In 1880, when Oliver Wendell Holmes (later to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) criticized the logical theology of law articulated by Christopher Columbus Langdell (the first Dean of Harvard Law School), neither Holmes nor Langdell was aware of the revolution in logic that had begun, the year before, with Frege's Begriffsschrift. But there is an important element of truth in Holmes's insistence that a legal system cannot be adequately understood as a system of axioms and corollaries; and (...) this element of truth is not obviated by the more powerful logical techniques that are now available. (shrink)

In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville makes two claims about scientific inquiry in democracies: first, that in the abstract there is nothing essential about democracies that prevents them from achieving in science; and second, that in practice democracies will bend science toward practical applications. This paper will examine the nature of the compatibility of science with democracy within a literature roughly called ‘liberal social thought’, using de Tocqueville's claims as an organizing principle. In assessing the first claim, the paper identifies (...) three tensions between science and democracy—the populist, the plutocratic, and the exclusionary—the last of which is an essential tension, as it is grounded in the exclusionary nature of the rationality common to both science and liberal democracy. If one rejects the rationality of scientific inquiry, one risks being excluded from political inquiry and political rights. In assessing the second claim, the paper views the professionalization of science and the idea of a ‘republic of science’ as embodying the exclusionary tension and thus as being undemocratic. The exclusionary tension underlies many current conflicts in science and democratic governance. (shrink)

The assumed difference and continuing estrangement between political philosophy and political science is a relatively recent development. Both fields sprang from closely entwined concerns about democracy and matters of social and political justice, and today both must still confront their practical as well as cognitive relationship to their subject matter. This issue, however, has receded into the background of these discourses. Ludwig Wittgenstein's vision of philosophy is in effect a vision of social inquiry. His work, when viewed from this perspective, (...) prompts us to reconsider the logical status of various modes of political inquiry: how can these practices, descriptively and normatively, do justice to their subject matter? How can they deal with such foundational issues as the nature of social phenomena, the concepts of representation and interpretation, the problem of knowledge of other minds and what is involved in making explanatory and evaluative judgments about the objects of inquiry? (shrink)

It is becoming clear that many of today’s management theories are inadequate theoretically and practically to move understanding, scholarship, and practice to where it needs to be for scholars, business leaders, and policy makers to cope with an increasing fraught world. This Special Issue’s focus is on sustainability. Sustainability challenges need to incorporate multidisciplinary interventions and the trans- and interdisciplinary nature of solutions. To actively seek transformation toward sustainability, fundamental and innovative short-term as well as long-term efforts are required in (...) society, economy, technology, and education, including our understanding of human behavior and attitudes toward the management of the environment. This introductory piece presents natural science theories as a promising approach for achieving progress toward transformation for sustainability. (shrink)

W. V. O. Quine is generally seen as one of the foremost empiricists of the twentieth century. For large parts of his career, the label “empiricist” is accurate; in his mature work, however, he integrated decidedly antiempiricist elements in his epistemology. From The Roots of Reference onward, he enlists natural selection and innate cognitive structures to ensure that scientific concepts have a “degree of objective validity.” From From Stimulus to Science onward, he also explains the very possibility of communication via (...) a preestablished harmony of innate cognitive structures that is guaranteed by natural selection. This article reconstrues the reasons that compelled Quine to these commitments, and it details the development of Quine’s thinking on these topics across more than 3 decades; in particular, the article argues that recognizing that so-called stimulus meanings are private decisively shaped Quine’s views. By means of a critical evaluation, the article argues that natural selection can make plausible that scientific concepts have a degree of objective validity—if this Quinean claim is properly understood; in contrast, the article suggests, with recourse to research by Robert C. Richardson, that it is doubtful whether natural selection can underpin the preestablished harmony that Quine requires to explain communication. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article reviews a conversation between business ethicists and feminist scholars begun in the early 1990s and traces the development of that conversation in relation to feminist theory. A bibliographic analysis of the business ethics and corporate social responsibility literatures over a twenty-five-year period elucidates the degree to which gender has been a salient concern, the methodologies adopted, and the ways in which gender has been analyzed. Identifying significant limitations to the incorporation of feminist theory in these literatures, we discuss (...) how feminist scholarship relating to behavior, organizations, and economics could be integrated. We suggest that a better integration of feminist theory would strengthen BE/CSR research, and point to new research directions and agendas arising from our approach. (shrink)

