En el presente trabajo analizamos críticamente el modo en que el Estructuralismo Empirista de van Fraassen caracteriza la relación de representación entre las teorías y los fenómenos. Nuestro objetivo es ofrecer argumentos que destaquen el papel del objeto en la construcción de modelos de datos. Asimismo, nos proponemos mostrar que la opción metodológica sugerida en su obra reciente resulta insuficiente para recuperar un vínculo plausible entre los modelos de datos y los fenómenos.

Recent studies of scientific interaction based on agent-based models suggest that a crucial factor conducive to efficient inquiry is what Zollman has dubbed ‘transient diversity’. It signifies a process in which a community engages in parallel exploration of rivaling theories lasting sufficiently long for the community to identify the best theory and to converge on it. But what exactly generates transient diversity? And is transient diversity a decisive factor when it comes to the efficiency of inquiry? In this paper we (...) examine the impact of different conditions on the efficiency of inquiry, as well as the relation between diversity and efficiency. This includes certain diversity-generating mechanisms previously proposed in the literature, as well as some factors that have so far been neglected. This study is obtained via an argumentation-based ABM. Our results suggest that cautious decision-making does not always have a significant impact on the efficiency of inquiry while different evaluations underlying theory-choice and different social networks do. Moreover, we find a correlation between diversity and a successful performance of agents only under specific conditions, which indicates that transient diversity is sometimes not the primary factor responsible for efficiency. Altogether, when comparing our results to those obtained by structurally different ABMs based on Zollman’s work, the impact of specific factors on efficiency of inquiry, as well as the role of transient diversity in achieving efficiency, appear to be highly dependent on the underlying model. (shrink)

Los científicos tratan de persuadir a sus colegas y, en última instancia, al conjunto de la sociedad, para que acepten sus tesis, descubrimientos y propuestas. Desarrollan para ello una serie de estrategias que pueden ser estudiadas como un “juego de persuasión” en el que intervienen, además de los procesos de argumentación formal e informal típicamente estudiados por la lógica y metodología de la ciencia, aspectos tradicionalmente considerados “sociológicos”. En este artículo se analiza el debate sobre la ciencia del cambio climático (...) como un juego de este tipo, desde un enfoque inferencialista, sobre la base del esquema presentado en Zamora Bonilla (2006a). (shrink)

Scientific and political developments of the early twentieth century led Michael Polanyi to study the role of the scientist in research and the interaction between the individual scholar and the surrounding conditions in community and society. In his concept of “personal knowledge” he gave the theory and history of science an anthropological turn. In many instances of the history of sciences, research is driven by a commitment to beliefs and values. Society plays the role of authority and communicative backdrop that (...) presupposes individual liberty. As a system of beliefs science is rooted in community and also in history. However, as soon as fellow humans become the objects of research, their appeal transcends the researcher. Consequently, the history of human endeavor reveals a “firmament” of standards and obligations which represent an ontological reality, for which Polanyi invokes Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of noosphere. (shrink)

THE RHETORIC OF ECONOMICS by Donald N. McCloskey Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985; 229 pp., $21.50.

When he formulated the program of neurophenomenology, Francisco Varela suggested a balanced methodological dissolution of the hard problem of consciousness. I show that his dissolution is a paradigm which imposes itself onto seemingly opposite views, including materialist approaches. I also point out that Varela's revolutionary epistemological ideas are gaining wider acceptance as a side effect of a recent controversy between hermeneutists and eliminativists. Finally, I emphasize a structural parallel between the science of consciousness and the distinctive features of quantum mechanics. (...) This parallel, together with the former convergences, point towards the common origin of the main puzzles of both quantum mechanics and the philosophy of mind: neglect of the constitutive blindspot of objective knowledge. (shrink)

