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Scientific knowledge: a sociological analysis

London: Athlone. Edited by David Bloor & John Henry (1996)

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  1. Decentering sociology: Synthetic dyes and social theory.Andrew Pickering - 2005 - Perspectives on Science 13 (3):352-405.
    : This essay addresses the difficulties that sociology as a discipline continues to experience in grasping the relations between technology, science and the social. I argue that these difficulties stem from a resolute centering of sociology on the social, which follows a generically Durkheimian blueprint. I elaborate a response to these difficulties which derives from recent lines of work in science and technology studies, and which entails a decentering of the social relative to the material and the conceptual, in terms (...)
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  • From dyes to iraq: A reply to Jonathan Harwood.Andrew Pickering - 2005 - Perspectives on Science 13 (3):416-425.
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  • Toward a sociology of epistemic things.David Bloor - 2005 - Perspectives on Science 13 (3):285-312.
    : H-J Rheinberger's book Toward a History of Epistemic Things contains a sophisticated account of scientific reference and scientific method worked out in conjunction with a case study of the laboratory synthesis of proteins. This paper offers a detailed critical analysis of Rheinberger's position from the standpoint of the sociology of scientific knowledge. The central thesis is that Rheinberger's account of reference, whether deliberately or unwittingly, assimilates discourse about the natural world to discourse about the social world. The result is (...)
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  • Defusing eliminative materialism: Reference and revision.Maurice K. D. Schouten & Huib Looren de Jong - 1998 - Philosophical Psychology 11 (4):489-509.
    The doctrine of eliminative materialism holds that belief-desire psychology is massively referentially disconnected. We claim, however, that it is not at all obvious what it means to be referentially (dis)connected. The two major accounts of reference both lead to serious difficulties for eliminativism: it seems that elimination is either impossible or omnipresent. We explore the idea that reference fixation is a much more local, partial, and context-dependent process than was supposed by the classical accounts. This pragmatic view suggests that elimination (...)
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  • The Failure of Frances’s Live Skepticism.Susan Feldman - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (4):385-396.
    _ Source: _Page Count 12 In his _Scepticism Comes Alive_, Bryan Frances contends that his “live skepticism” poses a genuine challenge to claims of knowledge in a way that classic “brain-in-a-vat” skepticism does not. This is mistaken. In this paper, I argue that Frances’s live skepticism dies on the horns of a dilemma: if we interpret a key premise in Frances’s skeptical argument template sociologically, then it undercuts itself, showing that there is no reason to accept it and the argument (...)
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  • Being Expert: L’Aquila and Issues of Inclusion in Science-Policy Decision Making.Danielle DeVasto - 2016 - Social Epistemology 30 (4):372-397.
    Responding to the call to provide guidance for incorporating diverse perspectives in science-policy debate, Collins and Evans’ normative model of expertise provides a useful starting point for deciding who gets to come to the table—expertise and experience. However, new materialist critiques highlight the epistemic challenges of such an approach. Drawing on the work of Annemarie Mol, I propose that the theory of multiple ontologies and a practise-based orientation can enrich conversations about expertise and inclusion in science-policy decision-making, particularly in matters (...)
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  • Perception is Theory Laden: The Naturalized Evidence and Philosophical Implications.William F. Brewer - 2015 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 46 (1):121-138.
    This paper proposes a set of criteria for an appropriate experiment on the issue of the theory ladenness of perception. These criteria are used to select a number of experiments that use: belief-based ambiguous figures, fragmented figures, or memory color. Crucially, the data in experiments of this type are based on the participant’s qualitative visual experience. Across many different types of experimental designs, different types of stimuli, and different types of belief manipulation, these experiments show the impact of belief/theory on (...)
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  • Active externalism, virtue reliabilism and scientific knowledge.Spyridon Orestis Palermos - 2015 - Synthese 192 (9):2955-2986.
    Combining active externalism in the form of the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses with virtue reliabilism can provide the long sought after link between mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science. Specifically, by reading virtue reliabilism along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition, we can account for scientific knowledge produced on the basis of both hardware and software scientific artifacts. Additionally, by bringing the distributed cognition hypothesis within the picture, we can introduce the notion of epistemic group agents, (...)
