scholarly journals Scientific Models and Games of Make-Believe: A Modal-Logical Perspective

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-109
Author(s):  
Matthieu Gallais
2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 286-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Akash ◽  
Kanwal Rehman ◽  
Shuqing Chen

Author(s):  
Michael Sy Uy

From the end of World War II through the U.S. Bicentennial, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation granted close to $300 million (approximately $2.3 billion in 2017 dollars) in the field of music alone. In deciding what to fund, these three grantmaking institutions decided to “ask the experts,” adopting seemingly objective, scientific models of peer review and specialist evaluation. They recruited music composers at elite institutions, professors from prestigious universities, and leaders of performing arts organizations. Among the most influential expert-consultants were Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Milton Babbitt. The significance was twofold: not only were male, Western art composers put in charge of directing large and unprecedented channels of public and private funds, but also, in doing so, they determined and defined what was meant by artistic excellence. They decided the fate of their peers and shaped the direction of music making in this country. By asking the experts, the grantmaking institutions produced a concentrated and interconnected field of artists and musicians. Officers and directors utilized ostensibly objective financial tools like matching grants and endowments in an attempt to diversify and stabilize applicants’ sources of funding, as well as the number of applicants they funded. Such economics-based strategies, however, relied more on personal connections among the wealthy and elite, rather than local community citizens. Ultimately, this history demonstrates how “expertise” served as an exclusionary form of cultural and social capital that prevented racial minorities and nondominant groups from fully participating.


Author(s):  
Anik Waldow

From within the philosophy of history and history of science alike, attention has been paid to Herder’s naturalist commitment and especially to the way in which his interest in medicine, anatomy, and biology facilitates philosophically significant notions of force, organism, and life. As such, Herder’s contribution is taken to be part of a wider eighteenth-century effort to move beyond Newtonian mechanism and the scientific models to which it gives rise. In this scholarship, Herder’s hermeneutic philosophy—as it grows out of his engagement with poetry, drama, and both literary translation and literary documentation projects—has received less attention. Taking as its point of departure Herder’s early work, this chapter proposes that, in his work on literature, Herder formulates an anthropologically sensitive approach to the human sciences that has still not received the attention it deserves.


Author(s):  
Otávio Bueno ◽  
Steven French

In this chapter, we show how the partial structures framework can be used to give an account of how scientific models represent systems, and in a way that pays due regard to the relations between the relevant mathematics and such models. In particular, both the open-ended nature of these developments and the transfer of relations between one structure and another can be accommodated within the partial structures account. Finally, the expansion of the framework to include partial homomorphisms holding between structures also allows us to accommodate the fact that typically not all of the mathematics is used in a particular application, leaving surplus structure that can be subsequently exploited.


Sci ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 73
Author(s):  
Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay ◽  
Nolan Grunska ◽  
Don Dcruz ◽  
Mark C. Greenwood

We address the need for a model by considering two competing theories regarding the origin of life: (i) the Metabolism First theory and (ii) the RNA World theory. We discuss two inter-related points. (I) Models are valuable tools in understanding both the processes and intricacies of the origin of life issues. (II) Insights from models also help us to evaluate the core objection to origin of life theories called “the inefficiency objection” commonly raised by proponents of both the Metabolism First theory and the RNA World theory against each other. We use Simpson’s paradox as a tool for challenging this objection. We will use models in various senses ranging from taking them as representations of reality to treating them as theories/accounts that provide heuristics for probing reality. In this paper, we will frequently use models and theories interchangeably. Additionally, we investigate Conway’s Game of Life and contrast it with our Simpson’s Paradox (SP)-based approach to emergence of life issues. Finally, we discuss some of the consequences of our view. A scientific model is testable in three senses: (i) a logical sense, (ii) a nomological sense, and (iii) a current technological sense. The SP-based model is testable in the logical sense. It is also testable nomologically. However, it is not currently feasible to test it.


Leonardo ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Davis

This article presents a reflection on a body of creative work carried out during four years of Ph.D. research that explored the relationship between complexity theory and music. The article highlights conceptual problems that arose during the creation of the work, especially those associated with the exploration of scientific models for the creation of art. The author does not attempt to offer any final solutions but rather presents the journey undertaken through the combined artistic and research practice as a way of documenting the strategies he developed during this period of creative practice.


2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 3771-3851 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Masson ◽  
P. Le Moigne ◽  
E. Martin ◽  
S. Faroux ◽  
A. Alias ◽  
...  

Abstract. SURFEX is a new externalized land and ocean surface platform that describes the surface fluxes and the evolution of four types of surface: nature, town, inland water and ocean. It can be run either coupled or in offline mode. It is mostly based on pre-existing, well validated scientific models. It can be used in offline mode (from point scale to global runs) or fully coupled with an atmospheric model. SURFEX is able to simulate fluxes of carbon dioxide, chemical species, continental aerosols, sea salt and snow particles. It also includes a data assimilation module. The main principles of the organization of the surface are described first. Then, a survey is made of the scientific module (including the coupling strategy). Finally the main applications of the code are summarized. The current applications are extremely diverse, ranging from surface monitoring and hydrology to numerical weather prediction and global climate simulations. The validation work undertaken shows that replacing the pre-existing surface models by SURFEX in these applications is usually associated with improved skill, as the numerous scientific developments contained in this community code are used to good advantage.


2011 ◽  
Vol 104 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Eshleman

A growing consensus recognizes that the differences among Christians in the late second and early third centuries were neither as obvious nor as great as representatives of later orthodoxy would have us believe, and that what divided Christians in this period were not so much different beliefs and ideas as different hermeneutical and ritual practices. This article approaches the same conclusion from a different angle: from the perspective of potential recruits to Christianity, drawing on social-scientific models of conversion. For them, the peculiarities of doctrine and even of practice that obsess ancient polemicists and modern scholars were often largely invisible. While those features could take center stage for mature converts—and hence in retrospective accounts of conversion—they seem to have played little role in bringing people to specific versions of the faith in the first place. Rather, for many Christian recruits, the road to “orthodoxy” or “heresy” began not in ideological attraction, but in attachments to family, friends, and patrons already inside the group.


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