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The most difficult challenge for naturalists in philosophy is accounting for scientific understanding of nature as itself a scientifically intelligible natural phenomenon. This book advances naturalism with a novel response to this challenge, drawing upon the philosophy of scientific practice and interdisciplinary science studies, philosophical work on the normativity of conceptual understanding, and new developments in evolutionary biology. The book’s two parts develop complementary, mutually supporting revisions to familiar accounts of conceptual understanding and of Sellars’s “scientific image” of ourselves-in-the-world. The first part shows how language and scientific practices exemplify the evolutionary process of niche construction. Conceptual capacities arise from the normativity of discursive practice within an evolving developmental niche, in place of familiar naturalistic appeals to a functional teleology of cognitive or linguistic representations. The second part treats scientific understanding (“the scientific image”) as situated within the ongoing practice of scientific research rather than as an established body of scientific knowledge. Scientific work does not culminate in a single, comprehensive image within the Sellarsian “space of reasons”; the sciences instead expand and reconfigure the entire space of reasons, in ways that are prospectively directed toward further revision in research. The first part thereby situates our conceptual capacities within a scientific conception of nature, while the second part explicates a scientific conception of nature in terms of that account of conceptual understanding.

What happens to scientific knowledge when researchers outside the natural sciences bring elements of the latest trend across disciplinary boundaries for their own purposes? Researchers in fields from anthropology to family therapy and traffic planning employ the concepts, methods, and results of chaos theory to harness the disciplinary prestige of the natural sciences, to motivate methodological change or conceptual reorganization within their home discipline, and to justify public policies and aesthetic judgments. Using the recent explosion in the use (and abuse) of chaos theory, this book examines the relationship between science and other disciplines as well as the place of scientific knowledge within our broader culture. The book's detailed investigation of the myriad uses of chaos theory reveals serious problems that can arise in the interchange between science and other knowledge-making pursuits, as well as opportunities for constructive interchange. By engaging with recent debates about interdisciplinary research, the book contributes a theoretical vocabulary and a set of critical frameworks for the rigorous examination of borrowing.

Evolutionary biology since Darwin has seen a dramatic entrenchment and elaboration of the role of chance in evolution. It is nearly impossible to discuss contemporary evolutionary theory in any depth at all without making reference to at least some concept of “chance” or “randomness.” Many processes are described as chancy, outcomes are characterized as random, and many evolutionary phenomena are thought to be best described by stochastic or probabilistic models. Chance is taken by various authors to be central to the understanding of fitness, genetic drift, macroevolution, mutation, foraging theory, and environmental variation, to take but a few examples. And for each of these notions, there are yet more stories to tell. Each weaves itself into the various branches of evolutionary theory in myriad different ways, with a wide variety of effects on the history and current state of life on Earth. Each is grounded in a particular trajectory in the history of philosophy and the history of biology, and has inspired a variety of responses throughout science and culture. This book endeavors to offer a cross-section of biological, historical, philosophical, and theological approaches to understanding chance in evolutionary theory.

Creatively Undecided offers a new way to look at how scientific understandings change. Thomas Kuhn has shown us how scientific practice and thinking depends on the normative framework in which it is conducted, but he and his followers have failed to show how such frameworks can be deemed the possible outcomes of the kind of critical assessment that Popper viewed as central to all rational deliberation. How can a scientist subject her standards to rational appraisal if that very act requires the use of those standards? The novel way out argued for in the book is to realize that exposure to external normative criticism is capable of destabializing normative commitment to a far greater extent than mere self-critique. Therefore, while science can only be transformed from within, by people who have standing in the field, criticism from the outside is essential. We may not be able to be sufficiently self-critical on our own, but trusted criticism from outside, even if resisted, can begin to change our perspective—at which point transformative self-criticism becomes a real option. The book’s novel thesis, argued for philosophically in the first four chapters comprising Parts I and II, is put to the test of a detailed case study in the history of British mathematics in Part III.

