Introduction: The Philosophy of Expertise—What is Expertise?

Introduction: What is the Philosophy of Science?

What is the philosophy of science? It is the application of philosophical methods to philosophical problems as they arise in the context of the sciences. That's not a particularly helpful answer as it stands, but at least it allows us to break our original question into parts: What are the methods of philosophy? What are philosophical problems? How do these problems arise within different scien...

Trust, expertise, and the philosophy of science

Trust is a central concept in the philosophy of science. We highlight how trust is important in the wide variety of interactions between science and society. We claim that examining and clarifying the nature and role of trust (and distrust) in relations between science and society is one principal way in which the philosophy of science is socially relevant. We argue that philosophers of science...

Introduction: The Philosophy of Vectors

Introduction: The Philosophy of Information

Luciano Floridi’s 1999 monograph, Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction, provided the impetus for the theme of this issue, more for what it did not say about librarianship and information studies (LIS) than otherwise. Following the pioneering works of Wilson, Nitecki, Buckland, and Capurro (plus many of the authors of this issue), researchers in LIS have increasingly turned to the efficacy ...

Introduction: The Philosophy of Historiography

This book studies our knowledge of history, its nature, historical development, epistemic limits, and scope. In ordinary language “history” is ambiguous. It may mean past events or the study of past events (Dray, 1993, p. 1). In its original Greek historie is etymologically related to the verb “to see” and consequently to inquiry and knowledge. In other languages, “history” means a story (Le Go...