5th Sydney-Tilburg Conference on the Progress of Science, Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science, April 25-27, 2012.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Thomas S. Kuhn’s seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which forcefully questioned the idea that science makes steady, rational progress towards truth. After half a century his challenge is everything but outdated. Look at the failure of economic science in the financial crisis, or the fierce debate about whether string theory is just a mathematical gimmick, unable to connect to empirical data. At the same time, however, the scientific enterprise appears to be more dynamic than ever, with an explosion of publications and new subdisciplines emerging by almost the hour. Philosophy of science has changed too. The abstract account of ‘method’ which Kuhn criticized have been replaced by efforts to model how science proceeds, exploring, for example the epistemic benefits and drawbacks of division of scientific labor. What is more, scientometric data and a wealth of case studies are readily available to empirically test theses about what progress in science means today. In this conference, will revisit this classical question in the philosophy of science in the light of current developments and invite contributions on both historical and systematic aspects of the progress of science. We particularly encourage work on progress in the special sciences, the emergence of new disciplines, and empirically informed reassessments of classical positions.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Heather Douglas (Waterloo), Paul Hoyningen-Huene (Hannover), Theo Kuipers (Groningen), and Michael Weisberg (Philadelphia)

Contact: tilps@UVT.NL.

"Paranoia and Pain Embodied in Psychology, Literature and Bioscience," Inaugural Literature and Science Conference, School of English, University of Liverpool, April 2-4, 2012.

The conference aims to explore overlapping paradigms of paranoia and pain in psychology, biological sciences, and literary texts/contexts. How is paranoia related to pain? How is pain expressed with/without paranoia? How are these two terms exposed in various contexts? How does our understanding of the psychophysiology of pain interrelate with literary accounts of paranoia and pain? What does research in the field of paranoia offer to literary studies surrounding this concept and vice versa? To what extent does pain echo paranoia; and is this echo physiological, stylistic, psychological, symbolic, or literal? How do these terms regulate our behaviour and expression of emotions in relation to broader concepts such as faith, ethics, and the value of human life? What does the study of these concepts offer today’s generation of intellectuals with regard to human relationships and the way we communicate with each other? This international conference brings together experts from different fields to address these questions by incorporating individual presentations and panels that focus on cross-disciplinary studies.

Considering the diversity of themes and questions for this conference, individual papers as well as pre-formed panels are invited to examine the following three key areas, proposed by the conference organizers. Other inter- and multi-disciplinary topics, relevant to the conference, will also be considered:

1- Impressions:

Expression of paranoia and pain in literary/scientific contexts; Metaphorical and literal exposition of pain and paranoia; Paranoid texts, painful contexts; The image of paranoia and pain in poetry, prose, and visual arts; Textual culture and the symbolics of pain; Stylistics of pain and paranoia in communication; How does the narrative of pain/paranoia identify with studies of affect?
2- Intersections:

The biology of pain and the emotional interpretation; The biology/literature of anaesthesia; Physical symptoms, emotional translations; Aesthetics and affective perspectives on pain/paranoia; How have cultural attitudes to the experience of pain and/or paranoia changed over the course of history?

3- Dissections:

Faith and the formation of our ideas on pain/paranoia; Side effects of pain-relief medication; Ethics and the questions of double effect; Is it ever appropriate to withhold pain relief in order to extend the life of a sufferer where analgesics have the side effect of shortening life?

http://paranoiapain.liv.ac.uk/

Fourth Conference, Association for Feminist Epistemologies, Methodologies, Metaphysics and Science Studies, Pennsylvania State University, May 10-12, 2012.

