Three Criteria for Consensus Conferences

Consensus conferences are social techniques which involve bringing together a group of scientific experts, and sometimes also non-experts, in order to increase the public role in science and related policy, to amalgamate diverse and often contradictory evidence for a hypothesis of interest, and to achieve scientific consensus or at least the appearance of consensus among scientists. For consensus conferences that set out to amalgamate evidence, I propose three desiderata: Inclusivity (the consideration of all available evidence), Constraint (the achievement of some agreement of intersubjective assessments of the hypothesis of interest), and Evidential Complexity (the evaluation of available evidence based on a plurality of relevant evidential criteria). Two examples suggest that consensus conferences can readily satisfy Inclusivity and Evidential Complexity, but consensus conferences do not as easily satisfy Constraint. I end by discussing the relation between social inclusivity and the three desiderata.     

The Anti-philosophical Stance, the Realism Question and Scientific Practice

In recent years a general consensus has been developing in the philosophy of science to the effect that strong social constructivist accounts are unable to adequately account for scientific practice. Recently, however, a number of commentators have formulated an attenuated version of constructivism that purports to avoid the difficulties that plague the stronger claims of its predecessors. Interestingly this attenuated form of constructivism finds philosophical support from a relatively recent turn in the literature concerning scientific realism. Arthur Fine and a number of other commentators have argued that the realism debate ought to be abandoned. The rationale for this argument is that the debate is sterile for it has, it is claimed, no consequence for actual scientific practice, and therefore does not advance our understanding of science or its practice. Recent “softer” accounts of social constructivism also hold a similar agnostic stance to the realism question. I provide a survey of these various agnostic stances and show how they form a general position that I shall refer to as “the anti-philosophical stance”. I then demonstrate that the anti-philosophical stance fails by identifying difficulties that attend its proposal to ban philosophical interpretation. I also provide examples of instances where philosophical stances to the realism question affect scientific practice.     

迪昂-奎因论点和科学理论检验的转换

在科学哲学中，科学理论的检验经历了从严格的单个判决性实验的检验到检验具有多层次扩展结构，比如范式或理论体系的转换，再到科学理论检验多元化的转换。在这个过程中，对迪昂一奎因论点的理解是关键。文章从科学理论的一般结构的分析开始，探讨了迪昂一奎因论点对科学理论检验重大转变的影响，概略地分析了科学哲学关于科学理论检验的历史进程。     

Outline of a Theory of Scientific Aesthetics

I offer a theory of art that is based on science. I maintain that, as any other human activity, art can be studied with the tools of science. This does not mean that art is scientific, but aesthetics, the theory of art, can be formulated in accord with our scientific knowledge. I present elucidations of the concepts of aesthetic experience, art, work of art, artistic movement, and I discuss the ontological status of artworks from the point of view of scientific philosophy.     

Sufficient Reason and Reason Enough

I offer an analysis of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its relevancy for the scientific endeavour. I submit that the world is not, and cannot be, rational—only some brained beings are. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is not a necessary truth nor a physical law. It is just a guiding metanomological hypothesis justified a posteriori by its success in helping us to unveil the mechanisms that operate in Nature.     

Rationality in the Discovery of Empirical Laws

In this paper I argue against the traditional viewthat in discovery processes there is no place forrational decisions. First I argue that some historicalprocesses in which an empirical law was developed,were rational. Second, I identify some of themethodological rules that we can follow in order to berational when constructing an empirical law. Finally,I argue that people who deny that scientific discoverycan be rational do not understand the nature ofmethodological rules.     

Mediating Mars: Perceptual Experience and Scientific Imaging Technologies

The philosophical tradition of phenomenology, with its focus on human bodily perception, can be used to explore the ways scientific instrumentation shapes a user’s experience. Building on Don Ihde’s account of technological embodiment, I develop a framework of concepts for articulating the experience of image interpretation in science. These concepts can be of practical value to the analysis of scientific debates over image interpretation for the ways they draw out the relationships between the image-making processes and the rival scientific explanations of image content. As a guiding example, I explore a contemporary debate over images of the surface of Mars which reveal a landmass that resembles river delta formations on Earth, and which thus has important implications for the history of Martian climate and water flow. The phenomenological framework I develop can be used to help evaluate the different interpretations on offer for these images, and to analyze the roles in this discussion played by spacecraft equipped with cameras and laser and thermal imaging devices.     

