Overview

This book asserts that what makes science 'Science' can only be the peculiar mode of its exercise of reason. Its essential content is an analysis of the Euclidean paradigm for systematic intellectual work and of the Newtonian paradigm for the particular intellectual work of the scientist who has so often been confounded by it. This book views science as the quest for understanding. This already distinguishes it from the many works on the Philosophy of Science from the last century which insisted that Science is the quest for knowledge. By that was meant that the goal of scientific activity is possession of the Truth. The ultimate reason for this position was that the Analytic Philosophy of the Twentieth-Century was built upon a logic of truth-values. The alternative foundation assumed here in that of primitive human meaning. The difference this makes will not emerge without a certain amount of argument but can be immediately suggested in this way: what is meant by understanding is precisely the grasping of complex meaning. What emerges is the role in the latter of the construction of models of a peculiar kind, viz. ones whose building-blocks can be made to correspond with elements of the semantic foundation of items in the mathematician's repertoire of symbols. This having been done, the Syntactico-Semantic Conception of Science is explained and compared and contrasted with the conceptions it is intended to supersede. The claim put forward for the reader's verdict is that only such a conception - under which a scientific theory is a presentation of warranted conclusions drawn from the symbolic manipulation of empirical intuition - can adequately explain the applicability of theory in the world of experience.

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"""Roscoe's new essay on the philosophy of science is a provocatively and elegantly written work.... The appearance of such a complex and original book can only be applauded."" - Prof. Bjorn Olav Roaldseth Stavanger University ""... brings an unusual clarity of imagination to bear in making explicit the connexion between symbols and raw experience. It is difficult to imagine the philosophical student of science who would not benefit from reading it. I enthusiastically recommend this bold and lucid work."" - Prof. Marie Smith Solbakken Stavanger University"""

Roscoe's new essay on the philosophy of science is a provocatively and elegantly written work.... The appearance of such a complex and original book can only be applauded. - Prof. Bjorn Olav Roaldseth Stavanger University ... brings an unusual clarity of imagination to bear in making explicit the connexion between symbols and raw experience. It is difficult to imagine the philosophical student of science who would not benefit from reading it. I enthusiastically recommend this bold and lucid work. - Prof. Marie Smith Solbakken Stavanger University

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