We welcome new participants and perspectives from across the academy and outside it that provide feminist discussion on any topic in epistemologies, methodologies, metaphysics, or science studies. Note the following broad themes of recent and ongoing interest:

• Practicing & teaching science as a feminist
• Gender, justice & climate change
• Liberatory approaches to science policy
• Feminist perspectives on cognition, logic, argumentation & rhetoric
• Liberatory methodologies
• Knowledges of resistance
• Experience, authority & ignorance
• Science, technology & the state
• Public philosophy

Proposals must be submitted using the EasyChair conference system. Please register at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=femmss4. Enter an abstract of 250-300 words plus bibliography in the “abstract” section, then 3-10 keywords in “keywords” space. Upload a CV of no more than 3 pages in .pdf format or Word (.doc or .docx) into the space for a “paper.” Submissions are due by August 1. (If you have any difficulty with the system contact Cate: hundleby@uwindsor.ca.)

Lehrer, Jonah. "The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong with the Scientific Method?" NEW YORKER December 13, 2010.

On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects’ psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company’s top-selling drug.

But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.

Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers. . . .

While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn’t always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn’t changed. The law of gravity remains the same.

Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. . . .

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer#ixzz1OV2CPaWU

Shermer, Michael. "Stephen Hawking's Radical Philosophy of Science." BIG QUESTIONS ONLINE November 23, 2010.

Hawking, Stephen, and Leonard Mlodinow.  The Grand Design.  New York: Bantom, 2010.

The models generated by biochemical processes in our brains constitute “reality.” None of us can ever be completely sure that the world really is as it appears, or if our minds have unconsciously imposed a misleading pattern on the data. I call this belief-dependent realism. In my forthcoming book, The Believing Brain, I demonstrate the myriad ways that our beliefs shape, influence, and even control everything we think, do, and say about the world. The power of belief is so strong that we typically form our beliefs first, then construct a rationale for holding those beliefs after the fact. I claim that the only escape from this epistemological trap is science. Flawed as it may be because it is conducted by scientists who have their own set of beliefs determining their reality, science itself has a set of methods to bypass the cognitive biases that so cripple our grasp of the reality that really does exist out there.

According to the University of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking, however, not even science can pull us out of such belief dependency. In his new book, The Grand Design, co-authored with the Caltech mathematician Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking presents a philosophy of science he calls “model-dependent realism,” which is based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events and assume that the models match reality (even if they do not), and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, Hawking and Mlodinow claim that “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” . . .

Visit: http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/columns/michael-shermer/stephen-hawking%E2%80%99s-radical-philosophy-of-science.

Annual Seminar, Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology, San Francisco, November 13, 2010.

The Association for Rhetoric of Science and Technology is again hosting its annual pre-conference prior to NCA. We invite scholars to submit works in various stages of progress. One of the strengths of the pre-conference is that it is a fairly intense day-long set of interactions, ideal for non-traditional presentations or projects in relatively early stages. Presentations addressing any aspect of the ways in which communication impacts the production, dissemination, and utilization of scientific knowledge are invited, using any methodological or theoretical approach. Our goal for this year’s pre-conference is to begin with a wide variety of brief scholarly presentations, and then build on those insights to address some of the perennial tensions in rhetoric of science. Conversation last year focused on several topics that we are looking to develop further, including:

• Risk communication and assessment
• Public engagement
• Negotiation of expertise
• Private/public boundary
• Health as scientific rhetoric
• Governance in science/policy
• Other issues as appropriate

Visit the conference website here: http://associationdatabase.com/aws/RSA/pt/sd/news_article/29524/_PARENT/layout_details/false.

Pub: Bruce Clark, et al., eds. ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini, eds.  Routledge Companion to Literature and Science.  London: Routledge, 2010.

With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars, the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science traces the network of connections among literature, science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. Divided into three main sections, this volume links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism. Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers. With authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of the sciences in their literary dimensions and cultural frameworks, here is the essential guide to this vibrant area of study.

More information is here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415495253/ref=pe_5050_17186000_snp_dp#_.

"The Rise of Empiricism," Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, September 6-7, 2010.

