: This paper first discusses the current historical and philosophical framework forged during the last century to account for both the history and the epistemic status of Newton's theory of general gravitation. It then examines the conflict surrounding this theory at the close of the seventeenth century and the first steps towards the revolutionary shift in rational mechanics in the eighteenth century. From a historical point of view, it shows the crucial contribution of the Cartesian mechanistic philosophy and Leibnizian analytic (...) methods to the emergence of so-called Newtonian mechanics which can also be fairly characterized as a synthetic theory of attraction. From a philosophical standpoint, the paper suggests that the reworking of Newton's theory in the 18th century is better understood in a theoretical framework that reconciles Kuhn's notion of "invisible revolution" rather than his notion of "normal science" with Whewell's ascription of the completion of dynamical studies to the post Newtonian period. (shrink)

This paper takes up Shannon Rodgers’ 2016 critique of curriculum writers’ call for observable verbs, pp. 563–578), and argues that a more effective line of critique should focus not on metaphorical thinking, but on the notion of observation itself, by way of Nietzsche on metaphor, the history of astronomy, the non-existence of dragons and dissuading indigenous people from voting.

One of the most enduring contributions of Sir Karl Popper to the philosophy of science was his deductive approach to the scientific method, as opposed to Hilary Putnam’s absolute faith in science as an inductive process. Popper’s logic of discovery counters the whole inductive procedure that modern science is so often identified with. While the inductive method has generally characterized how scientists commence their work in laboratories, for Popper scientific theories actually start with generalizations inside our mind whose validity the (...) scientific method must test until those come to be falsified. A step further in the scientific method is the function of paradigms that Thomas Kuhn’s revolutionary science has developed. Kuhn’s community and consensus-based approach and Popper’s hypothesis-based approach are both important in the development of science as it is. This paper seeks to show how models of development may be integrated in the above debate in order to derive insightful implications that are crucial to the understanding of economic progress and human development. (shrink)

According to a common line of criticism, Donald Davidson’s argument in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” is invalid because it moves illicitly from the relatively weak thesis that conceptual schemes cannot be incommensurable to the stronger thesis that the idea of a conceptual scheme itself is incoherent. I argue in this paper that such objections fail because they misunderstand the position that Davidson’s argument is intended to rule out. According to the “scheme-content dualism” Davidson targets, conceptual schemes (...) differ only if they are incommensurable with one another. Thus, if Davidson has successfully shown the idea of incommensurability to be incoherent, then he has shown “the very idea of a conceptual scheme” to be incoherent, as well. (shrink)

Sociologists have long recognized the fragmentation our discipline’s knowledge, but few explanations go beyond “new internalist” studies of practices. Abbott’s scholarship in the topic areas of professions and disciplines is synthesized here to highlight a condition identified as “ajurisdiction,” or, the absence of professional responsibility. Ajurisdiction explains sociological fragmentation by situating the development of sociology within broader historical contexts: first, within the history of the academic profession, in general; and, secondly, within wider systems of professions and power. Beginning with the (...) origins of the social sciences in German legal science, this article tracks the historical interactions between professional and academic knowledge to explain sociology’s ajurisdictional condition. The theoretical framework and concept positions the academic profession in a unique position in relation to abstract knowledge, a relation that affects the internal differentiation of knowledge between and within disciplines and professional faculties as demonstrated by the case of sociology and law. (shrink)

This paper argues that scientific studies distinguish themselves from other studies by a combination of their processes, their (knowledge) elements and the roles of these elements. This is supported by constructing a process model. An illustrative example based on Newtonian mechanics shows how scientific knowledge is structured according to the process model. To distinguish scientific studies from research and scientific research, two additional process models are built for such processes. We apply these process models: (1) to argue that scientific progress (...) should emphasize both the process of change and the content of change; (2) to chart the major stages of scientific study development; and (3) to define “science”. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a pattern of development, the significance of which has not been generally recognized. This pattern is characterized by an initial occurrence of what I shall call an overdetermined problem - i.e. a problem with no solution compatible with accepted belief and practice - followed by a resolution of the problem which relies on and exploits a change in what was previously taken as given.

To avoid teleological interpretations, it is important to make a distinction between functions and uses of consciousness, and to address questions concerning the consequences of consciousness. Assumptions about the phylogenetic distribution of consciousness are examined. It is concluded that there is some value in identifying consciousness an exclusively human attribute.

