This article considers the `Strong Programme' account of scientific knowledge from a fresh perspective. It argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the Strong Programme's monistic intent, that is, its aim to unify considerations of instrumental adequacy and social interests in explanations of the development of scientific knowledge. Although sharing the judgment of many critics that the Strong Programme approach is flawed, the article diverges from standard criticisms by suggesting that the best alternative is not a dualistic framework but (...) a more adequate monistic approach. Key Words: Strong Programme • interests • monism • finitism • classification. (shrink)

How engineers know, and act on that knowledge, has a profound impact on society. Consequently, the analysis of engineering knowledge is one of the central challenges for the philosophy of engineering. In this article, we present a thematic multidisciplinary conceptual survey of engineering epistemology and identify key areas of research that are still to be comprehensively investigated. Themes are organized based on a survey of engineering epistemology including research from history, sociology, philosophy, design theory, and engineering itself. Five major interrelated (...) themes are identified: the relationship between scientific and engineering knowledge, engineering knowledge as a distinct field of study, the social epistemology of engineering, the relationship between engineering knowledge and its products, and the cognitive aspects of engineering knowledge. We discuss areas of potential future research that are underdeveloped or “undone.”. (shrink)

How engineers know, and act on that knowledge, has a profound impact on society. Consequently, the analysis of engineering knowledge is one of the central challenges for the philosophy of engineering. In this article, we present a thematic multidisciplinary conceptual survey of engineering epistemology and identify key areas of research that are still to be comprehensively investigated. Themes are organized based on a survey of engineering epistemology including research from history, sociology, philosophy, design theory, and engineering itself. Five major interrelated (...) themes are identified: the relationship between scientific and engineering knowledge, engineering knowledge as a distinct field of study, the social epistemology of engineering, the relationship between engineering knowledge and its products, and the cognitive aspects of engineering knowledge. We discuss areas of potential future research that are underdeveloped or “undone.”. (shrink)

ArgumentRecent studies of patents have argued that the very materiality and techniques of legal media, such as the written patent document, are vital for the legal construction of a patentable invention. Developing the centrality placed on patent documents further, it becomes important to understand how these documents are ordered and mobilized. Patent classification answers the necessity of making the virtual nature of textual claims practicable by linking written inscription to bureaucracy. Here, the epistemological organization of documents overlaps with the grid (...) of patent administration. How are scientific inventions represented in such a process? If we examine the process of creating a new patent category within the International Patent Classification (IPC), it becomes clear that disagreements about the substance of the novel inventive subject matter have been resolved by computer simulations of patent documents in draft classifications. The practical needs of patent examiners were the most important concerns in the making of a new category. Such a lack of epistemological mediation between the scientific and legal identities of an invention depicts a legal understanding that science is already inside patent law. From an internal legal perspective, the self-referential introduction of the new patent category may make practical sense; however it becomes problematic from a technological and scientific standpoint as the remit of the patent classification also affects other social contexts and practices. (shrink)

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 (...) his background in experimental psychology and his attempts to supercede Merton's own structural-functionalist program for the sociology of knowledge. By retracing this extended trail of readings and re-readings, we may begin to understand the roots of Bloor's curious interpretation of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and inquire in a reflexive way about the present and future directions of science studies. (shrink)

This article draws the city into the limelight of social studies of technology. Considering that cities consist of a wide range of technologies, it is remarkable that cities as an object of research have so far have been relatively neglected in the field of technology studies. This article focuses on the role of obduracy in urban sociotechnical change, an issue that, it is argued, has considerable importance for both students of the cities and the daily practice of town planners and (...) architects, and, at the same time, forms an important theoretical debate in science, technology, and society studies. The article provides an overview of theoretical conceptions of obduracy in both technology studies and urban studies and proposes a heuristic model for the analysis of this phenomenon. In this way, this article aims to contribute to the establishment of a common interdisciplinary playground for these disciplines. (shrink)

