The notion of natural kinds has been widely criticized in philosophy of science but also appears indispensable for philosophical engagement with classificatory practices. Rather than addressing this ...tension through a new definition of “natural kind”, this article suggests materiality as a substitute for naturalness in philosophical debates about scientific classification. It is argued that a theory of material kinds provides an alternative and more inclusive entry point for analyzing classificatory practices, which is specified through an account of “restricted malleability” of materiality and further analyzed as (1) gradual, (2) multi-dimensional, (3) scalable, (4) interactive, and (5) purpose sensitive.
Mathématicien russe, prêtre orthodoxe, déporté et mort au goulag au début du vingtième siècle, Paul Florenski conçoit les mathématiques comme une science de l’être humain. Sa synthèse ...philosophico-mathématique s’inspire notamment des idées de théorie des ensembles pour non seulement comprendre le monde, mais plus radicalement façonner les phénomènes et fonder la culture spirituelle pour les générations futures. Cette démarche l’amène à relire les intuitions mathématiques comme une forme de spiritualité qui rend capable de comprendre la finitude du monde.
Minimal Model Explanations Batterman, Robert W.; Rice, Collin C.
Philosophy of science,
07/2014, Letnik:
81, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article discusses minimal model explanations, which we argue are distinct from various causal, mechanical, difference-making, and so on, strategies prominent in the philosophical literature. We ...contend that what accounts for the explanatory power of these models is not that they have certain features in common with real systems. Rather, the models are explanatory because of a story about why a class of systems will all display the same large-scale behavior because the details that distinguish them are irrelevant. This story explains patterns across extremely diverse systems and shows how minimal models can be used to understand real systems.
The politics of care in technoscience Martin, Aryn; Myers, Natasha; Viseu, Ana
Social studies of science,
10/2015, Letnik:
45, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Care is a slippery word. Any attempt to define it will be exceeded by its multivocality in everyday and scholarly use. In its enactment, care is both necessary to the fabric of biological and social ...existence and notorious for the problems that it raises when it is defined, legislated, measured, and evaluated. What care looks and feels like is both context-specific and perspective-dependent. Yet, this elusiveness does not mean that it lacks importance. In our engagements with the worlds that we study, construct, and inhabit, we cannot but care: care is an essential part of being a researcher and a citizen. To properly invite you into this Special Issue, then, we need to say something about what we mean when we write about care.
À l’intersection de la biologie évolutive, de la biologie du développement, de l’embryogenèse, de la génétique et de la génomique, cette leçon inaugurale étudie les différentes temporalités de ...l’embryon. Elle aborde également des approches technologiques récentes permettant de produire et de cultiver des pseudo-embryons in vitro, qui pourraient aboutir à terme à la possibilité de concevoir et de faire croître des embryons intégralement ex utero, sans même avoir recours à des cellules germinales. Ce nouveau champ de recherche soulève des questions éthiques et sociales essentielles qui nécessitent d’être considérées avec beaucoup d’attention.
Science and values: a two-way direction Ratti, Emanuele; Russo, Federica
European journal for philosophy of science,
03/2024, Letnik:
14, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
In the science and values literature, scholars have shown how science is influenced and shaped by values, often in opposition to the ‘value free’ ideal of science. In this paper, we aim to contribute ...to the science and values literature by showing that the relation between science and values flows not only from values into scientific practice, but also from (allegedly neutral) science to values themselves. The extant literature in the ‘science and values’ field focuses by and large on reconstructing, post hoc, how values have influenced science; our reconstruction of the case studies, instead, aims to show that scientific concepts and methods
too, because of specific identifiable characteristics,
can promote some values rather than (or at the expense of) others. We explain this bidirectional relation in analogy to debates on the normativity of technical artifacts and on feminist approaches in science, and we illustrate our claims with cases from the health sciences and machine learning. While our arguments in this paper also draw on post hoc reconstructions, we intend to show where, in the science in the making, we should engage not only with the question whether a practice is value-laden, but also how specific conceptual and methodological choices can influence values down the road. All in all, these considerations expand the ways in which philosophers can contribute to more value-aware scientific practices.
The goal of this paper is to develop a counterfactual theory of explanation (CTE). The CTE provides a monist framework for causal and noncausal explanations, according to which both causal and ...noncausal explanations are explanatory by virtue of revealing counterfactual dependencies between the explanandum and the explanans. I argue that the CTE is applicable to two paradigmatic examples of noncausal explanations: Euler’s explanation and renormalization group explanations of universality.
Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore ...unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the philosophy of science, showing what kinds of questions can be answered and how one can go about answering them.
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