全球化背景下后9.11时期英国伦敦掠影——解读麦克尤恩小说《星期六》

英国作家伊恩·麦克尤恩的小说《星期六》,讲述了后9.11时期家住伦敦市中心的神经外科医生贝罗安在2003年2月15日星期六这一天的经历。在全球化背景下的今天,贝罗安的经历具有典型的代表性,它表明了个人生活与国际局势密不可分,也折射了9.11事件对西方民众生活、心理造成的影响以及由此引发的人们生活方式和生活态度的改变。     

生态叙事:麦克尤恩小说研究

麦克尤恩的小说契合时代的脉搏,将自然﹑生命﹑生存﹑成长等严肃深邃的生态主题用生动的故事呈现出来,充满了众生平等﹑和谐共生的呼唤,渗透"回归生命本真,良知呵护生命和地球"的理想,给读者以深刻的反思和启示。     

伊恩·哈金的科学哲学思想述评

作为当代科学哲学界的重要人物,哈金在一系列重要问题上提出了自己的独到见解,本文旨在把哈金置于当代科学论的背景之下来集中阐述他的科学哲学思想,其中包括实验科学哲学、历史本体论、世界的重构与人的构造以及推理风格,并对其中可能引发的相对主义等问题进行了简要评论.     

工程设计中的方案优选

工程设计中如何科学的、定量的选择最佳设计方案,是个复杂的多因素问题。本文提出用层次分析法来进行设计中的方案优选,并详细给出了方法的特点、步骤、应用实例等。     

实践理性与科学合理性——哈金科学合理性思想研究

伊恩.哈金的科学哲学和实体实在论致力于解决科学合理性的危机。哈金重新发现了科学中实验的本质、属性和地位,从而有力地反驳了曾经动摇了科学合理性基础的意义不可通约性的论题和观察/实验负载理论的论题。通过将实验干预中表现出来的实践理性引入科学合理性的观念,哈金从实用主义的角度捍卫了科学的合理性。     

Narrow and broad styles of scientific reasoning: A reply to O. Bueno

In a recent paper, Otávio Bueno (2012) introduced a narrower understanding of Hacking's concept of styles of scientific reasoning. Although its ultimate goal is to serve a pluralist view of science, Bueno's proposal is a thought-provoking attempt at outlining a concept of style that would keep most of the original understanding's heuristic value, while providing some analytical grip on the specific details of particular scientific practices. In this reply, I consider solely this latter more proximate goal. More precisely, I assess whether or not Bueno's narrower understanding of styles could provide historians and philosophers of science with a workable unit to investigate particular transformations in scientific practices. While the author's proposal is certainly interesting overall, the usefulness of the unit it describes may be compromised by three shortcomings: 1° the extent to which the unit is meant to be narrower is indeterminate; 2° it does not improve much on the analytical capabilities of Hacking's concept; and 3° like Hacking's concept it is rather powerless to capture the dynamical character of particular scientific practices.     

The electrons of the dinosaurs and the center of the Earth: comments on D.D. Turner’s ‘The past vs. the tiny: historical science and the abductive arguments for realism’

Turner [The past vs. the tiny: Historical science and the abductive arguments for realism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35A (2004) 1] claims that the arguments in favor of realism do not support with the same force both classes of realism, since they supply stronger reasons for experimental realism than for historical realism. I would like to make two comments, which should be seen as amplifications inspired by his proposal, rather than as a criticism. First, it is important to highlight that Turner’s distinction between ‘tiny’ and ‘past unobservables’ is neither excluding nor exhaustive. Second, even if we agreed with everything that Turner says regarding the arguments for realism and their relative weight in order to justify the experimental or historical version, there is an aspect that Turner does not consider and that renders historical realism less problematic than experimental realism.     

Inevitability,contingency, and epistemic humility

This paper offers an epistemological framework for the debate about whether the results of scientific enquiry are inevitable or contingent. I argue in Sections 2 and 3 that inevitabilist stances are doubly guilty of epistemic hubris—a lack of epistemic humility—and that the real question concerns the scope and strength of our contingentism. The latter stages of the paper—Sections 4 and 5—address some epistemological and historiographical worries and sketch some examples of deep contingencies to guide further debate. I conclude by affirming that the concept of epistemic humility can usefully inform critical reflection on the contingency of the sciences and the practice of history of science.     

The past vs. the tiny: historical science and the abductive arguments for realism

Scientific realism is fundamentally a view about unobservable things, events, processes, and so on, but things can be unobservable either because they are tiny or because they are past. The familiar abductive arguments for scientific realism lend more justification to scientific realism about the tiny than to realism about the past. This paper examines both the “basic” abductive arguments for realism advanced by philosophers such as Ian Hacking and Michael Devitt, as well as Richard Boyd’s version of the inference to the best explanation of the success of science, and shows that these arguments provide less support to historical than to experimental realism. This is because unobservably tiny things can function both as unifiers of the phenomena and as tools for the production of new phenomena, whereas things in the past can only serve as unifiers of the phenomena. The upshot is that realists must not suppose that by presenting arguments for experimental realism they have thereby defended realism in general.     

Hacking’s historical epistemology: a critique of styles of reasoning

The paper begins with a detailed reconstruction of the development of Ian Hacking’s theory of scientific ‘styles of reasoning’, paying particular attention to Alistair Crombie’s influence, and suggesting that Hacking’s theory deserves to come under the title ‘historical epistemology’. Subsequently, the paper seeks to establish three critical theses. First, Hacking’s reliance on Crombie leads him to adopt an outdated historiographical position; second, Hacking is unsuccessful in his attempt to distance historical epistemology from epistemic relativism; and third, Hacking has not (yet) offered convincing criteria for individuating styles of reasoning.