Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Philosophy of Science Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2003

Discipline
Institution
Keyword
Publication
Publication Type

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Science

Objectivity, Information, And Maxwell's Demon, Steven Weinstein Dec 2003

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 Mar 2003

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 Jan 2003

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 Jan 2003

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 Jan 2003

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 Jan 2003

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 Jan 2003

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 …