Reviews for Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century

The average rating for Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-08-27 00:00:00 Doug Schooley I'm always a bit puzzled upon encountering a book at this level, regarding any subject within philosophy (or indeed any other field), being titled something along the lines of "an introduction to X" when it becomes utterly clear after reading just a short part of the first chapter that it is anything but an introduction to the subject. I've seen this before (for example with "Gamut"'s Logic, Language, and Meaning, Volume 1: Introduction to Logic ) and I always come away from the reading experience feeling that while one may not absolutely need previous knowledge on the subject to understand them because they do go through the basics in the beginning, they do so at such a pace, with so little time to really grasp all the definitions, distinctions, positions and what have you, that it is hopelessly optimistic to think that any reader could understand everything without having encountered these concepts previously. This is, rather than a true introduction, a survey of the subject of epistemology that covers everything from the basics up to advanced discussions introducing the reader to the current debates going on among academic philosophers. In any case, as a survey, it does a fantastic job. It starts with the basics: the classic definition of knowledge, the ideals of knowledge from which that definition sprung, the challenges from scepticism of different kinds (the main distinction made by Williams is between ancient scepticism's Agrippan trilemma challenging knowledge as a whole and Cartesian scepticism regarding knowledge of the external world) and moves up to modern times with the more sophisticated fallibilistic conceptions of knowledge, the problematic Gettier cases which this conception invites and the debates between internalists and externalists on the one hand, and that between foundationalists and coherentists on the other. Along the way Williams also deals with questions of the normativity of epistemology, arguments for the naturalization of epistemology, and the value of knowledge. I've already mentioned that this book fits into the category of "sort-of-introductory-but-not-really", but something that sets it apart is that the latter part of the book contains a lot of original work regarding the challenges of scepticism where the author lays out his own suggestion for how to deal with it. This is tied to his contextualist conception of the justification of knowledge, which he poses as an alternative to both of the more traditional conceptions of foundationalism and coherentism (view which Williams reject). It's all seems very original (but keep in mind that this is coming from someone who is by no means an expert on these issues), is very advanced with a form of rigor in dealing with seemingly all relevant issues, possible objections and unwanted consequences (Williams is very keen on distancing his views from the kinds of relativism that they can seem to invite) while simultaneously being clear and pedagogical as long as the reader has the patience required to understand these issues. In laying out his own views, Williams sometimes does a very good job of arguing for them (his contextualism seems very sensible and while I'm not sure if he really manages to dismiss charges of relativism, his conception of justification seems to fair a lot better than foundationalism and coherentism as he presents them, though I'm not sure that they get a really fair treatment) and sometimes not. An example of when he really does not do a good job of arguing for his position is in dismissing externalism without really treating it as carefully and thoroughly as one would have wished. Another example would be when he gets into the issue of truth, where I felt he did a dismal job of convincing the reader that the sort of deflationist view of truth that he seems to prefer is a reasonable one. In my view, deflationist accounts of truth are barely coherent. You often see a defence of deflationism relying on the disquotation criterion for truth (though there may be other ways which I have yet to encounter to defend deflationism), as if that was a sensible conclusion to draw from the criterion. Searle did a much better job at dealing with this issue in his The Construction of Social Reality where he showed convincingly that teh disquotation criterion actually suggests the correspondence theory of truth (or at least a specific version of that theory, which Searle lays out in a very convincing fashion). I agree wholeheartedly with Searle that (as I understand him) the disquotation criterion shows how claims of the truth of statements match the fact (a second-order fact I suppose) that the proposition expressed by the statement matches a fact in the world. Searle thinks, and I agree, that the very fact (second-order fact again) that there is such a "matching" needs a word and we might as well use "correspondence" to describe this. This is hardly central to the subject or the book though, I'd argue, very, very important to figure out correctly in laying out a particular epistemology and it seems Williams should agree considering his dismissal of epistemology as "first philosophy" (in the Cartesian tradition) i favor of a conception of the subject as something that permeates philosophy and relies upon theories of meaning and philosophy of mind (and theories of truth too, I'd argue, though Williams as a deflationist does not have a substantial theory of truth that goes beyond its dispensability so he can probably neglect to deal with it throughout his epistemological survey). I'm not sure if I treat Williams quite fairly in this area, but I think his presentation of truth and other issues in the last part of the book was shallow in a way that angered me a bit, especially since the bigger part of the book was anything but shallow. Had the whole book kept up the level of sophistication even in dealing with the issues about which I've now complained, I would have given it five stars out of five but as it stands, it reaches four but no more (four and a half might have been more fair had that been available). Four stars is by no means bad of course, and neither is the book. It's an excellent survey of the subject of epistemology for anyone not already immersed in the issues (and probably for the experts as well) as long as they have at least a little bit of understanding of at the very least general philosophical questions (it is not by any stretch a good first book on philosophy) and probably some basic knowledge about epistemology is good too. Do read it if you have some basic understanding of the questions raised in epistemology and wish to get an excellent treatise of all the complicated issues being discussed among professional epistemologists today.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-24 00:00:00 Andre Robert Excellent. Williams uses radical skepticism like a scalpel to show the problems with foundationalism and coherentism, and then to argue for his own contextualist position. I'd always thought this was a textbook, but while it is certainly broad in scope, I'd describe more as an extensive argument from epistemology in general for his own position.