Empiricism is often regarded as the characterising feature of modern scientific method, and, in those approaches to psychology and the social and economic sciences that seek to model themselves on successful scientific practice in the physical and life sciences, it often acts as a model of good practice. Yet what is advocated is a very simplified model in which a rarefied notion of method as value-free inquiry is presented as the essence of empiricism. The failings of such a conception have long been evident, but the motivations behind the various forms of empiricism have remained obscure. The conference will explore new avenues to the original form of empiricism and show how it was able to directly engage questions of value in a novel and revealing way, and how its connection with 'hard' sciences was not merely to provide a methodological gloss on these, but went to the core of what scientific explanation consisted in.

Speakers:

• Peter Anstey (Otago University)
• Millicent Churcher (Sydney University)
• Stephen Gaukroger (Sydney University)
• Peter Kail (Oxford University)
• David Macarthur (Sydney University)
• Liam Semler (Sydney University)
• Dejan Simkovic (Sydney University)
• Alberto Vanzo (Otago University)
• Anik Waldow (Sydney University)
• Charles Wolfe (Sydney University)

Contact: anik.waldow@arts.usyd.edu.au.

Fuller, Steve. Review of Theodore L. Brown, IMPERFECT ORACLE. NDPR (July 2010).

Brown, Theodore L. Imperfect Oracle: the Epistemic and Moral Authority of Science. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2009.

Theodore Brown is the ultimate academic all-rounder. A distinguished research chemist, author of a best-selling chemistry textbook, founding director of what is arguably America's leading research unit that actually lives up to its 'interdisciplinary' remit (University of Illinois' Beckman Institute), a vice chancellor for research and the author of a respectable, liberal-minded book on metaphor as the lifeblood of scientific creativity (Brown 2003). In fact, were it not for his apparent lack of interest in geopolitical manoeuvring, Brown's career might be comparable to that of another indefatigable 20th century American chemist, James Bryant Conant, the mentor of Thomas Kuhn.

But as readers of this journal would have asked of Conant, how is Brown as a philosopher? Whatever verdict one wishes to deliver on Conant as a philosopher of science, it is clear that he treated the positivist and pragmatist philosophies of his day more as inputs than authorities. Thus, Conant freely picked and mixed what he needed from them to clarify and justify the benevolent but elite role that he would have science play in the Cold War era. In contrast, Brown appears to be only as good as the intellectual agents he works with. Consequently, there are few interesting emergent properties from their combination. Brown's deferential approach means that his book could be easily mistaken for a lightly revised Ph.D. thesis by an above average student of naturalised analytic philosophy. Put a bit more positively, while this book is priced as if it were a specialist monograph, it could have been marketed in paperback as an introductory textbook in applied epistemology and ethics of contemporary science.

To his credit, Brown begins by asking some of the right questions about the foundations of science's epistemic and moral authority. Unfortunately he fails to see the need to range far beyond the precincts of contemporary analytic epistemology and constructivist sociology of science into the heart of political theory. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20587.

Barnes, Barry. Review of Massimo Pigliucci, NONSENSE ON STILTS. NDPR (July 2010).

Pigliucci, Massimo. Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.

The title serves well as an indication of the genre to which this book belongs. Directed to the general reader, it is an attempt by a philosopher of science to assist her in dealing with the problem of demarcating science from non-science. For the author this is a moral problem and not simply a technical or aesthetic one: belief in science is conducive to our good, whereas belief in non-science or pseudoscience, of which instances are worryingly abundant, is conducive to harm and has to be opposed. Thus, we shall not go too far wrong if we identify Pigliucci as a science warrior and his book as a contribution to the literature of the science wars.

