- Submit
-
Browse
- All Categories
- Metaphysics and Epistemology
- Value Theory
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic
- Philosophy of Biology
- Philosophy of Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of Computing and Information
- Philosophy of Mathematics
- Philosophy of Physical Science
- Philosophy of Social Science
- Philosophy of Probability
- General Philosophy of Science
- Philosophy of Science, Misc
- History of Western Philosophy
- Philosophical Traditions
- Philosophy, Misc
- Other Academic Areas
- More
Switch to: References
Citations of:
Add citations
You must login to add citations.
|
|
|
This paper develops an account of scientific objectivity for a relativist theory of evidence. It briefly reviews the character and shortcomings of empiricist and wholist treatments of theory acceptance and objectivity and argues that the relativist account of evidence developed by the author in an earlier essay offers a more satisfactory framework within which to approach questions of justification and intertheoretic comparison. The difficulty with relativism is that it seems to eliminate objectivity from scientific method. Reconceiving objectivity as a function (...) |
|
|
This book argues for the need to put into practice a profound and comprehensive intellectual revolution, affecting to a greater or lesser extent all branches of scientific and technological research, scholarship and education. This intellectual revolution differs, however, from the now familiar kind of scientific revolution described by Kuhn. It does not primarily involve a radical change in what we take to be knowledge about some aspect of the world, a change of paradigm. Rather it involves a radical change in (...) |
|
|
Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening is often credited as being one of the first works to focus on the role of experimentation in philosophy of science, catalyzing a movement which is sometimes called the “philosophy of experiment” or “new experimentalism”. In the 1980s, a number of other movements and scholars also began focusing on the role of experimentation and instruments in science. Philosophical study of experimentation has thus seemed to be an invention of the 1980s whose central figure is Hacking. (...) |
|
|
The dissemination of experimental materials, instruments, and methods is central to the progress of research in genetics. In recent years, competition for research funding and intellectual property issues have increasingly presented barriers to the dissemination of this "research-related information. "Information gathered in interviews with experimental geneticists and analysis of acknowledgment patterns in published genetics research are used to construct a series of basic scenarios for the exchange of genetic materials and research methods. The discussion focuses on factors affecting individuals' behavior (...) |
|
|
Emotions are often met with suspicion in political debates about risky technologies, because they are seen as contrary to rational decision making. However, recent emotion research rejects such a dichotomous view of reason and emotion, by seeing emotions as an important source of moral insight. Moral emotions such as compassion and feelings of responsibility and justice can play an important role in judging ethical aspects of technological risks, such as justice, fairness, and autonomy. This article discusses how this idea can (...) |
|
|
A science war is in full swing which has taken science's reproducibility crisis as a battleground. While conservatives and corporate interests use the crisis to weaken regulations, their opponent deny the existence of a science's crisis altogether. Thus, for the conservative National Association of Scholars NAS the crisis is real and due to the progressive assault on higher education with ideologies such as neo-Marxism, radical feminism, historicism, post-colonialism, deconstructionism, post-modernism, liberation theology. In the opposite field, some commentators claim that there (...) |
|
|
This essay is about the ensuing problem that in general it is nothelpful to talk about non-standard knowledge practices as modeled after our Western ideas of what knowledge is. It negotiates this problem by arguing that artisanal knowledge is an independent and self-contained mode of knowledge and is arranged in three parts. In the first part an outline is given of the key assumptions of the interactionist conception of knowledge that needs to be put in place as an alternative to (...) |
|
|
This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) |
|
|
The ArgumentThis paper is a study of the role of language in scientific activity. It recommends that language be viewed as a community's means of patterning its affairs. Language represents where the boundaries of the community are and who is entitled to speak within it, and it displays the structures of authority in the community. Moreover, language precipitates the community's view of what the world is like, such that linguistic usages can be taken as referring to that world. Thus, language (...) |
|
|