Displacing Epistemology: Being in the Midst of Technoscientific Practice

Interest the Erklären?CVerstehen debate is usually interpreted as primarily epistemological. By raising the possibility that there are fundamentally different methods for fundamentally different types of science, the debate puts into play all the standard issues??that is, issues concerning scientific explanation and justification, the unity and diversity of scientific disciplines, the reality of their subject matter, the accessibility of various subject matters to research, and so on. In this paper, however, I do not focus on any of these specific issues. I start instead from the fact that the very existence of the debate itself is an issue; in fact, it poses a philosophical problem that almost everyone but the hardest line logical empiricists has come to realize cannot be resolved epistemologically. In my view, however, that it cannot be resolved ontologically, either. I think the problem is at bottom hermeneutical, and its resolution requires that we focus first, not on the objects of science or the methods of studying them, but on the character of the philosophical orientation assumed by those who would try to resolve it. In this paper, I explain why I think this is so by analyzing (1) Dilthey??s contribution to the original debate, (2) Husserl??s reaction to Dilthey, and (3) Heidegger??s critical evaluation of both. This line of philosophical development??this movement of self-understanding from critiques of objectivism to hermeneutical phenomenology??is of course already a central feature of much work in continental philosophy of science. In my conclusion, however, I argue for the less well-established??even if apparently approved??idea that it ought to be a central feature of technoscience studies as well.     

马克思主义作为科学哲学在国外的历史与现状

与马克思主义人文主义解读相比,马克思传统的科学性解读在国内的处境及研究与它的应有的地位极不相称。那么作为一种科学哲学的马克思主义在国外的研究处境如何呢?笔者所在的研究团队在国外访学期间,通过对大量文献的收集与整理,发现对马克思主义科学哲学的研究在国外已经形成了如下共识:将实践范畴作为严整的(社会)科学探索;马克思传统中的科学研究与哲学升华的相互依赖;辩证唯物主义本体论及辩证法对于唯物史观的逻辑优先性;严整的(社会)科学探索作为哲学理解的基础性地位等。在此基础上,国外形成了几种代表性的研究领域:对马克思恩格斯经典著作中的科学哲学思想的深入挖掘;马克思主义作为科学哲学在前苏联的传播与发展;马克思主义在社会主义国际和共产国际之间的理论与实践;马克思主义在当代科学哲学中的延续;西方马克思主义科学哲学的初步探索等。     

From Change to Spacetime: An Eleatic Journey

I present a formal ontological theory where the basic building blocks of the world can be either things or events. In any case, the result is a Parmenidean worldview where change is not a global property. What we understand by change manifests as asymmetries in the pattern of the world-lines that constitute 4-dimensional existents. I maintain that such a view is in accord with current scientific knowledge.     

A Theory of Scientific Model Construction: <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Conceptual Process of Abstraction and Concretisation</Emphasis>

The process of abstraction and concretisation is a label used for an explicative theory of scientific model-construction. In scientific theorising this process enters at various levels. We could identify two principal levels of abstraction that are useful to our understanding of theory-application. The first level is that of selecting a small number of variables and parameters abstracted from the universe of discourse and used to characterise the general laws of a theory. In classical mechanics, for example, we select position and momentum and establish a relation amongst the two variables, which we call Newton’s 2nd law. The specification of the unspecified elements of scientific laws, e.g. the force function in Newton’s 2nd law, is what would establish the link between the assertions of the theory and physical systems. In order to unravel how and with what conceptual resources scientific models are constructed, how they function and how they relate to theory, we need a view of theory-application that can accommodate our constructions of representation models. For this we need to expand our understanding of the process of abstraction to also explicate the process of specifying force functions etc. This is the second principal level at which abstraction enters in our theorising and in which I focus. In this paper, I attempt to elaborate a general analysis of the process of abstraction and concretisation involved in scientific- model construction, and argue why it provides an explication of the construction of models of the nuclear structure.     

Pragmatism and the Practical Relevance of Truth

In this article, I argue that pragmatism has something to gain from returning once more to the question of truth, and acknowledging the truth of the existence of Being and its elements. The practical relevance of this insight is shown by my proposition for a practical hermeneutic social scientific method which logically follows from the truth of Being. The method is compatible with the inevitability of subjective judgments in any kind of scientific research, as well as with many pragmatist insights. It is my hope that pragmatists will be willing to follow their own adagium and conceive of this confrontation with difference as an opportunity to re-assess their views.     

s-Consensus index method: An additional axiom

A consensus index method is an ordered pair consisting of a consensus method and a consensus index Day and McMorris (1985) have specified two minimal axioms, one which should be satisfied by the consensus method and the other by the consensus index The axiom for consensus indices is not satisfied by the s-consensus index In this paper, an additional axiom, which states that a consensus index equal to one implies profile unanimity, is proposed The s-consensus method together with a modification of the s-consensus index (i e, normalized by the number of distinct nontrivial clusters in the profile) is shown to satisfy the two axioms proposed by Day and McMorris and the new axiom     

