Pluralism is a sound strategy in classifying disciplines of biology. The relevance of a particular classification depends on various methodological issues, on the way in which the scientist's problems are specified, and on factual matters.

The purpose of this article is to respond to Thomas Uebel´s criticisms of my comments regarding the current revisionism of Carnap´s work and its relations to Kuhn. I begin by pointing out some misunderstandings in the interpretation of my article. I then discuss some aspects related to Carnap´s view of the history of science. First, I emphasize that it was not due to a supposed affinity between Kuhn´s conceptions and those of logical positivism that Kuhn was invited to write the (...) monograph on the history of science for the Encyclopedia. Three other authors had been invited first, including George Sarton whose conception was entirely different from Kuhn´s. In addition, I try to show that Carnap attributes little importance to history of science. He seldom refers to it and, when he does, he clearly defends a Whig or an “old” historiography of science, to which Kuhn opposes his “new historiography of science”. It is argued that this raises serious difficulties for those, like Uebel, who hold the view that Carnap includes the historical or the social within the rational. (shrink)

Radical constructivism has had a major influence on present-day education, especially in the teaching of science and mathematics. The article provides an epistemological profile of constructivism and considers its strengths and weaknesses from the standpoint of its educational implications. It is argued that there are two central problems with constructivism: anti- realism and individualism which, in turn, lead to difficulties associated with idealism and relativism which, together, prove fatal for the theory.

The work of Thomas Kuhn has been very influential in Anglo-American philosophy of science and it is claimed that it has initiated the historical turn. Although this might be the case for English speaking countries, in France an historical approach has always been the rule. This article aims to investigate the similarities and differences between Kuhn and French philosophy of science or ‘French epistemology’. The first part will argue that he is influenced by French epistemologists, but by lesser known authors (...) than often thought. The second part focuses on the reactions of French epistemologists on Kuhn’s work, which were often very critical. It is argued that behind some superficial similarities there are deep disagreements between Kuhn and French epistemology. This is finally shown by a brief comparison with the reaction of more recent French philosophers of science, who distance themselves from French epistemology and are more positive about Kuhn. Based on these diverse appreciations of Kuhn, a typology of the different positions within the philosophy of science is suggested. (shrink)

Recently, natural scientists have begun to support an interpretive turn in ecology. Yet the ethical implications of interpreting nature have not been sufficiently addressed. In this essay, I use different interpretations of nature to make three distinct but related points relevant to forestry : ecological narratives should be evaluated on the basis of ethical norms, the choice of which interpretations of nature and ethical norms to use in environmental policy should be conducted by a process of public deliberation, and scientific (...) narratives should be denied a priori privilege over non-scientific interpretations of nature for policy purposes. (shrink)

A remarkable philosophical affinity may be observed between the intuitionistic conception of mathematics and the transformational generative approach to the study of language: both disciplines profess a mentalistic ontology, both posit an idealized subject, and both insist on their autonomy with respect to other disciplines. This philosophical parallel is formalized in terms of a generalization of the intuitionistic notion of creative subject; resulting are the foundations of a unified theory of mental acts based on intuitionistic logic — capturing, inter alia, (...) similarities between proof acts and speech acts. As an application of the theory, it is then shown how the notion of mental act may provide for an insightful formalization of various hypotheses pertaining to the linguistic dependence or relativity of mathematics. (shrink)

The history of biochemistry and molecular biology is replete with examples of erroneous theories that persisted for considerable lengths of time before they were rejected. This paper examines patterns of dissolution of three such erroneous hypotheses: The idea that nucleic acids are tetrads of the four nucleobases (‘the tetranucleotide hypothesis’); the notion that proteins are collinear with their encoding genes in all branches of life; and the hypothesis that proteins are synthesized by reverse action of proteolytic enzymes. Analysis of these (...) cases indicates that amassed contradictory empirical findings did not prompt critical experimental testing of the prevailing theories nor did they elicit alternative hypotheses. Rather, the incorrect models collapsed when experiments that were not purposely designed to test their validity exposed new facts. (shrink)

A common method of improving how well understood a theory is, is by comparing it to another theory which has been better developed. Radical interpretation is a theory which attempts to explain how communication has meaning. Radical interpretation is treated as another time dependent theory and compared to the time dependent theory of biological evolution. Several similarities and differences are uncovered. Biological evolution can be gradual or punctuated. Whether radical interpretation is gradual or punctuated depends on how the question is (...) framed: on the coarse-grained time scale it proceeds gradually, but on the fine-grained time scale it proceeds by punctuated equilibria. Biological evolution proceeds by natural selection, the counterpart to this is the increase in both correspondence and coherence. Exaption, mutations, and spandrels have counterparts metaphor, speech errors, and puns respectively. Homologous and analogs have direct counterparts in specific words. The most important differences originate from the existence of a unit of inheritance occurring in biological evolution - there is no such unit in language. (shrink)

