Scientific Practice in Modeling Diseases: Stances from Cancer Research and Neuropsychiatry

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-128
Author(s):  
Marta Bertolaso ◽  
Raffaella Campaner
Keyword(s):  
Cancer Research ◽  
Multilevel Models ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Mechanistic Models ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Mechanistic Explanations ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
Mechanistic Approach ◽  
The One

Abstract In the last few decades, philosophy of science has increasingly focused on multilevel models and causal mechanistic explanations to account for complex biological phenomena. On the one hand, biological and biomedical works make extensive use of mechanistic concepts; on the other hand, philosophers have analyzed an increasing range of examples taken from different domains in the life sciences to test—support or criticize—the adequacy of mechanistic accounts. The article highlights some challenges in the elaboration of mechanistic explanations with a focus on cancer research and neuropsychiatry. It jointly considers fields, which are usually dealt with separately, and keeps a close eye on scientific practice. The article has a twofold aim. First, it shows that identification of the explananda is a key issue when looking at dynamic processes and their implications in medical research and clinical practice. Second, it discusses the relevance of organizational accounts of mechanisms, and questions whether thorough self-sustaining mechanistic explanations can actually be provided when addressing cancer and psychiatric diseases. While acknowledging the merits of the wide ongoing debate on mechanistic models, the article challenges the mechanistic approach to explanation by discussing, in particular, explanatory and conceptual terms in the light of stances from medical cases.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

Substance and Cognition of Biological Phenomena

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-71
Author(s):  
Piotr Lenartowicz
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Chemical Substance ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural Behavior ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
The One ◽  
Living Being

Biologists are not used to the term „substance". They prefer to say „a living being", „an organism", a „specimen of species Homo sapiens'' - for instance. Chemists, on the other hand, when they say „this is a new substance" they usually mean the same Aristotle would mean - I think. The chemical meaning of the term „substance" is closest to the one I am going to discuss in this paper. To know a substance, one has to accumulate and store a multitude of different forms of evidence concerning this „natural behavior". So that concept of the „nature" of a given chemical substance is necessarily very complex and it cannot result from a single sensation, or a momentary observation

Uniformitarianism and Unity

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Oreskes
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Continental Drift ◽  
Jigsaw Puzzle ◽  
Theoretical Position ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Historical Geology ◽  
The One

William Bowie settled on a theoretical position that accounted for isostasy and the jigsaw-puzzle fit of the continents but ignored the facts of historical geology. And yet, as we have seen, he interacted and corresponded with historical geologists, particularly with Charles Schuchert (1858–1942). Of all the American geologists who ultimately rejected the theory of drift, Schuchert was perhaps the one who engaged the problem the most seriously. As America’s foremost historical geologist, Schuchert was well placed to argue the case for or against drift, and he grappled with the question of continental connections for at least fifteen years. In the end, however, Schuchert, like Bowie, rejected continental drift. Just as Bowie argued against drift because of beliefs grounded in the exigencies of geodetic practice, Schuchert ultimately argued against drift because of beliefs grounded in the exigencies of geological practice. For Bowie, the practice was Pratt isostasy, for Schuchert, it was Uniformitarianism. Charles Schuchert rejected continental drift because he interpreted it to be incompatible with Uniformitarianism. However, he did not reject it because he could not see drift taking place, as might be supposed. Uniformitarianism has meant many things to many people, and to Charles Schuchert in the late 1920s, it meant—rightly or wrongly—an essentially steady-state earth, whose details were forever changing but whose large-scale patterns and relationships remained the same. And this seemed to him to deny the possibility of major changes in the configuration of the continents. Moreover—and perhaps more importantly—for Schuchert, as for most historical geologists, Uniformitarianism was a form of scientific practice, a means of doing historical geology. It was, in fact, the primary means of doing historical geology. For Schuchert, abandoning Uniformitarianism was nearly tantamount to abandoning historical geology altogether. Not surprisingly, he declined to do this. Like William Bowie, Charles Schuchert settled on a theoretical position that preserved his scientific practice. But whereas Bowie’s theoretical ideas had little staying power, the alternative that Schuchert embraced influenced a generation of geologists to believe that drift was not so much impossible as unnecessary.

On nominal tense

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-352
Author(s):  
Pier Marco Bertinetto
Keyword(s):  
Side Effect ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Semantic Component ◽  
Aspect Markers ◽  
Paraguayan Guaraní ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Intense Debate

AbstractNordlinger & Sadler’s (2004. Nominal tense in crosslinguistic perspective. Language 80. 776–806) seminal work fostered an intense debate on the semantics of nominal tense systems, with the side effect of widening the typological coverage of this grammatical feature. This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing debate. In contrast with work by Tonhauser, who excluded ‘tense’ as a semantic component of the Paraguayan Guaraní nominal tense system, the paper claims that all TAM dimensions are involved – temporality, aspect, modality – with different proportions in the individual markers. Most importantly, it claims that nominal tense does not presuppose a semantics of its own, other than the one needed for verbal tenses. Moreover, the paper presents evidence that the semantic component of aspect, besides being necessarily activated in any nominal tense marker, is also directly conveyed by some of them, which can legitimately be called ‘nominal aspect’ markers. This integrates Nordlinger & Sadler’s (2004) survey, in which aspect was notably absent. In addition, the paper points out possible cases of nominal actionality (a.k.a. Aktionsart). Finally, the paper suggests that the pervasive presence of aspect (and also, but rarely, actionality) among nominal tense markers finds interesting parallels in some types of deverbal nominalizations, although these belong in another grammatical drawer.

“It's the Politics, Stupid.” Or is Reality more Complex?