In a thought experiment we want to test how the emergence of adult neural stem cells could constitute an example for a scientific revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. In his major work, The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (Kuhn 1996), the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, states that scientific progress is not a cumulative process, but new theories appear by a rather revolutionary sequence of events. Kuhn built his theory on landmark events (...) taken from chemistry and physics, lacking examples from biology. Beginning with Ramon y Cajal’s famous quote, no new neurons after birth , from the early years of the twentieth century, and Reynolds and Weiss’s conflicting finding in 1992 of adult neural stem cells giving rise to new neurons, we will test how the finding of neural stem cells in the adult brain matches with Kuhn’s theory. The pivotal problem of defining a paradigm will be our main focus, since the emergence of adult neural stem cells has been acclaimed by the scientific community as the rebuttal of Ramon y Cajal’s paradigm. (shrink)

This paper presents a new modal logic for ceteris paribus preferences understood in the sense of "all other things being equal". This reading goes back to the seminal work of Von Wright in the early 1960's and has returned in computer science in the 1990' s and in more abstract "dependency logics" today. We show how it differs from ceteris paribus as "all other things being normal", which is used in contexts with preference defeaters. We provide a semantic analysis and (...) several completeness theorems. We show how our system links up with Von Wright's work, and how it applies to game-theoretic solution concepts, to agenda setting in investigation, and to preference change. We finally consider its relation with infinitary modal logics. (shrink)

This paper examines the epistemological significance of the present situation of underdetermination in quantum mechanics. After analyzing this underdetermination at three levels---formal, ontological, and methodological---the paper considers implications for a number of variants of the thesis of scientific realism in fundamental physics and reassesses Lakatos‘ characterization of progress in physical theory in light of the present situation. Next, this paper considers the implications of underdetermination for Weinberg’s ‘‘dream of a final theory.’’ Finally, the paper concludes by suggesting how one might (...) still think of realism and progress in fundamental physics despite the possibility of persistent underdetermination in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

We will examine Kepler's use of a relation between velocity and distance from a centre of circular motion. This relation plays an essential role, through a derivation in chapter 40 of the Astronomia Nova, in the presentation of the Area Law of planetary motion. Kepler transcends ancient and contemporary applications of the distance-velocity relation by connecting it with his metaphysical commitment to the causal role of the Sun. His second main innovation is to replace the astronomical models of his predecessors (...) with an account that derives trajectories from physical principles. In this paper we restrict our attention primarily to the first 40 chapters of Kepler's Astronomia Nova. Hence, we do not discuss Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. (shrink)

Human knowledge is a phenomenon whose roots extend from the cultural, through the neural and the biological and finally all the way down into the Precambrian “primordial soup.” The present paper reports an attempt at understanding this Greater System of Knowledge (GSK) as a hierarchical nested set of selection processes acting concurrently on several different scales of time and space. To this end, a general selection theory extending mainly from the work of Hull and Campbell is introduced. The perhaps most (...) drastic change from previous similar theories is that replication is revealed as a composite function consisting of what is referred to as memory and synthesis. This move is argued to drastically improve the fit between theory and human-related knowledge systems. The introduced theory is then used to interpret the subsystems of the GSK and their interrelations. This is done to the end of demonstrating some of the new perspectives offered by this view. (shrink)

This article concerns the notion of living bodies that Spinoza develops in the Ethics (published posthumously in 1677). While commentators have emphasized the relevance of Spinoza’s works for contemporary physiology, they have neglected to study Spinoza’s own views on this topic. My aim is to draw attention to the specific parti pris that underlies Spinoza’s passages on anatomy. To do so, I first compare Spinoza’s claims on human body with the conceptions developed in his immediate historical environment. Then, I propose (...) to draw a parallel between Lakatos’s notion of “negative heuristics” and the high level of generalization Spinoza demonstrates in his propositions on the human body. This parallel allows me to show how Spinoza’s critical remarks on our knowledge of human body have heuristic value. (shrink)

Modern epistemology is in the peculiar position of retaining its trust in man’s ability to acquire knowledge without being capable of specifying the reasons for our gnosis success. Popper was the first to state that any conclusion concerning the possibility or impossibility of knowing is a transcendental statement and he states, also, that man reaches knowledge while trying to guess. In my opinion, we know things because we assume to have always been aware of them, in the sense that some (...) form of immediate awareness has promptly enabled us to perceive them, identify them, use them. But one needs to ascertain whether the reason is the most suitable faculty to ensure the positive development of knowledge. At last, Kuhn claims the impossibility of comparing different theories. But if we establish a comparison between theories in terms of their complexity, then we must admit that there occurs some progress. (shrink)

