scholarly journals Realism, perspectivism, and disagreement in science

Synthese ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michela Massimi
Keyword(s):  
Electric Charge ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Natural Unit ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Knowledge Claims ◽  
Associated Data

AbstractThis paper attends to two main tasks. First, I introduce the notion of perspectival disagreement in science. Second, I relate perspectival disagreement in science to the broader issue of realism about science: how to maintain realist ontological commitments in the face of perspectival disagreement among scientists? I argue that often enough perspectival disagreement is not at the level of the scientific knowledge claims but rather of the methodological and justificatory principles. I introduce and clarify the notion of ‘agreeing-whilst-perspectivally-disagreeing’ with an episode from the history of modern physics: namely, how we came to agree about the electric charge as a minimal natural unit despite different scientific perspectives and associated data-to-phenomena inferences available for it in the period 1897–1906.

The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Felten
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Distributed Cognition ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Ore Deposit ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Ranking Official ◽  
Knowledge Claims

This article looks into mining in central Germany in the late eighteenth century as one area of highly charged exchange between (specific manifestations of early modern) science and the (early modern) state. It describes bureaucratic knowledge as socially distributed cognition by following the steps of a high-ranking official that led him to discover a rich silver ore deposit. Although this involved hybridization of practical/artisanal and theoretical/scientific knowledge, and knowers, the focus of this article is on purification or boundary work that took place when actors in and around the mines consciously contributed to different circuits of knowledge production. For the sake of analysis, the article suggests a way of opposing bureaucratic versus scientific knowledge production, even when the sites, actors involved in, and practices of that knowledge production were the same or similar. Whereas the science of the time invoked consensus among equals to conflate competing knowledge claims, bureaucracies did so by applying a hierarchy among ranked individuals.

scholarly journals The Earth expansion theory and its transition from scientific hypothesis to pseudoscientific belief

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Sudiro
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Plate Tectonics ◽  
Continental Drift ◽  
Geological Evidence ◽  
Fixed Dimension ◽  
Scientific Hypothesis ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Expansion Theory ◽  
The Many

Abstract. During the first half of 20th century, the dominant global tectonics model based on Earth contraction had increasing problems accommodating new geological evidence, with the result that alternative geodynamic theories were investigated. Due to the level of scientific knowledge and the limited amount of data available in many scientific disciplines at the time, not only was contractionism considered a valid scientific theory but the debate also included expansionism, mobilism on a fixed-dimension planet, or various combinations of these geodynamic hypotheses. Geologists and physicists generally accepted that planets could change their dimensions, although the change of volume was generally believed to happen because of a contraction, not an expansion. Constant generation of new matter in the universe was a possibility accepted by science, as it was the variation in the cosmological constants. Continental drift, instead, was a more heterodox theory, requiring a larger effort from the geoscientists to be accepted. The new geological data collected in the following decades, an improved knowledge of the physical processes, the increased resolution and penetration of geophysical tools, and the sensitivity of measurements in physics decreased the uncertainty level in many fields of science. Theorists now had less freedom for speculation because their theories had to accommodate more data, and more limiting conditions to respect. This explains the rapid replacement of contracting Earth, expanding Earth, and continental drift theories by plate tectonics once the symmetrical oceanic magnetic striping was discovered, because none of the previous models could explain and incorporate the new oceanographic and geophysical data. Expansionism could survive after the introduction of plate tectonics because its proponents have increasingly detached their theory from reality by systematically rejecting or overlooking any contrary evidence, and selectively picking only the data that support expansion. Moreover, the proponents continue to suggest imaginative physical mechanisms to explain expansion, claiming that scientific knowledge is partial, and the many inconsistencies of their theory are just minor problems in the face of the plain evidence of expansion. According to the expansionists, scientists should just wait for some revolutionary discovery in fundamental physics that will explain all the unsolved mysteries of Earth expansion. The history of the expanding-Earth theory is an example of how falsified scientific hypotheses can survive their own failure, gradually shifting towards and beyond the limits of scientific investigation until they become merely pseudoscientific beliefs.

Introduction: Why Science Wars?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Steven L. Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Word Knowledge ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Science Wars ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
Knowledge Claims

While all definitions are stipulative by nature and reflect alternative usages, the meaning of the word “knowledge” is especially ambiguous. It carries profound consequences for what we mean by truth, reality, and rationality, but most importantly for our understanding of scientific knowledge claims. Rhetorically, knowledge trumps belief and opinion, but it is not clear that knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is essentially different from and superior to belief and opinion. As to the questions of what scientists know and how they know it, no answers have stood up to critical scrutiny in the history of modern science. Despite this uncertainty, modern science has claimed a hegemony in our society on the production of knowledge as superior to belief and opinion.

