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)

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.

Epistemology, I will argue, is of crucial importance to the sociology of knowledge— not just by way of definition of the phenomenon under study, but also because approaches to the sociology of knowledge rely on too-often implicit epistemological stances. I will make this argument through a series of categorizations: first, I will classify the field of epistemology into its three main forms; second, I will classify the sociology of knowledge into epistemological categories; third, I will classify the sociology of science (...) into these same categories. All the while, I will be making an argument for an empirical epistemology and "agnostic" studies of knowledge. This article does not cover the field of epistemology exhaustively, but tries to offer an orderly overview of classic positions for the benefit of social scientists. (shrink)

Although evidence-based medicine (EBM) has gained prominence in current medical practice and research, it has also had to deal with a number of problems and inconsistencies. For example, how do clinicians reconcile discordant results of randomized trials or how do they apply results of randomized trials to individual patients? In an attempt to examine such problems in a structured way, this essay describes EBM within a philosophical framework of science. Using this approach, some of the problems and challenges faced by (...) EBM can be explained at a more fundamental level. As well, by employing a similar description of the competing alternative research tradition of clinical medicine, this essay not only highlights the philosophical differences between these two modes of medical practice, but suggests that they, in fact, play a de facto complementary role in current clinical medicine. (shrink)

Paul Feyerabend once made a remark to the effect that his pragmatic theory of observation can be traced back to proposals put forward by leading Logical Empiricists during the height of the protocol sentence debate. In this paper I want to vindicate the systematic side of Feyerabend’s remark and show that a pragmatic theory of observation can in fact be found in Rudolf Carnap’s writings of 1932. I first proceed to dispel a misunderstanding concerning the term “pragmatic” raised by Thomas (...) Oberdan. Following Morris’ and Carnap’s documented usage, I show that the intended meaning of “pragmatic” refers to a specific semiotic relation between users of a language and their environment describable by empirical means. I reconstruct such a pragmatic theory in terms of a detector model that interprets observation sentences as bodily dispositions indicating physical events in the surroundings of the detector. I then proceed to show how Feyerabend’s later theory of observation picks up central features of Carnap’s account and also shares some of the motivations. I conclude by noting how an empirical theory of observation sentences offers a bootstrapping solution to the “basis problem”. (shrink)

This essay presents a careful interpretation of Adorno’s classical text The Essay as Form, published in 1958 as the introduction to his Notes on Literature. Since it thickly condenses many of Adorno’s general views, the Essay poses great hermeneutic challenges to readers. The paper, first, elaborates on the essay more broadly as a genre and identifies a spectrum between science and art each individual essay draws from to forge its particular hybridity. Second, the example is discussed as an epistemologically potent (...) trope oscillating between subsumption and singularity. This internal tension renders the example particularly qualified to serve as the conceptual basis on which interpretative themes in the essay can be discovered. Three lines of interpretation are suggested: poetological for the essay/ Essay’s definition, goal, and method; critical/dialectical for its treatment of concepts and in relation to content; and epistemic for the modern separation of art and science. The conclusion comes back to the issue of exemplarity. (shrink)

Moral rules provide the baseline for ethics, proscribing unacceptable behavior; moral ideals inspire us to act in ways that improve the human condition. Whatever the moral ideals for pure research, science has a practical side so it is important to find a moral ideal to give guidance to more applied research. This article presents a moral ideal for use-inspired research based on Norman Care’s idea of shared-fate individualism This ideal reflects the observation that all human lives, both present and future (...) are tightly coupled and, as a result, research projects should be chosen, where possible, with the goal of service to others. Together with the ideals of the habit of truth and the gift economy, shared-fate individualism provides the basis for a humane ethics of science. (shrink)

It seems natural to think that Carnapian explication and experimental philosophy can go hand in hand. But what exactly explicators can gain from the data provided by experimental philosophers remains controversial. According to an influential proposal by Shepherd and Justus, explicators should use experimental data in the process of ‘explication preparation’. Against this proposal, Mark Pinder has recently suggested that experimental data can directly assist an explicator’s search for fruitful replacements of the explicandum. In developing his argument, he also proposes (...) a novel aspect of what makes a concept fruitful, namely, that it is taken up by the relevant community. In this paper, I defend explication preparation against Pinder’s objections and argue that his uptake proposal conflates theoretical and practical success conditions of explications. Furthermore, I argue that Pinder’s suggested experimental procedure needs substantial revision. I end by distinguishing two kinds of explication projects, and showing how experimental philosophy can contribute to each of them. (shrink)

