Some exceptional and surprising mistakes of scholarship made in the writings of a number of feminist academics (Ruth Bleier, Ruth Hubbard, Susan Bordo, Sandra Harding, and Rae Langton) are examined in detail. This essay offers the psychological hypothesis that these mistakes were the result of political passion and concludes with some remarks about the ability of the social sciences to study the effect of the politics of the researcher on the quality of his or her research.

Quantum mechanics is certainly a strange place to start an investigation into the nature of the relationship between science and society. However, this article begins by integrating its history and proceeds through current conceptions of it by some physicists to examine quantum mechanics as an intersection of both science and knowledge. A famous thought experiment by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen pointed to an area that few physicists still research–a paradigm gone awry. Yet the vast majority of physiciststoday do not agonize (...) over this uncertainty. Physics today presses forward with indominable speed and precision. But by questioning a small sample of physicists doing physics about their practice, this study aims at an everyday physicist’s understanding of the matter; a paradox that lies between the results of experiment and their interpretation or place as knowledge in society. For Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, the paradox was that we can only determine the spin of an entangled particle–it only becomes real–after measuring the spin of its partner particle. For a few contemporary physicists, the problem is how to understand the fact that a measured particle “teleports” its state instantaniously to another point in space. Practicing physicist resolve this, to put it simply, by just using it. Quantum mechanics, as with physics, is incredibly accurate–accepting it as truth yields results that physicists and society can use. By interrogating this process in its historicity and current formulation, this article sheds some light on the way physics works as knowledge. It provides a possibility for turning the scientific eye toward the very meaning of science. (shrink)

Francis Bacon's concept of the ‘vexations of art’ entailed experimentation as an intervention into nature for the purpose of extracting its secrets. Although the standard edition of Bacon's works by Spedding, Ellis and Heath and the new Oxford edition by Graham Rees translate the phrase vexationes artium as the ‘vexations of art’, a significant number of scholars, translators and editors from the seventeenth century to the present have read Bacon's Latin as the ‘torment’ or ‘tortures of art’. Here I discuss (...) these latter interpretations and speculate on the reasons for their association of the term with experimentation. While it may not be possible to say with certainty what Bacon meant by ‘vexation’, the context of his thought, the rich set of metaphors on which he drew and the interpretations of dozens of scholars over four centuries would seem to favour assigning a robust, interventionist meaning to vexare. (shrink)

This paper surveys three controversial new directions in research about the nature of science and briefly summarizes both the intellectual and sociological impact of this work. A bibliographic introduction to the major literature is provided and some fruitful directions for future research are proposed. Philosophers of science are also exhorted to perform 'community service' by correcting misunderstandings of the methods of science fostered by these new approaches.

Objectivity in the sciences is a much-touted yet problematic concept. It is sometimes held up as characterising scientific knowledge, yet operational definitions are diverse and call for such paradoxical genius as the ability to see without a perspective, to predict repeatability, to elicit nature’s own self-revelation, or to discern the structure of reality with inerrancy. Here we propose a positive and general definition of objectivity based on work in the Reformational philosophy tradition. We recognise a suite of relation-frames–ways in which (...) things function and relate to each other, which can be analytically distinguished in the process of conceptual abstraction. These relation-frames also ground the diverse aspects of scientific analysis within which relationships and properties may be abstracted from entities and systems. We argue that objectivity can be understood as characteristic of representations that attempt to portray a subject in an earlier relation-frame than that in which it characteristically functions. In short, objectivity is projection. This proposal is exemplified from mathematics and the natural sciences and some possible objections to it are considered, as well as its extension to the social sciences. (shrink)

Os escritos de Francis Bacon dedicados à filosofia abundam em imagens, metáforas, comparações e alegorias destinadas a ilustrar e apresentar com eloquência suas ideias. Solidamente formado na cultura humanista de seu tempo, Bacon adotou com destreza os recursos da retórica e nutriu-se de um amplo espectro da literatura clássica greco-latina, assim como também dos escritos bíblicos. Em especial, a mitologia clássica (a que dedicou seu De sapientia veterum (1609) - Da sabedoria dos antigos) foi um de seus recursos predilteos na (...) hora de valer-se de alegorias para tornar acessível a um público amplo e não especializado os conteúdos mais inovadores, profundos e abstrusos de sua filosofia.1 Tudo isso converte algumas de suas obras em excelentes peças da literatura filosófica, nas quais Bacon põe em prática sua grande plasticidade como escritor, que, delicadamente e sem tropeços, transporta seus leitores da beleza da poesia e fantasia para os conceitos mais abstratos, sempre em busca de representar suas ideias filosóficas e de transformar a realidade por meio delas. Neste texto, apresentarei brevemente algumas das imagens pelas quais ele quis retratar aspectos fundamentais do seu projeto de restauração do saber. (shrink)