Links
But as a sort of mirror-image of the proton... [the anti-proton] captured the imaginations of physicists, who had already begun envisioning antimatter particles as routine counterparts of their more familiar twins. Scientists began asking things like why the universe ended up being made almost entirely of matter rather than antimatter, a question that has not yet been resolved.
Scientists from the mirror-universe responded: "Oh, but your universe is made up mostly of anti-matter. That is why we never come to visit."
[ add comment ] ( 4379 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
I was thinking about something in the neighborhood of research ethics and thought that I should make a short blog post about it. I realized that the point I had in mind depended on a bunch of context, so I wrote the following screed:
Several years ago, I worked on The Responsible Conduct of Research with Mike Kalichman. (RCR is a euphemism for research ethics, with the caveat that it never recommends violating official regulations.) My duties were largely editorial. Mike had written a book that he wanted cut apart and restructured as material for a website.
In addition to discussing rules and official regulations, each topic contains separate sections for Principles and Guidelines. The Principles are middle level ethical claims about the domain (eg, Authorship). The Guidelines are more specific, raising issues relevant to specific kinds of decisions within the domain.
I do not recall how much of this was Mike's original framework and how much was my contribution, but I think that this was the structure of some sections but not others when I started work. In fleshing out the framework, I had to formulate principles for every topic. Moreover, I had to write explanatory justifications for each principle.
These justifications proceeded along three familiar lines: (1) Don't cause suffering. (2) Respect people. (3) Try to generate knowledge and dispel ignorance.
If I had written the Ethics page for the RCR website, I would have made these higher principles explicit. They can be elaborated in the usual way. One feature of them that I rather like is that they correspond to the Peircean categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
A defense of the higher principles is beyond the scope of most discussions of RCR. It is philosophers' business, important if we want to justify the principles-- and any such business can embrangle us in details and difficulties from which we might never emerge.
For some purposes, it may be essential to revisit the ethical underpinnings of the principles. For example: (1) is often taken to include the suffering of animals, but (2) may or may not include respect for animals. Why? And what about fetuses? What about animal fetuses? Plants and spores?
One strategy is to show that many differing ethical theories can agree on the principle even when they disagree on its justification. Failing that, if each interlocutor accepts them for their own private reasons, then we can take them as more-or-less given. This makes applied ethics tractable without waiting for the more abstract questions to be resolved.
The RCR website breaks this down further, by suggesting that the higher level principles overdetermine some lower level principles. The lower level principles provide common ground even if there is disagreement as to exactly how they should be justified. Intermediate levels may be introduced as much as required, incrementally moving from abstract considerations down to brass tacks.
The Ethics page was written by Mary Devereaux, after I left the project. She lists something like the three principles I had in mind and adds a fourth, calling for "A commitment to the use of scientific knowledge and its applications to promote the social good." This is not a consequence of the principles I had in mind, and I am not sure it belongs on the list. Several reasons: The first three are directly relevant to how one should conduct oneself once involved in a research project; this other principle comes into play only when considering what job to take or-- if one is in a position of authority-- which research projects to pursue. The first three clearly make demands on any scientist; the fourth may be supererogatory. (Is it? Maybe.) There is no Peircean Fourthness; a fortiori there can be no fourth principle.
Nevertheless, the fourth principle seems like an important thing for scientists to think about. It belongs on some list, somewhere in the neighborhood of RCR.
(Having finished the screed, I've lost track of the original point.)
[ add comment ] ( 5055 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
Footnotes on Epicycles received its first piece of comment spam today. I guess that makes it an official blog. Now I just need to stop posting for a month and return only to post an apology for not posting.
[ add comment ] ( 6369 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
In the same vein as my remark about Peter Winch: Today I ran across another anticipation of the Kuhnian distinction between normal and revolutionary science.
In his 1960 introductory text Philosophy of Science, Stephen Toulmin discusses what it means for a theory to count as 'fundamental.' He argues that a fundamental theory would explain all of the things that need explaining. These standards are, as he puts it, "something with which scientists grow familiar in the course of their training, but which is hardly ever stated" [p. 117]. Sometimes, he adds, they change in non-incremental ways: "From time to time... the ideal changes in a way which cannot be described so simply, and these are occasions when disputes of a philosophical kind arise" [p. 117-8].
This is consonant with Winch's remark about the "accepted view" among philosophers at the time. Although I don't have much sense of Toulmin's intellectual biography, I suspect that he was led to this kind of thinking-- as Winch was-- by way of Wittgenstein.
I don't know if Wittgenstein ever read Ludwik Fleck who, as Greg commented in the previous thread, practically wrote The Structure three decades before Kuhn.
[ add comment ] ( 4729 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
I just uploaded a new version of my induction paper. This draft rectifies a systematic problem with terminology. Although I still think that the arguments have implications for what John Norton calls material theories of induction, they most readily apply to demonstrative theories of induction.
[ add comment ] ( 5222 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink
<<First <Back | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | Next> Last>>