This essay examines the claim that physicians have a special obligation to engage in social and political activism. Four ethical paradigms are considered. Two paradigms, the preventive medicine and the social medicine models, embody a limited professional obligation to advocate the priority of health in society; the justification for a more aggressive stance is limited by the failings of paternalism. The radical model and the heroic model speak to issues of personal virtue rather than professional obligation; they are not strictly (...) comparable. (shrink)

The epistemologically distant nature of many of today's environmental risks greatly problematises conventional risk analyses that emphasise objectivity, materiality, factual specificity and certainty. Such analyses fail to problematise issues of ontology and epistemology, assuming a reality that is readily 'readable' and a corresponding knowledge of that reality that is asocial, objective and certain. Under the weight of modern, invisible, manufactured environmental risks, however, these assumptions begin to crack, revealing their tenuous nature. As this paper argues, statements of risk are ultimately (...) social products that come to us by way of translation. They are statements not of what is but of knowledge expressed in probabilistic terms, and are thus thoroughly social in nature, for it is we – through our actions and social networks – that imbue them with meaning. One way we do this is through our social relations of trust. And it is this relationship – between trust and risk – that this paper seeks to detail both conceptually and empirically. While one could look toward any number of case studies to develop the conceptual details of this project, this paper focuses on the relatively recent case of mad cow disease to have been reported within the United States. Here, we have an epistemologically distant, and thus hotly contested, 'object', which has been the source of much risk debate; a debate that is also, in part, the effect of a deeper erosion of trust, particularly toward those managing our meat supply. (shrink)

In this age of debate it is not news that what constitutes 'truth' is often at issue in environmental debates. But what is often missed is an insight that the speakers of Middle English understood a millennium ago: that truth comes from trust, which, is the central theoretical position of this paper. Our point is that truth depends essentially on social relations – relations that involve power and knowledge, to be sure, but also identity. Thus, challenges to what constitutes the (...) 'truth' are equally challenges to identities and the social networks of trust in which that truth is embedded. We therefore attempt to move beyond Foucaultian discursive theory by reintroducing the subject as both the product and producer of discourse. For Foucault, the subject is reduced to the discursive relations of power/ knowledge. In his effort to free us from the Cartesian cogito and the modernist absolutisms that eventually followed, Foucault lapses into a kind of postmodern functionalism. We argue that we should not speak of power/ knowledge, as Foucault suggested, but of power/ knowledge /identity, recovering the actors and concrete social relations that produce discourse, and are not only produced by it. We then argue that these social relations become constituted in particular moments of phenomenological challenge – discursive moments that confront the existing social relations of knowledge and their dialogue of trust and truth. We illustrate the implications of a threat to the social relations of environmental knowledge through an analysis of one such moment of phenomenological challenge: a dispute over whether or not the power plant in the community where we used to live, Ames, Iowa, is producing dioxin. (shrink)

Recent trends in the debate about natural kinds tend towards increasingly permissive and practice-oriented views. I argue that while these accounts—which I characterize using Boyd’s ([1991]) term ‘enthusiasm’—offer several helpful insights, they often lack the normative force that they want to have; that is, they cannot provide an account of what makes something a good or bad, better or worse, kind for scientific pursuits. I argue that such accounts can regain a minimal sense of normativity in two ways. The first, (...) which has already been widely embraced by theorists, is to index the appropriateness of a scientific kind to the domain within which it is situated. While this is a good solution, it is not clear how it can be applied in interdisciplinary and cross-domain research pursuits, which are increasingly common. The second way of regaining normativity—which is especially, but not exclusively, effective for such cross-domain pursuits—is to attend to the stage at which scientific research is occurring. (shrink)

