"Fleck and Kuhn on Scientific Change"

Ludvik Fleck is often quoted as one of the inspirations for Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I will argue that there were some fundamental differences between their models of scientific change. While Kuhn was concerned with the production of knowledge within local communities, Fleck focussed on the translation of knowledge among such communities.     Return

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"Three Kinds of Idealization"

Philosophers of science increasingly recognize the importance of idealization, yet there is little consensus on some of the most basic questions about idealization, or even the best characterization of the practice. Despite this high degree of variation, some consensus has clustered around three types of positions, or three kinds of idealization. I will argue that all three kinds of idealization play important roles in scientific research traditions. There is no single purpose for idealization and hence there is not a single set of rules that theorists ought to follow when idealizing. While all three kinds of idealization can be found in scientific practice, they share enough in common that they can be characterized and studied in a unified way. The key is to focus not just on the practice and products of idealization, but on the goals governing and guiding it. I call these goals the representational ideals of theorizing and although they vary between the three kinds of idealization, attending to them gives a more unified picture of the practice.     Return

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"Representation vs Ontology in Mathematics"

I will argue that representation (and correspondences between representations) should replace ontology as the central explainer in the philosophy of mathematics. The argument has two parts. The core of the argument shows how distinctive qualities of competing representations help explain the ability of their users to grasp (and prove) mathematical relationships. I refer to several case studies (Descartes vs Euclid, but especially: ways of representing knots). The closing argument contrasts ways in which traditional ontology-oriented inquiries are unproductive in explaining the intellectual power of mathematics.      Return

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"Bold Leaps: Guesses or Inferences? Analogical Reasoning in Science"

In his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), the astronomer and philosopher J.F.W. Herschel claimed that it was sometimes acceptable to invent a theory by making a "bold leap" to a hypothesis, so long as this hypothesis was then tested deductively. Because of this comment, Herschel has generally been considered a proponent of the "hypothetical-deductive" or "hypothetical" method of science. It has been argued by commentators that because Herschel was well-versed in science, he realized that the science of his day relied on unobservable entities, such as light waves, ethers, and tiny particles of matter; Herschel, it is said, correctly recognized that theoretical science requires a hypothetical method. In my paper, I will show that this interpretation of Herschel is just one of a number of instances in which modern philosophers of science have erred in attributing a hypothetical method to writers of the past. I will demonstrate that Herschel, like these other writers, believed that analogical reasoning was a key part of scientific discovery. Scattered comments about "bold leaps" are meant to refer to instances of analogical inference, not conjectures or guesswork. Herschel, and other misunderstood writers such as Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century and Herschel's friend William Whewell in the nineteenth, believed that analogical inference played a large role in scientific discovery, even for theoretical science. And they were right. Part of the reason for these misinterpretations is historical: commentators have ignored the context of these comments within the work of the writer and within his intellectual and social framework. And part is philosophical: analogical inference is very often overlooked or undervalued as a part of inductive reasoning. I will argue here that, by debunking this "myth" about "bold leaps" in the scientific method proposed in the past, we can learn important lessons for philosophy of science in the present.     Return

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"Relativism and Its Discontents"

Relativism, the view that all knowledge is relative to some percipient subject and that there is no universal, objective truth, is a product of knowledge. Historically, it was probably the result of a generalisation of some observations made by Greek mariners and merchants: laws and customs in distant (and not so distant) countries were different, sometimes opposite, from those of the Greeks. Knowledge of different customs brought about a challenge to knowledge itself. Some daring thinkers argued that there was thus an obvious contrast between what is valid by nature, always and everywhere, and what is valid by custom or law, and is therefore situated in a specific time and place. From a notion about knowledge, relativism quickly and naturally expanded into a full-fledge theory about everything: moral values, education and civilization, political arrangements, the existence of the gods.