Our scientific theories, like our cognitive structures in general, consist of propositions linked by evidential, explanatory, probabilistic, and logical connections. Those theoretical webs ‘impinge on the world at their edges,’ subject to a continuing barrage of incoming evidence. Our credences in the various elements of those structures change in response to that continuing barrage of evidence, as do the perceived connections between them. Here we model scientific theories as Bayesian nets, with credences at nodes and conditional links between them modelled (...) as conditional probabilities. We update those networks, in terms of both credences at nodes and conditional probabilities at links, through a temporal barrage of random incoming evidence. Robust patterns of punctuated equilibrium, suggestive of ‘normal science’ alternating with ‘paradigm shifts,’ emerge prominently in that change dynamics. The suggestion is that at least some of the phenomena at the core of the Kuhnian tradition are predictable in the typical dynamics of scientific theory change captured as Bayesian nets under even a random evidence barrage. (shrink)

It is argued that while quantum mechanics contains nonlocal or entangled states, the instantaneous or nonlocal influences sometimes thought to be present due to violations of Bell inequalities in fact arise from mistaken attempts to apply classical concepts and introduce probabilities in a manner inconsistent with the Hilbert space structure of standard quantum mechanics. Instead, Einstein locality is a valid quantum principle: objective properties of individual quantum systems do not change when something is done to another noninteracting system. There is (...) no reason to suspect any conflict between quantum theory and special relativity. (shrink)

In recent decades, postmodernists and sociologists of science have argued that science is just one of many human activities with social and political aims -- comparable to, say, religion or art. They have questioned the objectivity of science, and whether it has any unique ability to find the truth. Not surprisingly, such claims have evoked a negative response from proponents of the traditional view of science; the debate between the two sides has been called the science wars. In the debate, (...) scientists have made few attempts to meet the postmodern critique on its own grounds, through serious reflection on the everyday practice of science. Yet that is the only way to understand the nature of science and the features that distinguish science from other activities. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between scientific knowledge and common sense intuitions as a complement to Hoyningen-Huene’s account of systematicity. On one hand, Hoyningen-Huene embraces continuity between these in his characterization of scientific knowledge as an extension of everyday knowledge, distinguished by an increase in systematicity. On the other, he argues that scientific knowledge often comes to deviate from common sense as science develops. Specifically, he argues that a departure from common sense is a price we may have to pay (...) for increased systematicity. I argue that to clarify the relation between common sense and scientific reasoning, more attention to the cognitive aspects of learning and doing science is needed. As a step in this direction, I explore the potential for cross-fertilization between the discussions about conceptual change in science education and philosophy of science. Particularly, I examine debates on whether common sense intuitions facilitate or impede scientific reasoning. While contending that these debates can balance some of the assumptions made by Hoyningen-Huene, I suggest that a more contextualized version of systematicity theory could supplement cognitive analysis by clarifying important organizational aspects of science. (shrink)

The last century has witnessed a succession of revolutionary transformations in the discipline of biology. The rapid expansion of our understanding of life and its nature has however had curiously little impact on the way that questions about life and its significance have been discussed by philosophers. This paper explores the answers that biology provides to central questions about our existence, and examines why the substitution of causal explanations for teleological ones appears natural and satisfying in the case of physical (...) theory, but meets widespread resistance in the case of biology. (shrink)

The “practice turn” in philosophy of science has strengthened the connections between philosophy and scientific practice. Apart from reinvigorating philosophy of science, this also increases the relevance of philosophical research for science, society, and science education. In this paper, we reflect on our extensive experience with teaching mandatory philosophy of science courses to science students from a range of programs at University of Copenhagen. We highlight some of the lessons we have learned in making philosophy of science “fit for teaching” (...) outside of philosophy circles by taking selected cases from the students’ own field as the starting point. We argue for adapting philosophy of science teaching to particular audiences of science students, and discuss the benefits of drawing on research within science education to inform curriculum and course design. This involves reconsidering teaching resources, assumptions about students, intended learning outcomes, and teaching formats. We also argue that to make philosophy of science relevant and engaging to science students, it is important to consider their potential career trajectories. By anticipating future contexts and situations in which methodological, conceptual, and ethical questions could be relevant, philosophy of science can demonstrate its value in the education of science students. (shrink)