One of the reasons the history of parapsychology and its ancestor psychical research is intriguing is because it addresses a central issue: the boundaries of science. This article provides an overview of the historiography of parapsychology and presents an approach to investigate the Dutch history of parapsychology contributing to the understanding of this central theme. In the first section the historical accounts provided by psychical researchers and parapsychologists themselves are discussed; next those studies of sociologists and historians understanding parapsychology as (...) deviant and even potentially revolutionary are dealt with; third, more contemporary studies are examined whereby enterprises such as parapsychology are understood as central to the culture in which they arose. On the basis of this analysis a new direction in the historiography of the subject is suggested in the fourth section, centred upon the relation between parapsychology and psychology in the Netherlands throughout the 20th century. In the Netherlands not only were pioneering psychologists such as Gerard Heymans (1857–1930) actively involved in experiments into telepathy, the first professor in parapsychology in the world – Wilhelm Tenhaeff (1894–1981) – was appointed in 1953 at Utrecht University and in the 1970s and 1980s parapsychology had its own research laboratory at Utrecht University in the division of psychology. This unique situation in the Netherlands deserves scholarly attention and makes an interesting case to investigate the much-neglected connections between the fields of psychology and parapsychology in the 20th century. The connections between psychology and parapsychology might help us to understand why parapsychology came to be regarded as a pseudoscience. (shrink)

The possibility of in-breakings of God in science is discussed. A realist philosophy of science is used as a framework in which new paradigms are seen as providing ever better approximations to the true underlying structure of nature, which will be revealed in the eschaton. It is argued that ecology–the study of the earth as a whole–cannot be treated as a natural science because there can be no paradigms for understanding the earth as a whole. Instead technology is used as (...) a means for interacting with God through nature. (shrink)

Research programmes are sets of problems preferred on epistemic grounds and including preferred heuristics for inquiry. Charles Lyell's research programme for biogeograpy includes the problem of explaining the distribution of species constrained by laws governing locomotion and containment of species. Included in the programme are laws governing the supernatural introduction of replacement species. Wallace and Darwin derected arguments against the putative intelligibility of this aspect of Lyell's programme before discovering natural selection, and their defence, at this time of natural laws (...) governing the introduction of new species is interesting as a defence of a noval programme of research, not a defence of a proposed theroy. These arguments are presented and an epistemological foundation is offered for them. 1 The author is indebted to a referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. (shrink)

In this article, I am concerned with the ethical foundations of behavior therapy, that is, with the normative ethics and the meta-ethics underlying behavior therapy. In particular, I am concerned with questions concerning the very possibility of providing an ethical justification for things done in the context of therapy. Because behavior therapists must be able to provide an ethical justification for various actions (if the need arises), certain meta-ethical views widely accepted by behavior therapists must be abandoned: in particular, one (...) must give up ethical subjectivism, ethical skepticism, and ethical relativism. An additional task is to show how it is possible to provide a nonsubjective, nonskeptical, and nonrelativistic moral justification for an ethical statement. Although this is a monumental task, I provide a rough sketch of such a model, one that is congenial to the value judgments underlying behavior therapy. (shrink)

As Gray insists, his comparator model proposes a brute correlation only – of consciousness with septohippocampal output. I suggest that the comparator straddles a feedback loop that boosts the activation ofnovelrepresentations, thus helping them feature in present or recollected experience. Such a role in organizing conscious contents would transcend correlation and help explain how consciousness emerges from brain function.