This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

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 (...) criticisms builds on perspectives provided by the sociology of knowledge and by John Dewey. My guiding thought here is that “person”, at least when the term is applied to groups, is what political scientists call an “essentially contested concept”. My third set of comments targets the rudimentary political philosophy of List’s and Pettit’s book. I suggest that List’s and Pettit’s corporate personhood theory turns out to be normatively irrelevant; that their concept of “respect” is marred by an ambiguity; and that it remains unclear how their work constitutes progress in guarding against corporate power. (shrink)

An ethnographic approach to the South Indian festival Ayudha Puja reveals that the celebration plays a role in the construction of scientific communities. Ayudha Puja has the ability to absorb westerners, non-Hindus, and non-Brahmins into Indian science and engineering communities and is thus widely practiced in South Indian industry and academia. The practice of Ayudha Puja thus parallels what M. N. Srinivas labels “Sanskritization.” Within India, the process of Sanskritization refers to the adoption of high-caste habits and diet by upwardly (...) mobile lower-caste communities. While not actually an example of Sanskritization, participation in Ayudha Puja is analogous to that process: by joining a Hindu rite within the scientific and professional workspace, outsiders become part of local laboratory, department, or office culture. Such practices reveal the need for scholars to investigate scientific community building outside the domain of how scientists reveal new facts about the world. (shrink)

I reconstruct my own journey into the history of the human sciences, which I show to have been a process of discovering the metaphysical standing of the human. I begin with Alexandre Koyré’s encounter with Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, which I use to throw light on the legacy of Kant’s ‘anthropological’ understanding of the human, which dominated and limited 19th-century science. As I show, those who broke from Kant’s strictures and set the stage for the 20th-century revolutions in science (...) - from Hegel, to John McTaggart, to Max Weber - typically were pursuing crypto-theological questions about how a finite being can comprehend an infinite universe. This journey is about the ‘common measure’ of being human, which is what links Plato to Kuhn, but has been most consistently taken up by law. I suggest that in seeking this ‘measure of man’, we may discover that to be human is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens, which would suggest a radical reorientation of the history of the human sciences. (shrink)

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 (...) is profound and radical, with immediate consequences on both Ontology and Epistemology. This work is our contribution to try to make more concrete how this new conception of the world might be. (shrink)

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 (...) nonlogical and nonobservational aspects of the contexts. Attacks on positivism disputed the effectiveness and rationality of this strategy. Thus " postpositivism " can be understood as a series of attempts to reconstitute the relation between the contexts as the basis for accurate social knowledge. Two of the most important of these attempts—grounded theory and postmodern anthropology—are considered, and a synthesis, which draws from the insights of cultural sociology, is proposed. (shrink)

_ 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 (...) fails. If we interpret that premise normatively, then the difference in the epistemic threat posed by live hypotheses compared to that of their moribund cousins evaporates, and with it, the purported distinctiveness of the live skeptical argument. (shrink)

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 (...) the main features of the theory and practice of the patenting of scientific and technological inventions. Second, I discuss several philosophical issues implied by these features and explore the possible contributions of the philosophy of science and technology to the clarification, or resolution, of these issues. The seven features discussed are: patents as commercial monopolies on scientific and technological inventions, the contrast between natural and non-natural subject matter, the distinction between inventions and discoveries, the reproducibility of inventions, the question of the sameness of two inventions, the distinction between the invented and the protected object, and the contrast between material objects versus concepts and theories. The article concludes with some observations on the problems and prospects of the philosophical study of the theory and practice of patenting scientific and technological inventions. (shrink)

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 (...) degree of faithfulness to Kuhn. And crucially, I argue against the overall cogency of his account, given the disparities I pinpoint between scientific and moral traditions. My overall critique is, however, fundamentally friendly, since nothing I have to say invalidates the very notion of a moral tradition, and all I am calling for are less problematic construals of that notion. (shrink)

The social epistemology of science to date has not adequately accounted for the embodied nature of cognition. This lacuna is evidenced in part by what Fred D’Agostino refers to as an “undertow” in the philosophy of science, which has pulled some of Kuhn’s revolutionary conceptual innovations back towards the traditional notions they are meant to replace. My primary concern in the following is to show how framing neo-Kuhnian social epistemology within the embodiment movement in cognitive science blunts such reactionary re-interpretations. (...) In §2, I argue that linguistically centered conceptions of rationality and normativity leave neo-Kuhnian accounts... (shrink)

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings (...) are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book consists of a collection of essays which dramatically develop Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a conception of science that I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a conception of rationality I call aim-oriented rationalism. This has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions. The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the problem of scientific change as an explanatory problem, that is, as a philosophical problem concerning what logical forms of explanation we should employ in order to un...