In this article, I will discuss two prominent views on the relevance and irrelevance of ontological investigations for the social sciences, namely, ontological foundationalism and anti-ontological pragmatism. I will argue that both views are unsatisfactory. The subsequent part of the article will introduce an alternative role for ontological projects in the philosophy of the social sciences that fares better in this respect by paying attention to the ontological assumptions of actual social scientific theories, models, and related explanatory practices. I will (...) illustrate and support this alternative through discussion of three concrete cases. (shrink)

Psychophysical scaling models of the form R = f, with R the response and I some intensity of an attribute, all assume that people judge the amounts of an attribute. With simple biases excepted, most also assume that judgments are independent of space, time, and features of the situation other than the one being judged. Many data support these ideas: Magnitude estimations of brightness increase with luminance. Nevertheless, I argue that the general model is wrong. The stabilized retinal image literature (...) shows that nothing is seen if light does not change over time. The classification literature shows that dimensions often combine to produce emergent properties that cannot be described by the elements in the stimulus. These and other effects cannot be adjusted for by simply adding variables to the general model because some factors do not combine linearly. The proposed alternative is that people initially judge the entire stimulus – the object in terms of its environment. This agrees with the constancy literature that shows that objects and their attributes are identified through their relations to other aspects of the scene. That the environment determines judgments is masked in scaling studies where the standard procedure is to hold context constant. In a typical brightness study the essential stimulus might be the intensity of the light or a difference between the light and the background. The two are perfectly confounded. This issue is examined in the case of audition. Judgments of the loudness of a tone depend on how much that tone differs from the previous tone in both pitch and loudness. To judge loudness people first seem to process the stimulus object in terms of differences between it and other aspects in the situation; only then do they assess the feature of interest. Psychophysical judgments will therefore be better interpreted by theories of attention that are based in biology or psychology than those that are based in classical physics. (shrink)

The traditional Chinese idea of t'ien‐jen‐ho‐i (Heaven and humanity in union) implies that humanity has to live in harmony with nature. As science and technology progress, however, the idea appears increasingly outmoded, and it becomes fashionable to talk about overcoming nature. Ironically, though, the further science reaches the more clearly are its limitations exposed. The exploitation of nature not only endangers many life forms on earth but threatens the very existence of the human species. I propose that a reconstruction of (...) the traditional Chinese idea of T'ien‐jen‐ho‐i will help us envisage a new and salutary relation between humanity and nature. (shrink)

Gray's integration of the different levels of description and explanation in his theory is problematic: The introduction of consciousness into his theorising consists of the mind-brain identity assumption, which tells us nothing new. There need not be correlations between levels of description. Gray's account does not extend beyond “brute” correlation. Integration must be achieved in a principled, mutually constraining way.

resumo: Este artigo pretende mostrar que sem a influência de uma filosofia construtivista que eu denomino boa, representada principalmente por Bruno Latour, a elucidação das substâncias químicas teria sido virtualmente impossível. Sem a noção de materiais “artefatuais” cunhada por eles, a Química Moderna seria impensável a partir dos metaparadigmas em uso no campo atual da história e da filosofia da ciência. A tese central que defendo aqui é a de que o construtivismo, tal como definido pelos antropológos da ciência, é (...) uma maneira disfarçada de colocar a histórica filosofia materialista na trilha da discussão histórica e filosófica das ciências e tecnologias e que isso restaura o papel desempenhado pelos materiais usados pelos cientistas para que sejam exatamente o que são. abstract: This paper aims to show that without the influence of a constructivist philosophy I call good, mainly represented by Bruno Latour, the ontological elucidation of the chemical substances would have been virtually impossible. Without the notion of artifactual materials given by them, would be Modern Chemistry unthinkable from the metaparadigms in use in the present field of history and philosophy of science. The central thesis I defended here is that constructivism as defined by the anthropologists of science is a disguised way of sliding historical materialist philosophy into the mainline of philosophical and historical discussion of the sciences and technologies and that those restore the role played by the materials used by sciences to be exactly what they are. (shrink)

Nineteenth and twentieth century philosophies of science have consistently failed to identify any rational basis for the compelling character of scientific analogies. This failure is particularly worrisome in light of the fact that the development and diffusion of certain scientific analogies, e.g. Darwin’s analogy between domestic breeds and naturally occurring species, constitute paradigm cases of good science. It is argued that the interactivist model, through the notion of a partition epistemology, provides a way to understand the persuasive character of compelling (...) scientific analogies without consigning them to an irrational or arational context of discovery. (shrink)

