Imaging the Absolute: Can Philosophy Visualize Abstractions?

Using design abstractions to visualize, quantify, and restructure software

During design or maintenance, software developers often use intuition, rather than an objective set of criteria, to determine or recapture the design structure of a software system. A decision process based on intuition alone can miss alternative design options that are easier to implement, test, maintain, and reuse. The concept of design-level cohesion can provide both visual and quantitative ...

Imaging Technology and the Philosophy of Causality

Russo and Williamson (2007) put forward the thesis that, at least in the health sciences, to establish the claim that C is a cause of E one normally needs evidence of an underlying mechanism linking C and E as well as evidence that C makes a difference to E. This epistemological thesis poses a problem for most current analyses of causality which, in virtue of analysing causality in terms of jus...

Can there be science without philosophy?

Over the last few decades, philosophy has gained an increasingly bad reputation among working scientists. Prominent researchers have suggested, in various forms and degrees of mockery, that philosophy has little or nothing positive to contribute to science. This essay provides a response to these allegations. We begin by examining, and ultimately questioning, an influential argument purporting ...

Explanation in Information Systems: Can Philosophy Help?

Accounts of explanation given in the information systems literature, most prevalent in the areas knowledge-based systems and human-computer interaction, generally do not consider the philosophical underpinnings of explanation concepts. The theoretically rich accounts that have emerged from the philosophy of science provide us with a well-developed framework for designing the structure and conte...

Absolute quantification in brain SPECT imaging