Ausgehend von der Gegenüberstellung der Wissenschaftlichkeit der Naturwissenschaften und der Geisteswissenschaften wird argumentiert, daß Wissenschaftlichkeit nur auf der Basis einer Zusammenstellung wissenschaftstheoretischer, wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher und wissenschaftssoziologischer Kriterien definiert werden kann. Eine solche dreiteilige Definition wird skizziert, und es wird behauptet, daß dies gültig sowohl für die Naturwissenschaften als auch für die Geisteswissenschaften ist. Es folgt daraus, daß es im Prinzip keine Verschiedenheit zwischen der Wissenschaftlichkeit der einen Basiswissenschaft und der anderen gibt. Die Formulierung dreier normativer Kriterien für Wissenschaft als solche schließt (...) den Artikel ab. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the representation in academic journal articles and textbooks of an organisation theory. In the case of Burns’ and Stalker’s book The Management of Innovation (1961,1966), summaries of the text by other scholars have arguably differed from the original authors and among themselves in their emphases. Similar points have been made about representations of other theorists such as Kurt Lewin and, perhaps most famously, Adam Smith. They all raise issues about the meanings of texts and where (...) such meanings lie: with the author, the reader, the text itself or perhaps some combination of these. They also raise questions about whether texts can be shown to have definitive meanings; and if not, whether there are any criteria for adjudicating on the validity of varied interpretations. Representations by textbook writers are analysed and questions about the meaning of texts raised by ‘structuralist’ and ‘deconstructionist’ writers examined. Their writings beg certain questions about textual representations. Perhaps the most extreme of these views is Barthes’ concept of the ‘death of the author’. Like Barthes, Derrida argues, for the reasons mentioned above, that there is no underlying, final decipherable meaning in a text, but gives more credence to the role of the author, accepting the validity of the author’s consciousness and intentions as one of the sources of meaning in texts. There are also other sources: the situatedness and historical context of the text and the text itself. Derrida’s concept of ‘différance’ requires the reader to engage in an analysis of the text which offers limitless possibilities for interpretation and a renunciation of the certainty of truth, because the meaning of a text may extend beyond the limits of our knowledge at any one time. His notion of the ‘logic of supplementarity’ is a further means to analyse texts, as it also disprivileges obvious or overt meanings in texts by overturning hierarchy in oppositions and questioning univocal definitions of meaning. Questions inspired by these and other writers give rise to an exploration of who is speaking in the text; which subject matter is represented as central and which as marginal; binary oppositions within the text and intertextual connections. The paper then begins the more ambitious task of answering the broader question as to whether it can be shown that there are more and less ‘representative’ or ‘stronger’ interpretations of a text. (shrink)

The inclusion of the practice of “developing and using models” in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and in the Next Generation Science Standards provides an opportunity for educators to examine the role this practice plays in science and how it can be leveraged in a science classroom. Drawing on conceptions of models in the philosophy of science, we bring forward an agent-based account of models and discuss the implications of this view for enacting modeling in science classrooms. Models, according (...) to this account, can only be understood with respect to the aims and intentions of a cognitive agent, not solely in terms of how they represent phenomena in the world. We present this contrast as a heuristic—models of versus models for—that can be used to help educators notice and interpret how models are positioned in standards, curriculum, and classrooms. (shrink)