After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, the author of this book asks, can these self-proclaimed physicalists also be antireductionists? The book navigates this difficult and seemingly intractable dualism with analysis and evidence. In the spirit of the few distinguished biologists who accept reductionism—E. O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins—the author provides a defense of reductionism and applies it to molecular developmental biology and the theory of natural selection, ultimately proving that the physicalist must also be a reductionist.

The convergence of new technologies for the production, dissemination and analysis of scientific data and new regulatory regimes has provoked a reshuffling of priorities in research practices and outcomes, with important consequences for what is viewed as scientific knowledge and how that knowledge is obtained, legitimated and used. This book investigates how databases are set up and used to generate biological knowledge, and the practical difficulties and challenges confronted by database curators when attempting to package data for travel. These insights inform debate on four fundamental issues: what counts as knowledge at a time of significant technological and institutional changes; what counts as data, and how this relates to existing conceptions of the role and use of evidence in the life sciences and elsewhere; what does it mean to organize and interpret data to generate new knowledge of living systems; and under what conditions is such a systematization achieved.

The announcement in 2003 that the Human Genome Project had completed its map of the entire human genome was heralded as a stunning scientific breakthrough. Since then, boasts about the benefits—and warnings of the dangers—of genomics have remained front-page news, with everyone agreeing that genomics has the potential to radically alter life as we know it. For the nonscientist, the claims and counterclaims are dizzying—what does it really mean to understand the genome? This book offers an answer to that question and much more with a clear and lively account of the genomic revolution and its promise. The book opens with a brief history of the science of genetics and genomics, from Mendel to Watson and Crick and all the way up to Craig Venter; from there the chapters delve into the use of genomics in determining evolutionary paths—and what it can tell us, for example, about how far we really have come from our ape ancestors. It then considers both the power and risks of genetics, from the economic potential of plant genomes to overblown claims that certain human genes can be directly tied to such traits as intelligence or homosexuality. Ultimately, the chapters in this book argue, we are now living with a new knowledge as powerful in its way as nuclear physics, and the stark choices that face us—between biological warfare and gene therapy, a new eugenics or a new agricultural revolution—will demand the full engagement of both scientists and citizens.

This book is a history of information, from its inception in the natural world to its role in the transformation of culture to the current Internet mania and is attendant assets and liabilities. Drawing on the history of ideas, the details of information technology, and the boundaries of the human condition, the book illuminates the relationship between things and signs, between reality and information.

Idealizations are assumptions made without regard for whether they are true and often with full knowledge they are false. This book develops a strong view of idealization’s centrality to science and reconsiders the aims of science in light of that centrality. The starting point is well-accepted ideas about how science is shaped by its human practitioners and by the world's complexity. Together, these ideas inspire a view of science as the search for causal patterns, a search that relies significantly on idealizations. Idealizations contribute to science in a variety of ways, including by playing a positive representational role. Case studies from across science are used to demonstrate idealizations’ ubiquity in science, as well as the wide range of purposes they serve. This account of idealization has implications for central philosophical debates about the aims of science. First, it provides reason to think the epistemic aim of science is not truth but human understanding. Understanding is a cognitive achievement that, unlike truth, can be directly furthered by idealizations. This in turn motivates an account of scientific explanation that does justice to how the production of understanding depends on human cognizers, including the cognitive value of causal patterns. It also inspires a view of the relationship among scientific projects not as investigating discrete levels of organization, but as independent and partial explanations dependent on one another for epistemic support. Finally, this account of idealization expands the influence of human values on science's aims and products, while also constraining scientific and metaphysical pluralism.

Technology permeates nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Cars enable us to travel long distances, mobile phones help us to communicate, and medical devices make it possible to detect and cure diseases. However, these aids to existence are not simply neutral instruments, they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. Because technology plays such an active role in shaping our daily actions and decisions, it is crucial, this book argues, that we consider the moral dimension of technology. As such, the book offers an in-depth study of the ethical dilemmas and moral issues surrounding the interaction of humans and technology. Drawing from Heidegger and Foucault, as well as from philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, it locates morality not just in the human users of technology but in the interaction between us and our machines. The book cites concrete examples, including some personal ones, and argues for the morality of things. The book forces us all to consider the virtue of new inventions and to rethink the rightness of the products we use every day.