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  • Matters of Fact, and the Fact of Matter.Michael Lynch - 2014 - Human Studies 37 (1):139-145.
    My remarks in this brief commentary focus on Chris Calvert-Minor’s (2014) article on Karen Barad’s philosophical writings, and are only indirectly relevant to an assessment of Barad’s work. I have limited acquaintance with Barad’s writings, and even less with Nils Bohr’s. Barad explicitly borrows from Bohr’s theoretical writings when developing her version of feminist epistemology. Barad’s recruitment of Bohr to support her philosophy creates a dilemma for me and other readers who are not conversant with Bohr’s physics/philosophy. To my understanding, (...)
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  • Function by Agreement.Pablo Schyfter - 2015 - Social Epistemology 29 (2):185-206.
    Philosophers of biology have developed an extensive literature on biological functions. Here I propose a treatment of the topic based in social studies of science. I posit that the chief philosophical accounts of biological functions all rest upon a realist ontology of biological functions, one that conceives functions as human-independent qualities of things. Rather than being conceptualised as a property of traits or structures, function should be understood as a status granted by communities acting in accordance with specific domains of (...)
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  • Knowledge and Certainties in the Epistemic State of Nature.Martin Kusch - 2011 - Episteme 8 (1):6-23.
    This paper seeks to defend, develop, and revise Edward Craig's “genealogy of knowledge”. The paper first develops the suggestion that Craig's project is naturally thought of as an important instance of “social cognitive ecology”. It then introduces the genealogy of knowledge and some of its main problems and weaknesses, suggesting that these are best taken as challenges for further work rather than as refutations. The central sections of the paper conduct a critical dialogue between Craig's theory and Wittgenstein's claim–familiar from (...)
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  • Friends at last? Distributed cognition and the cognitive/social divide.Adam Toon - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (1):1-14.
    Distributed cognition (d-cog) claims that many cognitive processes are distributed across groups and the surrounding material and cultural environment. Recently, Nancy Nersessian, Ronald Giere, and others have suggested that a d-cog approach might allow us to bring together cognitive and social theories of science. I explore this idea by focusing on the specific interpretation of d-cog found in Edwin Hutchins' canonical text Cognition in the wild. First, I examine the scope of a d-cog approach to science, showing that there are (...)
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  • Relativism or Relationism? A Mannheimian Interpretation of Fleck’s Claims About Relativism.Markus Seidel - 2011 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (2):219-240.
    The paper explores the defence by the early sociologist of science Ludwik Fleck against the charge of relativism. It is shown that there are crucial and hitherto unnoticed similarities between Fleck’s strategy and the attempt by his contemporary Karl Mannheim to distinguish between an incoherent relativism and a consistent relationism. Both authors seek to revise epistemology fundamentally by reinterpreting the concept of objectivity in two ways: as inner- and inter-style objectivity. The argument for the latter concept shows the genuine political (...)
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  • Review of C. Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition. Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. [REVIEW]Roberto Frega - 2009 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 1 (1).
    Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...
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  • Naturalistic approaches to social construction.Ron Mallon - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social “construction,” “constructionism” and “constructivism” are terms in wide use in the humanities and social sciences, and are applied to a diverse range of objects including the emotions, gender, race, sex, homo- and hetero-sexuality, mental illness, technology, quarks, facts, reality, and truth. This sort of terminology plays a number of different roles in different discourses, only some of which are philosophically interesting, and fewer of which admit of a “naturalistic” approach—an approach that treats science as a central and successful (if (...)
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  • How to be a scientific realist (if at all): a study of partial realism.Dean Peters - 2012 - Dissertation, London School of Economics
    "Partial realism" is a common position in the contemporary philosophy of science literature. It states that the "essential" elements of empirically successful scientific theories accurately represent corresponding features the world. This thesis makes several novel contributions related to this position. Firstly, it offers a new definition of the concept of “empirical success”, representing a principled merger between the use-novelty and unification accounts. Secondly, it provides a comparative critical analysis of various accounts of which elements are "essential" to the success of (...)
