The Leo Apostel Center
                        **********************
in collaboration with the Doctoral Programme of the VUB invites
everyone to the 28th of its interdisciplinary seminars in the
Foundations series. In this series CLEA invites scholars that are
actively engaged in the research on the foundations of a particular
discipline. Their lectures will always be directed to an
interdisciplinary audience, and the discussions aim at confronting
the foundations of the different disciplines.


        The Crowbar Model of Method and Some Implications
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                by Prof. Dr. Thomas Nickles
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                (University of Nevada, Reno)


Wednesday, May 20 1998 at 5 p.m. in room B217 (building B, 3rd floor)
         Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Campus Oefenplein

About the lecture
*****************
After listing several different conceptions of method and its
functions, I discuss one of these--method as a tool or instrument, a
kind of logical crowbar or lever--as a means for raising further
(sometimes embarrassing) questions, both historical and
philosophical. How did the founders of modern methodology (Bacon,
Descartes, et al.) hit upon their ideas about method (by luck?) and
how did they pretend to justify their claims for method? Is a
general, portable method of science possible even in principle? How
useful can methods be at the frontier of research? If methods are the
product of innovative research rather than its guiding hand (part of
the "discovery" itself rather than its explanatory cause), then what
use can methods have? Can there be a content-neutral method, or does
the claim that a method is a good one make substantive
presuppositions about the domain to which it is applied and also
about human cognition? What assumptions about economy of nature and
human (individual) cognitive economy and control are built into
traditional assumptions about method? What assumptions are built in
concerning design and how to explain them?

About the speaker
*****************
Thomas Nickles is Foundation Professor at the University of Nevada,
Reno. He studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and continued his philosophical
education at Princeton, where his dissertation on The Structure and
Interrelationships of Physical Theories was supervised by Carl G.
Hempel. He taught philosophy of physics at the University of  Chicago
and has been a Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh
Center for Philosophy of Science.
Nickles is one of the central figures in the methodological study of
discovery who developed a problem solving model to approach the
topic. He organized the congress on discovery (in Reno, exactly 20
years ago) that may be seen as the pivoting point for the renewed
methodological and historical interest in discovery processes.
He was also an invited speaker and a member of the Program Committee
of the "International Congress on Discovery and Creativity" held in
Ghent(14-16 May 1998). Nickles is the author of more than fifty
articles in major philosophical journals and collections and edited
"Scientific Discovery, Logic and Rationality" and its twin volume
with case studies (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980). He is preparing books on
generative and bootstrap methodology.


The presentations with questions will last about an hour. Afterwards,
an hour or more is reserved for an in-depth, group discussion of the
topic.
More info at the CLEA office: phone 02-644 26 77 or via the Web-page:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/