Central assumptions in dominant philosophy of science were reformulated in the context of the encounter of Vienna Circle logical positivism with U.S. McCarthyism and the Cold War. For these mostly Jewish and socialist émigrés from European fascism, insisting on value-freedom, “the view from nowhere”, for science and its philosophy was a political necessity. We live in a world animated by strikingly different social and political impulses. Yet that notion of objectivity is still used to police university research, public debates and international relations. It does so in the face of widely-recognized incompetence to detect and eliminate racist, sexist, class, colonial and other anti-democratic biases from the results of research. This study presents six compelling arguments for standpoint epistemology’s “strong objectivity” that has arisen from social justice research. These projects insist on fairness to the data and to a claim’s severest critics, but are capable of detecting and eliminating from natural and social science research distorting social values and interests that remain invisible to conventional research. Among the foci of these arguments are methodology that reveals the actual relation between the global impoverishment of women and Third World development policy, the reliability of indigenous knowledge and its contributions to biodiversity, how secularisms are distinctive cultural forces on modern Western sciences, and why the pluralism of scientific ontologies and epistemologies should be nourished rather than eliminated or only tolerated. In light of the desired demise of “Mr. Nowhere,” this study also identifies new kinds of “proper scientific selfs” generated in such research.

So far the “science wars” have generated far more heat than light. Combatants from one or the other of what C. P. Snow famously called “the two cultures” (science versus the arts and humanities) have launched bitter attacks but have seldom engaged in constructive dialogue about the central issues. This book has gathered together some of the world's foremost scientists and sociologists of science to exchange opinions and ideas rather than insults. The contributors find surprising areas of broad agreement in a genuine conversation about science, its legitimacy and authority as a means of understanding the world, and whether science studies undermines the practice and findings of science and scientists. The book is organized into three parts. The first consists of position papers written by scientists and sociologists of science, which were distributed to all the participants. The second presents commentaries on these papers, drawing out and discussing their central themes and arguments. In the third section, participants respond to these critiques, offering defenses, clarifications, and modifications of their positions. Who can legitimately speak about science? What is the proper role of scientific knowledge? How should scientists interact with the rest of society in decision making? Because science occupies such a central position in the world today, such questions are vitally important. Although there are no simple solutions, this book shows the reader exactly what is at stake in the Science Wars, and provides a valuable framework for how to go about seeking the answers we so urgently need.

Computer simulation was first pioneered as a scientific tool in meteorology and nuclear physics in the period following World War II, but it has grown rapidly to become indispensible in a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including astrophysics, high-energy physics, climate science, engineering, ecology, and economics. Digital computer simulation helps study phenomena of great complexity, but how much do we know about the limits and possibilities of this new scientific practice? How do simulations compare to traditional experiments? And are they reliable? This book seeks to answer these questions. Scrutinizing these issues with a philosophical lens, it explores the impact of simulation on such issues as the nature of scientific evidence; the role of values in science; the nature and role of fictions in science; and the relationship between simulation and experiment, theories and data, and theories at different levels of description.

Many people assume that the claims of scientists are objective truths. But historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have long argued that scientific claims reflect the particular historical, cultural, and social context in which those claims were made. The nature of scientific knowledge is not absolute because it is influenced by the practice and perspective of human agents. This book argues that the acts of observing and theorizing are both perspectival, and that this nature makes scientific knowledge contingent, as Thomas Kuhn theorized forty years ago. Using the example of color vision in humans to illustrate how his theory of “perspectivism” works, the author argues that colors do not actually exist in objects; rather, color is the result of an interaction between aspects of the world and the human visual system. He extends this argument into a general interpretation of human perception and, more controversially, to scientific observation, conjecturing that the output of scientific instruments is perspectival. Furthermore, complex scientific principles—such as Maxwell's equations describing the behavior of both the electric and magnetic fields—make no claims about the world, but models based on those principles can be used to make claims about specific aspects of the world. The book offers a solution to the most contentious debate in the philosophy of science over the past thirty years.