According to the standard interpretation of Einstein’s field equations, gravity consists of mass-energy curving spacetime, and an additional physical force or entity—denoted by Λ (the ‘cosmological constant’)—is responsible for the Universe’s metric-expansion. Although General Relativity’s direct predictions have been systematically confirmed, the dominant cosmological model thought to follow from it—the ΛCDM (Lambda cold dark matter) model of the Universe’s history and composition—faces considerable challenges, including various observational anomalies and experimental failures to detect dark matter, dark energy, or inflation-field candidates. This (...) paper shows that Einstein’s Equivalence Principle entails two possible physical interpretations of General Relativity’s field equations. Although the field equations facially appear to support the standard interpretation—that gravity consists of mass-energy curving spacetime—the field equations can be equivalently understood as holding that gravitational effects instead result from mass-energy accelerating the metric-expansion of a second-order spacetime fabric superimposed upon an absolute, first-order Euclidean space, resulting in the observational appearance of spacetime curvature. This alternative interpretation of relativity is shown to be empirically equivalent to the standard interpretation of relativity, albeit with a changing value for Λ (which is similar to how Λ is understood in the conception of Λ as ‘quintessence’, but in this case takes Λ to be gravity). The reconceptualization is then shown to potentially resolve major observational anomalies for the ΛCDM model, including recent observations conflicting with ΛCDM predictions, as well as failures to directly detect dark matter, dark energy, and inflation field/particle candidates. (shrink)

The way we experience, investigate and interact with reality changes drastically in the course of history. Do such changes occur gradually, or can we pinpoint radical turns, besides periods of relative stability? Building on Oswald Spengler, we zoom in on three styles in particular, namely Apollonian, Magian and Faustian thinking, guided by grounding ideas which can be summarised as follows: “Act in accordance with nature”, “Prepare yourself for the imminent dawn and “Existence equals will to power”. Finally, we reach the (...) present. How to characterise the new era we entered round the year 2000? (shrink)

Douglas Edwards is arguably the most prominent contemporary advocate of moderate alethic pluralism. Significantly influenced by Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch, his work on the nature of truth has become widely discussed in the topical literature. Edwards labels his version of moderate alethic pluralism determination pluralism. At first blush, determination pluralism appears philosophically promising. The position deserves thoughtful consideration, particularly because of its capacity to accommodate the scope problem. I argue, however, that upon analysis the view is better understood as (...) a form of metaphysical dualism or what I will call meta-dualism. Furthermore, determination pluralists face a dilemma; there appears to be an instability at the core of their dualistic model. On the one horn of the dilemma, they need a clear metaphysical demarcation at the interface of their two necessary domains. On the other horn, they seem to need to a metaphysically vague boundary at the interface of their two necessary domains. Determination pluralism needs substantial revision. (shrink)

Allegations of fraud involving falsification as research misconduct may result in severe consequences for those convicted. The focus of this article is the Public Health Service’s (PHS) definition of falsification . A well-articulated revised definition is required for veritable instances of falsification as misconduct to be consistently identified and potentially offer a framework for elucidation. A philosophical critique of the explicit definition is undertaken to determine what comprises falsification at its core, which could substantially reduce the number of allegations of (...) fraud as suspected instances of misconduct. The flaw in the PHS definition of falsification is due to circular logic, which allows anything to be proven according to it. Furthermore, to be confident that falsification has occurred, one must be certain of what is true when it has not occurred, which is demonstrated not to be plausible. falsification was found to be the most common type of fraud as misconduct alleged yet the rarest to be determined to occur because the flawed definition confounds what constitutes an occurrence of it. In addition to conceptual ambiguity and ignorance, allegations of falsification are suggested to occur strategically as maneuvers by researchers who may exploit the inherent flaw in the definition to eliminate rival competitors. -/- The purpose of part two is to critique the definition of falsification as research misconduct according to the Public Health Service (PHS) in order to better understand what it entails. In support of this purpose, the approach decided upon for analysis was philosophical including framing the issue borrowing from both mereological and epistemological perspectives. Through the consideration given to parthood relations of mereology, we gained insight from a cognitive imperfection standpoint about similarities that exist between the epistemic constraints on knowledge and the nature of violations concerning research misconduct. Findings from the examination of a case study include the significance of accuracy in representation in falsification as misconduct and the core dimensions comprising an instance of falsification, which are Deliberateness, Alteration, and Inclusion. Given that either behavior or actions must occur that violate these three aspects in order to qualify as an instance of misconduct under falsification, the author proposes that, at a minimum, any revisions made to the definition of falsification stipulate what he refers to as the Violation Imperative. (shrink)

