The Constructive Realist Account of Science and Its Application to Ilya Prigogine’s Conception of Laws of Nature

Sciences are often regarded as providing the best, or, ideally, exact, knowledge of the world, especially in providing laws of nature. Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of non-equilibrium chemical processes—this being also an important attempt to bridge the gap between exact and non-exact sciences [mentioned in the Presentation Speech by Professor Stig Claesson (nobelprize.org, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977)]—has had this ideal in mind when trying to formulate a new kind of science. Philosophers of science distinguish theory and reality, examining relations between these two. Nancy Cartwright’s distinction of fundamental and phenomenological laws, Rein Vihalemm’s conception of the peculiarity of the exact sciences, and Ronald Giere’s account of models in science and science as a set of models are deployed in this article to criticise the common view of science and analyse Ilya Prigogine’s view in particular. We will conclude that on a more abstract, philosophical level, Prigogine’s understanding of science doesn’t differ from the common understanding.

History of Science: Looking Ahead to the 21st Century Editorial

(Theauthor.ProfessorLiuDunisthecurrentDirectoroftheInstitutefortheHistoryofScience,theChineseAcademyofSciences.andeditorofthejournalStudiesintheHistoryofNaturalSciences.ThisEditorialwasoriginallypublishedinChineseinthisjournal,Vol.18,No.3,pp.193~195...     

Transmission of Islamic Exact Science to India and its Neighbours and Repercussions Thereof

LetmefirstclarifythatscienceasdevelopedinIslamicculturalareasorsocietiesduringtheMiddleAgesisabbreviatedhereasIslamicScience.Inthatcontext,theExactScienceis confinedtoastronomy(includingmathematicalgeography)andmathematicsonly;physicswas thenapartofnatura…     

Inference to the Best Manipulation – A Case Study of Qualitative Reasoning in Neuropharmacy

How can new drug lead suggestions beinferred from neurophysiological models? This paperaddresses this question based on a case study ofresearch into Parkinson's disease at the GroningenUniversity Department of Pharmacy. It is argued thatneurophysiological box-and-arrow models can beunderstood as qualitative differential equationmodels. An inference task is defined to helpunderstand and possibly aid the discovery andexplanation of new drug lead suggestions.     

What has Philosophy to Offer to Chemistry?

The paper asks about the reasons for the neglect of chemistry in modern philosophy of science and investigates in how far this science can be the object of an autonomous philosophical reflection. It is argued that from a culturalistic point of view chemistry indeed offers a field of interesting questions ranging from the reconstruction of its epistemological objects to the elucidation of the semantic functions of terms like "atom" or "molecule". It is further argued that the philosophical reflection upon chemistry has important consequences for the didactic, the history and even the ethics of this science, making thus philosophy to a partner of chemistry in fulfilling its purposes in human society. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Who is Afraid of the Political? A Response to Robert Scharff and Michel Puech

In their respective commentaries to my article “Postphenomenology and the Politics of Sustainable Technology” both Robert Scharff and Michel Puech take issue with my postphenomenological inroad into the politics of technology. In a first step I try to accommodate the suggestions and objections raised by Scharff by making my account of the political more explicit. Consequently, I argue how an antagonistic relational conceptualisation of the political allows me to address head on Puech’s plea to leave politics behind and move towards an ethically informed, post-political approach to sustainability. “But perhaps the question philosophy is confronted with—through the question of the political—might be whether not all reasoning, including a purely theoretical reasoning, can truly only be a political reasoning, resulting in an inevitable, indeed necessary circular structure” (Boehm 2002; author’s translation). In a footnote to my original article ‘Postphenomenology and the Politics of Sustainable Technology’, I wrote that “for the purpose of this paper, it suffices to say that I use the adjective ‘political’ to indicate all aspects of human and non-human agency that are related to ‘shaping the good life’ (Goeminne 2011a).” With hindsight, brought about by the commentaries of Scharff (2011) and Puech (2011), I now see that I could not have been more optimistic. Or should I say naïve? Indeed, although coming from different angles and resulting in very different suggestions, both commentaries precisely target my postphenomenological inroad into the ‘politics’ of technology. In challenging my grounding of the politics of technology in a postphenomenological perspective, Scharff in particular invites me to make my notion of the political more explicit. In what follows, I will therefore first elaborate my take on the political dimension of technology in dialogue with Scharff’s comments and suggestions. Armed with this deepened concept of the political, I will then address Puech’s plea to leave politics behind and move towards an ethically informed, post-political approach to sustainability. Evidently, within the limits of this piece, I can only indicate the broader direction my conceptualisation of the political takes. It suffices perhaps to say that, partly induced by the commentaries of Scharff and Puech, the question of the political has meanwhile taken a much more prominent place in my research as can be seen from a few recent publications [e.g. Goeminne (2012) and Goeminne (forthcoming)]. In saying this, I am also expressing my indebtedness to the commentators for nudging me in this political direction.     

The Reality Doesn't Correspond to Its Appellation of“无氟冰箱”(wufubingxiang)

当代最大的环境问题之一就是大气臭氧层的破坏.各新闻媒体对这个问题进行了大量的报道,主要目的在于唤醒广大公众的环境意识,其功绩不小.但是在宣传报道中对于臭氧层破坏的问题有的提法不科学,形成了某些误解,其中"无氟冰箱"就是最明显的实例之一.     