Nowadays, it is especially moral and cultural relativism that hold the sway, because of the strong immigration fluxes and the exposure to different cultures not mediated by that typical attitude of Western superiority that was still dominant until a few decades ago. The problem of relativism, when applied to practical matters, is still more interesting and commands our attention for its consequences. Is there any standard, beside our preferences, likes and dislikes, by which we may evaluate competing claims about entities of the utmost importance (values, political arrangements, religion, scientific theories about man and the universe)?

In my paper I will examine historically the origins of relativism and the first consistent relativist thinker, Protagoras, in order to show how his theory about knowledge contains an explicit non-relativist part when it comes to value-judgements. I then move on to maintain that relativism, although an attractive theory for its deconstructionist slant, it is untenable as a general outlook on reality.      Return

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"What is Empirical Testing?"

Science is epistemically special, or so I will assume: it is better able to produce knowledge about the workings of the world than other knowledge-directed pursuits. Further, its superior epistemic powers are due to its being in some sense especially empirical: in particular, science puts great weight on a form of inductive reasoning that I call empirical confirmation. My aim in this paper is to investigate the nature of science's "empiricism", and to provide a preliminary explanation of the connection between empirical confirmation and epistemic efficacy. I will try to convince you that the place to find an account of empirical confirmation is the dusty, long-neglected instantialist account of scientific inference offered by mid-century logical empiricists. Some revision of instantialism will be required. As for what isadvantageous in empirical confirmation, I propose that it is an unusual degree of independence from background belief.       Return

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"Stratifying a Population By Race "

Social scientists attempt to understand variations within a population in a socioeconomic or biomedical trait, e.g., household income, school achievement, unemployment, risk of heart disease or rate of diabetes-related death, by stratifying the population using a demographic variable like sex, age, race or ethnicity and studying the statistical relationship between the variable and the trait. In order to do so, they assign each member of the population or sample a race or ethnicity and assume that there is one correct way to make the assignment, e.g., by ancestry, other-reports or ancestry. I argue that there is no one correct way to assign an individual to a racial or ethnic category and that what race or ethnicity an individual should be assigned depends of the trait whose variation the social or biomedical scientist is attempting to understand; as a result, a member of the population might be assigned one race for the purpose of understanding a variation in one socioeconomic or biomedical trait and a different race for the purpose of understanding a variation in a different one, white in relation to sickle-cell disease and black in relation to academic achievement. I propose an approach to race and ethnicity similar to one some economists have adopted towards indices like poverty and unemployment, viz. that there is no best way to define ‘poverty’ or ‘unemployment’ and which definition is best depends on what the term is to be used for. My proposal would improve the research in the social and biomedical sciences on racial difference and oppose the common view that race is an intrinsic property of persons.        Return

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"Race, Medicine, and Money: Contextualizing the Emergence of 'Ethnic' Drugs"

This presentation endeavors to place into context recent developments surrounding the United States Food and Drug Administration recent approval of BiDil as the first ever race-specific drug—in this case to treat heart failure in African Americans. It traces the development of BiDil, from its origins in the 1980’s and explores how practices of law, commerce and science and intertwined to transform BiDil from a drug to treat everyone regardless of race into a racially marked—and marketed—pharmaceutical. It focuses in particular on both commercial incentives and statistical manipulation of medical data as framing the drive to bring BiDil to market as a race-specific drug. In current discourse about pharmacogenomics, targeting a racial audience is perceived as necessary because at this point the technology and resources do not exist to scan efficiently every individual’s genetic profile. The presentation argues that medical researchers may say they are using race as a surrogate to target biology in drug development, but corporations are using biology as a surrogate to target race in drug marketing.       Return

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"On Reflection (...more or less)"

In philosophy, persons are often distinguished by a propensity for reflection—a conscious and concerted mentation effecting control of behavior. In psychology, research on unconscious processing suggests that this philosophical conception of persons is unrealistic; ethically significant human behavior is very often beyond reflective control. A psychologically lifelike conception of persons will therefore de-emphasize reflective control; instead, the human ethical distinctiveness marked with such philosophical honorifics as “person,” “agency,” “practical rationality,” and “the self” is found in the collaboratively developed rationalizing explanations of behavior by which humans living in groups regulate their lives.       Return