The content is certainly as this would lead us to expect. The usual suspects are attacked: postmodernists, humanist intellectuals, religious fundamentalists and the like. The usual examples appear: UFOs, paranormal phenomena, and of course criticisms of evolution. A potted history of science from Aristotle's time is laid on (innocent Whiggism for the most part), and a flatpack philosophy of science (naturalist and verificationist). More idiosyncratic and slightly more interesting are discussions of science in the media ('it's crazy out there') and of think tanks ('Caveat Emptor!'). And the author is a little less respectful than usual of heroic figures in science and philosophy, scorning to conceal the sheer viciousness of Isaac Newton, for example, and hinting that Plato/Socrates may well have been an overbearing old bore whose notion of dialogue bears scant resemblance to our own. None of this, however, alters the fact that for anyone who has encountered this sort of thing before little of philosophical interest is likely to be learned from the present example, unless it is through reflection on the function and design of such texts themselves. . . .

I suspect that there is no way of presenting the knowledge and methods of the sciences to general readers that does not fail in some important respect. And the comparison of these with alternatives, whether those that engage in competition with the sciences, or those that pretend to be sciences themselves, or those that rub along with them, peacefully co-existing at other locations in our elaborate division of technical and intellectual labour, is inordinately difficult, as Pigliucci is obviously well aware. But he does not even try to meet the challenge this implies, choosing instead for the most part a facile approach that covers its limitations with the truculent style and affectation of contempt for one's fellow human beings increasingly encountered in the literature of the science wars. The sciences deserve better than this. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20527.

Goldblatt, David. Review of Barry Allen, ARTIFICE AND DESIGN. NDPR (June 2010).

Allen, Barry. Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience. Ithaca: Cornell UP 2008. Barry Allen's new book is unusual in its enormous chronological scope and its vast geographical coverage. Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience takes us from the Upper Paleolithic Age to the present time and from East Africa to the lifelines of Manhattan. To say that it is interdisciplinary is to understate his attempt to be everywhere academically. Allen turns to "evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, science studies, aesthetics, and the history, philosophy, and anthropology of art and technology" to put in place his panoramic thesis. In its refusal to accept widely accepted views, Artifice and Design is as stubborn as it is provocative. Disagreement with Allen on the history and conceptual analysis of humanity's relationship to art and artifice should not prevent strong praise for his undertaking. So what is it about? Allen claims that the civilization that best manages its technology, the society of well-made works, must include the humanizing appeal of art -- a consideration of aesthetics. Beginning before the existence of what are believed to be the first tools and working up through the history of modern building and contemporary manufacturing, Allen insists that aesthetics, the way things look and feel, has been part of good design and, then, good engineering. Artifice, or workmanship, he says, is intimately connected to a work's perceptual appeal. Whatever else is involved in putting something together, its success requires perceptual concern as well. And art is, or ought to be, not disinterested perception, not art for art's sake, not exiled in museums or otherwise isolated from human life, but rather an integrated part of life, just as technology is irreversibly at one with how we live. Allen is a contextualist. When we utilize and evaluate artifacts, cars for example, we must also consider their effects and recognize that smog too is an artifact whose history is at one with the history of the automobile. So artifacts can be coherent or incoherent with the motives that originated them. Talk about technology always includes talk about a tradition of design and an economy of a people. Designers of machines need to care about what happens to them when machines are no longer needed or when they stop working. When retired, can they be recycled or repaired, or will they simply be added to the accumulating world of trash? "Repair," he says very nicely, "is a kind of care . . . Repair is a caring reply to skill's art". Allen prefaces his discussion of technology with nothing less than speculations on the origins of knowledge. Knowledge, he claims, has little to do with the modern and contemporary epistemology of the epistemologists. For Allen, knowledge begins with doing something. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19889.

"Current Topics in the Human Sciences," Technische Universität Berlin, June 18-19, 2010.