Cognitive studies of science and technology have had a long history of largely independent research projects that have appeared in multiple outlets, but rarely together. The emergence of a new International Society for Psychology of Science and Technology suggests that this is a good time to put some of the latest work in this area into topiCS in a way that will both acquaint readers with the cutting edge in this domain and also give them a hint of its history. (...) One core theme includes how scientists, inventors, and engineers represent and solve problems; another, related theme is the extent to which they distribute and share cognition. Methodologies include fine‐grained studies of historical records, protocols of working scientists, observations and comparisons of engineering science laboratories, and computational simulations designed both to serve as research tools and also to improve scientific problem‐solving. The series of articles will conclude with the Associate Editor’s suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, I highlight the importance of models and social structure to Kuhn’s conception of science, and then use these elements to sketch a Kuhnian classification of scientific controversies. I show that several important sorts of non-revolutionary scientific disagreements were both identified and analyzed in Structure. Ultimately, I contend that Kuhn’s conception of science supports an approach to scientific controversies that has the potential to both reveal the importantly different sources of scientific disagreements and to provide useful resources for (...) understanding their endurance and eventual termination. Several brief examples are used to suggest the power of a Kuhnian analysis and this analysis is contrasted with several more contemporary alternatives. (shrink)

This paper adapts Kuhn’s conceptual framework to developmental episodes in the theory and practice of medicine. Previous attempts to understand the reception of Ignaz Semmelweis’s work on puerperal fever in Kuhnian terms are used as a starting point. The author identifies some limitations of these attempts and proposes a new way of understanding the core Kuhnian notions of “paradigm,” “progress,” and “revolution” in the context of a socially embedded technoscience such as medicine.

Evolutionary biologists, evolutionary epistemologists, and biosemioticians have demonstrated that organisms not merely adapt to an external world, but that they actively construct their environmental, sociocultural, and cognitive niches. Denis Noble demonstrates that such is no different for those organisms that engage in science, and he lays bare several crucial assumptions that define the scientific dogmas and practices of evolutionary biology.

Scientific publications depict science as an orderly endeavour and the epitome of rationality. In contrast, scientific practice is messy and not strictly rational. Here, I analyse this inconsistency, which is recurrent, and try to clarify its meaning for the functioning of science. The discussion is based on a review of relevant literature and detailed analysis of the role of each of the three intervening elements, the scientist, his/her practice and the scientific publication, with an emphasis on the circular mode of (...) the latter’s creation. This way, I will discuss the nature, causes and relevance of the inconsistency. That corresponds to answering three questions, respectively: ‘what are the characteristics of the inconsistency?’, ‘what are its origins?’ and ‘how could it be interpreted within a model for the structure and functioning of science?’ From this discussion it is concluded that, contrary to the negative character generally attributed to it, the inconsistency between practice and reporting is part of the production mechanism of science. (shrink)

Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors largely followed this lead, so the history of epistemology, down to our own time, has been a predominantly individualist affair.

Definitions of stronger and weaker versions of physical realism are offered, The first relating to the existence of physical objects and the second to the independence of their properties. It is argued that recent debates about the commensurability and convergence of scientific theories and the causal theory of reference are irrelevant to the truth of these theses, Although their proponents seem to think them linked. It is then argued that support for realist positions must be inductive. Such support is provided (...) for both the weaker and stronger theses. (shrink)

Normative theories can be useful in developing descriptive theories, as when normative subjective expected utility theory is used to develop descriptive rational choice theory and behavioral game theory. “Ought” questions are also the essence of theories of moral reasoning, a domain of higher mental processing that could not survive without normative considerations.

In this paper, I elaborate on the very political dimension of epistemology that is opened up by the radical change of focus initiated by constructivism: from science as knowledge to science as practice. In a first step, this brings me to claim that science is political in its own right, thereby drawing on Mouffe and Laclau’s framework of radical democracy and its central notion of antagonism to make explicit what is meant by ‘the political.’ Secondly, I begin to explore what (...) this intrinsic political dimension of science might entail for democratic thought. I do so by connecting my preliminary explorations in the field of science with Andrew Feenberg’s elaborate frame of thought on the democratization of technology. Interestingly, Feenberg is one of the few thinkers who have connected questions of power and ideology, typically treated of within the field of political theory, with a constructivist approach to technological progress. In this sense, this paper can be seen as a first attempt to expand Feenberg’s framework of democratic rationalization from the world of technology to the world of science. (shrink)

