History and Philosophy of Science
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Recent Submissions
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The Genius of the 'Original Imitation Game' Test
(Springer, 2020-10-29)Twenty years ago in "Turing's Two Tests for Intelligence" I distinguished two distinct tests to be found in Alan Turing's 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence": one by then very well-known, the other neglected. ... -
Physically similar systems - A history of the concept
(Springer Nature, 2017)The concept of similar systems arose in physics and appears to have originated with Newton in the seventeenth century. This chapter provides a critical history of the concept of physically similar systems, the twentieth ... -
Experimentation on analogue models
(Springer Nature, 2017)Analogue models are actual physical setups used to model something else. They are especially useful when what we wish to investigate is difficult to observe or experiment upon due to size or distance in space or time; for ... -
Physically similar systems: A history of the concept
(Springer, 2017)The concept of similar systems arose in physics, and appears to have originated with Newton in the seventeenth century. This chapter provides a critical history of the concept of physically similar systems, the twentieth ... -
Physical pictures: Engineering models circa 1914 and in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus"
(Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002)Today I want to talk about an element in the milieu in which Ludwig Wittgenstein conceived the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that has not been recognized to date: the generalization of the methodology of experimental scale ... -
Kites, models and logic: Susan Sterrett investigates models in Wittgenstein's world
(SimplyCharly.com, 2008)This is the text of Dr. Sterrett's replies to an interviewer's questions for simplycharly.com, a website with interviews by academics on various authors, philosophers, and scientists. -
Historical context and Philosophy of Science: a reply to Peter Simons' 'Coincidence and Kite-Flying'
(2009-03-04)This essay responds to a review of my book "Wittgenstein Flies A Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World" by Peter Simons that appears in the March 2009 issue of the journal Metascience. The revised version ... -
Wittgenstein flies a kite: a story of models of wings and models of the world
(Pi Press, 2005-11-16)The philosophy of language and experimental research in aeronautics made great leaps at about the same time in the early twentieth century. Strange as it may sound, this was no coincidence. Sterrett explains what Wittgenstein ... -
Physical pictures: Engineering models circa 1914 and in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus"
(2000-07-17)In 1914, Wittgenstein recorded an incident in his Notebooks that he later mentioned to several friends as occasioning a major insight for his views in the Tractatus that propositions represent by being pictures. The entry ... -
Pictures of Sound: Wittgenstein on gramophone records and the logic of depiction
(Elsevier, 2005-06)I consider the way Wittgenstein employed some kinds of sound recordings (but not others) in discussing logical form in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus. The year that Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna, 1889, nearby ... -
Darwin’s analogy between artificial and natural selection: how does it go?
(Elsevier, 2002-03)The analogy Darwin drew between artificial and natural selection in "On the Origin of Species" has a detailed structure that has not been appreciated. In Darwin’s analogy, the kind of artificial selection called Methodical ... -
Sounds like light: Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and Mach's work in Acoustics and Aerodynamics
(Elsevier, 1998-03-11)Ernst Mach is the only person whom Einstein included on both the list of physicists he considered his true precursors, and the list of the philosophers who had most affected him. Einstein scholars have been less generous ...
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