The conference seeks to analyze concepts that denote characteristics typically (though not necessarily exclusively) associated with being /human/. A guiding question is whether something can be gained from putting the category of the human back on the agenda of philosophy of science and inquiring into similarities and differences between questions and problems arising in various fields that study humans. Methodologically, two features are distinctive of the approach taken here: 1. We focus on specific concepts that denote the subject matters or methods of various human sciences, but that have also been objects of reflection within philosophy for a long time (for example practice, meaning, values, empathy). 2. We bring together * philosophers of science, who think philosophically about the research done about a given object of the human sciences (for example emotions, rationality, consciousness), * philosophers working in other fields, who think about the objects of the human sciences in the context of, say, philosophy of mind or ethics, * historians of philosophy (of science), who think about the ways in which our philosophical thinking about the concepts in question have developed. These two features are meant to stimulate discussions about (a) the extent to which philosophy is (or should be) informed by scientific studies of specifically human traits, (b) the extent to which philosophy of science is (or should be) in touch with more traditional philosophical debates, and (c) the extent to which the history of the philosophy (of the human sciences) can make a systematic contribution to current philosophy (of the human sciences). Visit the conference website here: http://www.wissensforschung.tu-berlin.de/serviceboxen/1819062010_current_topics_in_the_philosophy_of_the_human_sciences/program/

Cfp: "Objectivity and the Practice of Science," Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Tilburg University, October 5, 2010.

Science is arguably among our most successful and sophisticated epistemic endeavors. But how objective is it? Aren't scientists and their methods susceptible to all forms of bias? Traditionally, answers to this question have focused on the social construction of scientific knowledge. On the level of individual research, however, other questions might be more pressing: How objective are statistical inference tools? Can evidence-based medicine keep its promise to replace subjective assessments by hard facts? Is it possible to design and conduct a social science experiment that is not contaminated by the experimenter's research agenda? How does the concept of objectivity vary over different scientific disciplines? We invite contributions that address these and similar research questions on the objectivity of scientific research. More information is here: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/humanities/tilps/ops2010/.

Romano, Carlin. "Science Warriors' Ego Trips." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION April 25, 2010.

Pigliucci, Massimo. Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Standing up for science excites some intellectuals the way beautiful actresses arouse Warren Beatty, or career liberals boil the blood of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It's visceral. The thinker of this ilk looks in the mirror and sees Galileo bravely muttering "Eppure si muove!" ("And yet, it moves!") while Vatican guards drag him away. Sometimes the hero in the reflection is Voltaire sticking it to the clerics, or Darwin triumphing against both Church and Church-going wife. A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn't want to feel that sense of power and rightness? You hear the voice regularly—along with far more sensible stuff—in the latest of a now common genre of science patriotism, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science From Bunk (University of Chicago Press), by Massimo Pigliucci, a philosophy professor at the City University of New York. . . . The problem with polemicists like Pigliucci is that a chasm has opened up between two groups that might loosely be distinguished as "philosophers of science" and "science warriors." Philosophers of science, often operating under the aegis of Thomas Kuhn, recognize that science is a diverse, social enterprise that has changed over time, developed different methodologies in different subsciences, and often advanced by taking putative pseudoscience seriously, as in debunking cold fusion. The science warriors, by contrast, often write as if our science of the moment is isomorphic with knowledge of an objective world-in-itself—Kant be damned!—and any form of inquiry that doesn't fit the writer's criteria of proper science must be banished as "bunk." Pigliucci, typically, hasn't much sympathy for radical philosophies of science. He calls the work of Paul Feyerabend "lunacy," deems Bruno Latour "a fool," and observes that "the great pronouncements of feminist science have fallen as flat as the similarly empty utterances of supporters of intelligent design." . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Science-Warriors-Ego-Trips/65186/.