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  • Posłuszne klucze, chodliwe aparaty.Łukasz Afeltowicz & Witold Wachowski - 2013 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 4 (1):13-16.
    The authors' commentary on Bruno Latour's "Technology is society made durable" provides the reader with an opportunity to become acquainted with actor-network theory.
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  • constructivism on Technoscience.Ewa Bińczyk - 2013 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 4 (1):54-76.
    The main aims of the article are as follows: to indicate that cognition may be satisfactorily modelled from a constructivist perspective; to reconstruct the latest tendencies within science and technology studies encapsulated in the term constructivism rather than in the notion of social constructivism; to show how technoscience is conceptualised from the constructivist standpoint.
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  • Micro‐situational Foundations of Social Structure: An Interactionist Exploration of Affective Sanctioning.Irene Rafanell - 2013 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43 (2):181-204.
    Micro-interaction dynamics of affective sanctioning have been widely acknowledged but rarely related to the emergence of social phenomena. This paper aims to highlight the constitutive force of interaction activity by critically analysing two sociological models, Bourdieu's theory of practice and Barnes's Performative Theory of Social Institutions (PTSI). Such a comparison allows me to reveal two differing models of social phenomena currently operating in sociological debates: an extrinsic structuralist model which tacitly conveys macro-structural phenomena as prior and determinant of individuals and (...)
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  • Realism, Reliabilism, and the 'Strong Programme' in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.Jeff Kochan - 2008 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (1):21 – 38.
    In this essay, I respond to Tim Lewens's proposal that realists and Strong Programme theorists can find common ground in reliabilism. I agree with Lewens, but point to difficulties in his argument. Chief among these is his assumption that reliabilism is incompatible with the Strong Programme's principle of symmetry. I argue that the two are, in fact, compatible, and that Lewens misses this fact because he wrongly supposes that reliabilism entails naturalism. The Strong Programme can fully accommodate a reliabilism which (...)
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  • Coming From Material Reality.Miguel Ferrero & J. L. Sánchez-Gómez - 2015 - Foundations of Science 20 (2):199-212.
    In a previous essay we demonstrated that quantum mechanical formalism is incompatible with some necessary principles of the mechanism conception still dominant in the physicist’s community. In this paper we show, based on recent empirical evidence in quantum physics, the inevitability of abandoning the old mechanism conception and to construct a new one in which physical reality is seen as a representation which refers to relations established through operations made by us in a world that we are determining. This change (...)
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  • Two main problems in the sociology of morality.Gabriel Abend - 2008 - Theory and Society 37 (2):87-125.
    Sociologists often ask why particular groups of people have the moral views that they do. I argue that sociology’s empirical research on morality relies, implicitly or explicitly, on unsophisticated and even obsolete ethical theories, and thus is based on inadequate conceptions of the ontology, epistemology, and semantics of morality. In this article I address the two main problems in the sociology of morality: (1) the problem of moral truth, and (2) the problem of value freedom. I identify two ideal–typical approaches. (...)
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  • Exploring Philosophical Issues in the Patenting of Scientific and Technological Inventions.Hans Radder - 2013 - Philosophy and Technology 26 (3):283-300.
    Thus far, the philosophical study of patenting has primarily focused on sociopolitical, legal, and ethical issues, such as the moral justifiability of patenting living organisms or the nature of (intellectual) property. In addition, however, the theory and practice of patenting entails many important problems that can be fruitfully studied from the perspective of the philosophy of science and technology. The principal aim of this article is to substantiate the latter claim. For this purpose, I first provide a concise review of (...)
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  • Educational Research and the Philosophy of Context.Michael A. Peters - 2012 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 44 (8):793-800.
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  • Alasdair MacIntyre's Analysis of Tradition.Tom Angier - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 22 (4):540-572.
    I argue that, in analysing the structure and development of moral traditions, MacIntyre relies primarily on Kuhn's model of scientific tradition, rather than on Lakatos' model. I unpack three foci of Kuhn's conception of the sciences, namely: the ‘crisis’ conception of scientific development, what I call the ‘systematic conception’ of scientific paradigms, and the view that successive paradigms are incommensurable. I then show that these three foci are integrated into MacIntyre's account of the development of moral traditions with a surprising (...)
