Recent years have seen enticing empirical approaches to solving the epistemological problem of the theory-ladenness of observation. I group these approaches in two categories according to their method of choice: testing and refereeing. I argue that none deliver what friends of theory-neutrality want them to. Testing does not work because both evidence from cognitive neuroscience and perceptual pluralism independently invalidate the existence of a common observation core. Refereeing does not work because it treats theory-ladenness as a kind of superficial, removable (...) bias. Even if such treatment is plausible, there is likely no method to ascertain that effects of this bias are not present. More importantly, evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that a deeper, likely irremovable kind of theory-ladenness lies within the perceptual modules. (shrink)

In this article I think through Black feminism and queer theory to critically analyze toxicology. I focus on toxicology's conception of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, a class of toxicants that can cause epigenetic changes leading to inheritable health issues. I suggest that Black feminist interventions are particularly necessary for the study of toxicants because multiply marginalized populations are disproportionately more exposed to EDCs. The structural preconditions that generate this uneven, racialized, and sexualized toxic body-burden threaten to turn cultural constructions of race and (...) sex into biological realities. My discursive analysis of key scientific texts on toxicology, EDCs, and epigenetics underscores how Eurocentric biases and eugenic logics permeate and co-constitute biochemical matter. I further argue that these texts’ un/articulated norms regarding the human, sexual behavior, and evolutionary fitness undermine the usefulness of toxicological assessments for environmental justice. I close by urging scientist scholar-activists to reconceive the study of toxicants. A Black feminist approach to toxicity, I suggest, would not only situate chemical exposures in their sociopolitical contexts, but also radically revision what it means to be human. (shrink)

The themes of this issue—which include the meaning of our health and disease concepts, the so-called “medical gaze” and its embedded power relations, and the epistemic value of mixing therapy with research—are introduced by reflecting on a case about an infant girl whose head is observed to be somewhat flat.

We evaluate three of Geary's claims, finding that there is little evidence for sex differences in object- vs. person-orientation; sex differences in competition, even if biologically caused, lead to sex differences in mathematics only given a certain style of teaching; and sex differences in mental rotation, though real, are not well explained in a sociobiological framework or by the proximate biological variables assumed by Geary.

Suspicion of “physics envy” surrounds the standard statistical toolbox used in the empirical sciences, from biology to psychology. Mainstream methods in these fields, various lines of criticism point out, often fall short of the basic requirements of measurement. Quantitative scales are applied to variables that can hardly be treated as measurable magnitudes, like preferences or happiness; hypotheses are tested by comparing data with conventional significance thresholds that hardly mention effect sizes. This article discusses what I call “shmeasurement.” To “shmeasure” is (...) to fail to apply quantitative tools to quantitative questions. We “shmeasure” when we try to measure what cannot be measured, or, conversely, when we ask binary questions of continuous measurements. Following the critics of standard statistical tools, it is argued that our statistical toolbox is indeed less concerned with the measurement of magnitudes than we take it to be. This article adds, however, that measurement is not all there is to scientific activity. Most techniques of proof do not resemble measurement as much as voting—a practice that makes frequent use of numbers, figures, or measurements, yet is not chiefly concerned with assessing quantities. Measurement is only one among three functions of the scientific toolbox, the other two being collating observations and deciding which hypotheses to relinquish. I thus make a plea for “shmeasurement”: the mismeasure of things starts to make more sense once we take into account the nonquantitative side of scientific practice. (shrink)

The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae and the demise of racial typologies after World War II in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. “Race” is placed outside of rational discourse as a residue of outdated essentialist and hierarchical thinking. I will throw doubt on this (...) underlying assumption, not in order to re-legitimate race but in order to understand better why race has been, and continues to be, such a politically powerful and explosive concept. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:‘Race’ has long searched for a stable, suitable idea, with no consensus on a master meaning in sight. What I call deflationary pluralism about the existence of race recognizes that various meanings may be true as far as they go but avoids murky disputes over whether there are races in some sense. Once we have rejected the notion that racial essences yield innate cognitive differences, there is little point to arguing over the race idea. In its place, I propose the (...) idea of socioancestry, which jettisons racial thinking yet recognizes the social dynamics of color. For example, Black Americans, many of whom have traceable non-African ancestry, constitute an Africa-identified, socioancestrally black subgroup. ‘Race’ talk is not needed to sustain legitimate color-conscious approaches to social identity and social justice. Long-standing fixation on the race idea has obscured the simple truth that visible continental ancestry is the root of the social reality of color consciousness. (shrink)