THE LI FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP OF NEW YORK to honour the memory of Dr Lu Gwei-djen

A visiting Fellowship tenable atthe Needham Research Institute in Cambridge,England,is offeredfor one year by the L i Foundation of New York.This is to enable a Chinese scholar from the People' sRepublic of China to conduct research in a subjectrelevant t…     

On Indivisibles and Infinitesimals: A Response to David Sherry, “The Jesuits and the Method of Indivisibles”

In “The Jesuits and the Method of Indivisibles” David Sherry criticizes a central thesis of my book Infinitesimal: that in the seventeenth century the Jesuits sought to suppress the method of indivisibles because it undermined their efforts to establish a perfect rational and hierarchical order in the world, modeled on Euclidean Geometry. Sherry accepts that the Jesuits did indeed suppress the method, but offers two objections. First, that the book does not distinguish between indivisibles and infinitesimals, and that whereas the Jesuits might have reason to object to the first, the second posed no problem for them. Second, seeking an alternative explanation for the Jesuits’ hostility to the method, he proposes that its implicit atomism conflicted with the Catholic doctrine of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and was therefore heretical. In response to Sherry’s first criticism I point out that the Jesuits objected to all forms of the method of indivisibles, and that the distinction between indivisibles and infinitesimals consequently cannot explain the fight over the method in the seventeenth century. With regards to the Eucharist, I agree with Sherry that the Jesuits were indeed concerned about the method’s affinity to atomism and materialism, though for a different reason: these doctrines were antithetical to their efforts to impose divine hierarchy and order on the world. In as much as the technical details of the miracle of the Eucharist mattered, they provided no grounds for objecting to a mathematical (rather than physical) doctrine.     

Address at the Opening Ceremony of the 22nd International Congress of History of Science

Honorable Council members of the DHS, Chairs of Delegations, Distinguished Guests, Lances and Gentlemen ： On behalf of the Chinese host, I sincerely and warmly welcome you to Beijing and the 22^nd International Congress of the History of Science. To my knowledge, in the 76 years of its history, this is only the second time that the Congress is being held in the Far East, and is also the second time the Congress is meeting in a developing country.     

The Assassin of Relativity

In his younger years—from the time they were students together at the Zurich Polytechnic—Albert Einstein was good friends with Friedrich Adler. Adler, son of the cultured leader of the Socialist Party in Vienna, was, like Einstein, a physicist very much engaged with both epistemology and politics. They shared a fascination with Ernst Mach.     

Friends of Wisdom?

This commentary addresses the question of the meaning of critique in relation to objectivism or dogmatism. Inspired by Kant’s critical philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology, it defines the first in terms of conditionality, the second in terms of oppositionality. It works out an application on the basis of Salthe’s (Found Sci 15 4(6):357–367, 2010a) paper on development and evolution, where competition is criticized in oppositional, more than in conditional terms.     

Address at the Opening Ceremony of the 22~(nd) International Congress of History of Science

HonorableCouncilmembersoftheDHS,ChairsofDelegations,DistinguishedGuests,Ladies andGentlemen:OnbehalfoftheChinesehost,IsincerelyandwarmlywelcomeyoutoBeijingandthe22nd InternationalCongressoftheHistoryofScience.Tomyknowledge,inthe76yearsofitshisto ry,thisis…     

Using Wittgenstein’s Family Resemblance Principle to Learn Exemplars

The introduction of the notion of family resemblance represented a major shift in Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the meaning of words, moving away from a belief that words were well defined, to a view that words denoted less well defined categories of meaning. This paper presents the use of the notion of family resemblance in the area of machine learning as an example of the benefits that can accrue from adopting the kind of paradigm shift taken by Wittgenstein. The paper presents a model capable of learning exemplars using the principle of family resemblance and adopting Bayesian networks for a representation of exemplars. An empirical evaluation is presented on three data sets and shows promising results that suggest that previous assumptions about the way we categories need reopening.

Two Chinese Pioneers of Relativity

1Introduction OnDecember17,1922,AlbertEinsteinwrotefromKyoto,JapantoXiaYuanli,a physicsprofessoratPekingUniversity.PleasedbyXia sletter,Einsteinnonethelessin formedXiathathemightnotbeabletocometoBeijing,forwhichhecouldnothelpla menting,“Beijingissoclosea…     

《从存在到演化》(From Being to Becoming)

普利高津的新著《从存在到演化》已由上海科技出版社出版,全书256页,定价1.90元。此书的英文版1980年出版,1984年作者又作了修订。普利高津在书中对耗散结构理论作了一个比较简明、系统而又尽可能通俗的讲解,对理论的数学部分作了大量精简,突出讲了它的物理内容和科学意义。此书为具有一定物理学、化学和热力学知识的读者说明了一个远离平衡态的开放系统,怎样从混沌无序演化为复杂的结构,例如大气的循环,化学波的传播,单细胞生物的聚集等。书中对过去和未来的不对称性——时间的不可逆性提出了新的解释,描述了一个演化的而不是静止的宇宙。本书回答了如何从混沌中产生     

The Discovery of the Southern Sky

该文题为《南天星空的发现－－对欧洲和中国三份最早的南天星表的研究》。从１５世纪末开始，以哥伦布发现美洲大陆为标志，欧洲进入伟大的地理新发现时代。欧洲航海家们越过赤道，到达了南半球，从而南天极附近的星空开始成为欧洲人能够看到的星空。