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Scientific Practice (scientific + practice)
Selected AbstractsMORAL PARTICULARISM AND SCIENTIFIC PRACTICEMETAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 4-5 2008BRENDAN LARVOR Abstract: Particularism is usually understood as a position in moral philosophy. In fact, it is a view about all reasons, not only moral reasons. Here, I show that particularism is a familiar and controversial position in the philosophy of science and mathematics. I then argue for particularism with respect to scientific and mathematical reasoning. This has a bearing on moral particularism, because if particularism about moral reasons is true, then particularism must be true with respect to reasons of any sort, including mathematical and scientific reasons. [source] Citizens and Scientists: Toward a Gendered History of Scientific Practice in Post-revolutionary FranceGENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2001Carol E. Harrison Because the French Revolution failed to produce a widely acceptable definition of citizenship, the limits of manhood suffrage in the early nineteenth century were uncertain. Social practices, in particular scientific activity, served as claims to the status of citizen. By engaging in scientific pastimes, bourgeois Frenchmen asserted that they possessed the rationality and autonomy that liberal theorists associated both with manliness and with civic capacity. However, bourgeois science was never a stable signifier of masculinity or of competence. As professional science emerged, the bourgeois amateur increasingly became the feminised object of satire rather than the sober and meritorious citizen-scientist. [source] The politics of risk and trust in mental healthCRITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2004John Wilkinson This essay provides a critical account of Risk Society theory through analysis of an article by ,I,ek on human genetics research, using this as a basis for distinguishing a range of meanings of 'risk' and describing their interplay within the mental health domain. The paper argues that mental health policy in the UK has been distorted through a preoccupation with a supposedly scientific practice of risk assessment which uncannily reflects popular and tabloid prejudice. It is argued that Risk Society theory does not, as its proponents claim, supersede the politics of inclusion and exclusion, so much as overlay and disguise them. The importance of Risk Society theory in the development of Third Way politics would invite a similarly critical view of a range of contemporary British social policy. [source] A Question of IntegrityGERMAN RESEARCH, Issue 2 2008Ulrike Beisiegel Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. The DFG's recommendations for ensuring good scientific practice are still current, even ten years after they were published , and yet they have still not really arrived in everyday science [source] The scientifically-minded psychologist: Science as a core competencyJOURNAL OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 7 2004Kathleen J. Bieschke At the Competencies Conference: Future Directions in Education and Credentialing in Professional Psychology, the Scientific Foundations and Research Competencies Work Group focused on identifying how psychologists practice scientifically. This article presents the subcomponents associated with the core competency of scientific practice. The subcomponents include: 1) access and apply current scientific knowledge habitually and appropriately; 2) contribute to knowledge; 3) critically evaluate interventions and their outcomes; 4) practice vigilance about how sociocultural variables influence scientific practice; and 5) routinely subject work to the scrutiny of colleagues, stakeholders, and the public. In addition, the article briefly discusses how the depth of training for and assessment of each subcomponent will vary by training model. Implications and future directions for individual psychologists, training programs, and the profession are discussed. This is one of a series of articles published in this issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Several other articles that resulted from the Competencies Conference will appear in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice and The Counseling Psychologist. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol. [source] Representations of scientists in Canadian high school and college textbooksJOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 9 2008Michiel van Eijck Abstract This study investigated the representations of a select group of scientists (n,=,10) in a sample of Canadian high school and college textbooks. Drawing on semiotic and cultural-historical activity theoretical frameworks, we conducted two analyses. A coarse-grained, quantitative analysis of the prevalence and structure of these representations exhibited bias toward particular scientists' representations and particular types of texts and inscriptions therein, suggesting a domain-specific rhetorical structure. A fine-grained, qualitative analysis of scientists' representations revealed that high school and college textbooks represent: (a) objects of scientific practice as projected or anticipated independently from human activity; (b) scientists' individual actions aiming at the creation of non-tangible tools and rules by means of observation, modification, or manipulation of given, tangible objects; (c) scientific practice as isolated due to which the simultaneous belonging to different practices hardly determines the goals of scientists' actions; and (d) scientists as part of a small community of mainly other scientists who subsequently determine each other's individual actions. The implications of these outcomes were discussed. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 1059,1082, 2008 [source] The Philosophy of Social Science: Metaphysical and EmpiricalPHILOSOPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2007Francesco Guala Ontological debates have always been prominent in the philosophy of social science. Philosophers have typically conceived of such debates as pre-scientific attempts to reform social scientific practice, rather than as post-scientific reflections on a firm body of scientific knowledge. Two celebrated contemporary research programs in social ontology , collective intentionality and evolutionary game theory , also follow this approach. In this paper I illustrate their central elements and criticize their weak empirical foundations. I finish by reviewing some work that combines empirical evidence with theoretical reflection, and suggest that it constitutes the way forward in the philosophy of social science. [source] Science, samples and people (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, Issue 3 2010Jonathan Marks A legal action taken by the Havasupai tribe against Arizona State University, for the improper use of their blood, affords an opportunity to reflect on past and future scientific practice within anthropology. [source] A communication model of conceptual innovation in scienceCOMMUNICATION THEORY, Issue 3 2001Wiliam J. White This essay exploring the nature of scientific communication begins with the premise that conceptual innovation is both a fundamental scientific activity and essentially a communication phenomenon. Conceptual innovation is fundamental as a scientific practice in that science as an institution is predicated on the development of new knowledge. It is essentially communicative in that it is the public character of science that relies on the consensual and communal evaluation of knowledge claims that determines the fate of new ideas. Science comprises a number of overlapping discursive formations whose nature is determined by the positions of (and relationships among) actors and ideas within communication and ideational networks, and which are characterized by a particular situational logic. The nature of these situational logics is such as to give rise to some of the characteristic communication dynamics of science, including consensus, problemshift, branching, and demarcation. [source] Science, Modernity, and the Making of China's One-Child PolicyPOPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 2 2003Susan Greenhalgh China's one-child-per-couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one-child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world-in-crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core,that China faced a virtual "population crisis" and that the one-child policy was "the only solution" to it,as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge-making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself. [source] Childbirth in ancient Rome: From traditional folklore to obstetricsAUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF OBSTETRICS AND GYNAECOLOGY, Issue 2 2007Donald TODMAN Abstract In ancient Rome, childbirth was a hazardous event for both mother and child with high rates of infant and maternal mortality. Traditional Roman medicine centred on folklore and religious practices, but with the development of Hippocratic medicine came significant advances in the care of women during pregnancy and confinement. Midwives or obstetrices played an important role and applied rational scientific practices to improve outcomes. This evolution from folklore to obstetrics was a pivotal point in the history of childbirth. [source] Protocols, practices, and the reproduction of technique in molecular biology*THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2002Michael Lynch ABSTRACT Protocols are one of the main organizational resources in molecular biology. They are written instructions that specify ingredients, equipment, and sequences of steps for making technical preparations. Some protocols are published in widely used manuals, while others are hand-written variants used by particular laboratories and individual technicians. It is widely understood, both in molecular biology and in social studies of science, that protocols do not describe exactly what practitioners do in the laboratory workplace. In social studies of science, the difference between protocols and the actual practices of doing them often is used to set up ironic contrasts between ,messy' laboratory practices and the appearance of technical order. Alternatively, in ethnomethodological studies of work, the difference is examined as a constitutive feature, both of the livedwork of doing technical projects, and of the administrative work of regulating and evaluating such projects. The present article takes its point of departure from ethnomethodology, and begins with a discussion of local problems with performing molecular biology protocols on specific occasions. The discussion then moves to particular cases in criminal law in which defense attorneys crossexamine forensic technicians and lab administrators. In these interrogations, the distinction between protocols and actual practices animates the dialogue and becomes consequential for judgments in the case at hand. The article concludes with a discussion of administrative science: the work of treating protocols and paper trails as proxies for actual ,scientific' practices. [source] | ||||||||||