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  • New Forms of Complementarity in Science.Andrea Bonaccorsi - 2010 - Minerva 48 (4):355-387.
    New sciences born or developed in the 20th century (information, materials, life science) are based on forms of complementarity that differ from the past. The paper discusses cognitive, or disciplinary, institutional, and technical complementarity. It argues that new sciences apply a reductionist explanatory strategy to complex multi-layered systems. In doing so the reductionist promise is falsified, generating the need for multi-level kinds of explanation (e.g. in post-genomic molecular biology), new forms of complementarity between scientific and non-scientific organizations, and new forms (...)
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  • Mediating Science and Society in the EU and UK: From Information-Transmission to Deliberative Democracy?Anwar Tlili & Emily Dawson - 2010 - Minerva 48 (4):429-461.
    In this paper we critically review recent developments in policies, practices and philosophies pertaining to the mediation between science and the public within the EU and the UK, focusing in particular on the current paradigm of Public Understanding of Science and Technology (PEST) which seeks to depart from the science information-transmission associated with previous paradigms, and enact a deliberative democracy model. We first outline the features of the current crisis in democracy and discuss deliberative democracy as a response to this (...)
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  • Economic Approaches to Understanding Scientific Norms.Michael Strevens - 2011 - Episteme 8 (2):184-200.
    A theme of much work taking an ““economic approach”” to the study of science is the interaction between the norms of individual scientists and those of society at large. Though drawing from the same suite of formal methods, proponents of the economic approach offer what are in substantive terms profoundly different explanations of various aspects of the structure of science. The differences are illustrated by comparing Strevens's explanation of the scientific reward system (the ““priority rule””) with Max Albert's explanation of (...)
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  • The Non‐theoretical View on Educational Theory: Scientific, Epistemological and Methodological Assumptions.José Penalva - 2014 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 48 (3):400-415.
    This article examines the underlying problems of one particular perspective in educational theory that has recently gained momentum: the Wilfred Carr approach, which puts forward the premise that there is no theory in educational research and, consequently, it is a form of practice. The article highlights the scientific, epistemological and methodological assumptions inherent in such a view. The argument is developed as follows: first, it expounds what Carr understands by the methodology of action research and educational theory, setting out his (...)
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  • Thought Experiments in Science Studies.Petri Ylikoski - 2003 - Philosophica 72 (2):1-25.
    In this paper I examine the role of thought experiments in the social studies of science. More specifically, I will focus on two strands of social studies of science: the so-called sociology of scientific knowledge and the naturalistically oriented philosophy of science with interest in social dimensions of science. I begin by discussing David Hull's views on thought experiments in the study of science. His account serves as a foil that helps me to make some points about thought experiments. As (...)
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  • The "strong programme", normativity, and social causes.Chris Calvert-Minor - 2008 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 38 (1):1–22.
    Barry Barnes and David Bloor of the Strong Programme of the sociology of knowledge advance a naturalized epistemology that reduces all accounts of normativity to social causes. I endorse their program of naturalizing one kind of normativity, but I argue that there is another kind they cannot naturalize. Within the context of sociological explanations of rationality, there are norms of rationality instantiated by scientists that Barnes and Bloor study, and Barnes and Bloor's own normative ascriptions of scientists as rational beings. (...)
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  • Do the right thing! Rule finitism, rule scepticism and rule following.Wes Sharrock & Graham Button - 1999 - Human Studies 22 (2-4):193-210.
    Rule following is often made an unnecessary mystery in the philosophy of social science. One form of mystification is the issue of 'rule finitism', which raises the puzzle as to how a learner can possibly extend the rule to applications beyond those examples which have been given as instruction in the rule. Despite the claim that this problem originated in the work of Wittgenstein, it is clear that his philosophical method is designed to evaporate, not perpetuate, such problems. The supposed (...)
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  • A Mannheim for All Seasons: Bloor, Merton, and the Roots of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.David Kaiser - 1998 - Science in Context 11 (1):51-87.