Although cognitive science started in the 1970s as a multidisciplinary field with the goal of becoming an interdisciplinary one over time, it is now dominated by cognitive psychology. The question becomes whether this matters, and if it does, what should cognitive scientists do about it? I propose that the multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity of cognitive science does matter because it leads to potential generation of new ideas, models, and methods. I offer a few recommendations for reforming cognitive science based, in part, (...) on the recent 41st annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society that sought to reopen cognitive science to minority disciplines comprising cognitive science. (shrink)

An interpretation is given of John Dewey's views about “realism” in metaphysics, and of how these views relate to contemporary debates. Dewey rejected standard formulations of realism as a general metaphysical position, and interpreters have often been taken him to be sympathetic to some form of verificationism or constructivism. I argue that these interpretations are mistaken, as Dewey's unease with standard formulations of realism comes from his philosophical emphasis on intelligent control of events, by means of ordinary action. Because of (...) his views about relations, Dewey's views in this area do risk collapsing into an overly holistic position. I discuss how these problems might be avoided, and consider also how Dewey's views about naturalism and realism might usefully inform ongoing work. (shrink)

This paper attempts to delineate a kind of realism, which incorporates some anti-realistic insights regarding the perspective, situated, and historical character of our forms of knowing and being in the world, and which resonates with the basic tenets of Christian theism. The first part of the paper analyzes the challenges anti-realism poses to Christian theism, particularly regarding the role, which the doctrine of creation played in securing the correspondence theory of truth as well as the fundamental experience of God as (...) the foundation of order and meaning. Using Heidegger’s hermeneutics in the second part, it is shown that epistemic pluralism can be made compatible with realism. Given that this form of hermeneutic realism still has problems with integrating the transcendence of God, as well as his/ her presence and action in the “world,” the notion of continuous co-creation as the basis for a pluralist realism that is amenable to Christian theism is explored in the final part. (shrink)

The independence of research is a key strategic issue of modern societies. Dealing with it appropriately poses legal, economic, political, social and cultural problems for society, which have been studied by the corresponding disciplines and are increasingly the subject of reflexive discourses of scientific communities. Unfortunately, problems of independence are usually framed in disciplinary contexts without due consideration of other perspectives’ relevance or possible contributions. To overcome these limitations, we review disciplinary perspectives and findings on the independence of research and (...) identify interdisciplinary prospects that could inform a research programme. (shrink)

Ontic structural realism (OSR) claims that all there is to the world is structure. But how can this slogan be turned into a worked-out metaphysics? Here I consider one potential answer: a metaphysical framework known as generalism (Dasgupta, 2009, 2016). According to the generalist, the most fundamental description of the world is not given in terms of individuals bearing properties, but rather, general facts about which states of affairs obtain. However, I contend that despite several apparent similarities between the positions, (...) generalism is unable to capture the two main motivations for OSR. I suggest instead that OSR should be construed as a meta-metaphysical position. (shrink)

Ontic structural realism claims that all there is to the world is structure. But how can this slogan be turned into a worked-out metaphysics? Here I consider one potential answer: a metaphysical framework known as ‘generalism’. According to the generalist, the most fundamental description of the world is not given in terms of individuals bearing properties, but rather, general facts about which states of affairs obtain. However, I contend that despite several apparent similarities between the positions, generalism is unable to (...) capture the two main motivations for OSR. I suggest instead that OSR should be construed as a meta-metaphysical position. 1Introduction 2Motivations 2.1Theory change 2.2Permutation invariance 3Metaphysics 4Generalism 4.1Quantifier generalism 4.2Algebraic generalism 5Why Generalism Is Not Ontic Structural Realism 6Ontic Structural Realism as Meta-metaphysics 7Conclusion. (shrink)

The difficulty to pin down the philosophical content of structuralism depends on the fact that it operates on an implicit metaphysics; such a metaphysics can be best unfolded by examining Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist critique of it. The essay argues that both structuralism and Derrida’s critique rely on holistic premises. From an initial externalist definition of structure, structuralism’s metaphysics emerges as a kind of ‘immanent’ holism, similar to the one pursued, in the contemporary analytic panorama, by Donald Davidson. By contrast, Derrida’s (...) deconstructionist critique appears engaged in a ‘quasi-transcendental’ version of holism, which the author analyzes in connection with Martin Heidegger’s notion of Verwindung, or twisted overcoming. (shrink)

