It is argued that, while there is no such property as truth, there is a feature of factuality which certain states of affairs have and others lack. Since states of affairs can appear before the mind as having this feature when, in reality, they do not have it, a most difficult epistemological problem arises, namely, how to distinguish between a state of affairs which merely appears to have factuality and a state of affairs which really is factual. The (...) class='Hi'>test for factuality, it is maintained, is twofold. It consists, on the one hand, of perception and introspection, and on the other, of coherence. What we perceive and introspect is not only presented to us as factual, but justifiedly taken to be factual. In case of doubt, though, we cannot but fall back on coherence, comparing some of our beliefs, perceptions, assumptions etc. with others. (shrink)

It is argued that, while there is no such property as truth, there is a feature of factuality which certain states of affairs have and others lack. Since states of affairs can appear before the mind as having this feature when, in reality, they do not have it, a most difficult epistemological problem arises, namely, how to distinguish between a state of affairs which merely appears to have factuality and a state of affairs which really is factual. The (...) class='Hi'>test for factuality, it is maintained, is twofold. It consists, on the one hand, of perception and introspection, and on the other, of coherence. What we perceive and introspect is not only presented to us as factual, but justifiedly taken to be factual. In case of doubt, though, we cannot but fall back on coherence, comparing some of our beliefs, perceptions, assumptions etc. with others. (shrink)

This paper considers the method of idealization and factualization as the main method of all advanced empirical science. The procedure is as follows. Some idealizing conditions are assumed: the vanishing of factors $(p_{i}=0)$ which never vanish in the real world. An idealization law is formulated -- a law which is exactly (non-vacuously) fulfilled only in an ideal model, not in any real system. Then the idealizing assumptions are abrogated one by one-it is a process of gradual factualization, of the transition (...) to the factual laws which are fulfilled in real systems. These laws may be directly applied and tested by experience. (shrink)

Recent philosophical accounts of mathematics increasingly focus on the quasi-Empirical rather than the formal aspects of the field, The praxis of how mathematics is done rather than the idealized logical structure and foundations of the theory. The ultimate test of any philosophy of mathematics, However idealized, Is its ability to account adequately for the factual development of the subject in real time. As a text case, The works and views of felix klein (1849-1925) were studied. Major advances in (...) mathematics turn out to be most adequately understood as shifts to new conceptualizations at different levels of idealization and abstraction. The implications of the model are explored with special reference to modern philosophical views of the nature and the warrants of mathematical claims to knowledge, And the methodology of the development of this knowledge. (shrink)

Recent philosophical accounts of mathematics increasingly focus on the quasi-Empirical rather than the formal aspects of the field, The praxis of how mathematics is done rather than the idealized logical structure and foundations of the theory. The ultimate test of any philosophy of mathematics, However idealized, Is its ability to account adequately for the factual development of the subject in real time. As a text case, The works and views of felix klein (1849-1925) were studied. Major advances in (...) mathematics turn out to be most adequately understood as shifts to new conceptualizations at different levels of idealization and abstraction. The implications of the model are explored with special reference to modern philosophical views of the nature and the warrants of mathematical claims to knowledge, And the methodology of the development of this knowledge. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy seeks to examine empirically various factual issues that, either explicitly or implicitly, lie at the foundations of philosophical positions. A study of this genre (Miller & Feltz, 2011) was critiqued. Questions about the study were raised and broader issues pertaining to the field of experimental philosophy were discussed.

: Our paper discusses the epistemic attitudes of particle physicists on the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. It is based on questionnaires and interviews made shortly before and shortly after the discovery in 2012. We show, to begin with, that the discovery of a Standard Model Higgs boson was less expected than is sometimes assumed. Once the new particle was shown to have properties consistent with SM expectations – albeit with significant experimental uncertainties –, there (...) was a broad agreement that ‘a’ Higgs boson had been found. Physicists adopted a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, they treated the particle as a SM Higgs boson and tried to establish its properties with higher precision; on the other hand, they searched for any hints of physics beyond the SM. This motivates our first philosophical thesis: the Higgs discovery, being of fundamental importance and establishing a new kind of particle, represented a crucial experiment if one interprets this notion in an appropriate sense. By embedding the LHC into the tradition of previous precision experiments and the experimental strategies thus established, underdetermination and confirmational holism are kept at bay. Second, our case study suggests that criteria of theory preference should be understood as epistemic and pragmatic values that have to be weighed in factual research practice. The Higgs discovery led to a shift from pragmatic to epistemic values as regards the mechanisms of electroweak symmetry breaking. Complex criteria, such as naturalness, combine epistemic and pragmatic different values, but are coherently applied by the community. (shrink)

Despite decades of prevention efforts, millions of persons worldwide continue to become infected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) every year. This urgent problem of global epidemic control has recently lead to significant changes in HIV testing policies. Provider-initiated approaches to HIV testing have been embraced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, such as those that routinely inform persons that they will be tested for HIV unless they explicitly refuse ('opt out'). While these (...) policies appear to increase uptake of testing, they raise a number of ethical concerns that have been debated in journals and at international AIDS conferences. However, one special form of 'provider-initiated' testing is being practiced and promoted in various parts of the world, and has advocates within international health agencies, but has received little attention in the bioethical literature: mandatory premarital HIV testing. This article analyses some of the key ethical issues related to mandatory premarital HIV testing in resource-poor settings with generalized HIV epidemics. We will first briefly mention some mandatory HIV premarital testing proposals, policies and practices worldwide, and offer a number of conceptual and factual distinctions to help distinguish different types of mandatory testing policies. Using premarital testing in Goma (Democratic Republic of Congo) as a point of departure, we will use influential public health ethics principles to evaluate different forms of mandatory testing. We conclude by making concrete recommendations concerning the place of mandatory premarital testing in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. (shrink)

Part Two, Area A. Resuming the investigation set afoot in Part 1,1 we there proposed that subliminally people do commonly sense moral obligation as a kind of debt (chreos) of shared responsibility ? every person's share in the cost of a good community which is the common cause of all. Testing this ?common understanding? by the facts of human nature and community, this article examines the substratum of my good, good of others, idea of good community, of common cause in (...) it, of shared responsibility for it, of consequent debt of all to whole, and of human freedom and capacity to estimate and pay on a basis to be examined in Area B projected. ?Elementary freedom? depends on capacity for truthful purpose and for independent judgment, ?ultimate freedom? on a determined truthful purpose coupled with adequacy of ideas for interpretation of entire experience. Every human is free in the elementary sense, and accordingly responsible. Ultimate freedom has to be won, and actively affirmed. (shrink)

