Physics Avoidance And Other Essays In Conceptual Strategy 1st Edition Mark Wilson by Mark Wilson 9780198803478, 0198803478 instant download after payment.

Mark Wilson presents a series of explorations of our strategies for
understanding the world. "Physics avoidance" refers to the fact that we
frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we
anticipate, but must seek alternative policies that allow us to address
the questions we want answered in a tractable way. Within both science
and everyday life, we find ourselves relying upon thought processes that
reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout manners. Conceptual
innovators are often puzzled by the techniques they develop, when they
stumble across reasoning patterns that are easy to implement but
difficult to justify. But simple techniques frequently rest upon complex
foundations—a young magician learns how to execute a card-guessing
trick without understanding how its progressive steps squeeze in on a
proper answer. As we collectively improve our inferential skills in this
gradually evolving manner, we often wander into unfamiliar explanatory
landscapes in which simple words encode physical information in complex
and unanticipated ways. Like our juvenile conjurer, we fail to recognize
the true strategic rationales underlying our achievements and may turn
instead to preposterous rationalizations for our policies. We have
learned how to reach better conclusions in a more fruitful way, but we
remain baffled by our own successes.
At its best, philosophical
reflection illuminates the natural developmental processes that generate
these confusions and explicates their complexities. But current
thinking within philosophy of science and language works to opposite
effect by relying upon simplistic conceptions of "cause", "law of
nature", "possibility", and "reference" that ignore the strategic
complexities in which these concepts become entangled within real life
usage. To avoid these distortions, better descriptive tools are required
in philosophy. The nine new essays within this volume illustrate this
need for finer discriminations through a range of revealing cases, of
both historical and contemporary significance.