How do scientists persuade colleagues from diverse fields to cross the disciplinary divide, risking their careers in new interdisciplinary research programs? Why do some attempts to inspire such research win widespread acclaim and support, while others do not? This book addresses such questions through close readings of three scientific monographs in their historical contexts—Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), which inspired the “modern synthesis” of evolutionary biology; Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? (1944), which catalyzed the field of molecular biology; and Edward O. Wilson's Consilience (1998), a so far not entirely successful attempt to unite the social and biological sciences. The book examines the rhetorical strategies used in each book and evaluates which worked best, based on the reviews and scientific papers that followed in their wake.

This book enters into the complexities of human behavioral research, a domain still dominated by the age-old debate of “nature versus nurture.” Rather than supporting one side or another or attempting to replace that dichotomy with a different framework for understanding behavior, the book focuses on how scientists study it, specifically sexual behavior and aggression, and asks what can be known about human behavior through empirical investigation. It dissects five approaches to the study of behavior—quantitative behavioral genetics, molecular behavior genetics, developmental psychology, neurophysiology and anatomy, and social/environmental methods—highlighting the underlying assumptions of these disciplines, as well as the different questions and mechanisms each addresses. The book also analyzes efforts to integrate different approaches. It concludes that there is no single “correct” approach but that each contributes to our overall understanding of human behavior. In addition, the book reflects on the reception and transmission of this behavioral research in scientific, social, clinical, and political spheres.

Can we use technology in the pursuit of a good life, or are we doomed to having our lives organized and our priorities set by the demands of machines and systems? How can philosophy help us to make technology a servant rather than a master? This book uses a careful collective analysis of Albert Borgmann's controversial and influential ideas as a jumping-off point from which to address questions such as these about the role and significance of technology in our lives. Contributors both sympathetic and critical examine Borgmann's work, especially his “device paradigm”; apply his theories to new areas such as film, agriculture, design, and ecological restoration; and consider the place of his thought within philosophy and technology studies more generally.

It is a popular belief that science is supposed to provide a literally or objectively true account of the world. Philosophers call this the thesis of scientific realism. Yet an inspection of the actual language used by scientists reveals that it is full of metaphor. Metaphor, it is frequently said, provides 'a lens through which we see the world.' What does this mean for the question of scientific realism? Is this lens objective or does it distort reality? By tracing the history of key metaphors in the development of cell theory and cell biology, and analyzing the valuable cognitive work they perform, this book argues that metaphors are, like microscopes and other instruments, a vital 'tool' in the construction of scientific knowledge and explanations of how the world works. More than just rhetorical devices for conveying difficult ideas to non-specialists, metaphors provide the conceptual means with which scientists interpret and intervene in the world. When properly understood the use of metaphors allow still for a viable form of scientific realism. Terms and phrases originally intended metaphorically may eventually come to be used quite literally to express what we call ‘objective scientific truths.’ Metaphors are powerful tools with which scientists ‘rewire,’ ‘reprogram,’ or ‘edit’ the cell’s genetic and biochemical ‘signaling circuits,’ to make them more efficient cell ‘factories’ or to ‘switch on’ a cancer cell’s ‘death program.’ They are a vital component in how humans achieve scientific understanding of the world and attempt to change and direct its processes.

Ambitiously identifying fresh issues in the study of complex systems, this book, in a model of interdisciplinary exploration, makes these concerns accessible to scholars in the fields of ecology, environmental science, and science studies. It explores concepts used to deal with complexity in three realms: ecology and socio-environmental change; the collective constitution of knowledge; and the interpretations of science as they influence subsequent research. For each realm, the author shows that unruly complexity—situations that lack definite boundaries, where what goes on “outside” continually restructures what is “inside,” and where diverse processes come together to produce change—should not be suppressed by partitioning complexity into well-bounded systems which can be studied or managed from an outside vantage point. Using case studies from Australia, North America, and Africa, he encourages readers to be troubled by conventional boundaries—especially between science and the interpretation of science—and to reflect more self-consciously on the conceptual and practical choices researchers make.