It is quite unequivocal that Kuhn was committed to (some version of) naturalism; that he defended, especially in his later work, the autonomy of scientific rationality; and that he rejected the correspondence theory of truth, i.e., the traditional realistic conception of the world’s mind-independence. In this paper, I argue that these three philosophical perspectives form an uneasy triangle, for while it is possible to coherently defend each of them separately or two of them combined, holding all three leads to incoherence. (...) Hence, the only option is to reject one of them in a way that is both compatible with Kuhnian historiography and philosophically fruitful. My purpose in this paper is not exegetical. My ambition is to sketch a coherent philosophical framework which does justice to Kuhn’s historiographical model for scientific change and avoids the philosophical costs of relativism and anti-naturalism. In particular, I argue in favor of the following interconnected positions: (1) Given the role of anomalies in Kuhn’s historiographical model, the latter satisfies the two fundamental conditions for acknowledging the mind-independence of the world: the ‘irreducibility condition’ and the ‘objectivity condition’, (2) Kuhn’s rejection of the notion of an ‘Archimedean platform’ does not entail that the truth-value of beliefs doesn’t play a role in the explanation of their change, (3) Adopting scientific realism is the only way to defend the autonomy of scientific rationality within a naturalistic philosophical framework. However, adopting realism leads to a liberal rather than an eliminative version of naturalism. (shrink)

In 1962, the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure ‘revolutionized’ the way one conducts philosophical and historical studies of science. Through the introduction of both memorable and controversial notions, such as paradigms, scientific revolutions, and incommensurability, Kuhn argued against the traditionally accepted notion of scientific change as a progression towards the truth about nature, and instead substituted the idea that science is a puzzle solving activity, operating under paradigms, which become discarded after it fails to respond accordingly to anomalous challenges and (...) a rival paradigm. Kuhn’s Structure has sold over 1.4 million copies and the Times Literary Supplement named it one of the “Hundred Most Influential Books since the Second World War.” Now, fifty years after this groundbreaking work was published, this volume offers a timely reappraisal of the legacy of Kuhn’s book and an investigation into what Structure offers philosophical, historical, and sociological studies of science in the future. (shrink)

David Hull accounts for the success of science in terms of an invisible hand mechanism, arguing that it is difficult to reconcile scientists' self-interestedness or their desire for recognition with traditional philosophical explanations for the success of science. I argue that we have less reason to invoke an invisible hand mechanism to explain the success of science than Hull implies, and that many of the practices and institutions constitutive of science are intentionally designed by scientists with an eye to realizing (...) the very goals that Hull believes need to be explained by reference to an invisible hand mechanism. Thus, I reduce the scope of Hull's invisible hand explanation and supplement it by appealing to a hidden hand explanation. (shrink)

This paper explicates the philosophical and epistemological background of the MIRRORS project, which is the starting point of the various contributions in this issue. Developments in the philosophy of science will be discussed, especially the watershed work of Kuhn, in order to analyze further developments in the sociology of science, particularly starting from the Strong Programme. Finally, it will be shown how a multidisciplinary approach in Science & Technology (S&T) studies, as opposed to an interdisciplinary one, is to be preferred. (...) Specifically, the connection between this approach and the modelling and idealizational approaches to science is stressed and defended as the best available approach for the formation of a conscientious democratic knowledge-based society. (shrink)