"Hermeneutics and Science: Worlds, Realities & Life," International Society for Hermeneutics and Science, Sigmund Freud University, August 27-29, 2010

The birth of hermeneutic (or hermeneutic phenomenological) philosophy of science was a result of the so-called "hermeneutic turn" of philosophy of science in the 60's. Arriving at different consequences of the critique of the traditional positivist philosophy of science almost the same transformation is called as social or sociological turn. In these years Apel, Hanson, Heelan, Ihde, Kisiel, Kockelmans, Markus, Follesdal, and others started to apply Heidegger's and Gadamer's views to depict the science and technology from a non-positivist position. As a consequence of these attempts for the 80's - 90's a relatively well-identifiable trend was emerged in philosophy of science: the hermeneutics of science, or hermeneutic philosophy of science and technology. Heidegger's and Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics provides an opportunity for developing a hermeneutic alternative to the analytic philosophy of science. This intellectual adventure has significant outcomes.Hermeneutics of science scrutinized the life world of scientists, the process of discovery, the structure of perception, scientists' relatedness to the world, experimentation, scientific and technological tools, scientific debates, the reconstruction of scientific texts, and many others topics. It shed new light e.g. on the issues about the philosophical foundations of Psychoanalysis. Heideggerian hermeneutics is also the basis of well known results in the Dasein analysis targeted the openness included in human Dasein, and aims to widen it via the analysis and develop self understanding and identity. Taking the problems of hermeneutic philosophy of science into a broader philosophical context some fundamental epistemological problems can be identified. These dilemmas yield to the identification of the unnecessary domination of the so-called scientism in culture and provide a possibility to its critique. It would be interesting to disclose the appearance the different forms of these problems in the practice of social and natural sciences, humanities, psychology, informatics and other forms of technology. This would be also an opportunity to confront philosophical ideas with everyday scientific and technological practice.

The aim of this conference is to provide an open and inspiring atmosphere to discuss all of these and related issues. Possible topics for discussion includes: •Reflections of scientists on their own praxis •Creativity, innovation and re-interpretation •Interpretation in History of Philosophy of Science •Science as human enterprise/praxis •Information and meaning: the question of interpretation •Open world hermeneutics: go beyond the "two cultures" •Life-world, systems and institutions •Institutions, organisations and relationships •What does it mean to live a fulfilled life? •How to cope with uncertainty? Challenges of uncertainty in everyday life and science. •Philosophical background of Dasein analysis •Life technologies and human survival: human-environment relations. •Varieties of relatedness to the world •Tools, toolmaking and technologies •Embodiment and thinking •Scientific knowledge and experties

Visit the conference website here: http://ishs.hu/call-for-papers.

Fish, Stanley. "Must There Be a Bottom Line?" NEW YORK TIMES January 18, 2010.

Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. January 19 marks the official publication of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. The title would seem to identify the book as an addition to the ever-growing body of studies that explore the relationships and tensions between religion and science, usually with the intent either of declaring one epistemologically or morally superior to the other, or of insisting (somewhat piously) that the two are compatible if we avoid extreme claims and counterclaims, or of triumphantly announcing that science is a form of faith, or of purporting to demonstrate that religion can be explained in naturalist terms as an expression of the instinct to survive and propagate. While Smith rehearses these theses and shows limited sympathy for some of them (and disdain for some others), her object in the book is to interrogate and critique the assumption informing the conversation in which these are the standard contentions. The assumption she challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry. The desire, she explains, is to sift through the claims of those perspectives and methods that vie for “underneath-it-all status” (a wonderful phrase) and validate one of them so that we can proceed in the confidence that our measures, protocols, techniques and procedures are in harmony with the universe and perhaps with God. It is within the context of such a desire that science and religion are seen as in conflict, in part because the claims of both are often (but not always) totalizing; they amount to saying, I am the Truth and you shall have no other truths before me. But if religion and science are not thought of as rival candidates for the title “Ultimate Arbiter,” they can be examined, in more or less evolutionary terms, as highly developed, successful and different (though not totally different, as the history of their previous union shows) ways of coping with the situations and challenges human existence presents. . . . Read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/must-there-be-a-bottom-line/. Herrnstein Smith's response is here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/science-and-religion-lives-and-rocks/.

"That Buck Rogers Stuff: the Rhetoric of Science and Science Fiction," Rhetoric of Science and Technology Preconference, Minneapolis, May 28, 2010.