Minimal memetics and the Evolution of Patented Technology

The nature and status of cultural evolution and its connection with biological evolution are controversial in part because of Richard Dawkin’s suggestion that the scientific study of culture should include “memetics,” an analog of genetics in which genes are replaced by “memes”—the hypothetical units of cultural evolution. Memetics takes different forms; I focus on its minimal form, which claims merely that natural selection shapes to some extent the evolution of some aspects of culture. Advocates and critics of memetics disagree about the scientific status of memetics, but they agree that memetics must face the following fundamental problems. Problem 1: Cultural evolution differs too much from biological evolution. Problem 2: Culture is too complex. Problem 3: Memes are too difficult to identify and track. Problem 4: Memetics produces only trivial results. This paper examines these problems in the context of a minimal memetic analysis in one specific context: patented inventions. Technology is a special subset of culture, and patented inventions are a special subset of technology—not least because there is a detailed written record of every patent. I describe four recent empirical results on technological innovation derived from memetic analysis of the patent record. Result 1: Inkjet printing, PCR, and stents are key drivers of technological innovation. Result 2: Patent genealogies are tangled and incestuous. Result 3: Door-opening innovations drive the evolution of technology. Result 4: The evolving content of the drivers of innovation confirms the importance of inkjet printing, PCR, and stents, among other inventions. These results show that minimal memetics can provide a novel and illuminating analysis the evolution of patented technology. Furthermore, this memetic analysis can answer all of the main problems with memetics. Problem 1 can be dismissed because culture and biology can be quite disanalogous, provided that natural selection still operates in both. Problem 2 is a mirage, because memetic analysis of the patented inventions is consistent with the full richness and complexity of the evolution of technology. Problem 3 is easy to solve, because the patent record makes it trivial to identify and track patents and their key traits through lineages. Problem 4 can be fully answered only after memetic analysis becomes widespread, but the results reviewed here shows that minimal memetics does yield scientific results that are nontrivial and interesting.     

论个体性状的完全因果解释

尼安德的"传递论证"中有两个不合理之处:第一,把个体性状出现的遗传学原因扩展为个体性状出现的所有原因,从而把完全因果解释理解成了对个体性状的历史解释;第二,要求对个体性状的解释包括对"原因的原因"的无休止上溯,从而把完全因果解释理解成了终极解释。索伯尔在回应尼安德时只是强调了遗传机制与选择机制属于两种不同的因果路径,没有指出尼安德对科学解释的错误理解,这就不能完全排除选择机制对个体性状的解释作用。     

Can Darwinian Mechanisms Make Novel Discoveries?: Learning from discoveries made by evolving neural networks

Some philosophers suggest that the development of scientificknowledge is a kind of Darwinian process. The process of discovery,however, is one problematic element of this analogy. I compare HerbertSimon's attempt to simulate scientific discovery in a computer programto recent connectionist models that were not designed for that purpose,but which provide useful cases to help evaluate this aspect of theanalogy. In contrast to the classic A.I. approach Simon used, ``neuralnetworks' contain no explicit protocols, but are generic learningsystems built on the model of the interconnections of neurons in thebrain. I describe two cases that take the connectionist approach a stepfurther by using genetic algorithms, a form of evolutionary computationthat explicitly models Darwinian mechanisms. These cases show thatDarwinian mechanisms can make novel discoveries of complex, previouslyunknown patterns. With some caveats, they lend support to evolutionaryepistemology.     

从拉瓦锡化学革命案例看萨伽德的整合认知-社会解释纲要

就科学知识的发展问题主要有逻辑解释、认知解释和社会解释之分.萨伽德在考虑逻辑因素的情况下,对认知解释和社会解释进行了有机的结合,提出了解释科学知识发展的整合认知-社会解释纲要(integrated cognitive-social schema).本文先对整合认知-社会解释纲要进行了描述,然后单独从认知因素和社会因素介绍萨伽德对化学革命案例的解释,最后对整合认知-社会解释纲要及其在化学革命案例上的运用进行了论述.     

Being Post-Positivist . . . or Just Talking About it?

Hans Ruin and Patrick Heelan join me in celebrating the rise of post-positivist and phenomenological approaches to scientific and technological practice. Yet as they both know, I am also concerned that the very presence of all the new accounts which give voice to this trend may tempt us into concluding prematurely that the traditional understanding of science and technology has already been displaced. With especially Ruin’s encouragement, I expand my original discussion of this concern by explaining why I agree with him about the ontologically mistaken suppositions that one might become post-positivistic by doing philosophy “meta-philosophically,” or become phenomenological by making “life” more basic that “nature.”