scholarly journals Construction of Scientific Facts – Why is Relativism Essential in Bypassing Incommensurable Gaps in Humanities. Case of Personal Involvement – Biased Scientific Facts

2022 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-219
Author(s):  
Lucija Mulej

This paper addresses the theory of knowledge in relativistic terms of Paul Feyerabend, stressing the importance of personal involvement in the research and theorizing. Since the topic is a constant and widely accepted premise the author is insisting that it has been actually ignored in the sociology and philosophy of science. It is apparent in discursive form, neglected in actual consequences for science in general. Defending the thesis of relativism had remained unacknowledged by the general scientific community. Biographies of mavericks and their struggle and exclusion from scientific community etc. had been constant in the history of science. Is science nowadays able to accept criticism and implement arguments of knowledge beyond the institutionalized standards? Throughout this article we argue that personal involvement creates biased scientific facts; acknowledging and applying tacit knowledge we move beyond personal involvement and create appropriate interpretations of facts and phenomena under investigation, where we reconsider the construction of facts and personal beliefs, knowing that our fields of expertise are incommensurable.

2019 ◽  
Vol 89 (11) ◽  
pp. 1128-1136
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Yu. Petrov

The paper is based on the results of research work in foreign archives. An attempt is made to summarize the main data identified in the foreign archives of the United States, Estonia, France, Spain, Italy, and other countries, to summarize the results of this interdisciplinary research and to identify prospects for the study of the history and heritage of Russian America. The paper does not pretend to be a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the sources on the stated topic this goal is, rather that of the monograph on which the author is currently working. The purpose of the paper is to acquaint the general scientific community with the characteristic lacunae and to show previously unknown archives in which there are documents both on Russian America and on various topics of general history.


Commonwealth ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Arway

The challenges of including factual information in public policy and political discussions are many. The difficulties of including scientific facts in these debates can often be frustrating for scientists, politicians and policymakers alike. At times it seems that discussions involve different languages or dialects such that it becomes a challenge to even understand one another’s position. Oftentimes difference of opinion leads to laws and regulations that are tilted to the left or the right. The collaborative balancing to insure public and natural resource interests are protected ends up being accomplished through extensive litigation in the courts. In this article, the author discusses the history of environmental balancing during the past three decades from the perspective of a field biologist who has used the strength of our policies, laws and regulations to fight for the protection of our Commonwealth’s aquatic resources. For the past 7 years, the author has taken over the reins of “the most powerful environmental agency in Pennsylvania” and charted a course using science to properly represent natural resource interests in public policy and political deliberations.


1665 ◽  
Vol 1 (18) ◽  
pp. 315-316 ◽  

The publisher of these tracts, knowing that the Honorable Robert Boyle had not left unconsidered the natural history of the sea, of which subject the late, and these present papers, have entertained the reader as to the observables of its flux and reflux; He was on this occasion instant, with that gentleman to impart to him, for publication, these heads of inquiries, he had drawn up, touching that subject: which having obtained (though the author desires, they may be lookt upon as unfinisht) he thus subjoyns.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 317-322
Author(s):  
Benjamin J. Dyson

Trial schematics are ubiquitous within psychology journals articles and have the potential to inform how we think about time in space from a non-linguistic point of view. Graphical representations of trial schematics were used to compare the spatial representations of time used by the scientific community with the dominant spatial stereotypes for temporal events reported by the scientific community. From 294 observations, approximately 81% of trial schematics contained left-to-right and / or top-to-bottom representations of first-to-last events, consistent with the dominant Western spatial expressions of time. An initially counter-intuitive left-to-right but bottom-to-top spatial stereotype used in approximately 18% of schematics is discussed with respect to its potential perceptual origins. The complications that arise from the use of multiple spatial axes in the representation of time are highlighted and given the tendency for trial schematics to be informationally poor, alternative routes for the supply of thorough experimental detail are suggested.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110441
Author(s):  
Eran Fisher