Some strongly empiricist views of scientific knowledge advocate a rejection of metaphysics. On such views, scientific knowledge is described strictly in terms of knowledge of the observable world, demarcated by human sensory abilities, and no metaphysical considerations need arise. This paper argues that even these views require some recourse to metaphysics in order to derive knowledge from experience. Central here is the notion of metaphysical inference, which admits of different “magnitudes”, thus generating a spectrum of putative knowledge with more substantially (...) empirical beliefs at one end, and more metaphysically imbued beliefs at the other. Given that metaphysical inference is required even concerning knowledge of the observable, the empiricist hope of avoiding metaphysics altogether is futile: knowledge of the observable simply involves metaphysical inferences that are of smaller magnitudes than others. Metaphysical inferences are required not only to distinguish veridical from non-veridical experience and to determine the quality of empirical information, but also in order to explain how we construct experience (through categorizations and classifications of objects, events, processes, and properties), how we extrapolate from empirical evidence to generalize about observable phenomena, and how we use this evidence to test and confirm hypotheses and theories. (shrink)

“Basic research” is often used in science policy. It is commonly thought to refer to research that is directed solely toward acquiring new knowledge rather than any more practical objective. Recently, there has been considerable concern about the future of basic research because of purported changes in the nature of knowledge production and increasing pressures on scientists to demonstrate the social and economic benefits of their work. But is there really something special about basic research? The author argues here that (...) “basic research” is a flexible and ambiguous concept that is drawn on by scientists to acquire prestige and resources. She shows that it is used for boundary work and gives examples of the work it does in different situations by drawing on interviews with scientists and policy makers on the category of basic research and the changes they have seen in it over time. (shrink)

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 (...) world we live and understand is to suppose a divine clarity that eludes our possession. Theorists use terms like ‘social causes,’ ‘matter,’ ‘construction,’ and ‘interpretation’ to help us figure out how our cognition and rationality work, and yet they woefully fail to capture the richness of our experiences, which blur distinctions between society and matter all the time. Every account of humanism should take stock of this difficulty, being careful to say only what one. (shrink)

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 (...) visual perception. Using an ecological validity argument, I conclude that attention-based interpretations of these findings are not successful because the relevant epistemological issues only require that we examine final perception, in the sense of visual awareness of the everyday world. Finally, I argue that the epistemological consequences of theory-ladenness can be reduced by using a top-down/bottom-up theoretical framework and by adopting appropriate methodological procedures to data derived from individual observations. (shrink)

: 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 (...) an inadequate account of scientific terms, which does not do justice to the independent character of the objects of scientific knowledge. A further feature of Rheinberger's approach is a commitment to an extreme form of methodological pluralism. This is challenged in the paper on the basis of a sociological reading of Carnap's famous identification of a "continuum of inductive methods.". (shrink)

Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most cited books of the twentieth century. Its iconic and controversial nature has obscured its message. What did Kuhn really intend with Structure and what is its real significance? -/- 1 Introduction -/- 2 The Central Ideas of Structure -/- 3 The Philosophical Targets of Structure -/- 4 Interpreting and Misinterpreting Structure -/- 4.1 Naturalism -/- 4.2 World-change -/- 4.3 Incommensurability -/- 4.4 Progress and the nature of revolutionary change -/- 4.5 (...) Relativism, rationality, and realism -/- 4.6 History and sociology of science -/- 4.7 Wittgenstein -/- 5 After Structure. (shrink)

In 1991, Linda Buck and Richard Axel identified the multigene family expressing odor receptors. Their discovery transformed research on olfaction overnight, and Buck and Axel were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Behind this success lies another, less visible study about the methodological ingenuity of Buck. This hidden tale holds the key to answering a fundamental question in discovery analysis: What makes specific discovery tools fit their tasks? Why do some strategies turn out to be more fruitful (...) than others? The fit of a method with an experimental system often establishes the success of a discovery. However, the underlying reasoning of discovery is hard to codify. These difficulties point toward an element of discovery analysis routinely sidelined as a mere biographical element in the philosophical analysis of science: the individual discoverer’s role. I argue that the individual researcher is not a replaceable epistemic element in discovery analysis. This article draws on contemporary oral history, including interviews with Buck and other actors key to developments in late 1980s olfaction. (shrink)

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 (...) who benefit from exerting power and those who suffer from the power being exerted upon them, and the asymmetry between leading groups and those which “are lead”. It turns out that Searle's notion of social facts is robust and compatible with a more adequate notion of social institutions emerging from the investigation. (shrink)

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.