What are scientific theories and how should they be represented? In this article, I propose a causal–structural account, according to which scientific theories are to be represented as sets of interrelated causal and credal nets. In contrast with other accounts of scientific theories (such as Sneedian structuralism, Kitcher’s unificationist view, and Darden’s theory of theoretical components), this leaves room for causality to play a substantial role. As a result, an interesting account of explanation is provided, which sheds light on explanatory (...) unification within a causalist framework. The theory of classical genetics is used as a case study. 1 Introduction2 The Theory of Classical Genetics3 Three Philosophical Accounts of the Theory of Classical Genetics3.1 The structuralist account3.2 Kitcher’s unificationism3.3 Darden and theory change in science4 A Common Lacuna: Where is Causality?5 Woodward’s Interventionist Account of Causation6 Causal Bayes Nets and Their Interrelations6.1 Causal Bayes nets6.2 Relations among causal nets6.3 Credal nets and their interrelations7 The Theory of the Gene and its Causal Graph8 A First Exemplar: Stem Length in Pea Plants8.1 Three crosses on stem length in pea plants8.2 The causal graph for stem length in pea plants8.3 Morgan’s explanatory principles and the credal net for stem length in pea plants9 Explaining Mendel’s Crosses: A Causal–Structural Account10 Monohybrid Crosses with Complete Dominance11 Exemplars,Explanatory Patterns, Generic Credal Nets, and Mechanism Schemas12 Incomplete Dominance13 Anomalies14 Multi-hybrid Crosses with Independent Assortment15 Multi-hybrid Crosses with Linkage and Crossing-Over16 Double Crossing-Over and the Linear Order of the Gene17 Causal–Structural Explanation18 Explanatory Unification19 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

Speaking: from Intention to Articulation Willem J. M. Levelt, 1989 (1993 paperback) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–12137–9(hb), 0–262–62089–8(pb)Rules for Reasoning Richard E. Nisbett (Ed.), 1993 Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates ISBN: 0–8058–1256–3(hb), 0–8085–1257–1 (pb)Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science Alvin I. Goldman, 1993 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–07153–3(hb), 0–262–57100–5(pb)Language Comprehension in Ape and Child, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 233, Vol. 58, Nos 3–4 Sue Savage‐Rumbaugh, Jeannine Murphy, Rose A. Sevcik, Karen E. (...) Brakke, Shelly L. Williams & Duane M. Rumbaugh, with commentary by Elizabeth Bates, and a reply by the authors, 1993 Chicago: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0–226–73542–7Language, Music and Mind Diana Raffman, 1993 Cambridge, MIT Press/Bradford Books ISBN: 0–262–18150–9Psychology of Proof Lance J. Rips, 1994 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–18153–3Human and Machine Thinking P. Johnson‐Laird, 1993 Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum ISBN: 0–8058–0921‐XIntelligent Behavior in Animals and Robots David McFarland & Thomas Bosser, 1993 Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press/ Bradford Books ISBN: 0–262–13293–1The Eye and the Mind: Reflections on Perception and the Problem of Knowledge Charles Landesman, 1993 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN: 0–7923–2586–9The Moral Self GilG. Noam & Thomas E. Wren (Eds), in cooperation with Gertud Nunner‐Winkler & Wolfgang Edelstein, 1993 Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–14052–1The Logic of Discovery: A Theory of the Rationality of Scientific Research Scott A. Kleiner, 1993 Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers ISBN: 0–7923–2371–8Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind S.M. Christenson & D.R. Turner (Eds), 1993 Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum ISBN: 0–805–80931–7. (shrink)

The Gestalt principle of isomorphism reveals the primacy of subjective experience as a valid source of evidence for the information encoded neurophysiologically. This theory invalidates the abstractionist view that the neurophysiological representation can be of lower dimensionality than the percept to which it gives rise.

This paper consists of two sections: first, I return to the question of precisely which contextual factors are at work in metaphorical interpretation, and of the relation between asserted, presupposed and implied information; the upshot of this will be a renewed emphasis on metaphor as a discourse phenomenon. Second, I sketch a preliminary argument as to what a social practice account of metaphor might look like. Recent explorations of the contextual factors involved in the interpretation ofmetaphor make crucial use of (...) David Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives, with its sophisticated treatment of context-dependence, and of the work on assertion developed by Stalnaker and others. All these approaches take contextual factors or parameters like that of speaker, time and place of utterance, etc., as given or primitive. Recent anthropological research, however, suggests that our practices constitute not only the contents of our utterances but also their contexts. Another recent development in linguistic anthropology is an increased attention to so-called language ideologies or metalinguistic beliefs, i.e., folk theories about the character and functioning of language. These insights suggest that metaphor is so thoroughly dependent on variable contextual and metalinguistic factors that it may well dissolve as a natural kind. At the very least, they suggest a shift away from the view of metaphor as a decontextualized sentence- or utterance-level phenomenon occurring in literate practices, which is still tacitly assumed in much literature on the topic. (shrink)

. Is R.S. Peters' way of mentioning women in his texts detrimental to philosophy of education? Some considerations and questions. Ethics and Education: Vol. 7, Creating spaces, pp. 291-302. doi: 10.1080/17449642.2013.767002.