Addiction is one of the most significant problems facing contemporary society. Consequently many scholars, institutions and clinicians have sought to understand this complex phenomenon, as is evident in the abundance of etiological models of addiction in existence today. A literature review pointed that there is little consensus regarding the nature and etiopathogenesis of addiction, and integrative models have not yet been able to provide the sought-after integration. In addressing this problem, this study offers a theoretical analysis of the paradigmatic and (...) meta-paradigmatic suitability of Integral Theory in the design of an integrated metatheory of addiction. The data consisted of the most prominent etiological theories and models of addiction. The study focused on several essential features constituting the architectonic of any metatheory that attempts to provide conceptual scaffolding for the construction of a comprehensive metatheory of addiction. The criteria for the construction of a metatheory were conceptual integration, ontological span, ontological depth, empirical validity and internal consistency. Integral Theory was critically assessed in terms of each of the abovementioned criteria. The study suggests that Integral Theory is eminently suitable as a philosophical foundation for the development of an integrated metatheory of addiction. (shrink)

En este trabajo presentamos los fundamentos teóricos de una propuesta para el abordaje didáctico de concepciones teleológicas de los y las estudiantes en la enseñanza de la Biología. La propuesta en cuestión supone acudir al modo en que Darwin lidió con las concepciones teleológicas dominantes entre sus contemporáneos, para proponer una estrategia general a través de la cual se podría incidir sobre las intuiciones teleológicas de los estudiantes, de modo que se pueda facilitar el aprendizaje de la teoría de la (...) selección natural. Sugeriremos también que esta propuesta implica un modo original de apelar a la analogía entre el cambio teórico en la Historia de la Ciencia y el aprendizaje de las ciencias. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn’un 1962 yılında yayımlamış olduğu “Bilimsel Devrimlerin Yapısı” adlı kitabı bilimsel gelişme, bilimin doğası ve bilimsel bilginin özerkliği gibi çeşitli bilim felsefesi konularında alanında rölativist ya da göreci bir anlayışa katkıda bulunarak bilimin sarsılmaz statüsüne zarar verip vermediğine yöneliktir. Kuhn’un rölativistlikle suçlanmasına yol açan argümanlardan ön plana çıkan ikisi; iki farklı rakip paradigmaya bağlı olan kuramların kıyaslanmasının mümkün olmadığını ileri süren metodolojik eşölçülemezlik argümanı ile kuramdan bağımsız nötr gözlem önermelerinin olamayacağını belirten gözlemlerin kuram yüklü olduğu savıdır. Kuhn bu argümanlar (...) çerçevesinde kendisine getirilen görecilik iddialarına karşı çıkar ve bilim felsefecilerinin ona yöneltmiş olduğu eleştirilere yıllar içerisinde “Bilimsel Devrimlerin Yapısı” kitabının ek bölümlerinde cevap vermektedir. Bu bağlamda, Kuhn’un bu iddialara ikna edici bir cevap verip vermediğini tespit edebilmek ve onun gerçekten bilim ve bilimsel bilginin statüsü konusunda rölativist olup olmadığını soruşturmak için ortaya konulan eleştirilerin etraflıca ele alınması gerekliliği ortaya çıkmaktadır. Diğer bir deyişle, Kuhn'un görecilik konusu ile ilgili bir neticeye varabilmek amacıyla onun bütün bilim anlayışının göz önünde bulundurulması önemlidir. Dolayısıyla Kuhn'un genel bilim tasviri bu çalışmanın odağını oluşturmaktadır. Bu bakımdan çalışmada, ilk olarak kısaca “göreciliğin” ne anlama geldiği ortaya konulacak, ardından Kuhn’un eşölçülemezlik ve kuram yüklülük tezleri ayrıntılandırılarak, bu çerçeve içerisinde neden rölativist olarak kabul edildiği serimlenecektir. Nihai olarak, Kuhn'un kendisine getirilen eleştirilere karşı ortaya koyduğu cevapların rölativist suçlamalardan sıyrılması için sağlam gerekçeleri sağlayamadığı ortaya konulacaktır. (shrink)

The article explores novel directions in the phenomenology of economics. It analyzes how the approaches of Till Düppe and Alfred Schütz, both inspired by Edmund Husserl, may shed light on the historical development of economics. I examine the substance and meaning of economics in the context of the forceful criticism of the whole discipline recently raised by Düppe. This examination uncovers important weaknesses and omissions inherent in Düppe’s argument against the economists’ scientific aspirations. The analysis of the social scientific endeavors (...) by Alfred Schütz who develops a phenomenologically informed ‘telescopic’ concept of an ideal type is then shown to be a more fruitful and methodologically rigorous way towards understanding the developments within economics. The Schützian view permits us to see how abstract economic models originate in the experience of the life-world and are continuous with it. Accordingly, the historical development of economic science may be viewed as consisting from two broadly defined phases, where at first the formalism is steadily increasing (the ‘zooming out’ phase) and later the discipline converges back to context-specific empirical examinations (the ‘zooming in’ phase). A case study concentrating on the economic theory of politics illustrates that both the drive towards abstraction that has culminated around 1950s and the more recent ‘zooming in’ is methodologically legitimate from the phenomenological point of view. I conclude that economics has never been completely severed from the paramount reality of the everyday life and for decades the interconnection has been growing stronger by the day. (shrink)

