MPI für ethnologische Forschung, Halle/Saale

I. General Methodological Problems -- Reflections on Science and Rationality -- The Epistemological and Methodological Sense of the Concept of Rationality -- On Two Kinds of Conventionalism with Respect to Empirical Sciences -- Realism and Instrumentalism: On A Priori Conditions of Science -- Once More about Empirical Support -- The Context of Discovery and the Context of Justification: A Reappraisal -- Continuity and Anticumulative Changes in the Growth of Science -- Some Remarks in Defense of the Incommensurability Thesis -- Marxism and the Controversy over the Development of Science -- Are there Definitively Falsifying Procedures in Science? -- The Pluralistic Approach to Empirical Testing and the Special Forms of Experiment -- Dialectical Correspondence and Essential Truth -- Testing Idealizational Laws -- Practical Idealization -- II. Formal Analysis -- An Interpretation of a Concept in Science by a Set of Operational Procedures -- A Formal Definition of the Concept of Simplicity -- Characteristics of Additive Quantities -- III. Ontological Problems -- On the Concept of Matter -- Time Separation -- Four Conceptions of Causation -- IV. Philosophy of Mathematics and Information Theory -- On the Philosophy of Mathematics -- Information, Regulation, Negentropy -- Information and Signal -- V. Philosophy of Physics -- Principles of Physics as Meta-laws -- Structural Laws in Physics -- Controversial Problems of the Probabilistic Interpretation of Quantum Phenomena -- Quantum Mechanics and the Structure of Physical Theories -- Difficulties with the Reduction of Classical to Relativistic Mechanics -- VI. Philosophy of Biology and Linguistics -- Genetic and Historical Explanation in Biology -- The Idealizational Status of Theoretical Biology -- Chomsky’s Inconsistencies in his Critique of Evolutionary Conceptions of Language -- VII. Other Papers -- The Problem of the Chemical Organization of Matter in the Light of a Closed Development Model -- An Outline of a Simulation Model of Science as a Part of the Model of Action -- The Notion of Technological Research and its Place among other Informational Activities -- Difficulties with Absolutism: The Case of Von Weizsäcker’s Philosophy -- Bibliographies -- Abbreviations used in the Bibliographies -- Bibliography of Polish Philosophy of Natural Science -- Bibliography of Non-Polish Authors Cited -- List of Contributors -- Index of Names -- Index of Subjects.