The word ‘pseudoscience’ is a marker of changing worries about science and being a scientist. It played an important role in the philosophical debate on demarcating science from other activities, and was used in popular writings to distance science from cranky theories with scientific pretensions. These uses consolidated a comforting unity in science, a communal space from which pseudoscience is excluded, and the user's right to belong is asserted. The urgency of this process dwindled when attempts to find a formal (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
Understanding the relationship between experts and laypeople is crucial for understanding today’s world of post-truth and the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. The emergence of post-truth has been linked to various phenomena such as a flawed social and mass media ecosystem, poor citizen education, and the manipulation tactics of powerful interest groups. The paper argues that the problem is, however, more profound. The underlying issue is laypeople’s inevitable epistemic dependence on experts. The latter is part and parcel of the “risk (...) |
|
|
In 1984 the author published From Knowledge to Wisdom, a book that argued that a revolution in academia is urgently needed, so that problems of living, including global problems, are put at the heart of the enterprise, and the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, and not just acquire knowledge. Every discipline and aspect of academia needs to change, and the whole way in which academia is related to the rest of the social world. Universities devoted to the (...) |
|
|
Se analizan en este artículo una serie de revistas y libros, así como otro tipo de manifestaciones producidas en España en el período 1968-1976, que se refirieron a la denominada crítica de la ciencia. Este movimiento tuvo su mayor vigencia en los países occidentales en la década de los setenta del pasado siglo. El análisis muestra la presencia de esta crítica en diferentes medios, aun cuando se puede considerar que su relevancia fue relativamente minoritaria en el conjunto de la sociedad (...) |
|
|
This article addresses the relationship between technology and institutions and asks whether technology itself is an institution. The argument is that social theorists need to attend better to materiality: the world of things and objects of which technical things form an important class. It criticizes the new institutionalism in sociology for its failure to sufficiently open up the black box of technology. Recent work in science and technology studies (S&TS) and in particular the sociology of technology is reviewed as another (...) |
|
|
‘‘Post-normal science’’ has received much attention in recent years, but like many iconic concepts, it has attracted differing conceptualizations, applications, and implications, ranging from being a ‘‘cure-all’’ for democratic deficit to the key to achieving more sustainable futures. This editorial article introduces a Special Issue that takes stock of research on PNS and critically explores how such research may develop. Through reviewing the history and evolution of PNS, the authors seek to clarify the extant definitions, conceptualizations, and uses of PNS. (...) |
|
|
This article reports the results of a study of confirmational response bias among social work journals. A contrived research paper with positive findings and its negative mirror image were submitted to two different groups of social work journals and to two comparison groups of journals outside social work. The quantitative results, suggesting bias, are tentative; but the qualitative findings based upon an analysis of the referee comments are clear and consistent. Few referees from prestigious or nonprestcgrous social work journals prepared (...) |
|
|
This paper makes a conceptual inquiry into the notion of ‘publics’, and forwards an understanding of this notion that allows more responsible forms of decision-making with regards to technologies that have localized impacts, such as wind parks, hydrogen stations or flood barriers. The outcome of this inquiry is that the acceptability of a decision is to be assessed by a plurality of ‘publics’, including that of a local community. Even though a plurality of ‘publics’ might create competing normative demands, its (...) |
|
|
Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud provided powerful accounts of systematic interested ignorance. Fifty years ago, Anglo-American philosophies of science stigmatized Marx's and Freud's analyses as models of irrationality. They remain disvalued today, at a time when virtually all other humanities and social science disciplines have returned to extract valuable insights from them. Here the argument is that there are reasons distinctive to philosophy why such theories were especially disvalued then and why they remain so today. However, there are even better (...) |
|
|
Tacit knowledge is widely acknowledged to be an important component of innovation, but such recognition is rarely accompanied by more detailed explanations about the nature of tacit knowledge, why such knowledge is significant, how it becomes codified or whether there may be limits to codification. This paper attempts to fill some of the gaps, drawing on a recent study of university/industry links in three emerging technologies. It concludes that tacit knowledge, which can only be transmitted through personal interaction, will continue (...) |
|
|
