A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

There are various ``classical'' arguments against abduction as a logic of discovery,especially that (1) abduction is too weak a mode of inference to be of any use, and (2) in basic formulation of abduction the hypothesisis already presupposed to be known, so it is not the way hypotheses are discovered in the first place. In this paper I argue, by bringing forth the idea of strategies,that these counter-arguments are weaker than may appear. The concept of strategies suggests, inter alia, that (...) many inferential moves are taken into account at the same time. This is especially important in abductive reasoning, which is basically a very weak mode of inference. The importance of strategic thinking can already be seen in Charles S.Peirce's early treatments of the topic, and N.R.Hanson's later writings on abduction although they did not use the concept of``strategies.'' On the whole, I am arguing that the focus should be more on methodological processes, and not only on validity considerations, which have dominated the discussion about abduction. (shrink)

The symptom (which here refers to both the clinical or ‘objective’ sign, that is, the sign that physicians believe cannot lie, and the patient’s subjective revelation of disorder, which is always considered suspect) has been relegated by a number of semioticians to a category of signs often considered of little consequence, a ‘natural’ sign signaling some specific condition or state within the body whose object stands in a strictly biological and securely determined relationship to the symptom. I believe the symptom, (...) however, is deep, rich, and symbolic in every sense, signifying the misadventures of a body impaled by its perceptual skills and history within its own unique Umwelt or sign-world. Unfortunately, the notion of a sign which reflects biologically coded events alone suggests the body is without the ability to think, learn, and produce a story of unlimited semiosis. This should seem especially problematic to those biosemioticians who find analogic codes of much greater importance than the supposedly digital codes of DNA. I suggest that the disordered and disorderly body and the Umwelt within which it survives offer biosemioticians and those who pursue semiotic models in other disciplines an important opportunity to jointly and more fully explore the experienced world of health and illness, a world in which culture and nature are fully interpenetrated. (shrink)

In this important new study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as his best selling Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as explanatory in themselves, and to regard the world as not necessarily deterministic in character. Combining detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breath and verve, The Taming of Chance (...) brings out the relations among philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics and the development of social institutions, and provides a unique and authoritative analysis of the "probabilization" of the Western world. (shrink)

This paper recovers and investigates the work of two forgotten figures in the history of American philosophy: Ella Lyman Cabot and Mary Parker Follett. It focuses on Cabot's work, developed between 1889 and 1906. During this period, Cabot took several classes given by Josiah Royce at Radcliffe College. Cabot's work creatively extends Royce's early thinking on the issues of growth, unity, and loyalty. This paper claims that Cabot's writing serves as a valuable type of Roycean interpretation—an interpretation that sheds light (...) on Royce's philosophy while redeploying his thinking in ways that explore its ethical and social implications. Cabot is an important figure in the community of classical American thinkers, a figure who deserves greater attention. This analysis concludes with a brief discussion of Cabot's legacy as it is carried on by Mary Parker Follett's progressive and feminist writings published in the early decades of the 1900s. Follett's contribution to the field of organizational management reveals her affinity with Cabot and variety of other American thinkers. (shrink)

Semiotics, the theory of sign and meaning, may help physicians complement the project of interpreting signs and symptoms into diagnoses. A sign stands for something. We communicate indirectly through signs, and make sense of our world by interpreting signs into meaning. Thus, through association and inference, we transform flowers into love, Othello into jealousy, and chest pain into heart attack. Medical semiotics is part of general semiotics, which means the study of life of signs within society. With special reference to (...) a case story, elements from general semiotics, together with two theoreticians of equal importance, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce, are presented. Two different modes of understanding clinical medicine are contrasted to illustrate the external link between what we believe or suggest, on the one hand, and the external reality on the other hand. (shrink)

This book presents an interpretation of pharmaceutical, surgical and psychotherapeutic interventions based on a univalent metalanguage: biosemiotics. It proposes that a metalanguage for the physical, mental, social, and cultural aspects of health and medicine could bring all parts and aspects of human life together and thus shape a picture of the human being as a whole, made up from the heterogeneous images of the vast variety of sciences and technologies in medicine discourse. The book adopts a biosemiotics clinical model of (...) thinking because, similar to the ancient principle of alchemy, tam ethice quam physice, everything in this model is physical as much as it is mental. Signs in the forms of vibrations, molecules, cells, words, images, reflections and rites conform cultural, mental, physical, and social phenomena. The book decodes healing, dealing with health, illness and therapy by emphasizing the first-person experience as well as objective events. It allows readers to follow the energy-information flows through and between embodied minds and to see how they form physiological functions such as our emotions and narratives. (shrink)

"... fascinating throughout.... the book is recreative in the highest sense." —Arthur C. Danto, The New Republic "A gem for Holmes fans and armchair detectives with a penchant for logical reflection, and Peirce scholars." —Library Journal.

The provocative paper by John Forrester ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ (1996) opened up the question of case thinking as a separate mode of reasoning in the sciences. Case-based reasoning is certainly endemic across a number of sciences, but it has looked different according to where it has been found. This article investigates this mode of science – namely thinking in cases – by questioning the different interpretations of ‘If p?’ and exploring the different interpretative responses of what (...) follows in ‘Then What?’. The aim is to characterize how ‘reasoning in, within, with, and from cases’ forms a mode of scientific investigation for single cases, for runs of cases, and for comparative cases, drawing on materials from a range of different fields in which case-based reasoning appears. (shrink)

NOTE: Series number is not an integer: n/a.