Scientific Explanation and Methodology of Science

This volume contains the contributed papers of invitees to SEMS 2012 who have also given talks at the conference. The invitees are experts in philosophy of science and technology from Asia (besides China), Australia, Europe, Latin America, North America, as well as from within China.

The papers in this volume represent the latest work of each researcher in his or her expertise; and as a result, they give a good representation of the cutting-edge researches in diverse areas in different parts of the world.

Contents:

• The Directedness of Time in Classical Cosmology (Andreas Bartels and Daniel Wohlfarth)
• Explanation, Special Relativity, and Presentism (Katherine Brading)
• A Muse of Fire (James Robert Brown)
• SSK or ESW? — The Bloor-Lynch Debate Revisited (Kai-Yuan Cheng)
• Model Error and Ensemble Forecasting: A Cautionary Tale (Seamus Bradley, Roman Frigg, Hailiang Du, and Leonard A Smith)
• The Contextualist Basis of Scientific Explanation (Guichun Guo)
• On a Bottom-Up Approach to Scientific Discovery (Xiang Huang)
• The New Ignorance (Janet A Kourany)
• Models, Fiction, and Fictional Models (Chuang Liu)
• A Contextualist Interpretation of Mathematics (Jie Liu)
• Understanding as Integration of Heterogeneous Representations (Sergio F Martínez)
• Approximation of Laws (Ilkka Niniluoto)
• Science, Sex, and Pictures: Reflections on van Fraassen's Use of Perspectival Representations (Kathleen Okruhlik)
• Bayesianism versus Confirmation (Michael Strevens)
• The Equivalent Transformation Between Non-Truth-Function and Truth-Function (Xiao-Long Wan and Ming-Yi Chen)
• Mechanism and Productive Event (Zhu Xu)
• Social Science and the Bayesian Probability Explanation Model (Jie Yin and Lei Zhao)
• Choice of Units and the Causal Markov Condition (Jiji Zhang and Peter Spirtes)

Readership: Graduate science students, professional scientists, and researchers.