Gerald Holton has famously described Einstein’s career as a philosophical “pilgrimage”. Starting on “the historic ground” of Machian positivism and phenomenalism, following the completion of general relativity in late 1915, Einstein’s philosophy endured (a) a speculative turn: physical theorizing appears as ultimately a “pure mathematical construction” guided by faith in the simplicity of nature and (b) a realistic turn: science is “nothing more than a refinement ”of the everyday belief in the existence of mind-independent physical reality. Nevertheless, Einstein’s mathematical constructivism (...) that supports his unified field theory program appears to be, at first sight, hardly compatible with the common sense realism with which he countered quantum theory. Thus, literature on Einstein’s philosophy of science has often struggled in finding the thread between ostensibly conflicting philosophical pronouncements. This paper supports the claim that Einstein’s dialog with Émile Meyerson from the mid 1920s till the early 1930s might be a neglected source to solve this riddle. According to Einstein, Meyerson shared (a) his belief in the independent existence of an external world and (b) his conviction that the latter can be grasped only by speculative means. Einstein could present his search for a unified field theory as a metaphysical-realistic program opposed to the positivistic-operationalist spirit of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Recently, a book was published, the sole purpose of which was to discourage researchers from using the scientific phenomenological method. The author had previously been critical of nurses who had used the scientific phenomenological method but in the new book he goes after the originators of different methods of scientific phenomenological research and attempts to criticize them severely. In this review I defend only the scientific phenomenological method that is strictly based upon the thought of Edmund Husserl. Given the entirely (...) negative project of only critiquing phenomenologically grounded scientific research, one would expect the author to be sensitive to the cautions historians and philosophers of science speak about when one attempts to criticize concepts and procedures that belong to a different research community. Paley, an empiricist, uses empirical criteria to criticize phenomenological work.Moreover, given the entirely negative project of critiquing phenomenologically grounded scientific research one would expect the author to be knowledgeable about phenomenology and the innovative research practices used by a new research community. However, the author has only a thin, superficial understanding of phenomenology. One gets the impression that he only reads phenomenology in order to critique it. He displays an outsider’s understanding of it which means that his criticisms of it are faulty because he does not know how to think and dwell within the phenomenological framework; he does not understand “discovery-oriented” research and he keeps judging such research according to criteria from the “context of verification” perspective which are the wrong criteria for “discovery-oriented” research; he denigrates and reduces nursing research strategies because he interprets them to be based on pragmatic motivations only. He does not even grant that nurses can have authentic scientific motivations for seeking phenomenologically based methods; he uses unfair rhetorical strategies in the sense that he uses strategies himself that he criticizes when others use them. The review below documents what has been summarized here. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers of science have produced an exciting array of works in the last several years, from critiques of androcentrism in traditional science to theories about what might constitute feminist science. I suggest here another possibility: that gynocentric science has existed all along, then the task of identifying a feminist alternative to androcentric science should be a suitable candidate for empirical investigation. Such empirical investigation could provide a solid ground for further theorizing about feminist science at a time when that (...) solid ground is looking rather necessary. (shrink)

This work takes a stand on whether Wallace should be regarded as co-author of the theory of natural selection alongside Darwin as he is usually considered on behalf of his alleged essential contribution to the conception of the theory. It does so from a perspective unexplored thus far: we will argue for Darwin’s priority based on a rational reconstruction of the theory of natural selection as it appears in the writings of both authors. We show that the theory does not (...) appear in exactly the same manner in the writings of each of its alleged co-discoverers: tough we find the same fundamental elements in both works, even in Darwin’s early texts, we discern a more complex unifying and ramified structure than the one we find in Wallace’s Ternate manuscript. Even when we think the badge of the “Darwin–Wallace” theory is well deserved, the unifying force of Darwin’s version has proved to be one of the keys for the ulterior success of the so-called Darwinian revolution in Biology. (shrink)