Despite decades of prevention efforts, millions of persons worldwide continue to become infected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) every year. This urgent problem of global epidemic control has recently lead to significant changes in HIV testing policies. Provider‐initiated approaches to HIV testing have been embraced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, such as those that routinely inform persons that they will be tested for HIV unless they explicitly refuse (‘opt out’). While these (...) policies appear to increase uptake of testing, they raise a number of ethical concerns that have been debated in journals and at international AIDS conferences. However, one special form of ‘provider‐initiated’ testing is being practiced and promoted in various parts of the world, and has advocates within international health agencies, but has received little attention in the bioethical literature: mandatory premarital HIV testing. This article analyses some of the key ethical issues related to mandatory premarital HIV testing in resource‐poor settings with generalized HIV epidemics. We will first briefly mention some mandatory HIV premarital testing proposals, policies and practices worldwide, and offer a number of conceptual and factual distinctions to help distinguish different types of mandatory testing policies. Using premarital testing in Goma (Democratic Republic of Congo) as a point of departure, we will use influential public health ethics principles to evaluate different forms of mandatory testing. We conclude by making concrete recommendations concerning the place of mandatory premarital testing in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. (shrink)

Richard Bradley has initiated a new debate, with Brian Hill and Jake Chandler as further participants, about the implications of a number of so-called triviality results surrounding the Ramsey test for conditionals. I comment on this debate and argue that ‘Inclusion’ and ‘Preservation’, which were originally introduced as postulates for the rational revision of factual beliefs, have little to recommend them in the first place when extended to languages containing conditionals. I question the philosophical method of postulation that (...) was applied in the new debate, and instead base my arguments on explicit representations of belief states and canonical constructions of belief state revisions. (shrink)

This article provides a brief overview of the efforts to develop and refine the Critical thinking Assessment Test and its potential for improving the design of classroom assessments. The CAT instrument was designed to help faculty understand their students’ strengths and weaknesses using a short answer essay format. The instrument assesses a broad collection of critical thinking skills that transcend most disciplines. The questions were deliberately designed around real-world scenarios that did not require specialized knowledge from any particular discipline. (...) Various faculty who collaborated in the national dissemination of the CAT instrument found that it was a helpful model for designing better course assessments to grade student work. Classroom assessments modeled on the CAT emphasize more critical thinking within the discipline and less rote retention of factual information. We describe the ongoing work to help faculty successfully adapt the CAT to applications that can be used in each discipline’s courses to evaluate and encourage students’ critical thinking. (shrink)

In an earlier issue, I argue (2014) that psychology and epistemology should distinguish religious credence from factual belief. These are distinct cognitive attitudes. Levy (2017) rejects this distinction, arguing that both religious and factual “beliefs” are subject to “shifting” on the basis of fluency and “intuitiveness.” Levy’s theory, however, (1) is out of keeping with much research in cognitive science of religion and (2) misrepresents the notion of factual belief employed in my theory. So his claims don’t (...) undermine my distinction. I conclude by suggesting some approaches to empirically testing our views. (shrink)

A test was administered to 102 engineering students to ascertain how engineering education influences their environmental knowledge and attitudes. Answers to definitional and factual questions in a forced-answer section demonstrated that students were improving their technical knowledge, but responses to more subtle questions were mixed. Answers to attitudinal questions exhibited a trend towards increased environmental awareness. For open-ended questions, posttest results showed an increase in knowledge of engineering work. Over 80% of the students considered themselves to have a (...) caring attitude toward the environment, with the “three R’s” and green transportation choices most commonly cited. Engagement in research, education, or advocacy doubled from pretest to posttest. Air pollution and solid waste disposal most frequently influenced students’ attitudes toward the environment. Outdoor experiences were the most frequently mentioned source of information; university courses rose from 4% to 15% on the posttest. Only 40% of the students could name an environmental role model. (shrink)

Resolution of Frege's Puzzle by denying that synonym substitution in logical truths preserves sentence sense and explaining how logical form has semantic import. Intensional context substitutions needn't preserve truth, because intercepting doesn't preserve sentence meaning. Intercepting is nonuniformly substituting a pivotal term in syntactically secured truth. Logical sentences and their synonym interceptions share factual content. Semantic content is factual content in synthetic predications, but not logical sentences and interceptions. Putnam's Postulate entails interception nonsynonymy. Syntax and vocabulary explain only (...) the factual content of synthetic predications; extrasentential reality explains their truth. Construction of logical factual content explains logical necessity. Terms retain objectual reference, but logical syntax preempts their function in explaining truth. Grasping the facts GG/gg assert entails understanding this. Understanding what GH states requires some recognition that GH must be true just because GmH, and GmH state an empirical fact. GH is standardly used to express that fact. Church's Test exposes puzzles. QMi sentences, and QTi sentences are metalogical necessities, true by syntax. Intercepting QMi creates empirical QM contingencies. Synonymy turns semantic contingencies into metalogical and lexical necessities. That transformation is syntactic, via the syntactic duality of definite descriptions. GmH is a contingent copredication, and a lexically necessary referential identity with rigidly codesignating indexicals. Metalogical sentences may be about expressional matter or what it expresses. GG has GG's semantic content, but the referent expression switches. Metalogical syntax secures truth by self-referential quotational indexing. Metalogically, referents are identified with intrasentential replica. Extrasentential identifications are metalogically irrelevant. (shrink)

If the healthy and the pathological are not merely judgments qualifiers, but real phenomena, it must be possible to define both of them positively, which, in this context, means as factual contraries. On the other hand, only a privative definition, either of the pathological as 'non-healthy', or of the healthy as 'non-pathological', can rationally circumscribe all possible states of an organism. This fluctuation between two meanings of the 'healthy'-'pathological' opposition, factual vs. rational, characterizes the ordinary usage of these (...) concepts and puts all philosophical definitions in a hopeless situation. Although a scientific definition may conceal this equivocation by adequately setting out the terms of the problem of discriminating between the 'healthy' and the 'pathological', it could explain some of the difficulties met in determining 'gold standards', in the choice of separators, and in the assessment of the diagnostic qualities of tests. (shrink)

