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Articles 1 - 30 of 30
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Science
Cultural Evolution: A Review Of Theoretical Challenges, Ryan Nichols, Mathieu Charbonneau, Azita Chellappoo, Taylor Davis, Miriam Haidle, Erik O. Kimbrough, Henrike Moll, Richard Moore, Thom Scott-Phillips, Benjamin Grant Purzycki, Jose Segovia-Martin
Cultural Evolution: A Review Of Theoretical Challenges, Ryan Nichols, Mathieu Charbonneau, Azita Chellappoo, Taylor Davis, Miriam Haidle, Erik O. Kimbrough, Henrike Moll, Richard Moore, Thom Scott-Phillips, Benjamin Grant Purzycki, Jose Segovia-Martin
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, that the field lacks ‘knowledge synthesis’, is poorly supported by ‘theory’, has an ambiguous relation to biological evolution and uses key terms (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘social learning’, ‘cumulative culture’) in ways that hamper operationalization in models, experiments and field studies. Although numerous review papers in the field represent and categorize …
The Role Of Local Knowledge In Climate Change Research, Ryan E. Mccoy
The Role Of Local Knowledge In Climate Change Research, Ryan E. Mccoy
Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy
This dissertation addresses the growing need within climate research for improvements in regional and local climate information. I argue that knowledge gaps in regional climate information constitute a form of climate injustice in which harm largely falls on regions most vulnerable to climate change. Moreover, I show that our current methods for garnering regional climate information fail to provide information on place-specific factors, such as local culture, socio-economic systems, and ecology, which mediate climate change impacts. In order to address these knowledge gaps, as well as provide information necessary for effective mitigation and adaptation, I argue for the inclusion of …
An Ideal Science, Kyle Singh
An Ideal Science, Kyle Singh
Dartmouth College Master’s Theses
Many contemporary debates and distinctions in the philosophy of science stem from a methodological view that takes the project of metaphysics to be descriptive in nature. I argue that if one adopts an approach that looks at how we use and change our concepts instead several key implications follow. The first is that non-trivial conceptual continuity between theories is unavoidable. The second is that Identifying these continuities can help us determine how we ought to develop successive theories. My prime example for a candidate that merits this kind of continuous status are ghost fields in Quantum Field Theory (QFT). In …
Keeping You In Shape: The Integration Of Fractals In The Study Of Healthy Systems, Alexandria Miller
Keeping You In Shape: The Integration Of Fractals In The Study Of Healthy Systems, Alexandria Miller
Honors Undergraduate Theses
This work discusses the application of fractals in studying the human body as a complex system. I argue that the human body falls under the classification of a complex system and can thus be studied by applying the universalities that complex systems possess. One of these universalities is fractality, which I find to have benefits in both research regarding the human body and in treatment of the human body, in relation to patient care practices. I begin by analyzing the definition of complex systems and fractals, and how these two concepts can fit together. I then discuss differing interpretations of …
Why Imre Lakatos’S Account Of Science Is Superior, Kyle J. Q. Catarata
Why Imre Lakatos’S Account Of Science Is Superior, Kyle J. Q. Catarata
Spectra Undergraduate Research Journal
An important question that has always been debated in philosophy of science concerns that of the best account of science. Ranging from multiple accounts, from Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos, etc., an argument of how Lakatos’s Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (MSRP) is the best account of science will be defended. In addition, the best account of scientific evidence and explanation – featuring philosophers from Lakatos, Peter Achinstein, Nancy Cartwright, and Philip Kitcher – is presented in support of Lakatos’s MSRP. Furthermore, using the scientific theory of continental drift, proposed by Alfred L. Wegener, will illustrate how Wegener’s …
Transdisciplinary Environmental Work: An Evaluation Of Transdisciplinarity In The Field Of Environmental Science And Its Relevance To South Carolina Conservation Efforts In Lake Wateree And The Catawba Indian Reservation, Olivia Mn Shugart
Senior Theses
Transdisciplinarity describes the integration of knowledge and exchange of ideas across diverse academic disciplines, public stakeholders, and decision-makers. In this paper, I discuss the relevance of transdisciplinarity to the environmental field and offer ways in which its principles could be employed to enhance current South Carolina conservation efforts. I advocate for transdisciplinary work through analyzing existing discourse on the value of transdisciplinary research to the environmental field, and I present some of the challenges associated with this mass integration of knowledge. Finally, I describe three models of transdisciplinary research that have been proposed by scholars to address some of these …
Contextualizing Artificial Intelligence: The History, Values, And Epistemology Of Technology In The Philosophy Of Science, Christopher Grimsley
Contextualizing Artificial Intelligence: The History, Values, And Epistemology Of Technology In The Philosophy Of Science, Christopher Grimsley
Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy
Artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies pose new questions for philosophers of science regarding epistemology, science and values, and the history of science. I will address these issues across three essays in this dissertation. The first essay concerns epistemic problems that emerge with existing accounts of scientific explanation when they are applied to deep neural networks (DNNs). Causal explanations in particular, which appear at first to be well suited to the task of explaining DNNs, fail to provide any such explanation. The second essay will explore bias in systems of automated decision-making, and the role of various conceptions of …
A Philosophy Of Bilingualism: How History And Science Inform Its Ethicality And Future, Matthew James Rethorn
A Philosophy Of Bilingualism: How History And Science Inform Its Ethicality And Future, Matthew James Rethorn
Open Access Theses & Dissertations
This Thesis explains the significance that bilingualism has played and should play in life. It consists of three chapters: Chapter 1 examines bilingual perspectives from different communities inside the United States; Chapter 2 presents a critical assessment of research from linguistics and psychology; and Chapter 3 explores the popular support for English-Spanish bilingualism sweeping through urban America. My first chapter highlights the interconnection of bilingualism with identity, exemplified in the Amish, Navajo, and Gullah communities. This analysis of ethnic groups represents more broadly the negative and positive experiences of bilingualism. My second chapter reflects on the validity and assumptions behind …
What Documents Cannot Do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi And The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma, C. Sean Burns
What Documents Cannot Do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi And The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma, C. Sean Burns
Information Science Faculty Publications
Our culture is dominated by digital documents in ways that are easy to overlook. These documents have changed our worldviews about science and have raised our expectations of them as tools for knowledge justification. This article explores the complexities surrounding the digital document by revisiting Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge—the idea that “we can know more than we can tell.” The theory presents to us a dilemma: if we can know more than we can tell, then this means that the communication of science via the document as a primary form of telling will always be incomplete. This dilemma …
Modal Understanding Of Robustness Analysis, Grayson O'Reilly
Modal Understanding Of Robustness Analysis, Grayson O'Reilly
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
No abstract provided.
Demystifying The Placebo Effect, Phoebe Friesen
Demystifying The Placebo Effect, Phoebe Friesen
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation offers a philosophical analysis of the placebo effect. After offering an overview of recent evidence concerning the phenomenon, I consider several prominent accounts of the placebo effect that have been put forward and argue that none of them are able to adequately account for the diverse instantiations of the phenomenon. I then offer a novel account, which suggests that we ought to think of the placebo effect as encompassing three distinct responses: conditioned placebo responses, cognitive placebo responses, and network placebo responses. Next, I consider implications of the placebo effect’s role in complementary and alternative medicine for discussions …
Book Review: Creatively Undecided: Toward A History And Philosophy Of Scientific Agency, David B. Levy
Book Review: Creatively Undecided: Toward A History And Philosophy Of Scientific Agency, David B. Levy
Touro University Libraries Publications and Research
The author reviews the book Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency.
Taylor’S Soft Perennialism: Psychology Or New Age Spiritual Vision?, Glenn Hartelius
Taylor’S Soft Perennialism: Psychology Or New Age Spiritual Vision?, Glenn Hartelius
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Taylor has responded to critiques of his soft perennialism model in relationship to what he has called awakening experiences. The fact that some individuals have this type of experience away from the context of religion or spirituality, according to soft perennialism, is explained by a sort of landscape of experience representing the diverse ways in which one may engage with and experience this essential beingness. While this inspiring vision could possibly be true, just as numerous other speculations about ultimate reality might be true; however, the evidence advanced in support of soft perennialism notion is not valid in the context …
The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan
The New Mechanical Philosophy, Stuart Glennan
Philosophy, Religion, and Classics
The New Mechanical Philosophy argues for a new image of nature and of science--one that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, and that casts the work of science as an effort to discover and understand those mechanisms. Drawing on an expanding literature on mechanisms in physical, life, and social sciences, Stuart Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them. A key quality of mechanisms is that they are particulars - located at different places and times, with no one just like another. The crux of …
Evotext: A New Tool For Analyzing The Biological Sciences, Grant Ramsey, Charles H. Pence
Evotext: A New Tool For Analyzing The Biological Sciences, Grant Ramsey, Charles H. Pence
Faculty Publications
We introduce here evoText, a new tool for automated analysis of the literature in the biological sciences. evoText contains a database of hundreds of thousands of journal articles and an array of analysis tools for generating quantitative data on the nature and history of life science, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. This article describes the features of evoText, presents a variety of examples of the kinds of analyses that evoText can run, and offers a brief tutorial describing how to use it.
