Inconsistent idealizations and inferentialism about scientific representation

Inferentialists about scientific representation hold that an apparatus's representing a target system consists in the apparatus allowing “surrogative inferences” about the target. I argue that a serious problem for inferentialism arises from the fact that many scientific theories and models contain internal inconsistencies. Inferentialism, left unamended, implies that inconsistent scientific models have unlimited representational power, since an inconsistency permits any conclusion to be inferred. I consider a number of ways that inferentialists can respond to this challenge before suggesting my own solution. I develop an analogy to exploitable glitches in a game. Even though inconsistent representational apparatuses may in some sense allow for contradictions to be generated within them, doing so violates the intended function of the apparatus's parts and hence violates representational “gameplay”.     

Clinical outcome measurement: Models,theory, psychometrics and practice

In the last decade much has been made of the role that models play in the epistemology of measurement. Specifically, philosophers have been interested in the role of models in producing measurement outcomes. This discussion has proceeded largely within the context of the physical sciences, with notable exceptions considering measurement in economics. However, models also play a central role in the methods used to develop instruments that purport to quantify psychological phenomena. These methods fall under the umbrella term ‘psychometrics’. In this paper, we focus on Clinical Outcome Assessments (COAs) and discuss two measurement theories and their associated models: Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Rasch Measurement Theory. We argue that models have an important role to play in coordinating theoretical terms with empirical content, but to do so they must serve: 1) as a representation of the measurement interaction; and 2) in conjunction with a theory of the attribute in which we are interested. We conclude that Rasch Measurement Theory is a more promising approach than CTT in these regards despite the latter's popularity with health outcomes researchers.     

Kuhn, the correspondence theory of truth and coherentist epistemology

Kuhn argued against both the correspondence theory of truth and convergent realism. Although he likely misunderstood the nature of the correspondence theory, which it seems he wrongly believed to be an epistemic theory, Kuhn had an important epistemic point to make. He maintained that any assessment of correspondence between beliefs and reality is not possible, and therefore, the acceptance of beliefs and the presumption of their truthfulness has to be decided on the basis of other criteria. I will show that via Kuhn’s suggested epistemic values, specifically via problem-solving, his philosophy can be incorporated into a coherentist epistemology. Further, coherentism is, in principle, compatible with convergent realism. However, an argument for increasing likeness to truth requires appropriate historical continuity. Kuhn maintained that the history of science is full of discontinuity, and therefore, the historical condition of convergent realism is not satisfied.     

A structural interpretation of measurement and some related epistemological issues

Measurement is widely applied because its results are assumed to be more reliable than opinions and guesses, but this reliability is sometimes justified in a stereotyped way. After a critical analysis of such stereotypes, a structural characterization of measurement is proposed, as partly empirical and partly theoretical process, by showing that it is in fact the structure of the process that guarantees the reliability of its results. On this basis the role and the structure of background knowledge in measurement and the justification of the conditions of object-relatedness (“objectivity”) and subject-independence (“intersubjectivity”) of measurement are specifically discussed.     

多源异构感知数据融合方法及其在目标定位跟踪中的应用

物联网的全面感知产生了海量的感知数据,并且感知数据呈现为显著的多源异构性.因此,如何实现海量多源异构感知数据的智能处理是一个具有挑战性的课题.数据融合是处理多模态数据并挖掘提取有价值信息的有效手段,但针对多源异构数据,特别是非结构化的视频多媒体信息,如何实现高效的融合计算还面临许多问题需要解决.本文针对物联网多源异构感知信息的处理问题,提出多层次的多源异构数据融合方法,并以基于无线信号、视频和深度感知数据的目标定位跟踪应用为切入点,重点研究多源异构数据的处理、特征表示和数据融合方法.根据不同类型数据的特性采用不同的数据融合方法,通过挖掘无线信号、视频和深度等多源异构数据内在的关联性,实现多源异构数据有价值信息的有效利用.实际复杂场景的实验表明,本文提出的基于多源异构数据融合的目标跟踪和定位方法,能够解决传统依赖单源同质数据的目标跟踪方法所面临的光照变化和遮挡交错等难点问题,并且可以获得较为准确的运动目标三维位置,具有良好的跟踪定位效果.     

Familiarity,application, and performance of sales forecasting techniques

This article presents the results of a survey to determine the degree of familiarity and usage, accuracy obtained, and evaluation of different forecasting techniques. It was found that regression analysis, subjective techniques, exponential smoothing, and moving average were well known and used for specific situations. Accuracy was relatively high for aggregate short range forecasts, but decreased for longer range and product level forecasts.     

Philosophy,history and sociology of science: Interdisciplinary relations and complex social identities

Sociology and philosophy of science have an uneasy relationship, while the marriage of history and philosophy of science has—on the surface at least—been more successful. I will take a sociological look at the history of the relationships between philosophy and history as well as philosophy and sociology of science. Interdisciplinary relations between these disciplines will be analysed through social identity complexity theory in order to draw out some conclusions on how the disciplines interact and how they might develop. I will use the relationships between the disciplines as a pointer for a more general social theory of interdisciplinarity which will then be used to sound a caution on how interdisciplinary relations between the three disciplines might be managed.     

