- References.

For the philosopher interested in the idea of objective knowledge of the real world, the nature of science is of special importance, for science, and more particularly physics, is today considered to be paradigmatic in its affording of such knowledge. And no understand ing of science is complete until it includes an appreciation of the nature of the relation between successive scientific theories-that is, until it includes a conception of scientific progress. Now it might be suggested by some that there are a variety of ways in which science progresses, or that there are a number of different notions of scientific progress, not all of which concern the relation between successive scientific theories. For example, it may be thought that science progresses through the application of scientific method to areas where it has not previously been applied, or, through the development of individual theories. However, it is here suggested that the application of the methods of science to new areas does not concern forward progress so much as lateral expansion, and that the provision of a conception of how individual theories develop would lack the generality expected of an account concerning the progress of science itself.