In this paper, we describe four broad ‘meta-methods’ employed in scientific and philosophical research of qualia. These are the theory-centred metamethod, the property-centred meta-method, the argument-centred meta-method, and the event-centred meta-method. Broadly speaking, the theory-centred meta-method is interested in the role of qualia as some theoretical entities picked out by our folk psychological theories; the property-centred meta-method is interested in some metaphysical properties of qualia that we immediately observe through introspection ; the argument-centred meta-method is interested in the role of (...) qualia in some arguments for non-physicalism; the event-centred metamethod is interested in the role of qualia as some natural events whose nature is hidden and must be uncovered empirically. We will argue that the event-centred metamethod is the most promising route to a comprehensive scientific conception of qualia because of the flexibility of ontological and methodological assumptions it can provide. We also reveal the hidden influences of the different meta-methods and in doing so show why consideration of meta-methods has value for the study of consciousness. (shrink)

This article explores how researchers in a scientific research lab co-operate with each other and value these co-operations, using a case study of a life sciences lab as an illustrative example. It explores how researchers within the lab co-operate in three main ways: through their ideas, methods and resources. A core contention of this article is that the values researchers attach to these different ways of co-operating can be assessed on two dimensions: goals and ways of understanding. The goals dimension (...) moves from group goals, manifested in the vision of the lab defined by its principal investigator, to the goals of individual researchers within the lab, often achieved through work on individual projects. Individual goals were more highly valued by researchers in this case study. The ways of understanding dimension moves from theory-based and theory-building research activities, to craft-based activities related to the research lab’s experiments. Theoretical ways of understanding are more highly valued by researchers in this case study. Combined, these two dimensions mean that researchers will value co-operations that support individual goals and theoretical ways of understanding more highly. Idea-based collaborations, individualistic and theoretical in nature, were the most highly valued. Collaborations based on resources, communal and craft-centered, were the least valued in this case study. (shrink)

Misunderstandings often develop when scientists from different backgrounds use the same words (e.g., “selection”) when they mean different things by them. Theorists must therefore choose and define their terms carefully. In addition, proponents of “new” theories need to demonstrate empirically that theirs are more powerful than the existing theories they wish to supplant. Wilson & Sober have not yet done this.

Both scientists and children make important structural discoveries, yet their computational underpinnings are not well understood. Structure discovery has previously been formalized as probabilistic inference about the right structural form—where form could be a tree, ring, chain, grid, etc.. Although this approach can learn intuitive organizations, including a tree for animals and a ring for the color circle, it assumes a strong inductive bias that considers only these particular forms, and each form is explicitly provided as initial knowledge. Here we (...) introduce a new computational model of how organizing structure can be discovered, utilizing a broad hypothesis space with a preference for sparse connectivity. Given that the inductive bias is more general, the model's initial knowledge shows little qualitative resemblance to some of the discoveries it supports. As a consequence, the model can also learn complex structures for domains that lack intuitive description, as well as predict human property induction judgments without explicit structural forms. By allowing form to emerge from sparsity, our approach clarifies how both the richness and flexibility of human conceptual organization can coexist. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to revisit the phlogiston theory to see what can be learned from it about the relationship between scientific realism, approximate truth and successful reference. It is argued that phlogiston theory did to some extent correctly describe the causal or nomological structure of the world, and that some of its central terms can be regarded as referring. However, it is concluded that the issue of whether or not theoretical terms successfully refer is not the key (...) to formulating the appropriate form of scientific realism in response to arguments from theory change, and that the case of phlogiston theory is shown to be readily accommodated by ontic structural realism. (shrink)

Wittgenstein did not claim that the ordinary language concept ‘game’ cannot be defined: he claimed that there are multiple definitions that can be adopted for special purposes, but no single definition applicable to all games. I will defend this interpretation of Wittgenstein’s position by showing its compatibility with a pragmatic argumentative view of definitions, and how this view accounts for the diversity of disagreeing game definitions in definitional disputes.