Is 'development' a concept that properly belongs to mind and morality and, if it does, what account can we give of moral development now that Piagetian and Kohlbergian models are increasingly being abandoned in developmental psychology? In addressing this central issue, it is hoped that the paper will contribute to the quest for a new integrated model of moral functioning, called for in the September 2008 Special Issue of the Journal of Moral Education (37[3]). Our paper argues that the notion (...) of moral development is fully justified, though it does not occur via invariant stages. Rather, each child is an emergent self-organising organism in which development is highly variable, dynamic and often non-linear. By viewing each child as a self-organising being and adopting the notion that moral development is dynamic and emergent from the predilection to value, the paper points towards a new account of moral development that opens up new avenues for educational research and moral education in schools. (shrink)

Although Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty both reject the traditional picture of cultural change in which intellectuals are supposed to have the ‘last word’ on cultural issues and envisage cultural changes as the result of ‘dialogue’ or ‘conversation’ between them and the lay public, they nevertheless end up espousing different pictures of cultural change because of their totally different conception of the role and function of language, truth and rationality in such dialogue. In the first two sections of this article, (...) I will recount Habermas’s critique of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism and the latter’s responses to it so that they can reveal the core issues of the debate. In the third section, I will argue that, as a ‘sociologized version’ of Rorty’s philosophy, Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of social performance provides us with a sociological framework that makes possible a wide range of empirical studies of cultural change. (shrink)

My first book, The Physicists, was conceived when I. I. Rabi visited Princeton in 1961–1962 as a Shreve Fellow in the History Department. Some two years earlier C. P. Snow had published his influential provocation, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, and the academic world was abuzz with initiatives aimed at achieving better literacy in science among liberal arts majors. Rabi was a Nobel laureate in physics at Columbia University and his visit was one of Princeton's efforts to this (...) end. It had been arranged by my mentor, Eric F. Goldman, a historian of modern America who had gotten to know Rabi through their mutual engagement with current issues in American democracy. (shrink)

In his dissection of the 1998 tobacco settlements, W. Kip Viscusi provides a window on how the ostensibly liberal public philosophy behind the modern American regulatory state betrays its foundational commitments. Animated by a moralizing concern with preventing harm to self, and a leftist antagonism towards corporate capitalism, “progressive liberalism” at first foundered in its war against the tobacco industry in the face of traditional liberal counterarguments about individual autonomy, knowledge of risk, and choice. Only when progressive liberals translated their (...) paternalist impulses into science‐centered arguments about ignorance and addiction, which involve barriers to autonomous choice and harm to others, did they succeed in turning the legal and regulatory tide against smoking. This dynamic raises questions about the future of individual autonomy in a science‐centered, progressive‐liberal modern polity. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag wird ausgeführt, daß Poppers Falsifikationskriterium einen logischen Fehler enthält. Die Regeln deduktiver Ableitung sind selbst für ihre Durchführung von induktiver Ableitung abhängig. Um das "Criterion of Flasification" für gültig zu erklären, beruft sich Popper auf diese Regeln deduktiver Ableitung. Es wird weiter gezeigt, daß eine Untersuchung aktueller wissenschaftlicher Gesetze nicht die These beweist, daß die wissenschaftlichen Gesetze universale Feststellungen von unbeschränktem Horizonte in der Zeit und im Zeitraum sind. Die Anerkennung dieser Tatsache scheint im Zusammenhang der wissenschaftlichen (...) Forschung die Wichtigkeit des Problems der Induktion sehr zu verkleinern. (shrink)

One of the features of an encompassing account of language that Charles Taylor examines in Chapter Five, “The Figuring Dimension of Language,” ofThe Language Animalis a special kind of metaphor, which is rooted in the embodiment of humans. Their perspective-taking, their intuition of position in space, etc., provide ‘structural templates’ for thinking and leave their traces in their expressions. Taylor compares these metaphors with paradigms. My paper discusses the differences between the two. Taylor’s example ‘Time Is a Resource’ is understood (...) more deeply if seen as a paradigm, i.e., a set of beliefs and practices, instead of as a ‘structural template,’ i.e., rooted in embodiment.L’une des possibilités de «la dimension figurative du langage» que Charles Taylor examine au chapitre 5 deThe Language Animalest un type particulier de métaphore ancré dans le corps humain. La perspective que les humains adoptent ou, par exemple, l’intuition de leur position dans l’espace fournissent des modèles structurels pour penser et laissent des traces dans nos expressions. Taylor compare ces métaphores à des paradigmes. Dans cet article, je traite des différences entre les deux. L’exemple du «temps comme ressource» mis en évidence par Taylor, ainsi que ses implications, sont mieux compris s’ils sont envisagés comme paradigme, c’est-à-dire comme un ensemble de croyances et de pratiques plutôt que comme un modèle structurel ancré de façon durable dans des corps. (shrink)

A dialectical contradiction can be appropriately described within the framework of classical formal logic. It is in harmony with the law of noncontradiction. According to our definition, two theories make up a dialectical contradiction if each of them is consistent and their union is inconsistent. It can happen that each of these two theories has an intended model. Plenty of examples are to be found in the history of science.