The concepts of placebos and placebo effects refer to extremely diverse phenomena. I recommend dissolving the concepts of placebos and placebo effects into loosely related groups of specific mechanisms, including (potentially among others) expectation-fulfillment, classical conditioning, and attentional-somatic feedback loops. If this approach is on the right track, it has three main implications for the ethics of informed consent. First, because of the expectation-fulfillment mechanism, the process of informing cannot be considered independently from the potential effects of treatment. Obtaining informed (...) consent influences the effects of treatment. This provides support for the authorized concealment and authorized deception paradigms, and perhaps even for outright deceptive placebo use. Second, doctors may easily fail to consider the potential benefits of conditioning, leading them to misjudge the trade-off between beneficence and autonomy. Third, how attentional-somatic feedback loops play out depends not only on the content of the informing process but also on its framing. This suggests a role for libertarian paternalism in clinical practice. (shrink)

Virtue ethics has been challenged on empirical grounds by philosophical interpreters of situationist social psychology. Challenges are necessarily challenges to something or other, so it’s only possible to understand the situationist challenge to virtue ethics if we have an antecedent grasp on virtue ethics itself. To this end, I first identify the non-negotiable “hard core” of virtue ethics with the conjunction of nine claims, arguing that virtue ethics does make substantive empirical assumptions about human conduct. Next, I rearticulate the situationist (...) challenge in light of these nine claims. I then turn to a discussion of specifications of several responses typically made by defenders of virtue ethics against the situationist challenge, arguing that most of them either are unsound or give up one of the elements in the hard core. A few, however, survive this criticism, and so I conclude by suggesting ways in which the situationist challenge might be not so much resisted as co-opted. Situational influences can be used to help people simulate virtue, a phenomenon I call factitious virtue. (shrink)

The F-twist is giving way to the methodology of scientific research programs. Milton Friedman's “Methodology for Economics” is being supplanted as the orthodox rationale for neoclassical economics by Imre Lakatos' account of scientific respectability. Friedman's instrumentalist thesis that theories are to be judged by the confirmation of their consequences and not the realism of their assumptions has long been widely endorsed by economists, under Paul Samuelson's catchy rubric “the F-twist.” It retains its popularity among economists who want no truck with (...) methodology, but among the increasing number of able economists who are writing on methodology the F-twist has been surrendered, not so much because these writers have decided it is false, as because something better has finally come along. (shrink)

In this paper I ask how educational researchers can believe the subjective perceptions of qualitative participant-observers given the concern for objectivity and generalisability of experimental research in the behavioural and social sciences. I critique the most common answer to this question within the educational research community, which posits the existence of two (or more) equally legitimate epistemological paradigms—positivism and constructivism—and offer an alternative that places a priority in educational research on understanding the purposes and meanings humans attribute to educational practices. (...) Only within the context of what I call a transcendent view from somewhere—higher ideals that govern human activities—can we make sense of quantitative as well as qualitative research findings. (shrink)

When is conceptual change so significant that we should talk about a new theory, not a new version of the same theory? We address this problem here, starting from Gould’s discussion of the individuation of the Darwinian theory. He locates his position between two extremes: ‘minimalist’—a theory should be individuated merely by its insertion in a historical lineage—and ‘maximalist’—exhaustive lists of necessary and sufficient conditions are required for individuation. He imputes the minimalist position to Hull and attempts a reductio : (...) this position leads us to give the same ‘name’ to contradictory theories. Gould’s ‘structuralist’ position requires both ‘conceptual continuity’ and descent for individuation. Hull’s attempt to assimilate into his general selectionist framework Kuhn’s notion of ‘exemplar’ and the ‘semantic’ view of the structure of scientific theories can be used to counter Gould’s reductio , and also to integrate structuralist and population thinking about conceptual change. (shrink)