Social interactions of autistic and non-autistic persons are intriguing. In all sorts of situations people with autism are part of the daily life of those around them. Such interactions exist despite the lack of familiar ways of attuning to one another. In Autistic Company, the anthropologist and philosopher Ruud Hendriks—himself trained as a care worker for young people with autism—investigates what alternative means are sometimes found by autistic and non-autistic people to establish a shared existence. Unprecedented in scholarly work on (...) autism, the book also reflects on how to talk about these unusual ways of getting on together. Drawing on methods from both the arts and the social sciences, this study covers very diverse sources, ranging from literary works to factual writing on autism in science and advisory literature, and from autobiographical accounts to ethnographic observations in a home for autistic people. “Putting familiar concepts to a test, Autistic Company wrenches and fiddles with the very distinctions that constitute our sense of self. By doing so, Hendriks succeeds in getting closer both to autistic and non-autistic extremes, showing how thin the division between us and them really is.” -L.W. Nauta in Krisis. (shrink)

So-called ‘anonymous’ tissue samples are widely used in research. Because they lack externally identifying information, they are viewed as useful in reconciling conflicts between the control, privacy and confidentiality interests of those from whom the samples originated and the public (or commercial) interest in carrying out research, as reflected in ‘consent or anonymise’ policies. High level guidance documents suggest that withdrawal of consent and samples and the provision of feedback are impossible in the case of anonymous samples. In view of (...) recent developments in science and consumer-driven genomics the authors argue that such statements are misleading and only muddle complex ethical questions about possible entitlements to control over samples. The authors therefore propose that terms such as ‘anonymised’, ‘anonymous’ or ‘non-identifiable’ be removed entirely from documents describing research samples, especially from those aimed at the public. This is necessary as a matter of conceptual clarity and because failure to do so may jeopardise public trust in the governance of large scale databases. As there is wide variation in the taxonomy for tissue samples and no uniform national or international standards, the authors propose that a numeral-based universal coding system be implemented that focuses on specifying incremental levels of identifiability, rather than use terms that imply that the reidentification of research samples and associated actions are categorically impossible. (shrink)

This paper presents arguments that challenge what I call the fact/value separability thesis: the idea, roughly, that factual judgements can be made independently of judgements of value. I will look at arguments to the effect that facts and values are entangled in the following areas of the scientific process in economics: theory development, economic concept formation, economic modelling, hypothesis testing, and hypothesis acceptance.

Animal research has long been a source of biomedical aspirations and moral concern. Examples of both hope and concern are abundant today. In recent months, as is common practice, monkeys have served as test subjects in promising preclinical trials for an Ebola vaccine or treatment 1 , 2 , 3 and in controversial maternal deprivation studies. 4 The unresolved tension between the noble aspirations of animal research and the ethical controversies it often generates motivates the present issue of the (...) Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. As editors of this special section, we hope that these original and timely articles will push the professional discussion of animal research ethics in a positive direction that will benefi t research scientists and others interested in moral problems in animal research. We also look forward to a day when animal research will genuinely meet both appropriate scientifi c and appropriate ethical criteria—criteria that themselves can be improved by critical scrutiny. Animal research—that is, the use of live animals as experimental subjects in biomedical and behavioral fi elds of learning—has been deeply entrenched for well over half a century. One signal development was the enactment in the late 1930s of federal product safety legislation in the United States and other nations that required animal testing of food, drugs, and medical devices prior to use by human subjects or consumers. 5 Another development was the publication of codes of research ethics that called for animal research prior to human research. The Nuremberg Code, published by an American military tribunal in 1947–48 after scrutiny of Nazi medical atrocities, stated that experiments involving the use of human subjects should be " based on the results of animal experimentation. " 6 The Declaration of Helsinki, fi rst published in 1964, reaffi rmed this assumption and added, rather imprecisely, that " the welfare of animals used for research must be respected. " 7 Against the background of such statements, the institutionalization and widespread acceptance of animal research in the twentieth century rested on two basic assumptions, one factual and one moral. The factual assumption was that animal research is suffi ciently reliable as a basis for predicting the effects of drugs, products, and other materials on human beings that animal trials can be expected to yield signifi cant scientifi c conclusions and medical benefi ts to humanity. (shrink)

Grice coined the term ‘conventional implicature’ in a short passage in ‘Logic and conversation’. The description is intuitive and deeply intriguing. The range of phenomena that have since been assigned this label is large and diverse. I survey the central factual motivation, arguing that it is loosely uni- fied by the idea that conventional implicatures contribute a separate dimen- sion of meaning. I provide tests for distinguishing conventional implicatures from other kinds of meaning, and I briefly explore ways in (...) which one can incorporate multiple dimensions of meaning into a single theory. (shrink)

In this article the author criticizes Michael Devitt’s Naturalistic Moral Realism, as well as that program in general. The author argues the following: moral explanations do not work; the fact that moral featuressupervene on the non-moral ones does not support the thesis of Realism; moral principles can not be tested like factual ones; Moral Realists Naturalists water down their thesis so much that it ceases to be a form of realism; there are no moral observations in any interesting sense.

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our (...) participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (69.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Abstract Most modern knowledge is not science. The physical sciences have successfully validated theories to infer they can be used universally to predict in previously unexperienced circumstances. According to the conventional conception of science such inferences are falsified by a single irregular outcome. And verification is by the scientific method which requires strict regularity of outcome and establishes cause and effect. -/- Medicine, medical research and many “soft” sciences are concerned with individual people in complex heterogeneous populations. These populations (...) cannot be tested to demonstrate strict regularity of outcome in every individual. Neither randomised controlled trials nor observational studies in medicine are science in the conventional conception. Establishing and using medical and other “soft science” theories cannot be scientific. It requires conceptually different means: requiring expert judgement applying all available evidence in the relevant available factual matrix. -/- The practice of medicine is observational. Prediction of outcomes for the individual requires professional expertise applying available medical knowledge and evidence. Expertise in any profession can only be acquired through experience. Prior cases are the fundament of knowledge and expertise in medicine. Case histories, studies and series can provide knowledge of extremely high reliability applicable to establishing reliable general theories and falsifying others. Their collation, study and analysis should be a priority in medicine. Their devaluation as evidence, the failure to apply their lessons, the devaluation of expert professional judgement and the attempt to emulate the scientific method are all historic errors in the theory and practice of modern medicine. (shrink)

This article argues that language provides instructions for the interpretive work of the addressee. The result of this interpretive process is the establishment of linguistic meaning. On this assumption, the article aims at explaining how meaning is established on the basis of the category of mood in Spanish. It is often assumed that the meaning of mood in Spanish is explainable in terms of assertion vs. non-assertion. Contrary to this, we shall claim that assertion belongs to the level of subordination. (...) Instead of the assertion theory, it is suggested that mood may be explained with reference to the notion of factuality. This claim is tested by means of an analysis of mood in complementizer phrases. (shrink)