Organizational Pressures on Forecast Evaluation: Managerial,Political, and Procedural Influences

This paper proposes a theory to explain why some forecasting organizations institutionalize forecast accuracy evaluation while others do not. The theory considers internal and external aspects of managerial, political, and procedural factors as they affect forecasting organizations. The theory is then tested using data from a survey of the US Federal Forecasters Group. Though some support for the theory is developed, multiple alternative explanations for results and the ‘public’ nature of the sample organizations prevent wide-scale generalization. The results suggest that larger organizations are more likely to have some form of forecast evaluation than smaller units. The institutionalization of forecast accuracy evaluation is closely linked to internal managerial and procedural factors, while external political pressure tends to reduce the likelihood of institutionalization of evaluation of forecast accuracy.© 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Late Feyerabend on materialism,mysticism, and religion

Feyerabend's interests in religion and mysticism grew through his career. In his later writings, Feyerabend's numerous critiques of scientific materialism are often accompanied by purported advantages of religious orientations and temperaments. These recommendations do not simply follow from his tolerant theoretical pluralism; they are more positive attempts to articulate distinctive aspects of human life satisfied by religion, but not by scientific materialism. Elevating the human need for mystery, reverence, and love, he contrasts these goods with the deliverances of monistic conceptions of science and reason. I bring attention to some of the common themes in these remarks to argue that they were integral with other parts of his philosophical project and that they could serve as helpful rejoinders to contemporary exhortations to science-based secularism from philosophers of science.     

French historical epistemology: Discourse,concepts, and the norms of rationality

In recent years, analytic philosophers have begun to recognize the value of the French school of historical epistemology (as embodied by figures such as Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault) for contemporary debates in the history and philosophy of science. This tradition, which some characterize as a ‘French’ approach to the philosophy of science, however, remains largely un-read by mainstream philosophers of science. This article offers an interpretation of this tradition, highlighting what the author takes to be its two central features: (i) its claim that scientific discourse is the object of epistemology and (ii) its claim that scientific concepts are the building blocks of scientific discourse.     

Quantification, Mandated Science and Judgment

In his Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Ted Porter asks how to account for the prestige and power of quantitative methods in the modern world. His answer involves two theses. One reverses a standard claim by asserting that quantification in basic sciences can often be driven by quantification in more applied areas such as government and business. The second thesis, which I call judgment replacement, asserts that quantification overcomes lack of trust in humans by replacing human judgment in scientific communities and public life. Some aspects of the latter thesis are insightful and convincing. However, as a general claim, the judgment replacement thesis says that quantification and objectivity imply shallowness, superficiality and lack of subtlety. I examine one of Porter's key examples and show that as a general proposition the judgment replacement thesis gives a warped account of governmental decisions that involve a great deal of scientific input, an activity that colleagues and I have called mandated science. I show that Porter obfuscates the very features of mandated science that need the most clarification. The quantitative mentality can be superficial but it can also be complex and profound, and quantification can actually increase human judgment. The virtues of quantitative methods help account for their prestige and power.     

Putting pragmatism to work in the Cold War: Science, technology, and politics in the writings of James B. Conant

This paper examines James Conant’s pragmatic theory of science—a theory that has been neglected by most commentators on the history of 20^th-century philosophy of science—and it argues that this theory occupied an important place in Conant’s strategic thinking about the Cold War. Conant drew upon his wartime science policy work, the history of science, and Quine’s epistemological holism to argue that there is no strict distinction between science and technology, that there is no such thing as “the scientific method,” and that theories are better interpreted as policies rather than creeds. An important consequence that he drew from these arguments is that science is both a thoroughly value-laden, and an intrinsically social, enterprise. These results led him to develop novel proposals for reorganizing scientific and technological research—proposals that he believed could help to win the Cold War. Interestingly, the Cold War had a different impact upon Conant’s thinking than it did upon many other theorists of science in postwar America. Instead of leading him to “the icy slopes of logic,” it led him to develop a socially- and politically-engaged theory that was explicitly in the service of the American Cold War effort.     

String theory,Einstein, and the identity of physics: Theory assessment in absence of the empirical

String theorists are certain that they are practicing physicists. Yet, some of their recent critics deny this. This paper argues that this conflict is really about who holds authority in making rational judgment in theoretical physics. At bottom, the conflict centers on the question: who is a proper physicist? To illustrate and understand the differing opinions about proper practice and identity, we discuss different appreciations of epistemic virtues and explanation among string theorists and their critics, and how these have been sourced in accounts of Einstein's biography. Just as Einstein is claimed by both sides, historiography offers examples of both successful and unsuccessful non-empirical science. History of science also teaches that times of conflict are often times of innovation, in which novel scholarly identities may come into being. At the same time, since the contributions of Thomas Kuhn historians have developed a critical attitude towards formal attempts and methodological recipes for epistemic demarcation and justification of scientific practice. These are now, however, being considered in the debate on non-empirical physics.     

The tragedy of the canon; or,path dependence in the history and philosophy of science

We have previously argued that historical cases must be rendered canonical before they can plausibly serve as evidence for philosophical claims, where canonicity is established through a process of negotiation among historians and philosophers of science (Bolinska and Martin, 2020). Here, we extend this proposal by exploring how that negotiation might take place in practice. The working stock of historical examples that philosophers tend to employ has long been established informally, and, as a result, somewhat haphazardly. The composition of the historical canon of philosophy of science is therefore path dependent, and cases often become stock examples for reasons tangential to their appropriateness for the purposes at hand. We show how the lack of rigor around the canonization of case studies has muddied the waters in selected philosophical debates. This, in turn, lays the groundwork for proposing ways in which they can be improved.     

Mathematical instrumentalism, Gödel’s theorem, and inductive evidence

Mathematical instrumentalism construes some parts of mathematics, typically the abstract ones, as an instrument for establishing statements in other parts of mathematics, typically the elementary ones. Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem seems to show that one cannot prove the consistency of all of mathematics from within elementary mathematics. It is therefore generally thought to defeat instrumentalisms that insist on a proof of the consistency of abstract mathematics from within the elementary portion. This article argues that though some versions of mathematical instrumentalism are defeated by Gödel’s theorem, not all are. By considering inductive reasons in mathematics, we show that some mathematical instrumentalisms survive the theorem.