This paper highlights some connections between work on truth approximation and work in social epistemology, in particular work on peer disagreement. In some of the literature on truth approximation, questions have been addressed concerning the efficiency of research strategies for approximating the truth. So far, social aspects of research strategies have not received any attention in this context. Recent findings in the field of opinion dynamics suggest that this is a mistake. How scientists exchange and take into account information about (...) each others’ beliefs may greatly influence the accuracy and speed with which the scientific community as a whole approximates the truth. On the other hand, social epistemologists concerned with peer disagreement have so far neglected the question of how practices of responding to disagreements with peers fare with respect to the goal of approximating the truth. Again, work on opinion dynamics shows that this may be a mistake, and that how we ought to respond to disagreements with our peers may depend on the specific purposes of our investigations. (shrink)

Upshot: In our response we focus on five questions that point to important common themes in the commentaries: why start in wicked problems, what kind of system is a scientific perspective, what is the nature of second-order research processes, what does this mean for understanding interdisciplinary work, and how may polyocular research help make real-world decisions.

Conceptualizing behavior decision theoretically as being ‘pulled’ (by an expected future) is fundamentally different from conceptualizing it as ‘pushed’ (or determined by past conditions according to causal laws). However, the fundamental distinction between teleological and non-teleological explanations not withstanding, decision-theoretic and evolutionary ‘ways of world making’ lead to strikingly similar forms of political, philosophical, and economic models. Common Hobbesian roots can account historically for the emergence of such a common ‘PPE’ outlook, while a game-theoretic framework of indirect evolution can accommodate (...) the fundamental methodological tension between teleological and non-teleological approaches or the ‘humanities’ and the ‘science’ traditions in PPE’s disciplines. (shrink)

A review of data concerning the uneven distribution of phobias suggests that nonassociative, ethological models can account for most of tile important findings that cannot be attributed to expectancy biases. The origin of a variety of fears that appear in fixed developmental patterns across divergent cultures and species can best be explained by biological models.

In his critique of preparedness theory, Davey does not address the limitations of adaptationism. The purpose of this commentary is to outline problems that arise when one assumes that mental illness (e.g., phobic disorder)musthave had adaptive significance for it to have survived the vicissitudes of natural selection.

This article outlines how conceptual spaces theory applies to modeling changes of scientific frameworks when these are treated as spatial structures rather than as linguistic entities. The theory is briefly introduced and five types of changes are presented. It is then contrasted with Michael Friedman’s neo-Kantian account that seeks to render Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” as a communicatively rational historical event of conceptual development in the sciences. Like Friedman, we refer to the transition from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics as an example (...) of “deep conceptual change.” But we take the communicative rationality of radical conceptual change to be available prior to the philosophical meta-paradigms that Friedman deems indispensable for this purpose. (shrink)

Maxwellian electrodynamics genesis is considered in the light of the author’s theory change model previously tried on the Copernican and the Einstein revolutions. It is shown that in the case considered a genuine new theory is constructed as a result of the old pre-maxwellian programmes reconciliation: the electrodynamics of Ampere-Weber, the wave theory of Fresnel and Young and Faraday’s programme. The “neutral language” constructed for the comparison of the consequences of the theories from these programmes consisted in the language of (...) hydrodynamics with its rich content of analogous models ranging from the uncompressible fluid up to molecular vortices. The programmes’ meeting led to construction of the whole hierarchy of crossbred objects beginning from the displacement current and up to common hybrids. After that the interpenetration of the pre-maxwellian programmes began that marked the beginning of theoretical schemes of optics and electromagnetism unification. Maxwell’s programme did assimilate some ideas of the Ampere-Weber programme, as well as the presuppositions of the programmes of Fresnel and Faraday; and the significance of this fact for further methodology of scientific research programmes development is discussed. It is argued that the core of Maxwell’s unification strategy was formed by Kantian epistemology looked through the prism of William Whewell and such representatives of Scottish Enlightenment as Thomas Reid and William Hamilton. All these enabled Maxwell to start to unify not only optics and electromagnetism, but British and continental research traditions as well. Maxwell’s programme did supersede the Ampere-Weber one because Maxwell did put forward as a synthetic principle the idea, that differed from that of Ampere-Weber by its flexible and contra-ontological, strictly epistemological, Kantian character. For Maxwell, ether was not the last building block of physical reality, from which fields and charges should be constructed . “Action at a distance”, “incompressible fluid”, “molecular vortices” were only analogies for Maxwell, capable to direct the researcher on the “right” mathematical relations. From the “representational” point of view all this hydrodynamical models were doomed to failure efforts to describe what can not be described in principle – things in themselves, the “nature” of electrical and magnetic phenomena. On the contrary, Maxwell aimed his programme to find empirically meaningful mathematical relations between the electrodynamics basic objects, i.e. the creation of inter - coordinated electromagnetic field equations system. Namely the application of this epistemology enabled Hermann von Helmholtz and his pupil Heinrich Hertz to arrive at such a version of Maxwell’s theory that served a heuristical basis for the radiowaves discovery. (shrink)