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. (...) While the Weberian paradigm rejects the concept of moral truth, the Durkheimian paradigm accepts it. By contrast, I argue that sociology should be metaphysically agnostic, yet in practice it should proceed as though there were no moral truths. The Weberians claim that the sociology of morality can and should be value free; the Durkheimians claim that it cannot and it should not. My argument is that, while it is true that factual statements presuppose value judgments, it does not follow that sociologists are moral philosophers in disguise. Finally, I contend that in order for sociology to improve its understanding of morality, better conceptual, epistemological, and methodological foundations are needed. (shrink)

I identify two versions of the scientific anti-realist’s selectionist explanation for the success of science: Bas van Fraassen’s original and K. Brad Wray’s newer interpretation. In Wray’s version, psycho-social factors internal to the scientific community – viz. scientists’ interests, goals, and preferences – explain the theory-selection practices that explain theory-success. I argue that, if Wray’s version were correct, then science should resemble art. In art, the artwork-selection practices that explain artwork-success appear faddish. They are prone to radical change over time. (...) Theory-selection practices that explain theory-success in science are however not faddish. They are mostly stable; that is, long-lived and consistent over time. This is because scientists (explicitly or implicitly) subscribe to what I will call the testability norm: scientific theories must make falsifiable claims about the external physical world. The testability norm and not psycho-sociology explains the theory-selection practices that explain theory-success in science. Contra Wray, scientific anti-realists can then maintain that the external physical world (as expressed in the testability norm) explains theory-success. (shrink)

In Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, Richard Posner wrestles with the ghost of John Dewey for the mantle of pragmatist jurisprudence. Most commentators have seen this work as pitting Posner against Dewey in a contest of pragmatisms, the stakes for which are no less than their respective legacies for legal and democratic theory. Some have sided with Posner and others with Dewey. I contend that the commentators have misidentified the target of Posner’s critique. Posner had another legal theorist in mind and (...) he was disingenuous in naming Dewey. A careful reconstruction of Posner’s argument shows that Dewey’s pragmatism provides a genuine middle way between Posner’s position and that of his intended rival. (shrink)

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...) motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)

Advocating a sociological explanation of scientific knowledge, David Bloor protests against the adherents of the autonomy of knowledge; i.e., those who asymmetrically explain the credibility of theories in the history of science. These philosophers and historians regard the credibility of true and rational theories due to their proper reasons, while accounting for the acceptance of false or irrational beliefs by citing social causes. Bloor assumes that the credibility of all beliefs is socially influenced, and therefore considers all in need of (...) sociological explanation. To substantiate this claim, he argues that all epistemic factors that are appealed to in explaining true or rational beliefs are really social. However, this argument aligns rational entities with social factors, and thus, undermines the ground of this division. Therefore, his prior complaint of the autonomy of knowledge would be invalidated. Hence, there is a conflict between Bloor’s objection to the asymmetrical explanation of scientific theories and his account of the social construction of epistemic reasons. In this paper, we reveal this concealed conflict and attempt to suggest ways to resolve it. (shrink)

This article contributes to the development of a rhetorical approach to the public understanding of science or science literacy. It is argued that rhetoric promises an alternative approach to deficit models that treat people as faulty scientists. Some tensions in the relevant rhetorical literature need resolution. These center on the application to science of an Aristotelian conception of rhetorical reasoning as enthymematic, without breaking from the Platonic/aristotelian division between technical and public spheres. The former opens science to the potential of (...) public critique; the latter closes this, effectively reinstating a deficit model. Gross’s writings are used to bring this point out sharply. A resolution is proposed, building on a view of rhetoric as socially constitutive and leading to a conception of public understanding as witcraft. Here, Billig’s rhetorical psychology provides the basis for reconfiguring the enthymeme in a manner that construes the division between spheres as itself rhetorically constituted. Creationism is used to provide brief illustration. (shrink)

This article takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method in the study of science, technology, and society and beyond and outlines a distinctive approach to address the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in online settings, and this risks undermining the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue (...) mapping. The article begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method, namely, demarcationist, discursive, and empiricist. Each has been adopted in STS, but only the last one offers a digital “move beyond impartiality.” I demonstrate this approach by analyzing issues of Internet governance with the aid of the social media platform Twitter. (shrink)

