Reviewed on Sep 15, 2022

Must read 🏆

Here the author gives lessons on how scientist discuss, criticize, and work with scientific research and what has changed till date.

The structure of scientific theory, theory interpretation, and criticism book author is a professor emeritus in philosophy at the University of Maryland. Suppe was born in 1940 he has a great interest in the philosophy of science and this book is one of his prominent works. The author gathers various documents where they were an outcome of the 1969 Illinois symposium to stand on the chaos (as he says) in the direction of the scientific theories and to select an alternative productive intellectual direction to follow. The contributors are from different philosophic backgrounds and are figures in the scientific research discipline. The book covers several scientific theories debates like the Received view, perception-communication, theory paradigms, theory domains, Instrumentalism, and realism.

To start with, within the book covers the reader finds different definitions for theory. For example, a theory is considered to be cognitive significance if it is verifiable and can be tested to be true.

Karl R. Popper says theories are nets cast to catch what we call “the world” to rationalize, to explain, and to master it. We Endeavour to make the mesh even finer and finer.

The world is witnessing massive and fast development in knowledge and new inventions and theories. According to that we can observe, and read different structures for the scientific theory depending on two factors the research inquiry and the scientist himself. The structure of scientific theory according to Campbell is composed of three components “an abstract calculus that is the logical Skelton of the explanatory system, a set of Correspondence rules that assign an empirical content to the abstract calculus, and an interpretation or model for the abstract calculus.” While Toulmin tells us that, a theory contains at least two distinct components “ideals of natural order, and other laws which are used to account for phenomenal deviations from the ideals.”

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Reviewed by

Husam in his 25 years in architectural and urban design practice experience has helped several international firms in the Middle East achieve success by meeting project’s planned goals and reduced projects budgets without quality tradeoff.