I'm looking for a department program that is at the intersection of philosophy of science, philosophy of education, philosophy of mind and graphic design
Creating Scientific Concepts By Nancy J. Nersessian
"An account that analyzes dynamic reasoning processes implicated in a fundamental problem of creativity in science: how does genuine novelty emerge from existing representations?"
Some Narrative Conventions of Scientific Discourse
Rom Harré, 1990
"The academic ‘we’ might seem at first glance to be just a version of the editorial ‘we’. Like the latter it is mutedly egocentric but it is not mainly used to imply teamwork. Rather, it is used to draw the listener into complicity, to participate as something more than an audience. "
Critical Realism: A Critical Evaluation
Tong Zhang, Social Epistemology 2022
"positivism provides the scientists with the excuse to focus on formulating and revising auxiliary theories and omit the discussion of core theories, thereby leading to the establishment of dogmatic metaphysics."
Navigating Publishing Critical Health Communication Research
Hudak, Front. Commun., 2020
"while interpretive and critical scholars are trained to read and analyze social scientific research, the inverse is not true. Post-positivists then review critical research without knowing the basic principles of that world view."
It’s been a while since I shared an Existential Comic. This one gets at a question we’ve discussed before, although it’s been several years. What exactly is the distinction between the physical and non-physical, in this case between science and magic?
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/537Credit: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/537Corey Mohler, the author, has a short write-up under the comic at his site, citing Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and J.R.R. Tolkien having his elves not understand what the hobbits mean when they ask to see elven magic. All the elves have are knowledge and capabilities, some of which seem like “magic” to mortals. (This isn’t always true in Tolkien’s mythology. Divine beings, for instance, have capabilities no one else can attain. But Tolkien mostly implies it’s just more of nature rather than anything distinct.)
Which brings us back to the question, what exactly is magic, the supernatural, or the non-physical? For that matter, what is the physical? The answer I’ve reached before, is the physical is anything that interacts with other physical things and evolves according to rules, rules we can hope to discover, at least to some degree. When we encounter something that doesn’t follow the rules as we understand them, historically we don’t assume we’ve found anything magical. We take it as something for which we just don’t know the rules yet.
Even in cases where we fail to understand the rules for a long time, we tend to just figure out what we can about it, and “black box” the rest. Isaac Newton had to do it with gravity, early modern biologists with the “spirit” that seemed to animate nerves, Charles Darwin with inheritance, and particle physicists today do it with quantum measurement.
Fantasy stories, like Harry Potter, usually present magic as something obviously distinct. But it’s telling that one of the things any fantasy author has to consider is what the “rules of magic” are for their fictional world. Just because it’s fantasy doesn’t mean anything goes, at least not in quality stories that avoid cheating with deus ex machina type events. In that sense, the challenge is similar to the rules of fictional science that sci-fi authors have to work out in their worlds.
Orson Scott Card once said that the real difference between the fantasy genre and science fiction is that one tends to have swords, wizards, and supernatural monsters in it, while the other machines, spaceships, and hi-tech monsters. (Since then, the borders have gotten blurrier, with both genres expanding into each other.)
All of which seems to indicate that magic, as commonly intuited, is just old notions of how the world works, albeit in a caricatured and romanticized form in contemporary fiction. In that sense, science is the successor, the new magic that’s taken us far beyond what the old variety was able to achieve.
Hey @histodons and @physics, what's a good book about the #manhattanproject that gives me a brief overview? Preferably in English or German. I recently read some historical books about early twentieth century #physics and the #viennacircle of the #philosophyofscience which kind of lead me to this topic.
I am utterly saddened that I won't be able to travel to Haifa tonight to teach the students of the Technion #PhilosophyOfScience.
My flight was canceled due to the horrific events unfolding in #Israel & #Gaza at the moment.
In my book, randomly & systematically murdering civilians is NOT fighting for freedom, no matter how oppressed you are. It's terrorism. I'm utterly disgusted by those who don't seem to understand that.
So much hate and senseless violence. It makes me speechless.
"scientific ‘objectivity’ can’t stand outside experience; in this context, ‘objective’ simply means something that’s true to the observations agreed upon by a community of investigators using certain tools. Science is essentially a highly refined form of human experience, based on our capacities to observe, act and communicate."
“The replication crisis is less of a ‘crisis’ in the Lakatosian approach than it is in the Popperian and naïve methodological falsificationism approaches”
POLL: Are you on board with mind/brain reductionism (to genetic expression)?
In 1998, Eric Kandel proposed a new intellectual framework for psychiatry in which brain function and dysfunction can ultimately be reduced to genetic expression but one in which environmental effects (including psychotherapy) play a role (by modulating genetic expression which changes neural circuits and neuron function).
@NicoleCRust I think this sort of gene expression reductionism is methodologically useful and should be pursued as a practical matter, but I'm not fully on board with it for (at least) two reasons.
First, even accepting a strictly reductionist approach to scientific explanation, I don't think gene expression patterns compose a complete description of nervous system in any meaningful sense. "Connectionists" also propose a fully reductive explanation of the nervous system on the basis of its wiring diagram, for example. I think neither of those contain enough information to recapitulate the other, and both are probably necessary for a full reductionist explanation of the nervous system. I like some of Eve Marder and colleagues' work in the crustacean pyloric rhythm to illustrate how both of these are necessary. I also think that there are other reductive variables necessary for a complete explanation, so those two together are still not sufficient for a reductionist program to succeed.
Second, I don't believe that a reductionist approach provides the best scientific explanations for many questions we have about the nervous system. I'm not in the camp that the mind is "irreducible," but as a matter of what constitutes a satisfying scientific explanation I don't think reductionism always does it. A table is "nothing more" than a bunch of wood in a particular arrangement, but a good explanation of tables may focus more on the structural stability of their shape rather than the mechanical properties of the wood, or on the cultural context of how they are used in dining rituals ("round table" vs "head of the table") etc. #Neuroscience#PhilosophyOfScience
"The difficulties encountered in implementing [Open Science] across diverse research environments are tied to philosophical assumptions about how science does – and ought to – work."