To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their engagement in this collective activity. Our (...) classification offers, on the one hand, a model of how the ethical aspects of science are taken into consideration by scientists and, on the other, some indications on how to institutionalize ethics in science. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

In this work, we will approach some essential questions about the collective imaginary and their relations with reality and truth. We should face this subject in a conceptual framework, followed by the corresponding factual analysis of demonstrable behavioral realities. We will adopt not only the methodology, but mostly the tenets and propositions of the analytic philosophy, which certainly will be apparent throughout the study, and may be identified by the features described by Perez : -/- Rabossi (1975) defends the idea (...) that analytic philosophy can be identified by considering certain family resemblances. He suggests the following family traits: a positive attitude toward scientific knowledge; a cautious attitude toward metaphysics; a conception of philosophy as a conceptual task, which takes conceptual analysis as a method; a close relationship between language and philosophy; a concern with seeking argumentative answers to philosophical problems; search for conceptual clarity Perez, Diana Ines, "Analytic Philosophy in Latin America”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ). These core concepts involve cultural, social, religious, scientific, philosophic, moral, and political contents, belonging to the individual and collective existence of each one of us. The present work grounds itself on analytical reflection. We will speculate the most comprehensive and profound way we can and express the results of our thoughts. Notwithstanding the multidisciplinary nature of the subject and the methodological openness for accepting contributions from any field of science, this work belongs to the aim of psychology and ontology or, in other terms, social and ontological psychology. The main scope of this paper is to observe how some essential evolutionary attributes of humankind, like creativity, imagination, and association, can become a hazardous sickness, sheltered in the misty shadows of the intelligence. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I aim to develop and defend a novel, pragmatist approach to foundational questions about meaning, especially the meaning of deontic moral vocabulary. Drawing from expressivists and inferentialists, I argue that meaning is best explained by the various kinds of norms that govern the use of a vocabulary. Along with inferential norms, I argue we must extend our account to discursive norms that govern normative statuses required to felicitously utter certain speech-acts—norms of authority—and the transitions in normative statuses (...) affected by speech-acts—pragmatic norms. These structural discursive norms differentiate discursive practices and account for distinctive features such as objectivity and motivational import that some have and others lack. The structure exhibited by a practice is then explained in terms of its utility, making it possible to see how different discursive practices are answerable to the different needs and purposes of the discursive beings who use them. I call the resulting explanatory framework a pragmatic analysis of linguistic meaning (PALM). -/- Turning my attention to moral “ought,” I argue that the structural discursive norms of moral discourse differentiate it from other objective discourses, like empirical discourse, on the one hand, and from other normative discourses, like prudential discourse, on the other. Drawing on work in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, I complete the PALM with an account of moral discourse a meta-normative practice with a metacoordinative function. Its utility for the discursive beings who use it lies in its enabling them to remedy certain tensions and instabilities that arise in their other coordinative, normative practices in a way that minimizes the risk of domination by alpha-type freeriders, the fracturing of social groups, and individual defection from cooperative endeavors. -/- In the final two chapters, I leverage the account to defend a pragmatist-friendly notion of objectivity in terms of a structure of distributed epistemic authority according to which no claim within a practice is ultimately authoritative or immune from challenge and to reconcile this sense of objectivity with a persistent pressure toward a kind of relativism that restricts the standing to make moral claims to members of the relevant communities. (shrink)

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hilary Putnam articulated a notion of relativized apriority that was motivated to address the problem of scientific change. This paper examines Putnam’s account in its historical context and in relation to contemporary views. I begin by locating Putnam’s analysis in the historical context of Quine’s rejection of apriority, presenting Putnam as a sympathetic commentator on Quine. Subsequently, I explicate Putnam’s positive account of apriority, focusing on his analysis of the history of physics and geometry. In (...) the remainder of the paper, I explore connections between Putnam’s account of relativized a priori principles and contemporary views. In particular, I situate Putnam’s account in relation to analyses advanced by Michael Friedman, David Stump, and William Wimsatt. From this comparison, I address issues concerning whether a priori scientific principles are appropriately characterized as “constitutive” or “entrenched”. I argue that these two features need to be clearly distinguished, and that only the constitutive function is essential to apriority. By way of conclusion, I explore the relationship between the constitutive function of a priori principles and entrenchment. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

