Bücher von Craig Dilworth

The roots of this work lie in my earlier book, Scientific Progress, which first appeared in 1981. One of its topics, the distinction - tween scientific laws and theories, is there treated with reference to the same distinction as drawn by N. R. Campbell in his Physics: The Elements. Shortly after completing Scientific Progress, I read Rom Harré¿s The Principles of Scientific Thinking, in which the concept of theory is even more clearly delineated than in Campbell, being directly connected to the notion of a model ¿ as it was in my book. In subsequent considerations regarding science, Harré¿s work thus - came my main source of inspiration with regard to theories, while Campbell¿s remained my main source with respect to empirical laws. Around the same time I also read William Whewell¿s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. In this work, Whewell depicts principles as playing a central role in the formation of science, and conceives of them in much the same way as Kant conceives of fundamental synthetic a priori judgements. The idea that science should have principles as a basic element immediately made sense to me, and from that time I have thought of science in terms of laws, theories and principles.

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.

Simplicity affords a new way of thinking about philosophical matters. In this book, the dualistic, true/false approach of formal logic is replaced by a three-part basis for thought. This basis consists of the simplicity categories of reason: simplicity, complexity, and nothingness. The category of simplicity is paradoxical, that of complexity is unproblematic, and that of nothingness is self-contradictory. These categories are to be applied to ontological categories, such as those of substance, self, or causality, thereby providing a clarification of the philosophical issue in question. The notion of perspective is integral to the simplicity way of thinking. A particular entity such as the self may be conceived as simple in one perspective, while being complex or nothing in another. Combined with the categories of simplicity, the notion of perspective is used to reveal a type of conceptual conflict that differs from contradiction. So, for example, the simplicity way of thinking better represents the relation between competing scientific theories such as the wave and particle theories of radiation as a form of perspectival incompatibility, rather than contradiction. From this basis, the book moves on to the distinction between two forms of simplicity: analytic and synthetic, which can respectively be conceived of as a point, and as a whole. Again the notion of perspective is employed: what is analytically simple in one perspective may well be synthetically simple in another. The application of the simplicity way of thinking to philosophy (as well as to other areas, such as mathematics and physics), of which there are many examples in this book, enhances our understanding by illuminating the conceptual relations involved in intellectually problematic situations.