Sharif Digital Repository

In addition to the successes of modern science and technology in helping humanity, science has brought harmful effects ,which has led to criticisms from different domains such ethics, religion, politics, philosophy , etc. Nicholas Maxwell as an Emeritus Reader in the Philosophy of Science has shown , in several of his works, the harmful byproducts of science, and has proposed some ideas for bring about a revolution in the philosophy of science. His main thesis is to change the academic and non-academic aim of works, from knowledge to wisdom. In summary, his concerns are: inappropriate metaphysical presuppositions concerning the comprehensibility of our universe, attention to rational... 

Paul Feyerabend, an Austrian philosopher of science, is known as one of major critics of science and philosophy of science in 20th century. This inquiry is an attempt to study and criticize the bedrock of Feyerabend's philosophy of science. In the first chapter there will be an intruduction to enter the subject. In the second chapter the method of this study will be explained. Third chapter is a reconstruction of Feyerabend's philosophy of science. In the 4th chapter bedrock of Feyerabend's philosophy of science is derived to be: scepticism and fighting against dogmatism, defying monopolization, humanistic concerns and his personal character. In the last chapter there will be criticisms on... 

Today, several centuries after the time when science began to flourish of science, everybody is familiar with destroying consequences of modern science and technology, in addition to its achievments. Besides, domination and exclusive position of science in educational system and government organizations have marginalized alternative knowledge. Thus, some people found this trend dangerous for humankind’s fate and tried to change this situation. Nasr and Feyerabend are two philosophers that despite their different work area both criticise modern science and try to establish their own ideal scientific community.Nasr’s approach is regeneration of traditional science which was prevalent before... 

In this thesis, we are going to study Sobolev classes of weakly differentiable mappings, specially Orlicz-Sobolev class, between compact Riemannian manifolds without boundary. These mappings posses less regularity than the mappings in the borderline case. Two major themes we investigate are smooth approximation of these mappings and the integrability of the Jacobian determinant. We impose no topological restrictions on manifolds in the approximation issue. We characterize classes of weakly differentiable mappings satisfying the approximation property and claim the Orlicz-Sobolev class is in these classes. The importance of our approach is that we are able to find tiny sets on which Sobolev... 

Prescribing and consuming drugs more than necessary is considered polypharmacy, which is both wasteful and harmful. In this study, an innovative data mining framework is developed for analyzing prescriptions regarding polypharmacy. The approach consists of three main steps: pre-modeling, modeling, and post-modeling. In the first step, after collecting and cleaning the raw data, several novel features are extracted for physicians and patients. In the modeling step, decision trees are applied to generate a set of If-Then rules to detect and describe physicians’ features or patients’ features associated with polypharmacy. A novel approach based on the response surface methodology (RSM) is... 

Think of an Alpine hiker who because of avalanche and a blinding blizzard, is stranded on a desolate, mountain path facing a chasm. The hiker cannot return the way he came because of the avalanche, yet, if he stays where he is, he will freeze as the temperature plummets. The hiker’s only real hope is to jump the chasm. Knowing that exertion generally follows belief, the hiker realizes that his attempt will be half-hearted, diminishing his chance of survival, unless he brings himself to the belief that he can make the jump. In circumstances like these, one is clearly justified both in forming beliefs motivated by pragmatic reasons, and in suppressing beliefs (I cannot make the jump) motivated... 

Feyerabend was a philosopher of science that became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules and rationality of science. Feyerabend’s view of science can be summarize in a few points; 1. On the issue of falsifiability, Feyerabend argues that no theory is ever consistent with all the relevant facts. He sees the use of ad-hoc postulates to save the dominant paradigm as an essential to the progress of science. He claims that scientists frequently depart completely from the scientific method when they use ad-hoc ideas to explain observations that are only later justified by theory. To Feyerabend, ad-hoc... 

There has been a lively debate between two major strategist groups in innovation strategy literature. The first, with Ansoff being the protagonist, pose a rational approach in describing a corporate innovation strategy formulation process while the other group, with Mintzburg as the protagonist, prescribe an incremental approach.It seems that in continuous change and uncertainty, rational approach can weakly predict the reality and one can claim that in such situations incremental approach is more effective than rational approach. Based on the review of literature and consequent classification, most of the strategies that are named as innovation strategies in literature use rational... 

A qualitative study has been conducted in order to identify evidence of bounded rationality in software engineers' career decision making. Tversky and Kahneman's heuristics and biases approach has been used as a theoretical framework of the study. The theoretical framework comprised four decision-making and judgment heuristics, i.e. availability, representativeness, anchoring and adjustment, and affect heuristic. The data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis method. The final results revealed that software engineers did make use of heuristics in making career decisions. Several incidents of the use of availability, representativeness, and...