This article aims to integrate discourse analysis of politically instrumental imagined identity geographies with the relational and territorial geography of the communities of praxis and interpretation that produce them. My case study is the international community of nationalist scientists who classified Europe’s biological races in the 1820s—1940s. I draw on network analysis, relational geography, historical sociology and the historical turn to problematize empirically how spatial patterns of this community’s shifting disciplinary and political coalitions, communication networks and power relations emerged, were (...) structured, persisted, changed, interacted and disappeared. I focus especially on core— periphery relations. I argue that if local historical spatial patterns affect those of later phenomena, geographies like that of European integration should be understood in the context of Europe’s complex historical cultural geography. Unlike discourse deconstruction alone, this complementary relational de-essentialization of geography can identify large-scale, enduring associations of cultural patterns as well as cultural flux and ambiguity. (shrink)

The ethics of bioculture deals with moral questions raised by the cultivation and farming of living things. P. W. Taylor believes that they have an inherent worth just like animals and wild plants. Therefore, judgment about how they should be treated cannot be limited to the principle of greater efficiency for the benefit of humans. Taylor developed a comprehensive theory that is founded on the symmetry between human and environmental ethics. He believes that every living thing is teleologically oriented and (...) a member of the earth's biotic community. A systemic and hologrammatic approach is the alternative to Taylor's ethics of bioculture. Each component of an ecosystem characterised by contingency, plays a role in co-evolution. Therefore, as moral agents, we must take historical responsibility for domesticating and employing other living things, and we should reconsider the emerging model of economic development and define criteria of ethical sustainability for bioculture companies. Such an ethics of bioculture can contribute to oriented decision-making to ensure that an increase in well-being for all living things is an economically and environmentally sustainable and political perspective. (shrink)

[T]he races of man are not sufficiently distinct to inhabit the same country without fusion; and the absence of fusion affords the usual and best test of specific distinctiveness.The subspecies is merely a strictly utilitarian classificatory device for the pigeonholing of population samples.Did human evolutionary history lead to a natural division of our species into subspecies, the so-called biological human races? The issue seemed to have been beaten to death during the second half of the 20th century. But the situation (...) in the biological sciences changed significantly with the rise of genomic science at the close of the century. The issue of race in science, which most people had deemed passé and obsolete, has .. (shrink)

Cultural anthropologists and sociobiologists developed initially incommensurable approaches to explaining cooperation and altruism in human societies. When understood as complex cultural adaptations, however, scientific research programs are subject to piecemeal changes in the research programs driving scientific research. The emergence of new research programs in cultural evolution and group selection resulted. This transformation is examined with a focus on explanations for the origin and maintenance of human inequality. The transmission, modification, and selection of the complex cultural packages underlying egalitarianism and (...) hereditary inequality challenge both the focus on biological roots of hierarchy and the autonomous construction of cultures. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss the nature of disagreement in scientific ontologies in the light of case studies from biology and cognitive science. I argue that disagreements in scientific ontologies are usually not about purely factual issues but involve both verbal and normative aspects. Furthermore, I try to show that this partly non-factual character of disagreement in scientific ontologies does not lead to a radical deflationism but is compatible with a “normative ontological realism.” Finally, I argue that (...) the case studies from the empirical sciences challenge contemporary metaontological accounts that insist on exactly one true way of “carving nature at its joints.”. (shrink)

The paper discusses the scope and influence of eugenics in defining the scientific programme of statistics and the impact of the evolution of biology on social scientists. It argues that eugenics was instrumental in providing a bridge between sciences, and therefore created both the impulse and the institutions necessary for the birth of modern statistics in its applications first to biology and then to the social sciences. Looking at the question from the point of view of the history of statistics (...) and the social sciences, and mostly concentrating on evidence from the British debates, the paper discusses how these disciplines became emancipated from eugenics precisely because of the inspiration of biology. It also relates how social scientists were fascinated and perplexed by the innovations taking place in statistical theory and practice. (shrink)

The paper discusses the scope and influence of eugenics in defining the scientific programme of statistics and the impact of the evolution of biology on social scientists. It argues that eugenics was instrumental in providing a bridge between sciences, and therefore created both the impulse and the institutions necessary for the birth of modern statistics in its applications first to biology and then to the social sciences. Looking at the question from the point of view of the history of statistics (...) and the social sciences, and mostly concentrating on evidence from the British debates, the paper discusses how these disciplines became emancipated from eugenics precisely because of the inspiration of biology. It also relates how social scientists were fascinated and perplexed by the innovations taking place in statistical theory and practice. (shrink)

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves to normalize. A (...) case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white racial subject positions within the context of the development of normalizing biopower that Foucault describes in his work through the 1970s. Once that context is provided, it becomes clear that a larger problem exists in Whiteness Studies, one evident in the use of the concept of ‘white privilege’. Whiteness Studies theorists have not thoroughly critiqued the juridical conception of power that they have inherited from traditional political theory; as a result, they cannot get away from psychological accounts of the origins of racism, even though they usually state very clearly that they believe racism is an institutional phenomenon and racist subject positions are formed within networks of power. If Whiteness Studies is to accomplish both its analytical and its political goals, its theorists need to pay close attention to Foucault’s work on biopower. (shrink)

