Philosophy Commons^™

"I Knew There Was Something Wrong With That Paper": Scientific Rhetorical Styles And Scientific Misunderstandings, Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This selection unpacks scientific prose and claim substantiation for Nobel Prize winner, Stan Prusiner, in the transmissible spongiform encephlopathies field (i.e., mad cow disease). Applying linguistic strategies such as M. A. K. Halliday's "favorite clause type," the author examines argumentative strategies in dense scientific prose both in bold and cautious rhetorical styles and invented lexical changes in new scientific development.

Modeling Mechanisms, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Philosophers of science increasingly believe that much of science is concerned with understanding the mechanisms responsible for the production of natural phenomena. An adequate understanding of scientific research requires an account of how scientists develop and test models of mechanisms. This paper offers a general account of the nature of mechanical models, discussing the representational relationship that holds between mechanisms and their models as well as the techniques that can be used to test and refine such models. The analysis is supported by study of two competing models of a mechanism of speech perception.

A Comparison Of The Canons Of Science Used In Positivistic Research And Constructivist/Naturalistic Research, Ipek Bozkurt, Andres Sousa-Poza

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, the canons of science which are crucial for positivistic, empirical research and constructivist/naturalistic research will be identified, described, compared and discussed. Although there are common canons which are often used in papers throughout literature, it would be beneficial to set a common ground for the identification and use of the canons. The canons used in positivistic research will differ from the canons used in constructivist/ naturalistic research. This paper will analyze major publications (papers, books, etc.) exploring the canons either directly or indirectly, and will provide a link between major characteristics of two different research philosophies and …

The Science And Religion Dialogue: Are Philosophical Foundations Necessary?, Michael Ventimiglia

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

William James is well-known for arguing that different words which describe the same practical state of affairs are, in fact, equivalent in meaning. This theory of meaning is one important strain of American pragmatism, the movement which remains America’s primary philosophical contribution to intellectual history, and it invites us to consider a unique perspective on the contemporary dialogue between science and religion. Specifically, it raises the question of the necessity of philosophical foundations when there is practical agreement.

This paper argues that when practical agreement can be reached there are certain purposes for which philosophical foundations can be strategically ignored. …

Unruly Complexity: Ecology, Interpretation, Engagement, Peter Taylor

Curriculum and Instruction Faculty Publication Series

Ambitiously identifying fresh issues in the study of complex systems, Peter J. Taylor, in a model of interdisciplinary exploration, makes these concerns accessible to scholars in the fields of ecology, environmental science, and science studies. Unruly Complexity explores concepts used to deal with complexity in three realms: ecology and socio-environmental change; the collective constitution of knowledge; and the interpretations of science as they influence subsequent research.

For each realm Taylor shows that unruly complexity-situations that lack definite boundaries, where what goes on "outside" continually restructures what is "inside," and where diverse processes come together to produce change-should not be suppressed …

From Guts To God: Credulity, Postmodernism, And Contemporary Physics, Michael Hardin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In an attempt to remove one of the major misunderstandings made by individuals in the humanities about contemporary physics, the issue of incredulity, this essay examines Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge against contemporary and twentieth-century theories and discoveries in physics. One of the best arguments against incredulity is the frequent use of god as metaphor within physics. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, two physicists, argue that the use of metaphor is one of the characteristics of postmodern science; this essay concludes with a discussion of those elements …

Of Parts And Wholes: Self-Similarity And Synecdoche In Science, Culture And Literature, Dirk Vanderbeke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The discussion here centers on how self-similarity, or parts resembling a whole, has been a recurring aspect in the most diverse fields of human thinking from antiquity to the present. Primary examples are drawn from physics, biology, cybernetics, alchemy, philosophy, myth and, of course, language and literature. The author argues that self-similar patterns are one of the persistent ways in which the human mind structures its experience and knowledge of the world, and then examines some of the questions that arise when an almost ubiquitous concept, structure or linguistic and literary phenomenon resurfaces in a new guise in …

Paradigm Shifts And New Worldviews: Kuhn, Laudan And Discovery In Molecular Biology, Priya Venkatesan

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The author poses an alternate set of ideas concerning paradigms, normal science, research traditions and scientific revolution on the basis of the unique and inherently distinctive development of molecular biology and genetics; for, a new set of conceptual tools concerning scientific progress are required for an adequate understanding of how biological processes were elucidated under the scientific auspices of the central dogma of the genetic code. This essay concentrates on a limited study of three aspects in genetics: the study of chromosome structure, dynamics and function, reverse transcriptases, and the discovery of RNA catalysts. In attempting to analyze …

Realist Ennui And The Base Rate Fallacy, P.D. Magnus, Craig Callender

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

The no‐miracles argument and the pessimistic induction are arguably the main considerations for and against scientific realism. Recently these arguments have been accused of embodying a familiar, seductive fallacy. In each case, we are tricked by a base rate fallacy, one much‐discussed in the psychological literature. In this paper we consider this accusation and use it as an explanation for why the two most prominent ‘wholesale’ arguments in the literature seem irresolvable. Framed probabilistically, we can see very clearly why realists and anti‐realists have been talking past one another. We then formulate a dilemma for advocates of either argument, answer …

Demonizing Science And Industry, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

The author discusses the perception that leaders in science and industry seeking power or setting down confining constraints to personal behavior as well as the converse of “…following where one’s heart and soul leads.” The author continues by positing that both sets of beliefs offer similar types of mental constraints.