Many authors, including paleobiologists, cladists and so on, adopt a nested hierarchical viewpoint to examine the relationships among different levels of biological organization. Furthermore, species are often considered to be unique entities in functioning evolutionary processes and one of the individuals forming a nested hierarchy.I have attempted to show that such a hierarchical view is inadequate in evolutionary biology. We should define units depending on what we are trying to explain. Units that play an important role in evolution and ecology (...) do not necessarily form a nested hierarchy. Also the relationships among genealogies at different levels are not simply nested. I have attempted to distinguish the different characteristics of passages when they are used for different purposes of explanation. In my analysis, species and monophyletic taxa cannot be uniquely defined as single units that function in ecological and evolutionary processes. (shrink)

Contemporary political theory is fractured in its account of ontology and methods. One prominent fault line is between empirical and normative theory – the former usually called ‘philosophy of social science’, or ‘social-science methodology’, and not ‘theory’ at all. A second fault line exists between analytical and post-modern political theory. These fractures prevent political researchers who engage with the same substantive issues, such as the right of same-sex couples to marry, from speaking to one another in a common language. This (...) paper's first section discusses the history of the fact-value divide in political studies: a history that led to the contemporary state of the discipline. The second section argues that Searle's philosophy provides tools that can bridge this divide. The third section raises normative objections that limit the extent to which one can accept Searle's theory as a fully general account of social and political reality. Although limited in scope, Searle's argument should be welcomed as an attempt to provide a common set of important tools for political researchers on all sides of these debates. (shrink)

Equipoise is an essential condition to justify a clinical trial. The term, describes a state of uncertainty: the data suggest but do not prove a drug's safety and efficacy The only way to resolve this uncertainty is further study In many cases, a clinical trial seems to be the most efficient way to prove safety and efficacy Equipoise is therefore not an esoteric philosophic construct applied to research ethics. Rather, since it is vital for the justification of clinical trials, it (...) is part of how society regulates medical progress. Where there is equipoise, drug design and development proceeds according to Food and Drug Administration and Health and Human Services regulations. When that equipoise ends, a drug is either not approved or becomes standard care. (shrink)

A decade after the completion of the Human Genome Project, the widespread appeal of personalized genomic medicine's vision and potential virtues for health care remains compelling. Advocates argue that our current medical regime “is in crisis as it is expensive, reactive, inefficient, and focused largely on one size fits all treatments for events of late stage disease.” What is revolutionary about this kind of medicine, its advocates maintain, is that it promises to resolve that crisis by simultaneously increasing the ability (...) to be “personalized,” “predictive,” “preventive,” and “participatory.” Some call personalized genomic medicine “P4 Medicine,” inscribing these cardinal virtues into the movement's name. All of these putative virtues have interesting implications for the future of health care. In this essay, we are especially interested in the claims that personalized medicine will lead to a more “participatory” or “patient‐centered” approach to health care, in which patients are “empowered” to take more personal control over their care. The rhetoric of patient empowerment is nothing new in health care, but personalized medicine is an interesting case study because it portrays empowerment as one of its key virtues and as a mechanism for fixing the health care “crisis.”. (shrink)

Group selection may be defined either broadly or narrowly. Narrowly defined group selection may involve either selection for altruism or group selection between alternative evolutionarily stable states. The last variety of group selection is likely to have been particularly important in human evolution.

I carved a massive cake of beeswax into bits and rolled them in my hands until they softened … Going forward I carried wax along the line, and laid it thick on their ears. They tied me up, then, plumb amidships, back to the mast, lashed to the mast, and took themselves again to rowing. Soon, as we came smartly within hailing distance, the two Sirens, noting our fast ship off their point, made ready, and they sang … The lovely (...) voices in ardor appealing over the water made me crave to listen, and I tried to say ‘Untie me!’ to the crew, jerking my brows; but they bent steady to the oars. (shrink)