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Weimer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Risk Regulation ◽  
The Precautionary Principle ◽  
The One

Reality is complex, and often does not lend itself to generalization or simplifying explanations. Yet at the same time, explaining reality often requires the shaping of notions and concepts of it through generalization and the reduction of complexity. This tension between complexity and particularity on the one hand and generalization and the search for abstracting explanatory patterns on the other is beautifully illustrated by two recently released publications on precaution and risk regulation in the United States and Europe, namely “The Politics of Precaution” by David Vogel1 and “The Reality of Precaution” edited by Jonathan Wiener, Michael Rogers, James Hammitt, and Peter Sand.Both books together can be seen as the latest significant contribution to the ongoing debate on the role of the precautionary principle in risk regulation in a comparative EU-US perspective. Both contributions are significant in that they consolidate the trend towards an empirically informed analysis of the actual practice of the application of precaution in risk regulation.

scholarly journals Explaining the visible and the invisible: Public knowledge of genetics, ancestry, physical appearance and race in Colombia

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 886-906 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernesto Schwartz-Marín ◽  
Peter Wade
Keyword(s):  
Focus Groups ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Physical Appearance ◽  
Genetic Ancestry ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Authoritative Knowledge ◽  
Mechanistic Explanations ◽  
Genetic Essentialism ◽  
Genetic Science ◽  
Using Data

Using data from focus groups conducted in Colombia, we explore how educated lay audiences faced with scenarios about ancestry and genetics draw on widespread and dominant notions of nation, race and belonging in Colombia to ascribe ancestry to collectivities and to themselves as individuals. People from a life sciences background tend to deploy idioms of race and genetics more readily than people from a humanities and race-critical background. When they considered individuals, people tempered or domesticated the more mechanistic explanations about racialized physical appearance, ancestry and genetics that were apparent at the collective level. Ideas of the latency and manifestation of invisible traits were an aspect of this domestication. People ceded ultimate authority to genetic science, but deployed it to work alongside what they already knew. Notions of genetic essentialism co-exist with the strategic use of genetic ancestry in ways that both fix and unfix race. Our data indicate the importance of attending to the different epistemological stances through which people define authoritative knowledge and to the importance of distinguishing the scale of resolution at which the question of diversity is being posed.

Biological generality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean- Gaël Barbara
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Microscopic Level ◽  
Anatomy And Physiology ◽  
Biological Objects ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
The One

This article examines generality in biology by focusing on two French schools of anatomy: the discipline of anatomie générale that was founded in France in 1800 by Xavier Bichat and the one developed in the 1870s by Louis Ranvier at the Collège de France by means of microscopy. The works of Bichat and Ranvier involved the disciplines of anatomy and physiology. Bichat’s work, especially his research on tissues, is of interest for understanding which kind of concept of generality gained favor in the life sciences at the start of the nineteenth century. Ranvier’s later career sheds light on the ways that generality was searched for at the microscopic level and its significance in the discovery of real and minute biological objects. Following a discussion of Bichat and Ranvier’s anatomie générale, this article explores the two men’s interests in generality as an actor’s category.

scholarly journals Waking Life: The Destiny of Cinema’s Dreamscape; or the Question of Old and New Mediations

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Markos Hadjioannou
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Film History ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Technological Base ◽  
Current Transition ◽  
The One ◽  
Fixed Boundaries

In light of the current transition from celluloid to digital cinema, this paper will explore the relation between old and new technologies as a means for understanding medium specificity as an activity of mediation. While the ongoing debate in screen studies aims at clarifying the extent of digital technology’s effects, it seems that the new technology is either being interpreted as inducing a rupture in film history clearly distinct from celluloid, or as directly repeating strategies, goals, forms, and impulses specific to an indexical and analogical visual culture. Indeed, the desire to acknowledge points of divergence or close interaction between technological forms is unquestionably useful; but my own approach to the technological change takes into account both the differences and similarities of forms as a means of exploring medium specificity. This will be a matter of dealing with the new as not new or old, but new and old – as simultaneously distinct and interactively interrelated, so that each medium acquires a space of its own without fixed boundaries. Rather than merge the one form into the other, the ontological explication of a medium may take account of its specific technological base while simultaneously paying attention to previous technologies that reside in it intact yet affected by the contextual possibilities of the new. Newness, thus understood, becomes a complex concurrency of differences and similarities that shift the borders of distinct forms in unexpected and continually renewable ways. With this in mind, I will discuss an example of digital mediation through Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), with a focus on the digital’s power for a creative interpretation of reality’s experience.

scholarly journals The Influence of Milan on the Development of the Lombard Koiné in Fifteenth-Century Italy: the Letters of Elisabetta of Pavia

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Brown
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Religious Writings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Main Tendency ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Development Of Language ◽  
The One

The main tendency characterizing the development of language in Lombardy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the formation of a koiné. The extent to which Milan influenced the Lombard koiné is the subject of ongoing debate. On the one hand, scholars suggest that Milan provided a centralizing force for the “Milanization” of other Lombard vernaculars, similar to what occurred for Piedmont and the Veneto. On the other hand, studies have pointed out that Milan was not a centralizing force for the Lombard koiné and that it remains to be verified whether the prestige of Milanese influenced non-Milanese vernaculars. This paper looks at the extent to which Milan influenced the koiné in fifteenth-century Lombardy. I consider eight linguistic items, previously described as unique to the vernacular of Pavia, to verify their presence or absence in a corpus of religious writings from the fifteenth-century nun Elisabetta of Pavia and whether Milanese items can be identified. I consider aspects of phonology and morphology in Elisabetta’s letters and conclude that her language is best characterized as a pre-koiné. The article concludes by arguing for less emphasis on the role of Milan in histories of the vernacular in Lombardy. This finding has implications for the history of non-literary writing in northern Italy and the importance attributed to capital cities in processes of koineization.

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