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Philosophical Debate (philosophical + debate)
Selected AbstractsThe Social Psychology of "Pseudoscience": A Brief HistoryJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 3 2004ARTHUR STILL The word ,pseudoscience' is a marker of changing worries about science and being a scientist. It played an important role in the philosophical debate on demarcating science from other activities, and was used in popular writings to distance science from cranky theories with scientific pretensions. These uses consolidated a comforting unity in science, a communal space from which pseudoscience is excluded, and the user's right to belong is asserted. The urgency of this process dwindled when attempts to find a formal demarcation petered out, and the growth of social constructionism denied science any special access to truth. The reaction to this led to the science wars, which ushered in a new anxiety in the use of ,pseudoscience', especially from the least secure branches. But recent writings on the disunity of science reveal how the sense of support drawn from it may be based on an illusion, creating a disunity of pseudoscience as well as of science. [source] The Reformation of the Eyes: Apparitions and Optics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century EuropeJOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 2 2003Stuart Clark Apparitions were the subject of fierce theological and philosophical debate in the period after the Reformation. But these controversies also raised issues fundamental to the nature and organization of human vision. They crossed and recrossed the boundaries between religion and the science and psychology of optics. Apparitions, after all, are things that appear, and spectres are things that are seen. Before they could mean anything to anyone they had to be correctly identified as phenomena. Their religious role, whether Protestant or Catholic, presupposed a perceptual judgement , essentially visual in character , about just what they were. During the early modern period this judgement , this visual identification , became vastly more complex and contentious than ever before, certainly much more so than in the case of medieval ghosts. The sceptics, natural magicians, and atheists turned apparitions into optical tricks played by nature or human artifice; the religious controversialists and demonologists thought that demons might also be responsible. This essay argues that the debate that ensued, irrespective of the confessional allegiances of the protagonists, was the occasion for some of the most sustained and sophisticated of the early modern arguments about truth and illusion in the visual world. [source] Judging interpretations: But is it rigorous? trustworthiness and authenticity in naturalistic evaluationNEW DIRECTIONS FOR EVALUATION, Issue 114 2007Thomas A. Schwandt This chapter situates Guba and Lincoln's chapter within the broad philosophical debate about the justifiability of interpretations. The emergence of a new paradigm of inquiry (naturalistic) has, unsurprisingly enough, led to a demand for rigorous criteria that meet traditional standards of inquiry. Two sets are suggested, one of which, the "trustworthiness" criteria, parallels conventional criteria, while the second, " authenticity" criteria, is implied directly by new paradigm assumptions. [source] Vienna,Chicago: The cultural transformation of the model system of the un-opposed molarBIOESSAYS, Issue 8 2007Xianghong Luan The discussion over the roles of genes and environment on the phenotypical specification of organisms has held a central role in science philosophy since the late 19th century and has re-emerged in today's debate over genetic determinism and developmental plasticity. In fin-de-siecle Vienna, this debate coincided with a philosophical debate over empiricism/materialism versus idealism/vitalism. Turn-of-the-century Vienna's highly interdisciplinary environment was also the birthplace for the model system of the un-opposed molar. The un-opposed molar system features new tissue formation at the roots of teeth and tooth drift once opposing teeth are lost. The un-opposed molar model system was revived by a group of Viennese scientists who left Vienna during the Nazi period to address Vienna's questions about evolution and heredity and about genes and environment in Chicago's post-WWII scientific exile community. Here we are using the colorful history of the un-opposed molar to investigate the role of culture and method in the scientific evolution of a model system. BioEssays 29:819,830, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] A Neglected Account of PerceptionDIALECTICA, Issue 3 2008Tom Stoneham I aim to draw the reader's attention to an easily overlooked account of perception, namely that there are no perceptual experiences, that to perceive something is to stand in an external, purely non-Leibnizian relation to it. I introduce the Purely Relational account of perception by discussing a case of it being overlooked in the writings of G.E. Moore, though we also find the same move in J. Cook Wilson, so it has nothing to do with an affection for sense-data. I then discuss the relation between the PR account and recent disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, and note that the PR account has some claim to be the only one that truly respects the directness of perception. The paper does not aspire to persuade the reader of the correctness of the neglected PR account, merely that it should be treated as a serious candidate in philosophical debates about perception. [source] Restoring landscapes: the authenticity problemEARTH SURFACE PROCESSES AND LANDFORMS, Issue 13 2006Isis Brook Abstract Philosophical concerns about restoring landscapes often revolve around two, connected, issues. First is the idea that a restored landscape, even if it is a perfect replica, has lost some of its value. The claim might appeal to a break in the continuity of the landscape and that continuity is part of what is valuable. Alternatively, often in the case of natural landscapes, the appeal is that any human manipulation is inauthentic; here the analogy is sometimes made with the art world and the restoration is deemed a fake. The second problem highlighted in philosophical debates is that the greater the success of restoration projects, the more threatened natural landscapes become: any claim that something must be preserved in its pristine or historically layered state is undermined by the claim that it could be put back again. Initially I discuss two opposing potential responses to these claims: (1) that humans are part of nature and thus cannot be an alien dominating force outside of nature; and (2) that nature is itself a social construct. Neither of these positions is entirely satisfactory, but what they jointly reveal is the reality of our fluid and multifaceted relationship with the world. I then show that Elliot's claim of the additional value of pristine nature is actually not based on an inherent value, but is dependent on the human valuation of it. I propose an alternative that places the source of value in the thing itself and thus arrive at a positive role for restoration as the setting in train and guiding of positive relationships above and beyond their social or public amenity value to us. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Theodor Lipps and the shift from "sympathy" to "empathy"JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 2 2005Gustav Jahoda In the course of extensive philosophical debates on aesthetics in nineteenth-century Germany, Robert Vischer introduced the concept of Einfühlung in relation to art. Theodor Lipps subsequently extended it from art to visual illusions and interpersonal understanding. While Lipps had regarded Einfühlung as basically similar to the old notion of sympathy, Edward Titchener in America believed it had a different meaning. Hence, he coined the term empathy as its translation. This term came to be increasingly widely adopted, first in psychology and then more generally. But the lack of agreement about the supposed difference between these concepts suggests that Lipps had probably been right. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] | |||||||||||||