Riassunto:
We respect Herbert A. Simon as an established leader of empirical and logical analysis in the human sciences while we happily think of him as also the loner; of course he works with many colleagues but none can match him. He has been writing fruitfully and steadily for four decades in many fields, among them psychology, logic, decision theory, economics, computer science, management, production engineering, information and control theory, operations research, confirmation theory, and we must have omitted several. With all of them, he is at once the technical scientist and the philosophical critic and analyst. When writing of decisions and actions, he is at the interface of philosophy of science, decision theory, philosophy of the specific social sciences, and inventory theory (itself, for him, at the interface of economic theory, production engineering and information theory). When writing on causality, he is at the interface of methodology, metaphysics, logic and philosophy of physics, systems theory, and so on. Not that the interdisciplinary is his orthodoxy; we are delighted that he has chosen to include in this book both his early and little-appreciated treatment of straightforward philosophy of physics - the axioms of Newtonian mechanics, and also his fine papers on pure confirmation theory.
Contenuti:
Section 1 — Testing Theories of Empirical Phenomena.- to Section 1.- 1.1. Symmetric Tests of the Hypothesis That the Mean of One Normal Population Exceeds That of Another.- 1.2. Statistical Tests as a Basis for ‘Yes—No’ Choices.- 1.3. Prediction and Hindsight as Confirmatory Evidence.- 1.4. On Judging the Plausibility of Theories.- Section 2 — Causes and Possible Worlds.- to Section 2.- 2.1. Causal Ordering and Identifiability.- 2.2. On the Definition of the Causal Relation.- 2.3. Spurious Correlation: A Causal Interpretation.- 2.4. Cause and Counterfactual (with Nicholas Rescher).- Section 3 — The Logic of Imperatives.- to Section 3.- 3.1. The Logic of Rational Decision.- 3.2. The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making.- Section 4 — Complexity.- to Section 4.- 4.1. Theory of Automata: Discussion.- 4.2. Aggregation of Variables in Dynamic Systems (with Albert Ando).- 4.3. The Theory of Problem Solving.- 4.4. The Organization of Complex Systems.- Section 5 — Theory of Scientific Discovery.- to Section 5.- 5.1. Thinking by Computers.- 5.2. Scientific Discovery and the Psychology of Problem Solving.- 5.3. The Structure of Ill-Structured Problems.- 5.4. Does Scientific Discovery Have a Logic?.- 5.5. Discussion: The Meno Paradox.- Section 6 — Formalizing Scientific Theories.- to Section 6.- 6.1. The Axioms of Newtonian Mechanics.- 6.2. Discussion: The Axiomatization of Classical Mechanics.- 6.3. Definable Terms and Primitives in Axiom Systems.- 6.4. A Note on Almost-Everywhere Definability.- 6.5. The Axiomatization of Physical Theories.- 6.6. Ramsey Eliminability and the Testability of Scientific Theories (with Guy J. Groen).- 6.7. Identifiability and the Status of Theoretical Terms.- Name Index.
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