This article critically examines the legal arguments presented on behalf of Charlie Gard’s parents, Connie Yates and Chris Gard, based on a threshold test of significant harm for intervention into the decisions made jointly by holders of parental responsibility. It argues that the legal basis of the argument, from the case of Ashya King, was tenuous. It sought to introduce different categories of cases concerning children’s medical treatment when, despite the inevitable factual distinctions between individual cases, the duty (...) of the judge in all cases to determine the best interests of the child is firmly established by the case law. It argues that the focus should not have been on a threshold for intervention but on whether his parents had established that the therapy they wanted was a viable alternative therapeutic option. In the April hearing, Charlie’s parents relied on the offer of treatment from a US doctor; by July they had an independent panel of international experts supporting their case although by this time the medical evidence was that it was too late for Charlie. One of Charlie’s legacies for future disputes may be that his case highlighted the need for evidence as to whether the treatment parents want for their child is a viable alternative therapeutic option before a court can determine which therapeutic option is in the best interests of the child. (shrink)

Throughout the sixteenth century, learned physicians across Europe performed a diverse array of “trials” of phenomena and published reports about them. This essay traces the phrase “periculum facere” (“to make a trial”) and related terms through natural history investigations, drug testing, chymical analysis, and anatomical discoveries. Physicians used ancient precedents, their learned expertise, and pedagogical authority to anchor the epistemic status of their trials and incorporated the historical narratives of their trial-making within arguments to factual and causal knowledge, even (...) philosophical scientia. Developed from engagement with things, ancient texts, other healers, and students, this lively tradition of contrived, first-person empirical trials flourished in some academic institutions, especially the University of Padua. The frequency and visibility of sixteenth-century medical trials, especially in the education of hundreds of students annually, is essential evidence for understanding how experimentation came to be widespread in early modern Europe. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to examine developmental differences in autobiographical memory using a novel test that assesses its semantic and episodic subcomponents. Forty-two children aged 7–13 years were asked to recall semantic information and episodic events from three different time periods. For the recalls of all events, sense of remembering or sense of just knowing was measured via the Remember/Know paradigm. Age-related differences were observed for episodic autobiographical memory whereas semantic autobiographical memory was characterized by a relative (...) developmental invariance. The increase with age was also found in the number of “Remember” responses and their justification in terms of the actual contextual information retrieved—factual, spatial, and, more especially, temporal details. These findings highlight developmental differences between the episodic and semantic subcomponents of autobiographical memory and support the view that mental ‘time travel’ through subjective time, which allows one to re-experience the past through self-awareness, is the last feature of autobiographical memory to become fully operational. (shrink)

Background: Ideas always have and always will change the world; with ideas-engagement enabling individuals to become more knowledgeable, better able to make good decisions and better positioned to re-align their values in response to new progressive norms and beliefs. Given these potential benefits, of primary interest is how citizens can be most effectively encouraged to engage with new ideas. Methods: With this study we test the efficacy of two approaches designed to enhance citizen’s perceptions regarding the value of ideas-engagement. (...) Specifically, we recontextualise a previously undertaken small-scale randomised control trial designed to stimulate states of either curiosity or pragmatic prospection amongst two randomly allocated groups of respondents. Our target variables involve the importance respondents attribute to staying up to date, as well as to four related attitudinal variables. Our target audience is the voting age population of England. Results: 515 participants took part in the experiment, with 269 receiving the curiosity stimulating intervention and 246, the prospection intervention. Our findings suggest that, by the end of four weeks, only the intervention designed to promote pragmatic prospection had significantly impacted on the importance respondents attribute to staying up to date. It also positively impacted the value- scores for one of the secondary attitudinal variables (relating to the importance of supporting physical and mental-health). Conclusions: While this study provides useful insight regarding ideas-engagement, further work is needed. In particular, future studies will require a larger sample, so as to ascertain the impact of these approaches on ‘ideas refusers’. Also required is the inclusion of a control group to provide a definitive counter factual. Furthermore, since positive changes in attitudes towards ideas- engagement also ideally leads to changes in behaviours, questions are also needed to examine the sources of ideas respondents subsequently engage with (or not) as a result of these interventions. (shrink)

For many innovations, oversight fits nicely within existing governance mechanisms; nevertheless, others pose unique public health, environmental, and ethical challenges. Synthetic artemisinin, for example, has many precursors in laboratory‐developed drugs that emulate natural forms of the same drug. The policy challenges posed by synthetic artemisinin do not differ significantly in kind from other laboratory‐formulated drugs. Synthetic biofuels and gene drives, however, fit less clearly into existing governance structures. How many of the new categories of products require new forms of regulatory (...) oversight, or at least extensive forms of testing, remains unclear.Any effort to improve the governance of synthetic biology should start with a rich understanding of the different possible science‐policy interfaces that could help to inform governance. CBA falls into a subset of the overall range of possibilities, and which interface is appropriate may turn out to depend on context, on the demands of the decision at hand. In what follows, we lay out a typology of interfaces. After that, we turn to the question of how to draw upon the range of possible interfaces and effectively address the factual and moral complexities of emerging technologies. We propose a governance model built around structures that we call “governance coordinating committees.” GCCs are intended to be mechanisms for accommodating the complexities of innovations that have far‐ranging societal impacts. The production of biofuels, for example, could contaminate water supplies and have a destructive environmental impact if not managed correctly. The introduction of a gene drive could have economic and environmental impacts that are not restricted to one nation. Forging appropriate means for determining and evaluating those societal impacts, to the best of a corporation's, industry's, or government's ability, is central to responsible research and innovation. Public policy must be shaped in a manner that accommodates as many concerns as possible and minimizes risks. (shrink)