    The ArgumentDavid Bloor often wrote that Karl Mannheim had “stopped short” in his sociology of knowledge, lacking the nerve to consider the natural sciences sociologically. While this assessment runs counter to Mannheim's own work, which responded in quite specific ways both to an encroaching “modernity” and a looming fascism, Bloor's depiction becomes clearer when considered in the light of his principal introduction to Mannheim's work — a series of essays by Robert Merton. Bloor's reading and appropriation of Mannheim emerged from (...)
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  • Scientists' Argumentative Reasoning.Hugo Mercier & Christophe Heintz - 2014 - Topoi 33 (2):513-524.
    Reasoning, defined as the production and evaluation of reasons, is a central process in science. The dominant view of reasoning, both in the psychology of reasoning and in the psychology of science, is of a mechanism with an asocial function: bettering the beliefs of the lone reasoner. Many observations, however, are difficult to reconcile with this view of reasoning; in particular, reasoning systematically searches for reasons that support the reasoner’s initial beliefs, and it only evaluates these reasons cursorily. By contrast, (...)
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  • Technoscience avant la lettre.Ursula Klein - 2005 - Perspectives on Science 13 (2):226-266.
    I argue and demonstrate in this essay that interconnected systems of science and technology, or technoscience, existed long before the late nineteenth century, and that eighteenth-century chemistry was such an early form of technoscience. Based on recent historical research on the early development of carbon chemistry from the late 1820s until the 1840s—which revealed that early carbon chemistry was an experimental expert culture that was largely detached from the mundane industrial world—I further examine the question of the internal preconditions within (...)
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  • Searle on social institutions: A critique.Wolfgang Balzer - 2002 - Dialectica 56 (3):195–211.
    The dominant “harmonious” notion of a social institution used by Searle in the discussion of social facts is critically reconsidered. It is argued that an essential ingredient is missing from this notion, namely the harming feature of power. The harmonious view treats power as an important part of social institutions, but takes into account only its beneficial side. This led to a thoroughly positive notion of social institutions which makes us blind to the harm they inflict, the duality of those (...)
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  • (1 other version)What is science? Methodological pitfalls underlying the empirical exploration of scientific knowledge.Dominika Yaneva - 2005 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 37 (2):333 - 353.
    The validity of three premises, set as foundational pillars of modern sociological approach to science, is contested, namely: (i) the postulate, stating that science is devoid of whatever generis specifical; (ii) it is liable to the usual empirical study; (iii) the practicing scientist's self-reflexive judgements must be disbelieved and rejected. Contrariwise, the ignored so far quaint nature of knowledge, escaping even from the elementary empirical treating - discernment and observation - is revealed and demonstrated. This peculiar nature requires, accordingly, a (...)
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  • Using Wittgenstein to Respecify Constructivism.David Francis - 2005 - Human Studies 28 (3):251-290.
    Taking its orientation from Peter Winch, this article critiques from a Wittgensteinian point of view some “theoreticist” tendencies within constructivism. At the heart of constructivism is the deeply Wittgensteinian idea that the world as we know and understand it is the product of human intelligence and interests. The usefulness of this idea can be vitiated by a failure to distinguish conceptual from empirical questions. I argue that such a failure characterises two influential constructivist theories, those of Ernst von Glasersfeld and (...)
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  • ‘Total evidence’ in phylogenetic systematics.Olivier Rieppel - 2009 - Biology and Philosophy 24 (5):607-622.
    Taking its clues from Popperian philosophy of science, cladistics adopted a number of assumptions of the empiricist tradition. These include the identification of a dichotomy between observation reports and theoretical statements and its subsequent abandonment on the basis of the insight that all observation reports are theory-laden. The neglect of the ‘context of discovery’, which is the step of theory (hypothesis) generation. The emphasis on coherentism in the ‘context of justification’, which is the step of evaluation of the relative merits (...)
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  • The Metaphysics and Politics of Corporate Personhood.Martin Kusch - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (9):1587-1600.
    This paper consists of brief critical comments on Chapter 8, “Personifying Group Agents”, of Christian List’s and Philip Pettit’s book Group Agency (2011). A first set of objections concerns the chapter’s history of ideas. List and Pettit present the history of the idea of corporate personhood as divided between “intrinsicist” and “performative” conceptions. I argue that this distinction does not fit with the historical record and that it makes important political and legal divides and battles invisible. A second set of (...)
