After not posting too much for the last year or so, I am hoping to return to the blogosphere on a more consistent basis. As some readers of this blog may have seen, my book Mathematics and Scientific Representation appeared in Feb. 2012. So some of what I will talking about will develop claims and themes from that book, especially in connection with the ongoing debates about mathematical explanation. Also, I hope to link to the reviews of the book that will appear sooner or later.
A new project that I would also like to discuss is more under the heading of Mathematics and Scientific Change. It appears to me that scientists have gotten better over time at using mathematics in science in ways that avoid a few problems. The main problem I raise in the book is that we don't typically know the right interpretation for a bit of successful mathematics, and it is often not clear that the mathematics should be assigned any physical interpretation. So I now hope to trace out some of ways mathematics was used and misused over the last two or three hundred years. A first step: working through Harper's exciting new book Isaac Newton's Scientific Method.
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