1,721,016 research outputs found
Historical Context and Philosophy of Science: Reply to Peter Simons' 'Coincidence and Kite-Flying'
Full text linkThis essay responds to a review of my book Wittgenstein Flies A Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World by Peter Simons that appears in the March 2009 issue of the journal Metascience
Kinds of Models
Full text linkI survey a broad variety of models with an eye to asking what kind of model each is in the following sense: in virtue of what is each of them regarded as a model? It will be seen that when we classify models according to the answer to this question, it comes to light that the notion of model predominant in philosophy of science covers only some of the kinds of models used in scientific contexts. The notion of a model predominant in philosophy of science requires that a model be related to something formal, such as equations or statements. Not all the examples provided in the brief survey in this paper fit that notion of a model. I identify another kind of model that ought to be included in philosophical and foundational studies of scientific models, which I call a “piece of the world” kind of model, to contrast with a “realm of thought” kind of model. These models also have formal methodologies associated with them, and, hence, analytic philosophers of science can embrace them without abandoning the rigor that has characterized the discipline
How Beliefs Make A Difference (PhD dissertation) SEARCHABLE pdf
Full text linkHow are beliefs efficacious? One answer is: via rational intentional action. But there are other ways that beliefs are efficacious. This dissertation examines these other ways, and sketches an answer to the question of how beliefs are efficacious that takes into account how beliefs are involved in the full range of behavioral disciplines, from psychophysiology and cognition to social and economic phenomena.
The account of how beliefs are efficacious I propose draws on work on active accounts of perception. I develop an account based on a proposal sketched by the cognitive scientist Ulrich Neisser. Neisser sketched an active account of perception, on which dynamic anticipatory schemata direct an organism's exploration and action, and are in turn revised as a result of exploration and action. This notion of schema has roots in nineteenth century neurophysiology and in Frederick Bartlett's subsequent work on memory. Neisser appealed to it to unite what he thought was right about information-processing accounts of perception with what he thought was right about ecological accounts of perception. The point that we must anticipate in order to perceive has been recognized by philosophers in the form of the "theory-ladenness of observation." I extend the concept of anticipatory schema to include its role in social perception and social interaction; the concept of anticipatory schema provides a more interactive account of the role of expectations in the maintenance and existence of social institutions, and can be used to enrich the account of convention David Lewis provided. I also show that the concept of rational expectations, which explains the neutrality of money in terms of the efficacy of anticipatory expectations, is compatible with the proposed account of how beliefs are efficacious.
I discuss how the proposal accounts for the three main modes by which beliefs can be efficacious: (i) via their role in causing intentional action, (ii) via their role in causing economic phenomena and the existence and maintenance of social institutions, and (iii) via their role in causing unintentional physiological responses, including anticipatory physiological responses that can enable perception, cause involuntary actions and give rise to the placebo effect
Physical Pictures: Engineering Models circa 1914 and in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Full text linkIn 1914, Wittgenstein recorded an incident in his Notebooks that he later mentioned to several friends as occasioning a major insight for his views in the Tractatus that propositions represent by being pictures. The entry reads: "In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally. (As when in the law-court in Paris a motor-car accident is represented by means of dolls, etc.)" This incident, he said, was pivotal in coming to the view in the Tractatus that propositions represent by being pictures. In his later writings as well, investigations of what it is to understand a proposition remain tied to investigations of what it is to understand a picture. Numerous scholars have looked to Hertz' Priniciples of Mechanics as the element of Wittgenstein's milieu from which he drew the notions of model and picture used in the Tractatus; that they have done so may be due to a brief parenthetical remark in a much later section of the Tractatus. However, I think that a far more relevant source of a notion of model in Wittgenstein's milieu was the engineering scale model. The methodology of scale modelling is strikingly different from analytical methods, in just those ways that are important to the notion of picturing found in the Tractatus: the primary notion is that of translatability between two physical situations, rather than between a physical situation and a mathematical or linguistic representation, or, even, between two physically similar situations whose similarity is established by showing that they are both instantiations of the same more general equation or general description. The notion fits well with the remark: "The essential nature of the propositional sign becomes very clear when we think of it as made up of spatial objects (such as tables, chairs, books) instead of written signs (3.1.4.3.1)." It's also significant that the methodology of scale modelling can be used when one has no theory by which the behavior of the model can be predicted, or, even, a theory of the phenomenon being investigated. Since wind tunnels were already in use when Wittgenstein did his engineering studies, the concept of scale model would actually have been in his milieu much earlier than the pivotal 1914 notebook entry. However, the methodology of scale modelling was then more a matter of engineering practice than it was a formal methodology. At the time Wittgenstein recorded the insight about a world being "put together experimentally", the field was at a threshold. Formal foundations for the practice were just then being developed; it was in 1914 that Buckingham's proof about the minimum number of dimensionless groups needed to identify physically similar situations was presented in London. I also speculate on why the use of a scale model in the context of a courtroom, rather than a laboratory, lent significance to the incident
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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