Complex constraints like conditionals ('If A, then B') and probabilistic constraints ('The probability that A is p') pose problems for Bayesian theories of learning. Since these propositions do not express constraints on outcomes, agents cannot simply conditionalize on the new information. Furthermore, a natural extension of conditionalization, relative information minimization, leads to many counterintuitive predictions, evidenced by the sundowners problem and the Judy Benjamin problem. Building on the notion of a `paradigm shift' and empirical research in psychology and economics, I (...) argue that the model of hypothesis testing can explain how people learn complex, theory-laden propositions like conditionals and probability constraints. Theories are formalized as probability distributions over a set of possible outcomes and theory change is triggered by a constraint which is incompatible with the initial theory. This leads agents to consult a higher order probability function, or a 'prior over priors,' to choose the most likely alternative theory which satisfies the constraint. The hypothesis testing model is applied to three examples: learning a simple probabilistic constraint involving coin bias, the sundowners problem for conditional learning, and the Judy Benjamin problem for learning conditional probability constraints. (shrink)

L'ingegneria concettuale è una branca della filosofia caratterizzata da un approccio normativo nei confronti della rappresentazione. Assunzione fondamentale è che i nostri dispositivi rappresentazionali possano essere difettosi. Si configura dunque come l'attività che consiste nell'identificare i difetti in tali dispositivi e mettere in atto strategie di miglioramento. Verranno illustrate le questioni fondamentali a cui una teoria di ingegneria concettuale deve rispondere: in cosa consiste esattamente questa attività? Come possiamo attuarla? Quali meccanismi regolano la formazione dei dispositivi rappresentazionali? Possiamo influire su (...) tali meccanismi? Verrà inoltre presentata un'obiezione all'ingegneria concettuale e varie risposte. -/- Conceptual engineering is a branch of philosophy characterised by a normative approach towards representation. The fundamental assumption of it is that our representational devices can be defective. Conceptual engineering is then the activity consisting of identifying the defects of such devices and putting in place ameliorative strategies. This paper illustrates the fundamental issues for a theory of conceptual engineering: what does this activity consist of? How can we implement it? What mechanisms regulate the formation of representational devices? Can we have an influence over those mechanisms? Moreover, it will be presented an objection to conceptual engineering and various responses to it. (shrink)

Our purpose in this article is to identify and suggest resolution for two core problematics of grounded theory. First, while grounded theory provides transparency to one part of the conceptualization process, where codes emerge directly from the data, it provides no such systematic or transparent way for gaining insight into the conceptual relationships between discovered codes. Producing a grounded theory depends not only on the definition of conceptual pieces, but the delineation of a relationship between at least two of those (...) pieces. Second, the conceptualization process of grounded theory is done in hierarchical fashion, where individual codes emerge from the data but then are used to generate insight into more general concepts and thematic statements. But various works on grounded theory have failed to provide any systematic way of using data specific levels of scale (the codes) to gain insight into more macro levels of scale (concepts and themes). We offer fractal concept analysis as a means of resolving both of these issues. By using a logic structure generator, fractal concept analysis delineates self-similar conceptual frameworks at various levels of abstraction, yielding a method for linking concepts together within and between levels of scale encountered in the grounded theory coding and categorization process. We conclude that this fractal analytic technique can bolster the aims of grounded theory as a formalized and systematic process for generating theory from empirical data. (shrink)