Book Review: Philosophy Of Science: Key Concepts, David B. Levy
Book Review: Philosophy Of Science: Key Concepts, David B. Levy
Touro University Libraries Publications and Research
The author reviews the book Philosophy of Science: Key Concepts.
Natural Kindness, Matthew H. Slater
Natural Kindness, Matthew H. Slater
Faculty Journal Articles
Philosophers have long been interested in a series of interrelated questions about natural kinds. What are they? What role do they play in science and metaphysics? How do they contribute to our epistemic projects? What categories count as natural kinds? And so on. Owing, perhaps, to different starting points and emphases, we now have at hand a variety of conceptions of natural kinds—some apparently better suited than others to accom- modate a particular sort of inquiry. Even if coherent, this situation isn’t ideal. My goal in this article is to begin to articulate a more general account of ‘natural kind …
Science And Rationality For One And All, P.D. Magnus
Science And Rationality For One And All, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
A successful scientific community might require different scientists to form different beliefs even when faced with the same evidence. The standard line is that this would create a conflict between the demands of collective rationality which scientists face as members of the community and the demands of individual rationality which they face as epistemic agents. This is expressed both by philosophers of science (working on the distribution of cognitive labor) and by epistemologists (working on the epistemology of disagreement). The standard line fails to take into account the relation between rational belief and various epistemic risks, values of which are …
A Hermeneutic Exploration Of And Proposed Solution To The Schism Between Researchers And Clinicians In Psychology, Mark S. Green
A Hermeneutic Exploration Of And Proposed Solution To The Schism Between Researchers And Clinicians In Psychology, Mark S. Green
All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Fragmentation in the field of psychology has persisted throughout its history (Slife, 2000). One example of this fragmentation is the gap between researchers and clinicians (Teachman, Drabick, Hershenberg, Vivian, & Wolfe 2012). Although many attempts have been made to bridge this gap, there is still no consensus regarding its resolution. This dissertation provides an explanation for the gap at the philosophical level and provides a method for communicating across potentially incommensurable philosophies, based on Gadamer’s (1960/1989) hermeneutic opus: Truth and Method.
Carl F. Craver And Lindley Darden: In Search Of Mechanisms: Discoveries Across The Life Sciences, Stuart Glennan
Carl F. Craver And Lindley Darden: In Search Of Mechanisms: Discoveries Across The Life Sciences, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
Carl Craver and Lindley Darden are two of the foremost proponents of a recent approach to the philosophy of biology that is often called the New Mechanism. In this book they seek to make available to a broader readership insights gained from more than two decades of work on the nature of mechanisms and how they are described and discovered. The book is not primarily aimed at specialists working on the New Mechanism, but rather targets scientists, students and teachers who are looking for a broad, philosophically and historically informed image of discovery in the life sciences.
Investigating The Lay And Scientific Norms For Using ‘Explanation’, Jonathan Waskan, Ian Harmon, Andrew Higgins, Joseph Spino
Investigating The Lay And Scientific Norms For Using ‘Explanation’, Jonathan Waskan, Ian Harmon, Andrew Higgins, Joseph Spino
Faculty & Staff Scholarship
In the mid-twentieth century, Hempel (1962, 1965) bucked posit ivist ort hodoxy and proposed that explanations have a legitimate role to play in science. Yet, when it came time to offer up a model of explanation, Hempel held fast to the positivist tendency of abstracting both from facts about human psychology and from the specific contents of claims (i.e., in favor of bare logical form). At the broadest level, he proposed that explanations are sets of true statements arranged into formally acceptable arguments. That such arguments count as explanations has, Hempel thought, nothing to do with what anyone thinks or …
Aspects Of Human Historiographic Explanation: A View From The Philosophy Of Science, Stuart Glennan
Aspects Of Human Historiographic Explanation: A View From The Philosophy Of Science, Stuart Glennan
Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS
While some philosophers of history have argued that explanations in human history are of a fundamentally different kind than explanations in the natural sciences, I shall argue that this is not the case. Human beings are part of nature, human history is part of natural history, and human historical explanation is a species of natural historical explanation. In this paper I shall use a case study from the history of the American Civil War to show the variety of close parallels between natural and human historical explanation. In both instances, I shall argue that these explanations involve narrative descriptions of …
What Scientists Know Is Not A Function Of What Scientists Know, P.D. Magnus
What Scientists Know Is Not A Function Of What Scientists Know, P.D. Magnus
Philosophy Faculty Scholarship
There are two senses of ‘what scientists know’: An individual sense (the separate opinions of individual scientists) and a collective sense (the state of the discipline). The latter is what matters for policy and planning, but it is not something that can be directly observed or reported. A function can be defined to map individual judgments onto an aggregate judgment. I argue that such a function cannot effectively capture community opinion, especially in cases that matter to us.
