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| List of figures | |
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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Preface | |
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| Issues and arguments | |
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| The naturalist and holist traditions and their detractors | |
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| An outline of the argument | |
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| Challenges to scientific rationality | |
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| Quine and the demise of positivism | |
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| Varieties of rationality | |
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| Kuhn and shifting standards | |
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| Incommensurability | |
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| Theory-laden data | |
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| Ambiguous criteria | |
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| Social constructivism and post-modernist rhetoric | |
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| The subtle invasion of values | |
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| The symptoms of good science | |
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| Causes, confirmation, and explanation | |
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| Some a priori objections | |
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| Confirmation and qualifications | |
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| How can ceteris paribus laws be confirmed and how can they explain? | |
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| Ceteris paribus in practice | |
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| Inferring causes from non-experimental data | |
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| Lawless explanations | |
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| Functionalism defended | |
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| Functionalism and its critics | |
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| What is functionalism? | |
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| Confirming functional explanations | |
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| Functionalist failures and successes | |
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| Optimal Eskimos and Hindu Cows | |
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| Marxist accounts of the state | |
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| The ecology of organizations | |
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| The critics answered | |
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| The failures of individualism | |
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| The prospects for reduction | |
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| Requirements for reduction | |
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| Conceptual arguments for and against reducibility | |
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| An empirical case against individualism | |
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| Claims about explanation and confirmation | |
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| Full explanation without reduction? | |
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| Is individualism the best explanation? | |
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| Are individualist mechanisms necessary? | |
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| Individualist evidence and heuristics | |
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| A question of ontology? | |
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| The truth in individualism | |
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| A science of interpretation? | |
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| Issues and presuppositions | |
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| The right-wing attack | |
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| Skeptical hermeneuts | |
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| Interpretive successes | |
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| Norms and symbols | |
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| Economics: a test case | |
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| How to think about economics | |
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| The supply-and-demand core | |
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| Confirming the laws of supply and demand | |
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| The central role of supply-and-demand arguments | |
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| Assessing neo-classical models | |
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| Reduction and microfoundations | |
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| Problems and prospects | |
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| References | |
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| Index | |