Auguste Comte's doctrine of the three phases through which sciences pass (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive) allows us to explain what John Stuart Mill was attempting in his magnum opus, the System of Logic: namely, to move the science of logic to its terminal and 'positive' stage. Both Mill's startling account of deduction and his unremarked solution to the Humean problem of induction eliminate the notions of necessity or force—in this case, the 'logical must'—characteristic of a science's metaphysical (...) |
|
|
There is a rapidly expanding field of research on social and ethical interactions with nano-scaled sciences and technologies. An important question is: What does social and ethical research actually mean when it is focussed on technological applications that are largely hypothetical, and a field of science spread out across multiple disciplines and lacking unification? This paper maps early literature in the field of research as a way of answering this question. Our aim is to describe how this field is developing (...) |
|
|
About a decade ago, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency unwittingly embarked on a transition from a technocratic model of science advising to the paradigm of ‘‘post-normal science’’. In response to a scandal around uncertainty management in 1999, a Guidance for ‘‘Uncertainty Assessment and Communication’’ was developed with advice from the initiators of the PNS concept and was introduced in 2003. This was followed in 2007 by a ‘‘Stakeholder Participation’’ Guidance. In this article, the authors provide a combined insider/outsider perspective on (...) |
|
|
Knowing that technologies are inherently value-laden and systemically interwoven with society, the question is how individual engineers can take up the challenge of accepting the responsibility for their work? This paper will argue that engineers have no institutional structure at the level of society that allows them to recognize, reflect upon, and actively integrate the value-laden character of their designs. Instead, engineers have to tap on the different institutional realms of market, science, and state, making their work a ‘hybrid’ activity (...) |
|
|
Como se usa act ual ment e l a pal abr ainglesa “scientism”, es una verdad verbaltrivial que se debe evitar el cientismo –una actitud inapropiadamente deferentehaci a l a ci enci a. Pero const i t uye unacuestión sustancial determinar cuando,y por qué, la deferencia hacia las cienciases inapropiada o exagerada. Este artículot r a t a d e r e s p o n d e r a e s t a c u e s t i ó (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This article addresses issues of regulatory convergence and Europeanization as they have developed within the agrochemicals sector. Taking the United Kingdom as a case study, the article considers the continuing importance of local and national factors within systems that are ostensibly international and standardized. In particular, the article shows how the embedded social relations of regulatory science in the United Kingdom, including institutional practices, judgments of expertise, and established relationships of trust, result in a “nation centeredness” and divergence of regulatory (...) |
|
|
Over the course of human history food security has represented a primary challenge for civilizations and societies. In the light of the projected trends of population expansion in the forthcoming decades, its primary importance in the global agenda has never decreased. Our contribution to this debate comes in the form of a critique of a paper recently published in the literature, Badur et al.. In their work, the authors suggest that continuous improvements in agricultural techniques and dietary re-adaptation and change (...) |
|
|
In this paper we discuss expected and reported effects on care provider-patient relations of the introduction of electronic patient records (EPRs) in consultation settings by reviewing exemplary studies and literature on the subject from the past decade. We argue that in order for such assessments to be meaningful, talk of effects of “the” EPR needs to be replaced by an “unpacking” of EPR systems into their constituent parts and functionalities, the effects of which need to be assessed individually. Following from (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Historians of science have treated the history of primary, secondary, tertiary, and popular science education, although overall the collective scholarship on these issues remains sparse in comparison to other topics in the history of science. Guided at first by the conceptual frameworks of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, this literature has moved beyond them to embrace a broader methodological pluralism. This essay examines areas where the scholarship on the history of science education is most developed: the history of tertiary science (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
The ArugmentThis essay answers a single question: what was Robert Hooke, the Royal Society's curator of experiments, doing in his well-known 1665 work,Micrographia?Hooke was articulating a “universal cure of the mind” capable of bringing about a “reformation in Philosophy,” a change in philosophy's interpretive practices and organization. The work explicated the interpretive and political foundations for a community of optical instrument users coextensive with the struggling Royal Society. Standard observational practices would overcome the problem of using nonstandard instruments, while inherent (...) |