Before I respond to James G. Matlock’s comments on my coedited volume, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death (MoA), I would like to thank him for taking the time to review such a large volume—and review it conscientiously—even if we ultimately disagree about its import. I would also like to extend my thanks to Journal of Parapsychology editor John Palmer for inviting this response, as it gives me an opportunity to clarify why many secondary issues (...) (and some significant matters) were untouched in the volume. While I find most of Matlock’s complaints specious, they nevertheless underscore the need to clear up misconceptions about the collection’s purpose, some of which are also found in others’ reviews. 1. Poisoning the Well 2. Mind-Brain Correlations are Data that Test Hypotheses 3. The Prior Probability Diversion 4. Apparent Causal Closure is Incidental Corroboration 5. How Relevant is the Metaphysics of Mind? 6. Theological Critiques do not Assess Survival Research 7. How Much Survival Research Ought One Critique? (shrink)

Scientific models share one central characteristic with fiction: their relation to the physical world is ambiguous. It is often unclear whether an element in a model represents something in the world or presents an artifact of model building. Fiction, too, can resemble our world to varying degrees. However, we assign a different epistemic function to scientific representations. As artifacts of human activity, how are scientific representations allowing us to make inferences about real phenomena? In reply to this concern, philosophers of (...) science have started analyzing scientific representations in terms of fictionalization strategies. Many arguments center on a dyadic relation between the model and its target system, focusing on structural resemblances and “as if” scenarios. This chapter provides a different approach. It looks more closely at model building to analyze the interpretative strategies dealing with the representational limits of models. How do we interpret ambiguous elements in models? Moreover, how do we determine the validity of model-based inferences to information that is not an explicit part of a representational structure? I argue that the problem of ambiguous inference emerges from two features of representations, namely their hybridity and incompleteness. To distinguish between fictional and non-fictional elements in scientific models my suggestion is to look at the integrative strategies that link a particular model to other methods in an ongoing research context. To exemplify this idea, I examine protein modeling through X-ray crystallography as a pivotal method in biochemistry. (shrink)

REVIEW (1): "Jeff Kochan’s book offers both an original reading of Martin Heidegger’s early writings on science and a powerful defense of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) research program. Science as Social Existence weaves together a compelling argument for the thesis that SSK and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology should be thought of as mutually supporting research programs." (Julian Kiverstein, in Isis) ---- REVIEW (2): "I cannot in the space of this review do justice to the richness and range of Kochan's (...) discussion [...]. There is a great deal in this foundational portion of Kochan's discussion that I find tremendously interesting and engaging [...]." (David R. Cerbone, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) ---- REVIEW (3): "Science as Social Existence will be of interest not only to Heidegger scholars but to anyone engaged in science and technology studies. [...] This is an informative and original book. Kochan should be praised for his clear, pleasant-to-read prose." (Michael Butler, in CHOICE). (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This study examines whether the empirical evidence on the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) differs depending on the publication outlet in which that evidence appears. This moderator meta-analysis, based on a total sample size of 33,878 observations, suggests that published CSP-CFP findings have been shaped by differences in institutional logics in different subdisciplines of organization studies. In economics, finance, and accounting journals, the average correlations were only about half the magnitude of the findings published (...) in Social Issues in Management, Business Ethics, or Business and Society journals (mean corrected correlation coefficientof.22 vs..49, respectively). Specifically, economists did not find null or negative CSP-CFP correlations, and average findings published in general management outlets (=.41) were closer to Social Issues in Management, Business Ethics, and Business and Society results than to findings reported in economics, finance, and accounting journals. (shrink)

Observation and experiment as categories for analysing scientific practice have a long pedigree in writings on science. There has, however, been little attempt to delineate observation and experiment with respect to analysing scientific practice; in particular, scientific experimentation, in a systematic manner. Someone who has presented a systematic account of observation and experiment as categories for analysing scientific experimentation is Ian Hacking. In this paper, I present a detailed analysis of Hacking’s observation versus experiment account. Using a range of cases (...) from various fields of scientific enquiry, I argue that the observation versus experiment account is not an adequate framework for delineating scientific experimentation in a systematic manner. (shrink)