In Science as Social Knowledge, Helen Longino offers a contextual analysis of evidential relevance. She claims that this "contextual empiricism" reconciles the objectivity of science with the claim that science is socially constructed. I argue that while her account does offer key insights into the role that values play in science, her claim that science is nonetheless objective is problematic.

Exploring the role of values in scientific inquiry, Hugh Lacey examines the nature and meaning of values, and looks at challenges to the view, posed by postmodernists, feminists, radical ecologists, Third-World advocates and religious fundamentalists, that science is value free. He also focuses on discussions of 'development', especially in Third World countries. This paperback edition includes a new preface.

UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC REASONING develops critical reasoning skills and guides students in the improvement of their scientific and technological literacy. The authors teach students how to understand and critically evaluate the scientific information they encounter in both textbooks and the popular media. With its focus on scientific pedagogy, UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC REASONING helps students learn how to examine scientific reports with a reasonable degree of sophistication. The book also explains how to reason through case studies using the same informal logic skills employed (...) by scientists and to analyze a complex series of propositions and hypotheses using sound scientific reasoning. (shrink)

We call for a new philosophical conception of models in physics. Some standard conceptions take models to be useful approximations to theorems, that are the chief means to test theories. Hence the heuristics of model building is dictated by the requirements and practice of theory-testing. In this paper we argue that a theory-driven view of models can not account for common procedures used by scientists to model phenomena. We illustrate this thesis with a case study: the construction of one of (...) the first comprehensive model of superconductivity by London brothers in 1934. Instead of theory-driven view of models, we suggest a phenomenologically-driven one. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The realistic spirit, a nonmetaphysical approach to philosophical thought concerned with the character of philosophy itself, informs all of the discussions in these essays by philosopher Cora Diamond. Diamond explains Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings, explores the background to his thought in the work of Frege, and discusses ethics in a way that reflects his influence. Diamond's new reading of Wittgenstein challenges currently accepted interpretations and shows what it means to look without mythology at the coherence, commitments, and (...) connections that are distinctive of the mind. (shrink)

Fundamental theories are hard to come by. But even if we had them, they would be too complicated to apply. Quantum chromodynamics is a case in point. This theory is supposed to govern all strong interactions, but it is extremely hard to apply and test at energies where protons, neutrons and ions are the effective degrees of freedom. Instead, scientists typically use highly idealized models such as the MIT Bag Model or the Nambu Jona-Lasinio Model to account for phenomena in (...) this domain, to explain them and to gain nderstanding. Based on these models, which typically isolate a single feature of QCD and disregard many others, scientists attempt to get a better understanding of the physics of strong interactions. But does this practice make sense? Is it justified to use these models for the purposes at hand? Interestingly, these models do not even provide an accurate description of the mass spectrum of protons, neutrons and pions and their lowest lying excitations well - despite several adjustable parameters. And yet, the models are heavily used. I'll argue that a qualitative story, which establishes an explanatory link between the fundamental theory and a model, plays an important role in model acceptance in these cases. (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noe. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noe argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought — that ...

This paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special (...) Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer’s hard problem. Next, I outline the phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy. (shrink)

A century ago, nearly all of those who wrote about the nature of science would have been in agreement that science ought to be “value‐free.” This had been a particular emphasis on the part of the first positivists, as it would later be on the part of their twentieth‐century successors. Science, so it was said, deals with facts, and facts and values are irreducibly distinct. Facts are objective; they are what we seek in our knowledge of the world. Values are (...) subjective; they bear the mark of human interest; they are the radically individual products of feeling and desire. Fact and value cannot, therefore, mix. Value cannot be inferred from fact; fact ought not be influenced by value. There were philosophers, notably some in the Kantian tradition, who viewed the relation of the human individual to the universalist aspirations of science rather differently. But the legacy of three centuries of largely empiricist reflection on the “new” sciences ushered in by Galileo and his successors was as unqualified in its distrust of value as in its extolling of the virtues of fact (see galileo). (shrink)

This is an important book precisely because there is none other quite like it.

Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Imagerie Ce´re´brale (LENA), Hoˆpital de La Salpeˆtrie`re, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

This paper argues that the appraisal of theory is in important respects closer in structure to value-judgement than it is to the rule-governed inference that the classical tradition in philosophy of science took for granted.

This paper starts with one of Chalmers’ basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. I claim there is no ‘theoretical fix’ or ‘extra ingredient’ in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena requires a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis. My proposed approach, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology, I have called neurophenomenology. It seeks articulations by mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience and (...) the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences. It needs to expand into a widening research community in which the method is cultivated further. (shrink)

Although the recent emphasis on models in philosophy of science has been an important development, the consequence has been a shift away from more traditional notions of theory. Because the semantic view defines theories as families of models and because much of the literature on “scientific” modeling has emphasized various degrees of independence from theory, little attention has been paid to the role that theory has in articulating scientific knowledge. This paper is the beginning of what I hope will be (...) a redress of the imbalance. I begin with a discussion of some of the difficulties faced by various formulations of the semantic view not only with respect to their account of models but also with their definition of a theory. From there I go on to articulate reasons why a notion of theory is necessary for capturing the structure of scientific knowledge and how one might go about formulating such a notion in terms of different levels of representation and explanation. The context for my discussion is the BCS account of superconductivity, a `theory' that was, and still is, sometimes referred to as a `model'. BCS provides a nice focus for the discussion because it illuminates various features of the theory/model relationship that seem to require a robust notion of theory that is not easily captured by the semantic account. (shrink)

I argue against an account of scientific representation suggested by the semantic, or structuralist, conception of scientific theories. Proponents of this conception often employ the term “model” to refer to bare “structures”, which naturally leads them to attempt to characterize the relation between models and reality as a purely structural one. I argue instead that scientific models are typically “representations”, in the pragmatist sense of the term: they are inherently intended for specific phenomena. Therefore in general scientific models are not (...) (merely) structures. I then explore some consequences of this pragmatist account of representation, and argue that it sheds light upon the distinction between theories and models. I finish by briefly addressing some critical comments due to Bas Van Fraassen. (shrink)

In this essay, which was his presidential address to the Philosophy of Science Association, Ernan McMullin argued that the watershed between “classic” philosophy of science and the “new” philosophy of science can best be understood by analyzing the change in our perception of the role played by values in science. He begins with some general remarks about the nature of value, goes on to explore some of the historical sources for the claim that judgement in science is value‐laden, and concludes (...) by reflecting on the implications of this claim for traditional views of the objectivity of scientific knowledge‐claims. (shrink)

Participation of the Public in Science: Towards a New Kind of Scientific Practice Participation of the public in science has been the object of an increasing number of social and political philosophical studies, but there is still hardly any epistemological study of the topic. While it has been objected that involvement of the public is a threat to the integrity of science, the apparent indifference of philosophers of science seems to testify to its lack of relevance to conceptions of scientific (...) activity. I argue both that it is not a threat to science and that it is relevant to philosophy of science by showing that it constitutes a new kind of epistemic practice. Two main objections to the idea that the involvement of non-scientists, with their situated perspective and contextual values, can form an epistemic practice will be addressed: the first bears on the epistemic potentialities of the cooperation between scientist and non-scientists; the second on the possibility that this cooperation takes the form of a practice. (shrink)