Book Review: Philosophy Of Science After Feminism By Janet Kourany, Gizem Karaali
Book Review: Philosophy Of Science After Feminism By Janet Kourany, Gizem Karaali
Pomona Faculty Publications and Research
Janet Kourany’s book is a strange one: published by Oxford University Press (as a part of its Studies in Feminist Philosophy series), it is an academically oriented book, but reading it, you sense that this is not yet another theoretical monograph. For Kourany has her ax to grind, and more importantly she has a program to promote. The program is for philosophers of science and is motivated and encouraged by the amazing work done in the past few decades by feminist scientists and feminist scholars of science, technology, and society. In the following I will try to explain why I …
Practical Objectivity: Keeping Natural Science Natural, Alan G. Padgett
Practical Objectivity: Keeping Natural Science Natural, Alan G. Padgett
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
The Bee-Haviour Of Scientists: An Analogy Of Science From The World Of Bees, Ben Trubody
The Bee-Haviour Of Scientists: An Analogy Of Science From The World Of Bees, Ben Trubody
Between the Species
I am going to compare the strategies and communication bees use in order to locate and retrieve nectar to the world of science and the scientist. The analogy is intentionally anthropomorphic but I wish to argue that if successful bees made assumptions they would be similar to those of the scientist: flowers can be regarded as facts, nectar as knowledge, honey as technology and their ‘waggle-dance’ as communication of ideas. I would like to say that this is to be used as an analogy and should not be taken to be a statement of the scientific method as an emergent …
Realist Ennui And The Base Rate Fallacy, P.D. Magnus, Craig Callender
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 …
Is Information Systems A Science? An Inquiry Into The Nature Of The Information Systems Discipline, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold
Is Information Systems A Science? An Inquiry Into The Nature Of The Information Systems Discipline, Deepak Khazanchi, Bjørn Erik Munkvold
Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications
The Information Systems (IS) discipline is apparently undergoing an identity crisis. Academicians question the need for IS departments in colleges stating the absence of a core for the field and its integration within other business functions as a basis for its elimination. At the same time, many practitioners, as reflected in the US government's recent IT labor shortage report, continue to ignore IS as a distinct field of study. This article briefly outlines these and other challenges and argues that notwithstanding underlying philosophical differences, it can be concluded that IS is an emerging scientific discipline. This conclusion is reached through …
An Intervening Cause Counterexample To Railton’S Dnp Model Of Explanation, Stuart Gluck, Steven Gimbel
An Intervening Cause Counterexample To Railton’S Dnp Model Of Explanation, Stuart Gluck, Steven Gimbel
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Peter Railton (1978) has introduced the influential deductive-nomological-probabilistic (DNP) model of explanation which is the culmination of a tradition of formal, nonpragmatic accounts of scientific explanation. The other models in this tradition have been shown to be susceptiblet o a class of counterexamplesin volvingi nterveningc auses which speak against their sufficiency. This treatment has never been extended to the DNP model; we contend that the usual form of these counterexamples is ineffective in this case. However, we develop below a new version which overcomes these difficulties. Thus we claim that all of the models in this tradition, DNP included, have …
Scientific Objectivity And Framework Transpositions, Patrick A. Heelan
Scientific Objectivity And Framework Transpositions, Patrick A. Heelan
Research Resources
Truth-invariance relative to synchronous communities of knowers in all countries of the world seems to be one of the striking facts about science that distinguishes it from common sense or even from philosophy. Science is international, cosmopolitan and has, it is claimed, but one language. So pervasive is this belief about the one language of science that it might seem to be almost part of what we mean by the scientific enterprise, and it was indeed a part of the classical philosophy of Newton, Descartes and Kant which supported the scientific enterprise in the first three hundred years of its …