Description
BIRKHAUSER On Aesthetics In Science 1988 Edition by Wechsler
Are aesthetic considerations part of the process by which scientific hypotheses are selected or rejected? And if so is aesthetics incompatible with necessary scientific objectivity or does it increase the validity of the cognitive aspects of science? These issues are examined in this unusual collection of essays by six prominent scholars (Cyril Stanley Smith Philip Morrison Arthur I. Miller Seymour A. Papert Howard E. Gruber and Geoffrey Vickers) who all agree that aesthetic judgments are crucial to science. Their essays are not so much concerned with the products and artifacts of science as with the concepts models and theories that make them possible. This text evolved from a course given by the editor Judith Wechsler at MIT. It is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate the role of aesthetics in science and technology. Table of contents : * Human Behavior and Holocene Ecology.- I. The Context of Human Adaptation.- 1 * The Use of Land Snails from Prehistoric Sites for Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.- 2 * Historical Climates of the Northeastern United States: Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries.- 3 * "Where's the Salmon?": A Reevaluation of the Role of Anadromous Fisheries in Aboriginal New England.- 4 * Problems in the Use of Sea-Level Data for Archaeological Reconstructions.- II. People on the Landscape.- 5 * Indian Fires in the Prehistory of New England.- 6 * Territoriality and Horticulture: A Perspective for Prehistoric Southern New England.- 7 * The Effect of Estuary Formation on Prehistoric Settlement in Southern Rhode Island.- III. Long-Term Perspectives.- 8 * Early/Middle Holocene Environments in the Middle Atlantic Region: A Revised Reconstruction.- 9 * The Distribution of Late Quaternary Forest Regions in the Northeast: Pollen Data Physiography and the Prehistoric Record.- 10 * Ecological Leveling: The Archaeology and Environmental Dynamics of Early Postglacial Land Use.- Afterword.