The Song Sparrow And The Child: Claims Of Science And Humanity, Joseph Vining

Books

For centuries public claims on behalf of science have been made about our nature and the nature of the world as a whole. Over the twentieth century such claims on behalf of science have grown deeper and stronger. More and more they are total claims, cosmological in the largest sense, and they have evoked opposition equally deep and strong.

There is the scientist in all of us. There is, too, the lawyer and law in all of us, which we realize the moment we serve as a witness or citizen juror. This book explores what the legal mind and ear …

Objectivity, Information, And Maxwell's Demon, Steven Weinstein

Dartmouth Scholarship

This paper examines some common measures of complexity, structure, and information, with an eye toward understanding the extent to which complexity or information‐content may be regarded as objective properties of individual objects. A form of contextual objectivity is proposed which renders the measures objective, and which largely resolves the puzzle of Maxwell's Demon.

Trends. Science Is Apolitical As Political, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This Trends article discusses the nature of science from a political psychological perspective.

From Fleck’S Denkstil To Kuhn’S Paradigm: Conceptual Schemes And Incommensurability, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This article argues that the limited influence of Ludwik Fleck’s ideas on philosophy of science is due not only to their indirect dissemination by way of Thomas Kuhn, but also to an incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework of history and philosophy of science and Fleck’s own more integratedly historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to understanding the evolution of scientific discovery. What Kuhn named “paradigm” offers a periphrastic rendering or oblique translation of Fleck’s Denkstil/Denkkollektiv, a derivation that may also account for the lability of the term “paradigm”. This was due not to Kuhn’s unwillingness to credit Fleck but rather to …

Continental Philosophy Of Science: Mach, Duhem, And Bachelard, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

As representatives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empiricism and positivism, the particular names Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) and Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) have of course and as already noted much more than a merely historical significance. In analytic philosophy of science, an ongoing tradition of reinterpretations of their work continues to influence the current linguistic or theoretical crisis in analytic philosophy and semiotics - semantics of scientific theory (Duhem not only as represented by W.V.O.Quine but also Stanley Jaki) as well as, on the other hand, the current emphasis on experiment representing the counter-absolutist turn to the history (and …

Detection Of Forces And Body Load In Standing And Walking In The American Cockroach, J. Adam Noah

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Sense organs in the legs that detect body weight are an important component in the regulation of posture and locomotion. This thesis seeks to gain an understanding of how body weight is detected by sense organs of the legs, and determine how this information influences muscle activities in standing and walking. The first study tested the ability of tibial campaniform sensilla (receptors that monitor forces in the cockroach leg) to encode variations in body load using magnets attached to the thorax. Recordings of sensory activities in freely standing animals showed that proximal tibial sensilla (oriented perpendicular to the leg long …

Kuhn's Paradigm As A Parable For The Cold War: Incommensurability And Its Discontents From Fuller's Tale Of Harvard To Fleck's Unsung Lvov, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

In a journal issue dedicated to a discussion of Steve Fuller's Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, I argue that Kuhn’s limited acknowledgment of Fleck’s influence on his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was due to a foundational incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework for philosophical studies of science and Fleck’s historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to scientific progress. The incommensurability in question constituted an insurmountable tension between the kind of language and thinking manifest in Fleck’s study and the conceptual language evident in Kuhn and characteristic of one might still call the received view’ in philosophy of science. …

Does Evolutionary Science Rule Out The Theistic God? The Johnson-Pennock Debate, Dan D. Crawford

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Phillip Johnson, in a number of recent writings, most notably in his 1991 book, Darwin on Trial. has called into question the whole of evolutionary science by arguing that it is based on the philosophical system of naturalism which assumes without justification that God plays no part in the process by which living things come to be. The philosopher, Robert Pennock, in his recent book, Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, defends science against Johnson's charge, arguing first that naturalism is not atheistic and so does not deny God, and second, that the principle naturalism uses to …

The Geocentric Universe: The Making Of A Cultural Symbol, Kathleen M. Isaacson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1980s, cultural history has applied the analysis of symbols to explain historical problems. Cultural historians such as Robert Darnton, Roger Chartier, and Dominick LaCapra have completed significant work in this area. Using their models, this study defines a cultural symbol within the history of science: the geocentric universe. It examines the symbol's origin and evolution from a mere idea to that of a symbol of significance. Beginning with the ancient Greece of Aristotle and Plato through the Middle Ages of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri, the symbol's potent influence expanded via powerful narratives and beautiful works of …

