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Men of science are sometimes mistrustful of or at least impatient with philosophy. One of them, himself no stranger to hard thought, was one day heard to comment on his colleagues in another faculty and on their propensity to indulge in what he called "all this nonsense about thinking". Against this may perhaps be set a meeting of philosophers who decided to discuss the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When asked sardonically by a scientist whether they had disproved it, one of the philosophers replied: "No, we have concluded that it is not so much false as meaning less" . This curious appearance of cross purposes reflects something more than mere captiousness or misunderstanding. As to the "nonsense about thinking", it is perfectly true that an excessive formalisation of argu ments does not usually assist clear thinking very much. Plenty of people would be nonplussed by a formal logical exercise of the type: all A is B, Cis B: is C therefore A? But equate A to Frenchman, C to Germans and B to Europeans, and tht:y would never run the slightest risk of going astray.
Contents
Joseph Henry Woodger, Curriculum Vitae.- Editors' Note.- Foreword.- I / Philosophy of Science.- Metaphysical Presuppositions and the Description of Biological Systems.- Speculations and Theories.- On Simple Theories of a Complex World.- The Devious Roads of Science.- Complexity And Organization.- The Relationship Between Formalized Languages And Natural Languages.- A Survey of Formal Semantics.- Analyticity Versus Fuzziness.- Toward a Logic of in Tensions.- II / Logical Analysis of Theory Structure.- Creative and Non-Creative Definitions in the Calculus of probability.- Algebraic Simplification of Redundant Sequential Circuits.- Aristotle's Syllogistic and its Extensions.- III / Models in Science.- A Representation of Animal Growth.- Analogies in Biology.- Probability Models and Thought and Learning Processes.- Models, Mathematics and Metaphors.- The Game-Theoretical Approach to Organization Theory.- Design by Natural Selection.- IV / Analytic Biology.- On The Concept of Genotype.- Gentical Semantics and Evolutionary Theory.- Biological Field Phenomena: Facts and Concepts.- Animal Organization as a Problem in Cell Form.- Morphological Correspondence and the Concept of Homology.- On Category Overlapping in Taxonomy.- An Analysis of Some Taxonomic Concepts.- Life Cycles as Hierarchical Relations.- Bibliographical Appendix.- Publications by Joseph Henry Woodger.
