Academic Books
Philosophy of Science
Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy (4th Edition)
(with Alex Rosenberg)
Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods, and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg and Lee McIntyre’s updated and substantially revised fourth edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving lucid explanations with clear analyses, the volume is a much-used, thematically oriented introduction to the field.
The fourth edition has been thoroughly rewritten based on instructor and student feedback, to improve readability and accessibility, without sacrificing depth. It retains, however, all of the logically structured, extensive coverage of earlier editions, which a review in the journal Teaching Philosophy called “the industry standard” and “essential reading.”
Key Features of the Fourth Edition:
- Revised and rewritten for readability based on feedback from student and instructor surveys.
- Updated text on the problem of underdetermination, social science, and the realism/antirealism debate.
- Improved continuity between chapters.
- Revised and updated Study Questions and annotated Suggested Readings at the end of each chapter.
- Updated Bibliography.
Praise
Explaining Explanation
Essays in the Philosophy of the Special Sciences
Far from being inferior to physics, the special sciences are crucial to understanding what is distinctive about scientific explanation: that description is just as important as ontology and that having the right attitude toward empirical evidence is as necessary as having the right method. Explaining Explanation is a collection of Lee McIntyre’s most significant philosophical essays from over the last twenty years. The principle areas of concern are the philosophy of social science and the philosophy of chemistry, but essays also cover more general problems such as underdetermination, explanatory exclusion, the accommodation-prediction debate, and laws in biological science. Despite the disparate themes of each essay—complexity, laws, explanation, prediction, reduction, supervenience, emergence, and redescription—they all converge through the lens of the special sciences, focusing on what it means to “explain” in the sciences.
Praise
Laws and Explanation in the Social Sciences
Defending a Science of Human Behavior
The first full-length defense of social scientific laws to appear in the last twenty years, this book upholds the prospect of the scientific explanation of human behavior against those who maintain that this approach is impossible, impractical, or irrelevant. By pursuing an analogy with the natural sciences, McIntyre shows that the barriers to social scientific laws are not generated by factors unique to social inquiry, but arise from a largely common set of problems that face any scientific endeavor. All of the most widely supported arguments against social scientific laws have failed largely due to adherence to a highly idealized conception of nomologicality (allegedly drawn from the natural sciences themselves) and the limited doctrine of “descriptivism.” Basing his arguments upon a more realistic view of scientific theorizing that emphasizes the pivotal role of “redescription” in aiding the search for scientific laws, McIntyre is optimistic about attaining useful law-like explanations of human behavior.