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Oldest tendencies in human understanding of the world:

“reduction” to basic principles ... the first “strucutural” ideas ?


the principles are not directly accessible

Beginning of “combinataion theory” (?):


ancient Greeks: 4 components - water, fire, soil, air
Middle ages: Universalia
nominalism = sunt nomina et flatum vocis
realism = sunt realia ( Platon-like ?)

Analytical philosophy - theoretical vs. empirical entities and attributes

Strict positivism: reduction sentences - reduction of theoretical to observable

Modest analytical philosophy:


- what are the relationships between them ?
- appropriate concept formation
correspondence problem

Related topics to empirical vs. theoretical problem:


- systems theory: black box, hidden elements, internal state
- behaviorism: S - R paradigm, Tolman’s “intervening “ variables
- measurement theory: indirect, associative, pointer measurement, m. “by fiat”
-
- induction - deduction problem
- exploratory - confirmatory approaches
Layers from directly observable to heuristically hypothetical vs “real”

Levels in analytical philosophy of science:


- empirical - “directly observable” (through “reasonably” scientific diagnostic
procedures, rigorously standardized)
- pure dispositional
- theoretico-dispositional
- theoretical concepts
- hypothetical
the last 4 called often altogether generically
theoretical concepts ... in wider sense
or “constructs”
Philosophical ways to look at theoretical concepts:
fictionalism
conventionalism theory of levels
constructivism neutralistic view
instrumentalism ......
operationalism .....
naive realism
Two dichotomies play role in theory building:
1. empirical vs. theoretical levels
2. “real” vs. formal level

Problems of formalization:
- formal representation of observation ... data coding - not necessarilly but including

data quantification and


measurement
(“raw research record” - data - variable not-necessarilly-
quantitative)
- modeling: - theory , its structure, formal model ...
- regression- like models,...
- not-quantitative models
- theory-data relationships
in quantitative models the correspondence problem as
associative measurement problem

Correspondence relationships:
- logical definition, problem: irect explicit definition vs. partial conditional
definition
- “causal” implication
- nondeterministic: - fuzzy logic implication
- stochastic: - conditional probability
- regression, correlation
- information theory measures of association

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