In this ground-breaking article submitted for publication in mid-1986, Lucinda Vandervort creates a radically new and comprehensive theory of sexual consent as the unequivocal affirmative communication of voluntary agreement. She argues that consent is a social act of communication with normative effects. To consent is to waive a personal legal right to bodily integrity and relieve another person of a correlative legal duty. If the criminal law is to protect the individual’s right of sexual self-determination and physical autonomy, rather than (...) simply to regulate the type and degree of force that may be used to obtain compliance from a victim, the point of reference must be the individual complainant, as a person who makes choices, not social norms or objective tests based on the ordinary person. To determine whether consent is voluntary, attention must be directed to the presence or absence of factors that had a coercive impact on the individual complainant, a specific person with a collection of social, cultural, and psychological experiences, needs, fears, values, and priorities. Individuals have the right to exercise self-determination in accordance with their own values and perceptions, not those of a mythical victim. Accordingly, Vandervort argues that the prosecution may show either refusal, the absence of affirmative voluntary agreement (including passivity or the absence of consent due to unconsciousness), or circumstances that invalidate any apparent consent. Any of these prove the absence of consent for the purposes of establishing the actus reus of sexual assault. -/- The definition of consent as the affirmative communication of voluntary agreement is also shown to have a variety of implications for the interpretation and application of the law of sexual assault and the handling of evidentiary issues at trial in sexual assault cases. Key among these is the pivotal significance of the legal definition of consent as a tool to bar availability of the defence of “mistaken belief in consent.” Vandervort argues that in many cases the defence of “mistaken belief in consent” is based on ignorance of the law of consent, mistake about the legal definition of consent, or a failure to appreciate the legal significance of facts that are well-known, and not on a mistaken belief in an erroneous set of facts. The broad proposition asserted here is that a statutory criminal law is enforceable only if all defences based directly or indirectly on belief in the validity of extra-legal norms that authorize infringement of rights protected by the criminal law are barred. This proposition and the characterization of some mistakes about consent as legal, not factual, are also shown to be useful to exclude rape-myths and stereotypical assumptions---the stuff of which “social” definitions of consent have long been constructed---from the decision-making process at trial. -/- . (shrink)

Schlick’s relationship with the Tractatus has been mainly investigated in what concerns the conception both of language and world, the insight of logic, the criteria of verifiability, the proper role of philosophy as mental activity. However, some other features of Schlick’s reading of the Tractatus require a closer consideration. In the 1920s, Schlick was dealing with the questions of ethics (and, to some extent, of religion), that represent from the early days the core issue of his philosophy of culture. Schlick’s (...) intellectual relationship with Wittgenstein ought to be explored also in this broader context, namely after his first encounter with the Tractatus. As it emerges from their private conversations in 1929, Schlick did not agree with Wittgenstein’s account of ethics as a domain going beyond the limits of language. Whereas Wittgenstein maintains that “that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same [Tractatus 6.421]”, Schlick considers ethics as a factual science. As he says in the Problems of ethics (1930), “if there are ethical questions that have meaning, and are therefore able to be answered, then ethics is a science”. Wittgenstein’s position is patently in contrast with Schlick’s. According to Wittgenstein, ethics, no differently from religion, cannot be tested as is usual for meaningful propositions, namely by recurring to hypotheses, high probability or knowing. My paper aims at highlighting this contrast, that is rooted both in the Tractatus and in Schlick’s conception of ethics as science already endorsed in his work before the arriving in Vienna. How Schlick would have appreciated Wittgenstein’s late thoughts on ethics remains, at any rate, an open question. (shrink)

Reviews the book, Relational being: Beyond self and community by Kenneth J. Gergen . The primary plea of the book is that psychology consider a relational rather than individual conception of its phenomena. Gergen encourages us to "treat what we take to be the individual units as derivative of relational process" . This notion of a fundamentally relational subject is one that the reader is invited to explore and to test against other, more traditional, ways of constructing being. It (...) is a proposition entertained and evaluated in terms of its implications but it is not presented as the real, true, or most factual account of human experience. Throughout the text, Gergen attempts to replace the individual or monological expositional style with a more dialogical, plural kind of textual negotiation. The book is constantly questioning and coming to terms with itself, its critics, and its limitations. The book is, as Bakhtin might have it, multivocal. Gergen invokes his own authorial voice, but also his voice as an embedded, historical being. Each chapter is peppered with anecdotes and personal reflections woven into the overall narrative as concrete counterpoint to the abstractions of theoretical argument. In the process, Gergen is surprisingly intimate, personal, and generous with his private life and history. The book also becomes something more human, narrative, and funny than is usual in theoretical exegesis. This style is quite inviting, partly because it is rooted in everyday life but also because it explicitly invites, and even voices, the critic, the question, and the doubt. Ultimately, what is compelling in the pages of Relational Being is what is fundamentally compelling about relationalism itself—namely, the way that it displaces abstract system as the core of meaning and replaces it with embodied relation. This displacement has the potential to redress some of the essential distortions at the heart of Enlightenment reason—particularly that venerable tradition of riding one’s chosen theoretical hobby horse into the face of concrete, lived experience . Relational practice moves us away from the distortions that inevitably come when we make everything we encounter instrumental to some idea that we cherish . Relational practice asks us, instead, to continually return to the lived relation and so continually rupture and remake the narratives by which we understand it. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

1. To list Pound’s triumphs of recognition in the realm of art, music, or literature is by itself no more enlightening than to catalog his oversights. Thus, for example, his instant and almost uncanny responsiveness to the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is not more informative than his bizarre ranking of Francis Picabia’s paintings above those of Picasso or Matisse. Clearly it is essential to know, with as much specificity as possible, exactly what Pound said about a particular work of art (...) or literature and, equally important, given the frequent shifts of emphasis and interest throughout his long career, just when these opinions were first formulated. Like every reader of the The Cantos, I am conscious of the enormous service rendered by Pound scholars whose research is giving us a more complete inventory of the poet’s various statements and positions, and it would be foolish to take my point here as a derogation of such efforts. But a list, no matter how complete, is not an argument, and an inventory, no matter how scrupulously assembled, is not an explanation; a recurrent problem in Pound studies is that too often the compoilation of discrete items of information is seen as a sufficient answer to problems of interpretation and understanding. In other words, I think it essential that discussions of pound and the Visual Arts move beyond the quagmire resulting from still another frain-storm of “factual atoms” chronicling his various passions and dislikes.2. Far from implying, however, that we must therefore simply accept Pound’s brilliant discoveries and pass over his “howling blunders,” my position would emphasize the need to take his ideas seriously enough to confront them, to test them against the material to which they are a response and for which they often seek to provide an explanatory account. There are times, as I have argued in an analogous context, when it is less demeaning to give a man credit for his worst errors than to remove from him the capacity to err.3. What we require, I believe, is less a catalog of all of Pound’s specific statements about various artists, with each utterance assigned a positive or negative prefix depending upon our own personal and currently sanctioned hierarchy of values, than a careful study of the place of those statements in the logic and texture of Pound’s own work. The attempt to focus attention on The Cantos’ network of artistic references—its invocation of masterpieces and privileged moments of cultural achievement—will yield only trivial results unless the inner dynamic linking Pound’s various exampla and the actual role these play in the poem’s argument become clearer in the process. Michael André Bernstein, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione , a volume of verse. He is currently completing a study of the Abject Hero and literary genealogy. His previous contribution to. (shrink)