Tussen zijn veertigste en zijn zestigste levensjaar was Jan Hendrik van den Berg (1914) een uitermate succesvol en populair auteur. Boeken van zijn hand, zoals Metabletica (1956) en Medische macht en medische ethiek (1969), waren ongekende bestsellers. Hij was de Nederlandse vertegenwoordiger van een belangrijke Europese stroming in de filosofie: de historische fenomenologie. In de jaren zeventig raakte hij echter in conflict met zijn tijd. Terwijl de Nederlandse publieke opinie een wending naar links doormaakte, bond Van den Berg de strijd (...) aan tegen verloedering, hooliganisme en anarchisme. Dit ging ten koste van zijn populariteit, maar niet van zijn productiviteit, noch van zijn innovativiteit. Tot op de dag van vandaag werkt hij aan een indrukwekkend , panoramisch oeuvre. Hij is de belangrijkste Nederlandse filosoof sinds Bolland. -/- Deze studie wil het werk van Van den Berg reconstrueren, situeren en beoordelen. Reconstrueren door de methodische en thematische coherentie ervan zichtbaar te maken. Situeren door het te confronteren met dat van andere, verwante auteurs zoals Husserl, Freud, Bachelard en Foucault. Beoordelen door na te gaan in hoeverre Van den Berg de inzet van zijn project, zowel inhoudelijk als methodologisch, waarmaakte. -/- Het werk van Van den Berg is geen curiosum, maar opvallend actueel. Hij onderzoekt het begin, de aanvang van wetenschappelijke en maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen waarvan het belang in de huidige situatie met nadruk zichtbaar wordt. Zijn beeldende stijl wekt de geschiedenis van de wetenschap tot leven, maar werd vaak als ‘anekdotisch’ afgedaan; zijn talent voor polemiek lokte soms felle reacties uit en zijn methodologische flexibiliteit maakte hem een gemakkelijk doelwit van academische kritiek. Aan de positieve kant van de balans staan echter zijn intellectuele enthousiasme en zijn internationale faam. Zijn werk verdient een rehabilitatie. (shrink)

Context: The majority of contemporary enactivist work is influenced by the philosophical biology of Hans Jonas. Jonas credits all living organisms with experience that involves particular “existential” structures: nascent forms of concern for self-preservation and desire for objects and outcomes that promote well-being. We argue that Jonas’s attitude towards living systems involves a problematic anthropomorphism that threatens to place enactivism at odds with cognitive science, and undermine its legitimate aims to become a new paradigm for scientific investigation and understanding of (...) the mind. Problem: Enactivism needs to address the tension between its Jonasian influences and its aspirations to become a new paradigm for cognitive science. By relying on Jonasian phenomenology, contemporary enactivism obscures alternative ways in which phenomenology can be more smoothly integrated with cognitive science. Method: We outline the historical relationship between enactivism and phenomenology, and explain why anthropomorphism is problematic for a research program that aspires to become a new paradigm for cognitive science. We examine the roots of Jonas’s existential interpretation of biological facts, and describe how and why Jonas himself understood his project as founded on an anthropomorphic assumption that is incompatible with a crucial methodological assumption of scientific enquiry: the prohibition of unexplained natural purposes. We describe the way in which phenomenology can be integrated into Maturana’s autopoietic theory, and use this as an example of how an alternative, non-anthropomorphic science of the biological roots of cognition might proceed. Results: Our analysis reveals a crucial tension between Jonas’s influence on enactivism and enactivism’s paradigmatic aspirations. This suggests the possibility of, and need to investigate, other ways of integrating phenomenology with cognitive science that do not succumb to this tension. Implications: In light of this, enactivists should either eliminate the Jonasian inference from properties of our human experience to properties of the experience of all living organisms, or articulate an alternative conception of scientific enquiry that can tolerate the anthropomorphism this inference entails. The Maturanian view we present in the article’s final section constitutes a possible framework within which enactivist tools and concepts can be used to understand cognition and phenomenology, and that does not involve a problematic anthropomorphism. Constructivist content: Any constructivist approach that aims for integration with current scientific practice must either avoid the type of anthropomorphic inference on which Jonas bases his work, or specify a new conception of scientific enquiry that renders anthropomorphism unproblematic. (shrink)

Geographic Information Science (GIS) is an interdisciplinary science aiming to detect and visually represent patterns in spatial data. GIS is used by businesses to determine where to open new stores and by conservation biologists to identify field study locations with relatively little anthropogenic influence. Products of GIS include topographic and thematic maps of the Earth’s surface, climate maps, and spatially referenced demographic graphs and charts. In addition to its social, political, and economic importance, GIS is of intrinsic philosophical interest due (...) to its methodological richness and because it is an instructive analogue to other sciences. This chapter works towards a philosophy of GIS and cartography, or PGISC. In particular, it examines practices of classifying geographic space, objects, and relations. By focusing on the use of natural kinds in data modeling and map generalization practices, I show how the making and using of kinds is contextual, fallible, plural, and purposive. (shrink)

