Simplicity And Complexity In Games Of The Intellect

"If it were necessary, for some curious legal reason, to draw a clear line between human and nonhuman--for example, if a group of australopithecines were to appear and one had to decide if they were to be protected by Fair Employment Laws or by the ASPCA--I would welcome them as humans if I knew that they were seriously concerned about how to bury their dead." In this witty and wise way, Lawrence Slobodkin takes us on a spirited quest for the multiple meanings of simplicity in all facets of life. Slobodkin begins at the beginning, with a consideration of how simplicity came into play in the development of religious doctrines. He nimbly moves on to the arts--where he ranges freely from dining to painting--and then focuses more sharply on the role of simplicity in science. Here we witness the historical beginnings of modern science as a search for the fewest number of terms, the smallest number of assumptions, or the lowest exponents, while still meeting criteria for descriptive accuracy. The result may be an elegant hypothetical system that generates the apparent world from less apparent assumptions, as with the Newtonian revolution; or it may mean deducing non-obvious processes from everyday facts, as with the Darwinian revolution. Slobodkin proposes that the best intellectual work is done as if it were a game on a simplified playing field. He supplies serious arguments for considering the role of simplification and playfulness in all of our activities. The immediate effect of his unfailingly captivating essay is to throw open a new window on the world and to refresh our perspectives on matters of the heart and mind.

The idea that simplicity matters in science is as old as science itself, with the much cited example of Ockham's Razor, 'entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem': entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A problem with Ockham's razor is that nearly everybody seems to accept it, but few are able to define its exact meaning and to make it operational in a non-arbitrary way. Using a multidisciplinary perspective including philosophers, mathematicians, econometricians and economists, this 2002 monograph examines simplicity by asking six questions: what is meant by simplicity? How is simplicity measured? Is there an optimum trade-off between simplicity and goodness-of-fit? What is the relation between simplicity and empirical modelling? What is the relation between simplicity and prediction? What is the connection between simplicity and convenience? The book concludes with reflections on simplicity by Nobel Laureates in Economics.

This unprecedented collection of 27,000 quotations is the most comprehensive and carefully researched of its kind, covering all fields of science and mathematics. With this vast compendium you can readily conceptualize and embrace the written images of scientists, laymen, politicians, novelists, playwrights, and poets about humankind's scientific achievements. Approximately 9000 high-quality entries have been added to this new edition to provide a rich selection of quotations for the student, the educator, and the scientist who would like to introduce a presentation with a relevant quotation that provides perspective and historical background on his subject. Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations, Second Edition, provides the finest reference source of science quotations for all audiences. The new edition adds greater depth to the number of quotations in the various thematic arrangements and also provides new thematic categories.

In these days of ever-increasing specialization, it is important to gain a broad appreciation of scientific disciplines such as chemistry. With this in mind, Chemically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations contains the words and wisdom of several hundred scientists, writers, philosophers, poets, and academics. Some quotations are illustrated by amusing cartoons. The book is completed by a bibliography and indexes. The bibliography is useful for readers who want to search for more details about the quotations listed. The extensive author and subject indexes provide the perfect tool for locating quotations for practical use or pleasure. The largest compilation of published chemistry quotations available, this book is designed to be entertaining and informative. It presents quotations so that you can get a feel for the depth and breadth of chemistry, and the visions and styles of chemists past and present. Chemically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotation can be read for entertainment or used as a handy reference.

Based on more than three decades of observation, Robert Jervis concludes in this provocative book that the very foundations of many social science theories--especially those in political science--are faulty. Taking insights from complexity theory as his point of departure, the author observes that we live in a world where things are interconnected, where unintended consequences of our actions are unavoidable and unpredictable, and where the total effect of behavior is not equal to the sum of individual actions. Jervis draws on a wide range of human endeavors to illustrate the nature of these system effects. He shows how increasing airport security might actually cost lives, not save them, and how removing dead trees (ostensibly to give living trees more room) may damage the health of an entire forest. Similarly, he highlights the interconnectedness of the political world as he describes how the Cold War played out and as he narrates the series of events--with their unintended consequences--that escalated into World War I. The ramifications of developing a rigorous understanding of politics are immense, as Jervis demonstrates in his critique of current systemic theories of international politics--especially the influential work done by Kenneth Waltz. Jervis goes on to examine various types of negative and positive feedback, bargaining in different types of relationships, and the polarizing effects of alignments to begin building a foundation for a more realistic, more nuanced, theory of international politics. System Effects concludes by examining what it means to act in a system. It shows how political actors might modify their behavior in anticipation of system effects, and it explores how systemic theories of political behavior might account for the role of anticipation and strategy in political action. This work introduces powerful new concepts that will reward not only international relations theorists, but also all social scientists with interests in comparative politics and political theory.

Why do unrelated organisms sometimes appear almost identical in details of the anatomy, behavior, physiology, and ecology? Homoplasy assembles leaders in evolutionary biology to explore issues of parallelism, convergence, and reversals. This innovative book is certain to provoke discussion of homoplasy compelling evidence for particular theories of evolutionary change The first book on this increasingly interesting subject Includes authoritative treatments from leading experts expressing a variety of viewpoints

This is the first book to bring together distinguished jurisprudential theorists, as well as up-and-coming scholars, to critically assess the nature of legal reasoning. The volume is divided into 3 parts: The first part, General Jurisprudence and Legal Reasoning, addresses issues at the intersection of general jurisprudence - those pertaining to the nature of law itself - and legal reasoning. The second part, Rules and Reasons, addresses two concepts central to two prominent types of theory of legal reasoning. The essays in the third and final part, Doctrine and Practice, delve into the mechanics of legal practice and doctrine, from a legal reasoning perspective.

Noetics is Lawrence Krader's magnum opus, which he began while still an undergraduate philosophy major at the City College of New York in the 1930s. By examining the architectonics of some of the greatest thinkers in history - Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl among others - as works of art combining myth, speculation and empirical science, Krader tackles one of the central problems of the philosophy of science: what is science and how does it relate to human thinking and knowing more generally. Building on his theories concerning the different orders of nature adumbrated in his Labor and Value (2003), he follows not only the lines of development of the three fields of science corresponding to three orders of nature (material, quantum, and human) but also examines the development of all three as human processes and products. Krader takes up the relations of thinking and knowing in conjunction with emotions, feelings and judgment and examines the processes of abstraction as one of the key and unique features of human being and knowing. He proposes noetics as a science of thinking and knowing and establishes its relation to the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the arts. The breadth and depth of Krader's scholarship is stunning and evokes Spinoza's thought that «all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.»