This article aims at reducing the gap between mathematics and physics from a Wittgensteinian point of view. This gap is usually characterized by two discriminating features. The propositions of physics assert something which might be false; they have a hypothetical character. On the contrary, since mathematical propositions are rules that condition the form of assertions, they remain immune from falsification. The propositions of physics refer to facts that may confirm or refute them. On the contrary, since mathematical propositions have no (...) meaning independently of the demonstration procedures, it cannot be said that they refer to “facts” that pre-exist demonstrations. If we take a closer look, however, these two differences fade away. On the one hand, the propositions of physics are more resistant to experimental tests than has been said in the wake of logical positivism. On the other hand, the “factual” empirical material is defined and co-constituted by instruments whose arrangement is determined by the theory to be tested. I conclude by discussing the possibility of a Wittgensteinian philosophy of contemporary physics. (shrink)

In this article I try to give an account of the meaning of phrases of the form ‘A causes B’ as they are most usefully used in everyday life and the applied sciences. This account covers narrower uses of such phrases, but we find that in our usage of the term, ‘A causes B’ neither entails nor is entailed by ‘A is always followed by B’. Logically necessary and sufficient conditions of this general term can be given, however, by reference (...) to particular cases of causation. The analysis of these is shown to be irreducibly counter-factual, i.e. such phrases are not definable in terms of statements describing those observable occurrences which constitute the relevant verificationary processes. Some objections to the analysis are considered, and it is tested against various examples. * Received 6.xii.65 1 This article is an expanded version of a paper read to the British Society for the Philosophy of Science at Bristol in September 1964. I have greatly benefited from criticisms and suggestions by members of the philosophy seminar of the University of Durham, especially Dr Doreen Bretherton, and also by Professor J. L. Mackie and the editor and referees of this Journal. (shrink)

In replying to Jay Schleusener, I have also answered many of the objections put less abstractly, though often more sharply, by Stanley Fish. For instance, Fish's assertion that my category of unintended negative consequences "will be filled by whatever does not accord with what Rader has decreed to be the positive constructive intention" is essentially the same charge brought by Schleusener and requires no further substantive answer than I have already offered here and, for that matter, in my original essay. (...) I would point out, however, that in this remark as elsewhere Fish loads his statements with inaccurate pejoratives: I do not decree but postulate the positive constructive intention and test it for explanatory adequacy by deduction open at every point to the counterdemonstration of fallacy. I would point out also that, in making this charge, he operates under different explanatory standards from those he adopts elsewhere. The statement quoted imputes to my theory as a special defect the fact of its supposedly self-fulfilling and nonfalsifiable character, whereas later Fish clearly asserts that all interpretations including his own are necessarily self-confirming. Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms", and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks". (shrink)

In a recent paper, Graf and Komatsu (1994) argued that the process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991) is limited in its ability to separate and measure conscious and unconscious forms of memory and so should be "handIed with caution". Given that the study of unconscious influences has always posed a difficult problem for memory researchers, we agree with the general emphasis on caution. In this paper, we too advocate caution, especially as it applies to the use of indirect tests, assessing Graf (...) and Komatsu’s critique, and using the process dissociation procedure. We address the substantive issues raised by Graf and Komatsu and also point out the errors, both factual and logical, in their paper. Any method proposing to provide separate measures of conscious and unconscious influences requires judicious use and a careful examination of its underlying assumptions. The assumptions underlying the process dissociation framework are supported by a large number of experiments spanning a diverse range of.. (shrink)

The following intellectual as opposed to practical reasons for all anthropologists doing fieldwork are examined: fieldwork: (1) records dying societies, (2) corrects ethnocentric bias, (3) helps put customs in their true context, (4) helps get the "feel" of a place, (5) helps to get to understand a society from the inside, (6) enables appreciation of what translating one culture into terms of another involves, (7) makes one a changed man, (8) provides the observational, factual basis for generalizations. None of (...) these is found sufficient to make fieldwork imperative for all anthropologists, although they are quite sufficient to allow that it is imperative for anthropology as a whole that fieldwork in some form by some people continue. In place of the view of fieldwork as an essential preparation for doing anthropology, an alternative role for it is explored: namely as a testing procedure. The implications of this--that the study of problems and the articulation of theories can usefully proceed prior to or even independently of fieldwork--are drawn out, and a new institution of selective fieldwork is proposed. (shrink)