In Conjunction with the Rhetoric Society of America Conference 2010. What happens in the space between science and science fiction? In its guise as the "literature of ideas," science fiction has inspired the careers of scientists, foreshadowed the arrival of new scientific developments, and illuminated the fact/value distinction. In that respect, science fiction is itself a "rhetoric of science"; that is to say, a reflexive discourse of science. Seen from a different angle, however, "sci-fi" is a synonym for pseudo-science and the misrepresentation of scientists. This is of particular concern in an era when "science" has become a highly politicized and hotly contested theme in public discourse. To what extent and with what effect does science fiction contribute to our notions of science and its place in the public sphere? The organizers of the ARST preconference at RSA thus seek presentations that explore questions about how the rhetorics of science and science fiction are employed to unify or divide, to express concordance or difference, and to imagine the possibilities and dangers of science and technology. Submit extended abstracts or presentation proposals (no longer than 5 pages, including notes and references) as Word or PDF attachments by March 15, 2010, to Bill White, ARST Secretary, at wjw11@psu.edu. Visit the Rhetoric of Science and Technology website here: www.arstonline.org.

Barash, David P, and Judith Eve Lipton. "How the Scientist Got his Ideas." CHRONICLE January 3, 2010.

We'd like to propose a revision. To our scientific colleagues: Let's stop running from "just-so story" as an epithet and start embracing its merits. To any nonscientist name-callers: Think again before you sign on to a supposed rebuke that isn't.

When it comes to "doing" science, just-so stories are us. It's not that science ends up being such a story, but it nearly always begins as one, emerging from curiosity, questioning, and uncertainty. It then progresses to reasoned conjecture—to asking, "What if?" and "Could it be?"—and then, if the proffered story seems worth pursuing—and is, in fact, pursuable—to validation, or, as the philosopher Karl Popper and his devotees would have it, to invalidation if not true, and to further refinement if it proves productive. Throughout, the enterprise is steeped in wonder—which includes, not coincidentally, both meanings of the word: as an experience of amazement and appreciation ("the wonder of it all") and as an act of imaginative inquiry ("I wonder if the continents moved" or "I wonder if matter is actually composed of tiny, irreducible particles"). Between wonder, in either sense, and scientific "fact" are just-so stories.

We believe that a just-so story is simply a story, a tentative, speculative answer to a question, and, as such, a clarification of one's thinking, ideally a goad to further thought, and, not incidentally, a necessary preliminary to obtaining the kind of additional information that helps answer a question (which, in the best cases, leads to yet more queries). When that happens—when the narrative is testable and generates fact-based research—then, in a sense, it is no longer a just-so story, but science, pure and … rarely simple.

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/How-the-Scientist-Got-His/63287/.

Wylie, Alison, Elizabeth Potter, and Wenda K. Bauchspies. "Feminist Perspectives on Science." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY (December 2009)

Feminists have a number of distinct interests in, and perspectives on, science. The tools of science have been a crucial resource for understanding the nature, impact, and prospects for changing gender-based forms of oppression; in this spirit, feminists actively draw on, and contribute to, the research programs of a wide range of sciences. At the same time, feminists have identified the sciences as a source as well as a locus of gender inequalities: the institutions of science have a long tradition of excluding women as practitioners; feminist critics of science find that women and gender (or, more broadly, issues of concern to women and sex/gender minorities) are routinely marginalized as subjects of scientific inquiry, or are treated in ways that reproduce gender-normative stereotypes; and, closing the circle, scientific authority has frequently served to rationalize the kinds of social roles and institutions that feminists call into question. Feminist perspectives on science therefore reflect a broad spectrum of epistemic attitudes toward and appraisals of science. Some urge the reform of gender inequities in the institutions of science and call for attention to neglected questions with the aim of improving the sciences in their own terms; they do not challenge the standards and practices of the sciences they engage. Others pursue jointly critical and constructive programs of research that, to varying degrees, aim at transforming the methodologies, substantive content, framework assumptions, and epistemic ideals that animate the sciences. The content of these perspectives, and the degree to which they generate transformative critique, depends not only on the types of philosophical and political commitments that inform them but also on the nature of the sciences and subject domains on which they bear. Feminist perspectives have had greatest impact on sciences that deal with inherently gendered subjects—the social and human sciences—and, secondarily, on sciences that study subjects characterized in gendered terms, metaphorically or by analogy (projectively gendered subjects), chiefly the biological and life sciences. Feminist perspectives are relevant to sciences that deal with non-gendered subject matters, but perspectives vary substantially in content and in critical import depending on the sciences and the particular research programs they engage. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-science/.