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  • Theory-laden thesis and constructivism.Juan Carlos Aguirre-García & Luis Guillermo Jaramillo-Echeverri - 2013 - Cinta de Moebio 47:74-82.
    The Thesis of Theory-Laden [TTL] holds that is not possible a neutral observation. From this thesis, some philosophers have inferred that the facts, i.e., the subject’s independent reality, do not exist or that they are social constructions only. The aim of this paper is assess if TTL necessarily implies a constructivist point of view or if, conversely, we can still speak about the reality. In order to do this, we will clarify these terms: "the theory-ladenness of observation" and "constructivism". Then, (...)
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  • Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientific Knowledge in a Postpositivist Era.Isaac Ariail Reed - 2010 - Sociological Theory 28 (1):20-39.
    In the production of knowledge about social life, two social contexts come together: the context of investigation, consisting of the social world of the investigator, and the context of explanation, consisting of the social world of the actors who are the subject of study. The nature of, and relationship between, these contexts is imagined in philosophy; managed, rewarded, and sanctioned in graduate seminars, journal reviews, and tenure cases; and practiced in research. Positivism proposed to produce objective knowledge by suppressing the (...)
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  • “Please, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”: The Role of Argumentation in a Sociology of Academic Misunderstandings.Yves Gingras - 2007 - Social Epistemology 21 (4):369 – 389.
    Academic debates are so frequent and omnipresent in most disciplines, particularly the social sciences and humanities, it seems obvious that disagreements are bound to occur. The aim of this paper is to show that whereas the agent who perceives his/her contribution as being misunderstood locates the origin of the communication problem on the side of the receiver who "misinterprets" the text, the emitter is in fact also contributing to the possibility of this misunderstanding through the very manner in which his/her (...)
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  • Interests, folk psychology and the sociology of scientific knowledge.Petri Ylikoski - 2004 - Philosophical Explorations 7 (3):265 – 279.
    This paper provides a conceptual analysis of the notion of interests as it is used in the social studies of science. After describing the theoretical background behind the Strong Program's adoption of the concept of interest, the paper outlines a reconstruction of the everyday notion of interest and argues that this same notion is used also by the sociologists of scientific knowledge. However, there are a couple of important differences between the everyday use of this notion and the way in (...)
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  • (1 other version)What is Science? Methodological Pitfalls Underlying the Empirical Exploration of Scientific Knowledge.Dominika Yaneva - 2006 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 37 (2):333-353.
    The validity of three premises, set as foundational pillars of modern sociological approach to science, is contested, namely: the postulate, stating that science is devoid of whatever generis specifical; it is liable to the usual empirical study; the practicing scientist's self-reflexive judgements must be disbelieved and rejected. Contrariwise, the ignored so far quaint nature of knowledge, escaping even from the elementary empirical treating - discernment and observation - is revealed and demonstrated. This peculiar nature requires, accordingly, a specific meta-cognitive dealing (...)
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  • Relativism about reasons.Nick Tosh - 2008 - Philosophia 36 (4):465-482.
    Historians must be sensitive to the alienness of the past. Insofar as they are concerned with their actors’ reasoning, they must (through open-minded empirical investigation) find out how their actors thought, and not assume that they thought like us. This is familiar historiographical advice, but pushed too far it can be brought to conflict with rather weak assumptions about what historians must presuppose if they are to interpret their actors at all. The present paper sketches those assumptions, and argues that (...)
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  • Blurry Humanism: A Reply to Michael Lynch.Chris Calvert-Minor - 2014 - Human Studies 37 (1):147-152.
    Humanism is blurry. It can have some clarity, but it is mainly blurry. To say anything otherwise is to fool oneself. Yes, we can construct reasonable humanistic theories that attempt to organize our understanding, such as methodologicalhumanism where one unifies discourses or practices according to human subjects or substantivehumanism that touts the importance of humanity via some shared attribute or substance. But to suggest that one can delineate and define the full salience of humanity, whether great or small, in the (...)
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