In our paper, we explore the question of what is wrong with Neurath’s “plank-by-plank” method, which Quine later also adopted with enthusiasm. Shipbuilding experts will confirm that plank-byplank replacement is only possible in the dock and never on the open sea. This is simply empty talk, flatus vocis, often attributed to philosophers. The main problem with Neurath’s ship metaphor is that it is completely alien to the seafarers’ way of life, or even in stark contradiction to it. If it is (...) the task of philosophy to bring order into the house of concepts, the use of metaphors should also be scrutinized. Any practical test of the plank-by-plank methodology would prove unsuccessful, for as soon as one would remove a plank from the ship, the ship would sink very quickly due to the onslaught of the water. If the philosophers argue for empiricist epistemology, as Neurath and Quine do, they should not use such utopian metaphors in which the practical life world is completely ignored. When philosophers argue for an empiricist epistemology, as Neurath and Quine do, they should be more careful in their use of metaphors that exclude empiricism, practice, and the practical world of life. It is rather a vivid example of abstract armchair philosophy to explain how science works. Finally, it remains a problem to elaborate a concept of epistemology by “philosophizing” abstractly about empiricism and empiricist epistemology without referring to concrete life experiences. Neurath’s boat metaphor, praised by Quine, is, unfortunately, an example of epistemology without reference to concrete forms of life, and it is still questionable whether we can achieve anything factually with such non-functional metaphors, let alone make the process of cognition scientifically plausible. The whole thing is reminiscent of the scholastic witty remark about how someone convincingly tries to talk about swimming without jumping into the water. Every sailor knows that a ship could only be serviced and repaired in a dock. Seafaring as a way of life, all the turbulence associated with this form of life, obviously remained unknown to Neurath, who spent most of his life in a continental, mountainous country, so it is fair to say that he used a very unusual metaphor not grounded in the practice of life, which, to make the paradox even greater, is meant to represent a naturalistic-empiricist concept of knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Human Genome Project and BioethicsEric T. Juengst, Ph.D. (bio)The fifteen-year "human genome project" at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy officially began on October 1, 1990. With it began a new dimension in federally supported scientific research: concurrent funding for work to anticipate the social consequences of the project's research and to develop policies to guide the use of the knowledge it produces. As (...) a result, the National Center for Human Genome Research (NCHGR) at NIH will support the largest public investment in bioethical analysis to date.NCHGR was established to work with other federal, private, and international organizations on the scientific effort to characterize the form and content of the human genome. The research will yield information—high-resolution genetic linkage and physical maps of all the human chromosomes as well as human DNA sequence data—that will be a resource for studies of gene structure and function. It will greatly increase our understanding of the genetic aspects of human health and disease. That increased understanding will eventually provide insights into the prevention and treatment of the 3,000 known inherited disorders, and of conditions caused by our (gene-governed) physiological reactions to pathogens, toxins, and mutagens of external origin.It has been clear since the conception of the human genome project, however, that professional and public deliberations concerning the responsible use of genetic information must be a part of the process. The most immediate consequence of genome research will be the development of new diagnostic and predictive tests, well in advance of corresponding therapeutic or curative advances. The implications of acquiring and using that knowledge about individuals raise policy questions at many levels within society. The primary purpose of the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Program at the NCHGR is to anticipate and address these questions early in the life of the scientific project, to help optimize the [End Page 71] benefits to human welfare and opportunity from the new knowledge, and to guard against its misuses.The program has identified three sets of questions as particularly important to pursue as the genome initiative proceeds:1.Issues involved in the integration of new genetic tests into medical practice. Human genome research is expected to increase greatly the number of gene-based diagnostic and prognostic tests available to health professionals. The bioethical policy problems involved in integrating those tests effectively into medical practice include developing standards for:— accuracy and quality control of genetic tests;— medical indications for testing and design of testing protocols;— professional responsibilities of clinicians who perform tests;— confidentiality of information obtained from testing;— access to and use of test results by third parties, such as health insurers; and— reimbursement for testing and test-related counseling.These are problems for both those charged with regulating the use of new genetic tests and for those establishing the standards of practice within the health professions. Thus, in addition to soliciting and funding scholarly research proposals on both the factual and normative questions raised by these problems, the program is commissioning a major new study by the National Academy of Sciences/Institute of Medicine aimed at providing professional guidelines for the integration of genetic services into mainstream medical practice.2. Issues involved in educating and counseling individuals about genetic test results. The primary risk that health professionals will face in using genetic tests is the misinterpretation of their findings and the resulting potential for psychological trauma, stigmatization, and discrimination. Sometimes, out of ignorance, patients, families, and social institutions already stigmatize genetic disorders and treat those with them unfairly. This risk broadens as the genetic elements of more health problems are uncovered and gene-based tests for susceptibilities and carrier states are developed.To protect against these risks, NCHGR is soliciting and supporting projects aimed at improving professional and public understanding of these tests and their implications. For example, a philosopher is leading a team of geneticists and physicians in a scholarly effort to clarify [End Page 72] concepts of genetic susceptibility and draw out the social meaning of their different interpretations. Other projects involve social scientific studies of genetic risk perceptions, stigmatization, and discrimination. The conclusions of these studies, and... (shrink)

Approaches relying on fair procedures rather than substantive principles have been proposed for answering dilemmas in medical ethics and health policy. These dilemmas generally involve two questions: the epistemological (factual) question of which benefits an intervention will have, and the ethical (value) question of how to distribute those benefits. This article focuses on the potential of fair procedures to help address epistemological and factual questions in medicine, using the debate over antidepressant efficacy as a test case. In (...) doing so, it employs concepts from social epistemology such as testimonial injustice (bias resulting from the exclusion of evidence) and hermeneutical injustice (bias resulting from a prevailing discussion framework’s conceptual limitations). This article also explores the relevance of scientific consensus to determinations regarding medical evidence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist PragmatistErin McKennai was recently asked to write on the philosophy of history from a pragmatist perspective. My initial response was that this is not my area of specialization and that I didn’t really have much to say. Then I realized that it was interesting to think about how I view and use notions of history in my work as (...) a feminist pragmatist. It turns out that in my own work, there is a theme of approaching/understanding history through the possibilities of the future. Rather than being confined by settled or fixed views of the present or the past, the present and past are better seen as possibilities for shaping new and different futures. This can be unsettling for many, as humans often like to justify practices and institutions with the idea that “it has to be this way” and/or “it has always been this way.” But unsettling this habit is important if we hope to approach conflict and disagreements in a productive manner that avoids dogmatism and division.Examining my own use of history in my varied philosophical work turned out to be interesting and instructive. It also revealed my reliance on theorists such as Jane Addams, Anna Julia Cooper, and John Dewey in my writing and my teaching. Usually, I work with implicit notions of history and its role in my philosophical writing. The one exception to that was in writing American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, co-authored with Scott L. Pratt. In that work, we explicitly took up a pragmatist approach to history rooted in the work of John Dewey. There, we wrote:For Peirce, James, and Dewey, philosophy worth the name began in response to experienced problems—situations marked by confusion, doubt, indeterminacy—and then returned to these problems, aiming to transform and reconstruct them in ways that allowed the inquirer to go forward, to encounter still more experience. Philosophy, then should be understood as an activity that arises from experience. Since [End Page 71] experience is framed by language, culture and history, philosophy is not a transcendental practice engaged with the really real and truly true.(McKenna and Pratt 3)In “Philosophy and Civilization,” Dewey noted that philosophy is closely tied to the histories of cultures. These ties are mutually transformative, as the philosophy produced is rooted in, and shaped by, the place and time just as it then transforms the place, time, and traditions that give rise to it.Dewey’s own philosophy of history guided our work in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present as we strove to offer a history of American philosophy that acknowledges its rootedness in particular times and places. In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Dewey noted that history is always in the making, when he wrote:The slightest reflection shows that the conceptual material employed in writing history is that of the period in which a history is written. There is no material available for leading principles and hypotheses save that of the historic present. As culture changes, the conceptions that are dominant in a culture change. Of necessity, new standpoints for viewing, appraising and ordering data arise. History is then rewritten. Material that had formerly been passed by, offers itself as data because the new conceptions propose new problems for solution requiring new factual material for statement and test.(LW 12:232–33)Dewey went on to argue that changes happening in the present put the past into a new perspective and bring to light new problems. This means that one’s understanding of the past is changed, and “we gain new instruments for estimating the force of present conditions as potentialities of the future” (LW 12:238). For this reason, in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, Pratt and I embedded the history of American philosophy in actual historical events that we thought could profitably provide context for the philosophy and could themselves be rethought from our present vantage point. We were guided by the standpoint that American philosophy is a tradition committed “to a dynamic, pluralistic world of experience in which knowledge is a... (shrink)