Roth, Paul A. Review of William Rehg, COGENT SCIENCE IN CONTEXT. NDPR (OCTOBER 2009).

Rehg, William. Cogent Science in Context: the Science Wars, Argumentation Theory and Habermas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

Books can easily be found that offer to examine and account for the "science wars", understood as the ongoing turf battle between philosophers and sociologists. The focus of the conflict concerns how to explain what considerations actually determine what comes to be accepted as the received views in any one of the natural sciences. The main contenders consist of two apparently opposed explanatory strategies. On the one hand, some advocate the primacy of contextual factors in order to explain why a scientific community settles on a particular view. On such accounts, the norms of scientific inquiry represent only the contingent products of historical circumstance. On the other hand, "internalist" accounts typically seek to establish that evidence can be and is rationally determinative. Evaluative procedures can have validity that transcend their context. On this view, use of proper rational procedure explains what prevails and why within a scientific community. The former view denies and the latter affirms that standards of rationality simpliciter can and do explain accepted scientific views. Unfortunately, authors of such books all too typically begin by assuming the correctness of one of the usual suspects with regard to accounts of scientific rationality. William Rehg's book proceeds by urging that resources can be located for an account of rationality that embraces neither of these views and yet incorporates core contentions of each. Specifically, Rehg argues for the relevance of "argumentation theory", an area of inquiry that straddles several disciplines and with which most philosophers of science will probably be unfamiliar. The "argumentation theory" as Rehg portrays it refers to studies of argument that represent "an interdisciplinary endeavor that provides a set of categories -- drawn from logic, linguistics, dialectic, rhetoric, and so on -- for the description and evaluation of arguments" (4). Rehg offers a straightforward rationale for taking this approach: "Like other areas of human endeavor, the sciences exist and develop as social practices -- exercises in embodied social rationality . . . This trend challenged defenders of science to develop more realistic conceptions of scientific rationality" (3). Argumentation theory as Rehg conceives of it holds the promise of providing a general normative framework for the evaluation of scientific claims that is superior in specific ways to the alternatives scouted above. His book promises a sustained and detailed account of how to construct this framework. Rehg employs the term 'cogency' to connote the joint process of assessing both the psychological effect and the rational strength of an argument. The appeal to cogency arises inasmuch as no one set of factors -- logical, rhetorical, or sociological -- typically suffices to make the case in favor of one view over another. The question that Rehg poses, and the litmus test for the approach of his book, concerns whether or not Rehg's contextualist version of argumentation theory offers a more robust normative framework than any of the alternatives that Rehg finds inadequate to the task of adjudicating disputes on the cogency of scientific claims. The primary challenge to the cogency of scientific argument consists in the need to bridge what Rehg terms "Kuhn's gap", understood as "a gap between logical and social-institutional perspectives, a gap that rhetorics of science attempt to bridge" (33). More specifically, in order to close Kuhn's gap, an argumentation theory must reveal "how persuasion occurs within the transitional phase itself -- the microprocesses that generate agreement on the new paradigm" (47). Kuhn's work poses the question but provides no answer. The gap will only be closed, however, in a philosophically satisfactory way by providing an account of cogency that demonstrates that scientists were persuaded to shift theoretical allegiances for the "right" reasons, i.e., that no group made a weaker argument appear the stronger. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17905.