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"Maupertuis on attraction as an inherent property of matter"

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis' famous and influential Discours sur les différentes figures des astres, which represented the first public defense of attractionism in the Cartesian stronghold of the Paris Academy, sometimes suggests a metaphysically agnostic defense of gravity as simply a regularity. However, Maupertuis' considered account in the essay, I argue, is much more subtle. I analyze Maupertuis' position, showing how it is generated by an extended consideration of the possibility of attraction as an inherent property and fuelled by an understanding of Lockean skepticism about knowledge of real essences that is more nuanced perhaps even than Locke's own.       Return

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"Temporal Dimensions of Reductionism in Biology"

Although reduction clearly concerns spatial dimensions, such as relations between macroscale and microscale properties, at least three relevant temporal dimensions can be distinguished: historical, iterated compositional, and emergent process. The first two are prevalent in prior philosophical discussions but the third is surprisingly absent given its centrality in experimental biology. This neglected dimension is shown to be more appropriate for the representation of time in reductive explanations of development. My analysis uncovers an array of previously unrecognized questions about reductionism that revolve around potentially competing explanatory preferences and the diversity of temporal measures available to investigators.       Return

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"Cartographic Knowledge and Emerging Dutch Colonialism: the View from Population Biology"

There has been a comeback in understanding human migration through biogeography, as can be seen in popular authors like Jared Diamond. This paper will tentatively suggest some ways that the concept of population in Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky can aid in studying shifts in the patterns of settlement and long-distance control in our species. For instance, there was a rapid change in the ways that populations around the Indian Ocean world related with Holland around the turn of the seventeenth century. Historians usually attribute this shift to the Dutch accumulation of cartographic and economic information about the region. They find a environmentalist framework such as Diamond's overly reductionist, incapable of explaining forces such as monopoly capitalism or religious zeal. This paper will argue that to properly understand the spatial functioning of colonialism, an adapted biogeographical notion of "population" can still be useful. For humans, however, empirical due needs to be given to factors such as money and maps, as such communication channels are necessary for spurring movement and social organization. Causality does not go one-way from the biophysical to the cultural as in Diamond, but only emerges through and within uneven webs in which culture and biology are already entwined.        Return

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"Galileo without Modernity? Preliminary Reflections on the Project of Writing Galileo Today."

What are the new trends in Galileo studies? None, I would suggest, because work on Galileo remains trapped, as it has been for three quarters of a century, in the modernist narratives of the "Scientific Revolution." These narratives also continue to anchor the modernizing project of mainstream history and philosophy of science (HPS), for ever since the founding fathers of the discipline institutionalized Galileo as the father of modern science by making him a central pillar in the discipline-defining edifice of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution (modernity through the passage From Galileo to Newton in Hall's classic formulation), writing about Galileo has essentially worked to reproduce the discipline of HPS through a continual reenactment of these founding stories of origin. Is it possible to liberate Galileo studies from the echo chamber of this discipline-bound conceptual framework? My paper explores these possibilities by asking whether there are alternatives to the "Galileo, First Modern Scientist" framework, and by exploring the implications of breaking free from this discipline-defining and modernity-enacting hermeneutic. Return

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"Getting Real about Genetics and Genomics: An Antirealist Perspective"

Inflated accounts of knowledge in genetics and genomics are reinforced by the epistemological idea that successful research is organized by comprehensive theoretical frameworks that identify fundamental entities and processes. According to this epistemology, the success (or failure) of genetics and genomics depends on a comprehensive, theoretical framework that identifies the fundamentals of heredity and development. In this paper, I advance a deflationary epistemology for understanding genetics and genomics. Research in these sciences, I contend, is organized around investigative strategies involving the manipulation of a broad range of biological processes; it is not structured by comprehensive theorizing about the fundamentals of information, genetic programs, or developmental systems..       Return

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