Luxury Communist Jesus

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Sandford
Keyword(s):  
Work Ethic ◽  
Protestant Work Ethic ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Protestant Work Ethic

This article begins by outlining contemporary anti-work politics, which form the basis of Sandford’s reading. After providing a brief history of anti-work politics, Sandford examines recent scholarly treatments of Jesus’ relationship to work. An examination of a number of texts across the gospel traditions leads Sandford to argue that Jesus can be read as a ‘luxury communist’ whose behaviour flies in the face of the Protestant work ethic. Ultimately, Sandford foregrounds those texts in which Jesus discourages his followers from working, and undermines work as an ‘end in itself’, contextualising these statements in relation to other gospel texts about asceticism and the redistribution of wealth.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

Can an Adulteress Save Jesus? the Pericope Adulterae, Feminist Interpretation, and the Limits of Narrative Agency

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Knust
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Feminist Interpretation ◽  
Narrative Agency ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

The pericope adulterae (John 7:53–8:11) is often interpreted as an inherently feminist story, one that validates women’s humanity in the face of a patriarchal order determined to reduce sexual sinners and women more generally to the status of object. Reading this story within a framework of queer narratology, however, leads to a different point of view, one that challenges the consequences of seeking rescue from a god and a text that are both quite willing to forge male homosocial bonds at a woman’s expense. As the history of this story also shows, texts and their meanings remain unsettled and therefore open to further unpredictable and contingent elaboration. Pondering my own feminist commitments, I attempt to imagine a world and a story where a woman is a person and Jesus is in need of rescue. Perhaps such a world is possible. Or perhaps it is not.

Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth van Houts
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Married Couple ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Social And Emotional ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Married Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This book contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe c. 900–1300. The focus will be on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage. The book consists of three parts: the first part (Getting Married) is devoted to the process of getting married and wedding celebrations, the second part (Married Life) discusses the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage, while the third part (Alternative Living) explores concubinage and polygyny as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions. Four main themes are central to the book. First, the tension between patriarchal family strategies and the individual family member’s freedom of choice to marry and, if so, to what partner; second, the role played by the married priesthood in their quest to have individual agency and self-determination accepted in their own lives in the face of the growing imposition of clerical celibacy; third, the role played by women in helping society accept some degree of gender equality and self-determination to marry and in shaping the norms for married life incorporating these principles; fourth, the role played by emotion in the establishment of marriage and in married life at a time when sexual and spiritual love feature prominently in medieval literature.

Renaissance Mass Murder

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Wars ◽  
Human Tragedy

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.

Epilogue: On the Current and Future State of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Megill
Keyword(s):  
Historical Writing ◽  
Conceptual Difficulty ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Initial Decision ◽  
Future State ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.

A Fierce Green Fire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marybeth Lorbiecki
Keyword(s):  
Life Story ◽  
Environmental Literature ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Ripple Effects ◽  
Ecological Vision ◽  
As Species ◽  
Wilderness Areas ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

For anyone interested in wildlife, birds, wilderness areas, parks, ecology, conservation, environmental literature, and ethics, the name Aldo Leopold is sure to pop up. Since first publication, Aldo Leopold: A Fierce Green Fire has remained the classic short, inspiring biography of Leopold--the perfect companion to reading his ever popular A Sand County Almanac. Winning numerous awards, this comprehensive account of his life story is dynamic and readable, written in the context of the history of American conservation and illustrated with historic photographs. Marybeth Lorbiecki has now enriched A Fierce Green Fire in a way no other biography on Leopold has, adding numerous chapters on the ripple effects of his ideas, books, ecological vision, land ethic, and Shack, as well as of the ecological contributions of his children, graduate students, contemporary scholars, and organizations--and the wilderness lands he helped preserve. Lorbiecki weaves these stories and factual information into the biography in a compelling way that keeps both lay and academic readers engaged. In the introduction to this edition, Lorbiecki makes it clear how much better our lives are because Leopold lived and why today we so radically need what he left us to bring about paradigm shifts in our ethical, economic, and cultural thinking. Instead of losing relevance, Leopold's legacy has gained ever more necessity and traction in the face of contemporary national and world challenges, such as species loss and climate change. Even the phenological studies he started at as a hobby are proving valuable, showing the climatic shifts that have occurred at the Shack lands since the 1930s, recognized by the plants and animals.

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