1,720,971 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Cognitive Diversity and the Progress of Science
No full textScience benefits from substantial cognitive diversity because cognitive diversity promotes scientific progress toward greater accuracy. Without diversity of goals, beliefs, and methods, science would neither generate novel discoveries nor certify representations with its present effectiveness. The revolution in geosciences is a principal case study.The role of cognitive diversity in discovery is explored with attention to computational results. Discovery and certification are inseparable. Moreover, diverse scientific groups agree convergently, and their agreements manifest an explanatory defense akin to the explanatory defense of realism. Scientists accept representations as a matter of their instrumental success in individual scientific research. Because scientists are diverse, this standard of acceptance means that widespread acceptance involves widespread instrumental success. This success is best explained through the accuracy of topics of agreement.The pessimistic induction is addressed; it fails to undermine the explanatory defense because past scientific successes don't resemble present ones in their degree of instrumental success; to make this point, instrumental success of representations of caloric and of oxygen are compared.Cognitive diversity challenges the methodological uniformity of scientific practice. Science lacks uniform methods and aims, and it ought to. It is argued that there is no sound basis for thinking that science aims. Moreover, the growth of science itself is not the growth of knowledge. Scientific communities rather than individual scientists are the main certifiers of scientific results. Hence, since knowledge requires a certifying belief formation process but the process relevant to science is not realized individually, science does not progress toward knowledge. The epistemology of science is socialized, but remains broadly realist because, even without a method of inquiry, science develops accurate representations of unobservable nature
Death
No full textWe don't like to think about death. In fact, we do everything we can to avoid it. Is it something to be feared? Why? Who does death harm? What kind of a loss is involved in the loss of a human life? Does the finitude of life render it, as Tolstoy thought, meaningless? Or is it rather the other way around? How is an attempt to make life meaningful affected by the fact that we don't know when we will die? Would immortality be desirable? Joining the University of Sydney from the University of Arizona, QEII Research Fellow Jenann Ismael will explore one of life's most grave concerns, 'death'.RIHS
Self-organizing collections and collective agents
No full textAdvances in understanding self-organization over the past few decades have led to the temptation to extend it to a model of human cognition. The extension is supported by new insights in situated cognition and success in reproducing quite complex behaviors in robots without any centralized control. Dennett has been a vocal proponent of the extension, repeatedly invoking analogies with self-organizing systems and denying the existence of a self, conceived as an inner locus of information and control. I arguei argue that there is a difference between self-organizing collections and collectives. Only the latter are agents. And this difference is crucial for our understanding of selves
Memory and Temporal Phenomenology
No full textIn the general project of trying to reconcile the objective view of the world with the subjective view, analytic philosophy in recent years, has been almost solely focused on sensory phenomenology. But there is at least as a big a gap between the view of time presented in physics and the view of time presented in the experience of the subject. In physics, there is an almost complete assimilation of time to space. Time is just one dimension in a four-dimensional manifold of events. We experience time, however, as something dynamic. I'll be exploring prospects for understanding of the phenomenology of flow without falling into the incoherent idea that time itself moves.Centre for Consciousness, Australian National Universit
Recommended from our members
Structure and Objects: A Defense of Structural Realism
No full textWhat stance should we take toward our best scientific theories? Traditionally, there have been two answers: realism and antirealism. Structural realism is an attempt to find middle-ground between these two views. Rather than accept everything our best theories seem to say about the world, the structural realist endorses only what those theories tell us about the structure of the world. I argue that switching the focus to structure allows the realist to better deal with problems of theory-change, and to better make sense of contemporary physics. I go on to offer a specific version of structural realism based on an understanding of structures as networks of relations between objects that are nothing more than places in structures. My view allows that there are objects and relations, but reverses the usual order of dependence: objects depend on relations rather than the other way around
The Difference Between Buses and Trams
Full text linkTram drivers know where their vehicles are bound, and don't have to decide to take them there, rather than somewhere else; the tramlines take care of it. Bus drivers know where their vehicles are headed, too, but without the benefit of the rails. In this talk we explain how this difference offers both bad news and good for bus drivers. It make them less noble, less god-like creatures than their tram-driving cousins, for their epistemic perspective is necessarily degenerate in comparison; but degeneracy sets them free. We propose that this discursion on public transport throws important new light on the foundations of interventionist causation: roughly, it suggests that the causal perspective is an inevitable by-product of an epistemic degeneracy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
A response to Mary
Full text linkFrank Jackson raised a formidable challenge against physicalism, in the form of a fable: Mary comprehends the physics of color vision but has never seen red; when she does, she learns what red looks like. Hence there is knowledge that transcends what is accessible from a purely third-person perspective. We point out that this can be true without contradicting physicalism. The solution of the apparent paradox is to notice that physicalism implies that knowledge must be physically realized. In turn, this implies the existence of (physical) reflexive knowledge, distinct from the knowledge obtained from a third-person perspective
- …
