to that goal, and it is hoped that it will incorporate further works dealing in an exact way with interesting philosophical issues. Zürich, April 1973 Mario Bunge From the Preface to the First Edition It may seem odd that aseries of works devoted to the natural sciences should indude - indeed begin with - a volume on phi losophy. Today, of course, it is generally agreed that philosophy and natural science are perfectly compatible. But to grant the theory of knowledge such a prominent position implies not only that these two fields are compatible, but that there is a natural connection between them. Thus the indusion of this book in the series can be justified only if such an intimate relation of mutual dependence and interpenetration really does exist. Without anticipating what is to come, the author would like first to explain his point of view on the relationship between epistemology and the sciences, and in so doing make dear at the outset the method to be followed in this book. It is my view - which I have already expressed elsewhere and which I never tire of repeating - that philosophy is not aseparate science to be placed alongside of or above the individual disciplines. Rather, the philosophical element is present in all of the scienccs; it is their true soul, and only by virtue of it are they sciences at all.

First published in Germany in 1918, this acutely reasoned treatise attacks many of philosophy's contemporary sacred cows, including the concept of metaphysics and Kant's arguments for synthetic a priori knowledge. The book expounds most of the doctrines that would later be identified with the "classical period" of the Vienna Circle. Unlike many of his peers, Schlick displays a detailed and sensitive knowledge of the traditions he criticizes, displayed here in the chief work of this pioneering Viennese philosopher.

This is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations. It does this by examining concepts as acquired dispositions, and then focuses on perhaps the most important of these: the concept of learning. This concept is important because everything that we know and do in the world is predicated on a prior act of learning. A concept can have many meanings and can be used in a number of different ways, and this creates difficulty when considering the nature of objects and the relationships between them. To enable this, David Scott answers a series of questions about concepts in general and the concept of learning in particular. Some of these questions are: What is learning? What different meanings can be given to the notion of learning? How does the concept of learning relate to other concepts, such as innatism, development and progression? The book offers a counter-argument to empiricist conceptions of learning, to the propagation of simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment, and to the denial that values are central to understanding how we live. It argues that values permeate everything: our descriptions of the world, the attempts we make at creating better futures and our relations with other people.

During the last twenty years our understanding of expertise has dramatically increased. Laboratory analysis of chess masters, experts in physics and medicine, musicians, athletics, writers, and performance artists have included careful examination of the cognitive processes mediating outstanding performance in very diverse areas of expertise. These analyses have shown that expert performance is primarily a reflection of acquired skill resulting from the accumulation of domain-specific knowledge and methods during many years of training practice. The importance of domain-specific knowledge has led researchers on expertise to focus on characteristics of expertise in specific domains. In Toward a General Theory of Expertise many of the world's foremost scientists review the state-of-the-art knowledge about expertise in different domains, with the goal of identifying characteristics of expert performance that are generalizable across many different areas of expertise. These essays provide a comprehensive summary of general methods for studying expertise and of current knowledge about expertise in chess, physics, medicine, sports and performance arts, music, writing, and decision making. Most important, the essays reveal the existence of many general characteristics of expertise.

Providing a clear and accessible introduction to epistemology or the theory of knowledge, this book discusses some of the main theories of justification, including foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, and virtue epistemology.

This book presents an epistemic framework for dealing with information-knowledge and certainty-uncertainty problems within the space of quality-quantity dualities. It bridges between theoretical concepts of entropy and entropy measurements, proposing the concept and measurement of fuzzy-stochastic entropy that is applicable to all areas of knowing under human cognitive limitations over the epistemological space. The book builds on two previous monographs by the same author concerning theories of info-statics and info-dynamics, to deal with identification and transformation problems respectively. The theoretical framework is developed by using the toolboxes such as those of the principle of opposites, systems of actual-potential polarities and negative-positive dualities, under different cost-benefit time-structures. The category theory and the fuzzy paradigm of thought, under methodological constructionism-reductionism duality, are used in the fuzzy-stochastic and cost-benefit spaces to point to directions of global application in knowing, knowledge and decision-choice actions. Thus, the book is concerned with a general theory of entropy, showing how the fuzzy paradigm of thought is developed to deal with the problems of qualitative-quantitative uncertainties over the fuzzy-stochastic space, which will be applicable to conditions of soft-hard data, fact, evidence and knowledge over the spaces of problem-solution dualities, decision-choice actions in sciences, non-sciences, engineering and planning sciences to abstract acceptable information-knowledge elements.

The stated subject of these lecture courses given by Husserlbetween 1910 and 1918is ‘reason, the word for the mental activities and accomplishments that govern knowledge, give it form and supply it with norms.’ They show their author still pursuing the course set out in the Logical Investigations up to the end of the second decade of the century and displaying utter consistency with stands that he began taking on meaning, analyticity, Platonism, manifolds, mathematics, psychologism, etc. in the 1890s. Thus, they undermine many idées reçues about the development of his thought. The centerpiece of this work is an exploration of the realm of meaning. Moreover, they add new dimensions to standard discussions by taking readers back to the place where phenomenology and analytic philosophy diverged. They show that Husserl tangled long and hard with the very ideas that went into the making of the latter and offer a wealth of interesting insights into sense and meaning, theory of judgment, complete and incomplete meanings, states of affairs, extensional logic, the relationship between logic and mathematics, functions and arguments, propositional functions, quantification, existential generalization, the word ‘all,’ number theory, sets, modality, deductive theory, ideas that are still under discussion today. Prepared for oral delivery in the classroom, they are refreshingly lively and spontaneous. They are clearer, more explicit, and readable than the books Husserl published during his lifetime.