Science without numbers : a defense of nominalism / Hartry Field.

Author
Field, Hartry H., 1946- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Εdition
Second edition.
Published/​Created
Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2016.
Description
vi, P-53, vi, 111 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Availability

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Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks Q175 .F477 2016 Browse related items Request

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    Subject(s)
    Summary note
    "Science Without Numbers caused a stir in philosophy on its original publication in 1980, with its bold nominalist approach to the ontology of mathematics and science. Hartry Field argues that we can explain the utility of mathematics without assuming it true. Part of the argument is that good mathematics has a special feature ('conservativeness') that allows it to be applied to 'nominalistic' claims (roughly, those neutral to the existence of mathematical entities) in a way that generates nominalistic consequences more easily without generating any new ones. Field goes on to argue that we can axiomatize physical theories using nominalistic claims only, and that in fact this has advantages over the usual axiomatizations that are independent of nominalism. There has been much debate about the book since it first appeared. It is now reissued in a revised contains a substantial new preface giving the author's current views on the original book and the issues that were raised in the subsequent discussion of it." --Publisher's description.
    Notes
    • Originally published in 1980.
    • "First Edition published in 2016"--Title page verso
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • New to this edition
    • Arithmetic and cardinality quantifiers
    • Mereology and logic
    • Representation theorems
    • Conservativeness
    • Indispensability
    • Other forms of anti-Platonism
    • Miscellaneous technicalia
    • Contents for the first edition
    • Preliminary remarks
    • Why the utility of Mathematical entities is unlike the utility of theoretical entities ; Appendix: on conservativeness
    • First illustration of why Mathematical entities are useful: Arithmetic
    • Second illustration of why mathematical entities are useful: Geometry and distance
    • Nominalism and the structure of physical space
    • My strategy for nominalizing Physics, and its advantages
    • A nominalistic treatment of Newtonian space-time
    • A nominalistic treatment of quantities, and a preview of a nominalistic treatment of the laws involving them
    • Newtonian Gravitational Theory nominalized
    • Continuity
    • Products and ratios
    • Signed products and ratios
    • Derivatives
    • Second (and higher) derivatives
    • Laplaceans
    • Poisson's equation
    • Inner products
    • Gradients
    • Differentiation of Vector Fields
    • The Law of Motion
    • General Remarks
    • Logic and ontology.
    ISBN
    • 0198777914 ((hardcover))
    • 9780198777915 ((hardcover))
    • 0198777922 ((paperback))
    • 9780198777922 ((paperback))
    LCCN
    2016945126
    OCLC
    963792531
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