(This is for the Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Marcus Rossberg) In this handbook entry, I survey the different ways in which formal mathematical methods have been applied to philosophical questions throughout the history of analytic philosophy. I consider: formalization in symbolic logic, with examples such as Aquinas’ third way and Anselm’s ontological argument; Bayesian confirmation theory, with examples such as the fine-tuning argument for God and the paradox of the ravens; foundations of mathematics, with examples such as (...) Hilbert’s programme and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems; social choice theory, with examples such as Condorcet’s paradox and Arrow’s theorem; ‘how possibly’ results, with examples such as Condorcet’s jury theorem and recent work on intersectionality theory; and the application of advanced mathematics in philosophy, with examples such as accuracy-first epistemology. (shrink)

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to (...) participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: in the allocation of platform resources, in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding. (shrink)

Analytic moral philosophers have generally failed to engage in any substantial way with the cultural history of morality. This is a shame, because a genealogy of morals can help us accomplish two important tasks. First, a genealogy can form the basis of an epistemological project, one that seeks to establish the epistemic status of our beliefs or values. Second, a genealogy can provide us with functional understanding, since a history of our beliefs, values or institutions can reveal some inherent dynamic (...) or pattern which may be problematically obscured from our view. In this paper, I try to make good on these claims by offering a sketchy genealogy of emancipatory values, or values which call for the liberation of persons from systems of dominance and oppression. The real history of these values, I argue, is both epistemologically vindicatory and functionally enlightening. (shrink)

It is not clear that scholars, when they use the term ‘conspiracy theory’, are in fact interested in investigating the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and belief in them as such. I consider two perspectives found in the fast-growing literature on conspiracy theories: The Faux-pas View and The Neutral View. I argue that there is a difference in scholarly motivation, or at a very minimum a difference in the sustaining motivation for the research paradigms. What the motivations are is much too (...) complex to detail in this paper, and I only give a suggestion to possible ones to consider. However, I maintain that investigating the motivations for - and interest in conspiracy theory research will illuminate why there is disagreements on the definition and conceptualization of the term itself. I argue that our interest will inform our research project, and determine the conceptualization of the term ‘conspiracy theory’, which in turn taints our interpretation of the contemporary exploratory research on the subject. (shrink)

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have fueled widespread academic discourse on the ethics of AI within and across a diverse set of disciplines. One notable subfield of AI ethics is machine ethics, which seeks to implement ethical considerations into AI systems. However, since different research efforts within machine ethics have discipline-specific concepts, practices, and goals, the resulting body of work is pestered with conflict and confusion as opposed to fruitful synergies. The aim of this paper is to explore ways to (...) alleviate these issues, both on a practical and theoretical level of analysis. First, we describe two approaches to machine ethics: the philosophical approach and the engineering approach and show how tensions between the two arise due to discipline specific practices and aims. Using the concept of disciplinary capture, we then discuss potential promises and pitfalls to cross-disciplinary collaboration. Drawing on recent work in philosophy of science, we finally describe how metacognitive scaffolds can be used to avoid epistemological obstacles and foster innovative collaboration in AI ethics in general and machine ethics in particular. (shrink)

Kuhn (1962) proposed an evolutionary model to explain how scientific knowledge is built, based on the concept of paradigm. Even though Kuhn’s model is general, it has been applied to only a few topics in evolutionary biology, almost exclusively to broad-based paradigms. We analyze here, through the lens of Kuhn’s theory, a small-scale paradigm change that occurred with the resolution of the controversy about the mating system of a Mediterranean shrub Phillyrea angustifolia (Oleaceae). We first summarize the different steps of (...) the paradigm change and replace them in the more general context of sex ratio theory. Second, we show how the different steps of the paradigm change can be interpreted by Kuhnian concepts and tools. Finally, we discuss the actual and future status of the new paradigm. (shrink)

To be, or not to be, that is the question…In his wonderful Facts and Mysteries, Martinus Veltman terminates a section with an anecdote: “When quarks were not immediately discovered after the introduction by Gell-Mann he took to calling them symbolic, saying they were indices. In the early seventies I met him at CERN and he again said something in that spirit. I then jumped up, coming down with some impact that made the floor tremble, and asked him: Do I look (...) like a heap of indices? This visibly rattled him, and indeed after that he no more advocated this vision, at least not as far as I know” (see page 240 in Veltman 2003). Although it is probable that Murray Gell-Mann, the inventor of quarks, has changed his mind regarding the reality of his symbols after this tough conversation, even later in the start of eighties the reality of quarks, as basic constituents of protons and neutrons, was a matter of disputes and exchanges (Shrader-Frechette 1982a, b; Albright 1982; Gruender 1982). A g. (shrink)