We examined the universality of the curse of knowledge by investigating it in a unique cross-cultural sample; a nomadic Nilo-Saharan pastoralist society in East Africa, the Turkana. Forty Turkana children were asked eight factual questions and asked to predict how widely-known those facts were among their peers. To test the effect of their knowledge, we taught children the answers to half of the questions, while the other half were unknown. Based on findings suggesting the bias’s universality, we predicted (...) that children would estimate that more of their peers would know the answers to the questions that were taught versus the unknown questions. We also predicted that with age children would become less biased by their knowledge. In contrast, we found that only Turkana males were biased by their knowledge when inferring their peers’ perspectives, and the bias did not change with age. We discuss the implications of these findings. (shrink)

This essay argues that legal efficacy understood as existent binding force and as dominance of a system of coercion vis-à-vis competing systems is not strictly a matter of fact, but involves what can be termed justified normativity in a factual context. The argument is divided into four sections. The first three sections describe different dimensions of a normative concept of legal efficacy applied to legal systems: efficacy as persuasiveness, as indirect communication, and as constitutive obedience. The final section focuses (...) on the efficacy of individual norms and adds a new criterion – membership – which establishes a multi-layered test of efficacy. (shrink)

A statement q is a conclusion intermediate between p and h if and only if (1) p justifies h, (2) p justifies q, and (3) (p and not-q) justifies h to a significantly lesser degree than p justifies h. I contend that Gettier-type counterexamples to definitions of factual knowledge violate the following principle: if one knows that h on the basis of p, then all the conclusions intermediate between p and h are true. This principle does not refer to (...) anyone's beliefs that intermediate conclusions are true. I test my contention against several examples which have been discussed in the literature. (shrink)

In his introductory textbook, Philosophy of natural science, Hempel presents, as an illustration and a starting point for an analysis of the processes of inventing and testing scientific theories, an account of the researches of Semmelweis the Hungarian physician who, in the middle of the xixth century, discovered the cause of puerperal fever and an effective method of prevention. The account does not involve anything that is factually untrue, but it is quite succinct, leaving out many important aspects of the (...) case. Our thesis is that, although those omissions are justified in view of the aims of the account, they are also convenient to Hempel, because they help to propagate an image of science which goes much beyond the processes of invention and test. It is an image which reflects the positivist conception of science, and thus, whatever the intentions of the author, contributes to the dissemination and strengthening of that conception, but which, at least in this case, does not correspond to reality. To demonstrate the thesis, we give an account of the parts of Semmelweis's story omitted by Hempel, and we show how they do not fit in with the positivist image of science. Along the way, we distinguish three types of critique of positivist historiography: the Kuhnian, the post-modern, and the engagé. In the conclusion, we present some considerations concerning the medical research of today. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Truth MattersOnce in a while stunning new ideas that energize a scholarly discipline—or even wreck it altogether—come from the outside. The most influential philosopher of science in the last generation was not a philosopher at all, but an historian and physicist, Thomas Kuhn. Ernst Gombrich, an art historian, has deeply informed the philosophy of art, as the linguist Noam Chomsky has affected the philosophy of language. And Jacques Derrida (...) continues to cast his stupefying spell over many a literature department, even if most philosophers remain unimpressed.In a minor but spectacular way (how else to describe an event first encountered on the front page of the New York Times?), Alan Sokal has barged in on this honorable tradition. As a physicist, he successfully placed a barely-coherent, factually ludicrous, jargon-ridden article in a major journal of cultural studies.When we caught up with Sokal’s hoax, our initial reaction was sympathy for the hapless editors of Social Text. They weren’t the first journal editors to be landed with a contribution that went sour (though the only other episodes we could recall were plagiarism, not parody). However, when one of these chaps, Stanley Aronowitz, reacted in the Times by calling Sokal “ill-read and half-educated” (May 18, 1996), editorial fellow-feeling began to evaporate. And when Stanley Fish, executive director of the Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text, launched a bitter counterattack on Sokal three days later, it was hard not to regard Fish’s indignation, as E. D. Hirsch described it in a subsequent letter to the Times, as “the indignation of Tartuffe on being exposed.” [End Page 299]After some tedious preliminaries, Fish accused Sokal of failing to understand that the sociology of science is an enterprise “distinct” from science, “with objects of study, criteria, and goals all its own.” Sokal knows this, naturally, as he had already made clear in his Lingua Franca article on the hoax, and as he explains again in his afterword in this issue of our journal. But Fish went on to a more sweeping generalization. Imagining Sokal believed that cultural studies threaten the stability or integrity of the sciences, Fish said not to worry: “A research project that takes the practice of science as an object of study is not a threat to that practice because, committed to its own goals and protocols, it doesn’t reach into, and therefore doesn’t pose a danger to, the goals and protocols it studies.”With this account of a well-ordered academic world, Fish inadvertently reveals what some see as a serious failing of cultural studies and postmodern theory: it poses a threat to absolutely nothing. Leave science aside for a moment, and consider a sociology of, say, astrology, or medicine, or the fashion industry. Could we envision a proper sociology of astrology which posed no danger to “the goals and protocols” in using planetary/zodiacal patterns to predict the future or retrodict the characters of subjects? Hardly; it’s the business of the sociology of any human activity to identify and question the intellectual claims and practical ambitions of that enterprise. And that is exactly what Alan Sokal did: he invented a clever test of the intellectual rigor of cultural studies in general and its version of poststructuralist sociology of science in particular. He then subjected Social Text—and implicitly in many minds the intellectual standards of the field it represents—to the test. It failed.Sokal’s methodology was not unique; it can be applied in different ways to many other disciplines. If you want to evaluate, for example, the intellectual pretensions of astrologers there is a fine way to do it; it essentially adapts the double-blind placebo procedure used in drug research, another celebrated testing methodology. Allow a group of astrologers to agree on a set of character readings based on accurate birth charts. Give these back, shuffled, with identifying information stripped off, to the subjects of the astrological readings. If the subjects can pick out their own readings from character descriptions alone (descriptions created by astrologers on the basis of birth information only, without meeting the subjects in question), then astrology must possess... (shrink)

Limitations of Dienes & Perner's (D&P's) theory are traced to the assumption that the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is true. D&P claim that 18-month-old children are capable of explicitly representing factuality, from which it follows (on D&P's theory) that they are capable of explicitly representing content, attitude, and self. D&P then attempt to explain 3-year-olds' failures on tests of voluntary control such as the dimensional change card sort by suggesting that at this age children cannot represent content and (...) attitude explicitly. We provide a better levels-of-consciousness account for age-related abulic dissociations between knowledge and action. (shrink)