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List of contents
List of figures
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Postscript
Introduction: towards philosophy of scientific practice
1 The origin of the concept of practice
2 Scientific practice: significance, types, and scopes
3 The nature of scientific practice
4 The nature of knowledge: local knowledge
5 Knowledge and power
6 The contextual normativity of scientific practice
7 Philosophy of scientific practice and naturalism (I)
8 Philosophy of scientific practice and naturalism (II)
9 Philosophy of scientific practice and relativism
10 Partnering the philosophy of scientific practice: the philosophy of scientific experimentation
11 New empiricism: a close relative of the philosophy of scientific practice
12 The starting point of scientific research: opportunity, question, or observation?
13 A new solution for an old problem: the relationships of observation, experiment, and theory
14 New studies on replicability of scientific experiments
15 Local knowledge (I): traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)
16 Local knowledge (II): Chinese theory of Fengshui
17 Local knowledge (III): ethnobotany
18 Conclusion: scientific practice in ongoing and unlimited process
References
Index
About the author
XU Zhu, Associate Professor in Department of Philosophy, ECNU. Research interests includes Epistemology, Philosophy of Action, Wittgenstein, and Philosophy of Social Science. The author of Understanding the Social: from Normativity to Mechanism (monograph published in Chinese) and several papers published both in Chinese and in English.
WU Tong, Professor of Philosophy of Science and Technology (tenured) in the STS Centre, Tsinghua University. Research interests include philosophy of scientific practice, philosophy of system and complexity, and local knowledge. The author of The Melody of Growth: the Self-Organizing Evolution of Science (monograph published in Chinese) and many influential papers in Chinese philosophy of science and technology.
Summary
The authors believe that it is necessary for philosophy of scientific practice (PSP) to turn from the theory-dominant to the practice-dominant position. PSP has also put forward some possibility to reinterpret epistemic status of local knowledge in Chinese tradition, which provides the most significant motivation to participate this study.