Climate change and the failure of crops are significant but overlooked events in the history of heredity. Bad weather and dangerously low harvests provided momentum and urgency for answers to questions about how best to improve and acclimatize staple varieties. In the 1790s, a series of crop failures in Britain led to the popularization of and widespread debate over Thomas Andrew Knight’s suggestion that poor weather was in fact largely unconnected to the bad harvests. Rather, Knight argued, Britain’s older varieties—particularly (...) its fruit trees—were coming to the natural end of their lifespans. At a period when Britain was trying to maximize its agricultural land usage, Knight campaigned that his fellow farmers ought to set aside land and resources in order to cultivate new varieties—an expensive and time-consuming procedure—in order to avoid disaster. In this paper, I argue that Knight’s lifelong commitment to his position demonstrates the role played by changes in climate and weather on popular understandings of plant heredity. Further, drawing upon the historiography of Britain’s climate and agriculture, I show that despite reliable weather and good harvests, Knight’s campaign survived for several decades before the continued health of Britain’s trees was finally treated as sufficient evidence to dispense with Knight’s warnings. This case provides a means of thinking about the history of heredity as it is shaped and impacted by changes in climate and local conditions. (shrink)

It is well-known that racism is encoded into the social practices and institutions of medicine. Less well-known is that racism is encoded into the material artifacts of medicine. We argue that many medical devices are not merely biased, but materialize oppression. An oppressive device exhibits a harmful bias that reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations. Using pulse oximeters and spirometers as case studies, we show how medical devices can materialize oppression along various axes of social difference, including race, gender, class, (...) and ability. Our account uses political philosophy and cognitive science to give a theoretical basis for understanding materialized oppression, explaining how artifacts encode and carry oppressive ideas from the past to the present and future. Oppressive medical devices present a moral aggregation problem. To remedy this problem, we suggest redundantly layered solutions that are coordinated to disrupt reciprocal causal connections between the attitudes, practices, and artifacts of oppressive systems. (shrink)

A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is. The problem is especially acute when we need to consider artificial systems which are significantly different to humans. In this paper we approach this problem in the following way: we take a number of well known informal definitions of human intelligence that have been given by experts, and extract their essential features. These are then mathematically formalised to produce a general measure of intelligence for arbitrary machines. (...) We believe that this equation formally captures the concept of machine intelligence in the broadest reasonable sense. We then show how this formal definition is related to the theory of universal optimal learning agents. Finally, we survey the many other tests and definitions of intelligence that have been proposed for machines. (shrink)

While Peace through Commerce (PTC) started as a conversation among a small group of scholars it has grown into an increasingly robust movement, giving rise to conferences, books, journal articles, and dialogue between scholars, managers, practitioners, government officials, and civil society actors, all of whom share an interest in the potential of commerce to foster greater peace. Because social movement scholarship explores the ability of collective interests to achieve social change it provides a useful lens through which to consider PTC's (...) maturation and, more broadly, the rise of scholarly conversations into social movements its. Increasingly, social movement theory has been used to describe and better understand a diverse range of social and organizational changes (Strang and II Jung, 2005) including academic endeavors (Hambrick and Chen, 2008). I draw on social movement theory to characterize the rise of PTC and to consider its future growth. I also suggest broader implications for the transition of academic dialogue as it attains movement status. (shrink)

Medical classification systems aim to provide a manageable taxonomy for sorting diagnoses into their proper classes. The question, this paper wants to critically examine, is how to correctly systematise diseases within classification systems that are applied in a variety of different settings. ICD and DSM , the two major classification systems in medicine and psychiatry, will be the main subjects of this paper; however, the arguments are not restricted to these classification systems but point out general methodological and epistemological challenges (...) of classifying diseases for differing purposes. Deciding what qualifies as a disease to be included into a classification system as well as choosing a specific validator for correctly systematising diseases is complicated because the broad applicability of medical classification systems simultaneously appears as aim and challenge. Drawing upon the case study of classifying Alzheimer’s disease, this paper will address three dilemmas in designing ‘good’ medical classification systems. They are due to general epistemological problems of medicine, such as the relationship between individual manifestations of diseases and the necessity of building groups in order to scientifically elucidate causes of diseases. Moreover, they involve pragmatic issues of designing usable classifications that allow for easily discriminating between classes of diseases, restricting, however, the completeness of disease representations. This paper wants to trace how the choice of certain validators is unavoidably value-laden and deeply intertwined with epistemological assumptions of how different uses relate to each other, resulting either in a prioritisation of (constrained) coherence or of (vague) pluralistic connectibility. (shrink)