Nature And Nurture In Cognition, Muhammad Ali Khalidi

Publications and Research

This paper advocates a dispositional account of innate cognitive capacities, which has an illustrious history from Plato to Chomsky. The ‘triggering model’ of innateness, first made explicit by Stich ([1975]), explicates the notion in terms of the relative informational content of the stimulus (input) and the competence (output). The advantage of this model of innateness is that it does not make a problematic reference to normal conditions and avoids relativizing innate traits to specific populations, as biological models of innateness are forced to do. Relativization can be avoided in the case of cognitive capacities precisely because informational content is involved. …

Was Heisst Das -- Die Bewandtnis? Retranslating The Categories Of Heideggers Hermeneutics Of The Technical, Theodore Kisiel

Research Resources

No abstract provided.

In-Between Science And Religion, Dominic Balestra

Research Resources

This paper traces the demise of the demarcation between science and non-science by falsifiability in early Popper through sophisticated revisions which results in transforming Popperian falsifiability into a historical situated criticizability, and one which retains a Duhemian requirement of subjectivity. This transformation opens a revised Popperian standpoint to the disciplinary rationality of theology, with important implications for reconsidering the relation between science and religion. It is then concluded that a significant, intellectual relationship of either dialogue or convergence between science and theology requires something like Patrick Heelan's hermeneutical philosophy of science for the standpoint in-between science and religion.

An Orthodox Heresy: Scientific Rhetoric And The Science Of Prions., Carol Reeves

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A significant theoretical shift in the research community examining a class of terminal, infectious neurological disorders that includes Mad Cow Disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Kuru was assisted by rhetorical production. The local rhetoric of one laboratory, that of Professor Stanley B. Prusiner, involved first situating an heretical hypothesis within the framework of the orthodox narrative and then audaciously promoting that heresy. Another aspect of rhetorical production in this case involved situating a new language associated with the heretical hypothesis. To promote their new lexicon, the Prusiner team evoked orthodox values of consistency, efficiency, and collective ratification. Eventually, what was once …

Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation, Stuart Glennan

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Philosophers of science typically associate the causal-mechanical view of scientific explanation with the work of Railton and Salmon. In this paper I shall argue that the defects of this view arise from an inadequate analysis of the concept of mechanism. I contrast Salmon's account of mechanisms in terms of the causal nexus with my own account of mechanisms, in which mechanisms are viewed as complex systems. After describing these two concepts of mechanism, I show how the complex-systems approach avoids certain objections to Salmon's account of causal-mechanical explanation. I conclude by discussing how mechanistic explanations can provide understanding by unification.

Writing Identity Into Space: The Relationship Between Ethnography, Autobiography, And Space In Bronislaw Malinowski's A Diary In The Strict Sense Of The Term And Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, Lawrence Phillips

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From a number of disciplinary perspectives autobiography has always presented a challenge to more or less discrete modes of reading and evaluating the text. To read autobiography as a literary text is to suppress its close relationship to the writer, however fictionalised and evasive the writing subject might be about a textual identity so closely related to his or her public persona. On the other hand, to read it as history or a documentary presentation of a life is to fail to acknowledge the heavy use of literary techniques and imbedded subjectivity that makes autobiography what it is. …

The Genesis Of Feyerabend's 'Incommensurability Thesis' And Its Relationship To His Philosophy Of Science And Society, Sim Hui Tee

Student Works (2000-2009)

This thesis explores the genesis of Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis and its relationship to his philosophy of science and society. The exposition commences with an introduction to the origin of incommensurability thesis in chapter one. A brief outlook of the concept is introduced. In the second chapter, intellectual influences of Popper and Wittgenstein on Feyerabend is examined. With these intellectual linkages in sight, Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis is elaborated in the light of philosophy of science, in chapter three. In the consequent chapter, the focus shifts towards Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis in the perspective of his philosophy of society. In the last chapter, …

The Observing Body: Quantum Mechanics, The Anthropic Principles, And Panopticism, C. Jason Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When philosopher of history and science Michel Serres wrote of that rare and narrow passage between the human sciences and the exact sciences [1], he intended to suggest not only the infrequency and difficulty of such contact, but also the unwillingness on either side to engage in what could be a dangerous, low-profit venture. It seems a long haul back to our common origins in philosophia, and typically, efforts to regain common ground between the disciplines have approached the problem as a one-sided move from the exact sciences to the study of the humanities. Notable exceptions such …

Human Technology And Terrorism: Implications For Aviation Security, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes common human vulnerabilities when using technology to minimize aviation security threat.

Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary

Research Resources

In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …

Examining Recent Expert Elicitation Judgment Guidelines: Value Assumptions And The Prospects For Rationality, Patricia Fleming

RISK: Health, Safety & Environment (1990-2002)

This paper was presented at the VALDOR Symposium, Stockholm, June 1999. The author examines the value assumptions in the U.S. Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission guidance on the use of expert judgment relating to high level nuclear waste disposal site selection.