By understanding laws of nature as geometrical rather than linguistic entities, this paper addresses how to describe theory structures and how to evaluate their continuity. Relying on conceptual spaces as a modelling tool, we focus on the conceptual framework an empirical theory presupposes, thus obtain a geometrical representation of a theory’s structure. We stress the relevance of measurement procedures in separating conceptual from empirical structures. This lets our understanding of scientific laws come closer to scientific practice, and avoids a widely (...) recognised deficit in current philosophy of science accounts, namely to risk a collapse of the physical into the mathematical. (shrink)

Philosophical analyses of scientific methodology have long understood intuition to be incompatible with a rule based reasoning that is often considered necessary for a rational scientific method. This paper seeks to challenge this contention by highlighting the indispensable role that intuition plays in the application of methodologies for scientific discovery. In particular, it seeks to outline a positive role for intuition and personal judgment in scientific discovery by exploring a comparison between the use of heuristic reasoning in scientific practice and (...) engineering design. While these discussions share many features, it will also be shown that the successful use of heuristics in engineering design is often considered to depend on a crucial factor that is markedly absent from accounts of the use of heuristics in scientific discovery; experienced judgment. In the final sections of this paper, I will compare attitudes to the role of computer analysis in scientific and engineering practices, with the aim of showing how the limitations of scientific discovery machines reveal the need for including intuition in philosophical accounts of heuristic reasoning in scientific discovery. (shrink)

Theoretical economics should not be divorced from real life. If theoretical research cannot provide a good explanation for real-world economic phenomena, then we have to question the appropriateness of the paradigm that our theoretical research follows. The battle between neoclassical macroeconomics and Keynesian economics has exposed the inadequacy of the paradigm that modern mainstream economics has followed. Neoclassical macroeconomics and Keynesian economics have the same microeconomic basis. However, the paradigm of the microeconomics on which they are based has serious flaws—the (...) scarcity hypothesis and the economic man hypothesis—do not conform to the facts. These two hypotheses are the basis for other hypotheses and principles, but neither of these two hypotheses holds up to scrutiny. Then the economics edifice built on this foundation is certainly unstable, and the corresponding economic policies are certainly not perfect. (shrink)

Kuhn's theory of paradigm reveals a pattern of scientific progress, in which normal science alternates with scientific revolution. But Kuhn underrated too much the function of scientific test in his pattern, because he focuses all his attention on the hypothetico-deductive schema instead of Bayesian schema. This paper employs Bayesian schema to re-examine Kuhn's theory of paradigm, to uncover its logical and rational components, and to illustrate the tensional structure of logic and belief, rationality and irrationality, in the process of scientific (...) revolution. (shrink)

Although prima facie no more than a successful private detective, Sherlock Holmes is a classic exponent of scientific method and has laid down several fundamental rules of scientific discovery and truth?detection. While he rediscovered and modified well?known principles of induction, analysis and synthesis, and decision theory, he also made significant contributions to patterns of explanation, and with his ?principle of exclusion? was an ingenious innovator. This latter cornerstone of Holmes's methodology led him to an interesting modal theory of the ?improbable (...) possible? as a competitor to the famous doctrine of the ?impossible probable? put forward by Aristotle in de Arte Poetica. Holmes's scientific discipline was seasoned by warmth, understanding, and boldness. (shrink)