|
|
Philosophy of science has traditionally focused on the epistemological dimensions of scientific practice at the expense of the ethical and political questions scientists encounter when addressing questions of policy in advisory contexts. In this article, I will explore how an exclusive focus on epistemology and theoretical reason can function to reinforce common, yet flawed assumptions concerning the role of scientific knowledge in policy decision making when reproduced in philosophy courses for science students. In order to address this concern, I will (...) |
|
|
Nowadays, almost everyone seems to agree that science is facing an epistemological crisis – namely the replicability crisis – and that we need to take action. But as to precisely what to do or how... |
|
|
|
|
|
This article discusses the ethics of knowledge production from a cultural point of view, in contrast with the more usual emphasis on the ethical issues facing individuals involved in KP. Here, the emphasis is on the cultural environment within which individuals, groups and institutions perform KP. A principal purpose is to suggest ways in which reliable scientific knowledge could be produced more efficiently. The distinction between ethical hazard and ethical behaviour is noted. Ethical hazards cannot be eliminated but they can (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
I develop the idea of what I call an interpretive praxis as a generalized procedure for analyzing how experimenters can formulate observable predictions, discern real effects from experimental artifacts, and compare predictions with data. An interpretive praxis requires theories – theories not only about instruments and the interpretation of phenomena, but also theories that connect the use of instruments and interpretation of phenomena to high‐level theory. I will call all such theories that enable experimentation to work intermediate theories. I offer (...) |
|
|
The paper addresses the question of whether, as Nanda claims, treating all knowledge traditions including science as local, denies the possibility of criticism. It accepts the necessity for criticism but denies that science can be the sole arbiter of truth and argues that we have to live with holding differing knowledges in tension with one another. |
|
|
Scientific communities as social groupings and the role that such communities play in scientific change and the production of scientific knowledge is currently under debate. I examine theory change as a complex social interaction among individual scientists and the scientific community, and argue that individuals will be motivated to adopt a more radical or innovative attitude when confronted with striking similarities between model systems and a more robust understanding of specialised vocabulary. Two case studies from the biological sciences, Barbara McClintock (...) |
|
|
An assessment of Joel Isaac’s recent, well-researched attempt to provide a context for the emergence of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That context consisted in the open space for cross-disciplinary projects between the natural and social sciences that existed at Harvard during the presidency of James Bryant Conant, from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. Isaac’s work at the Harvard archives adds interesting detail to a story whose general contours are already known. In particular, he reinforces the view (...) |
|
|
The ‘critique of intellectuals’ refers to a genre of normative discourse that holds intellectuals accountable for the consequences of their ideas. A curious feature of the contemporary, especially American, variant of this genre is its focus on intellectuals who were aligned with such world-historic losers as Hitler and Stalin. Why are Cold War US intellectuals not held to a similar standard of scrutiny, even though they turn out to have been aligned with the world-historic winners? In addressing this general question, (...) |
|
|
Neither religion nor science is first of all a realm of pure ideas, even though religion-and-science discussions often assume that they are. I propose that a concept of embodied science is more adequate and that religion-and-science should center its attention on science as enabler for improving the world (SEIW). This idea of science is rooted in Jerome Ravetz's concept of industrialized science and Donna Haraway's technoscience. SEIW describes the sociocultural context of science in commercial, government, and university settings. The chief (...) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Popper, Polanyi and Duncker represent the widely held position that theoretical and experimental scientific research are motivated by problems to which discoveries are solutions. According to the argument here, their views are unsupported and - in light of counter-instances, anomalous chance discoveries, and the force of curiosity - over-generalized. |
PhilPapers logo by Andrea Andrews and Meghan Driscoll.
This site uses cookies and Google Analytics (see our terms & conditions for details regarding the privacy implications). Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions.
All rights reserved by The PhilPapers Foundation
Server: philpapers-web-6f9648bdd6-l46rg uwo