This article explores the ontology of personal knowledge that algorithms on digital media create by locating it on two axes: historical and theoretical. Digital platforms continue a long history of epistemic media—media forms and practices, which not only communicate knowledge, but also create knowledge. As epistemic media allowed a new way to know the world, they also facilitated a new way of knowing the self. This historical perspective also underscores a key difference of digital platforms from previous epistemic media: their exclusion of self-reflection from the creation of knowledge about the self. To evaluate the ramifications of that omission, I use Habermas’s theory of knowledge, which distinguishes critical knowledge from other types of knowledge, and sees it as corresponding with a human interest in emancipation. Critical knowledge about the self, as exemplified by psychoanalysis, must involve self-reflection. As the self gains critical knowledge, deciphering the conditions under which positivist and hermeneutic knowledges are valid, it is also able to transform them and expand its realm of freedom, or subjectivity. As digital media subverts this process by demoting self-reflection, it also undermines subjectivity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-55
Author(s):  
José G. Perillán

John S. Bell openly questioned the dominance of an orthodox quantum interpretation that had seemingly raised the principle of indeterminism from an epistemological question to an ontological truth in the late 1920s. He understood the inevitability of indeterminism to be a theoretical choice made by the founding architects of quantum theory, not a fundamental principle of reality necessitated by experimental facts. As a result, Bell decried the general lull in quantum interpretation debates within the physics community, and in particular, the complete omission of Louis de Broglie’s deterministic pilot wave interpretation from all theoretical and pedagogical discourses. This paper reexamines the pilot wave’s rise, abandonment, and subsequent omission in the history of quantum theory. What emerges is not a straightforward story of victimization and hegemonic marginalization. Instead, it is a story that grapples with tensions between the polyphony of individual voices and a physics community’s evolving identity and consensus in response to particular sociopolitical and scientific contexts. At the heart of these tensions sits an international scientific community transitioning from a politically fractured and intellectually divergent community to one embracing a somewhat forced pragmatic convergence around rationally reconstructed narratives and concepts like the impossibility of determinism. The story of the pilot wave’s omission gives us a window into the inherent power that theoretical choice and a congealing rhetoric of orthodoxy have on a scientific community’s consensus, pedagogical canons, and the future development of science itself.


2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew L. Wallace

Led by the Meteorological Service of Canada, atmospheric research in Canada underwent a period of rapid growth after the end of the Second World War. Within this federal organization, and in response to operational challenges and staff shortages, there were significant investments in basic research and in research oriented toward external users within Canada. Specifically, new policies and programs were put in place to enable the organization to gain legitimacy within the scientific community and within the federal government. New links with stakeholders and, more importantly, the development of explicit policies to guide research were a prime focus. These formalized strategies for pursuing two parallel types of research generated some internal conflict, but also helped form a common scientific identity among personnel. There were concerted efforts to disseminate research products and reinforce links both with the scientific community and with external users of meteorological and climatological research. Borne out by quantitative data, this science policy–centered history sheds light on the development of research and research specializations in the field in Canada. Most importantly, it provides insight into the global postwar expansion of the atmospheric sciences, which is strongly tied to national contexts. Indeed, the quest for legitimacy and the close connection to government priorities is central to the history of the atmospheric sciences in the twentieth century. More broadly, this case study points to a possible new conception of government science driven by political, bureaucratic, and scientific imperatives, as a means to shed light on scientific networks and practices.


2000 ◽  
pp. 50-59
Author(s):  
S. Guzenko

With Ukraine gaining independence and its emergence as an independent democratic state, the interest of the scientific community in the Kyiv monuments of the great princely period increases, when Christianity, having come to our lands, has become an important factor in state-building.


Author(s):  
Iryna Batiuk ◽  

The aim of the article. Based on a comprehensive analysis of archives, published documents, and materials, as well as current historical studies, the phenomenon of mass child homelessness in Ukraine during the Holodomor-Genocide which organized by the Russian communist regime in 1932–1933s is highlighted. The aim of the article is to analyze the activities of state authorities and their commissions in assisting homeless children in the process of overcoming this tragic social phenomenon. The research methodology is based on a combination of general scientific (analysis and synthesis), special and historical (problem-chronological, historical-systematic) methods and principles of scientificity and historicism. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the author first attempted a systematic analysis of the mass child homelessness and death caused by the authorities for the first time in the history of Ukraine during the Holodomor-Genocide. Conclusions. We can state that almost all of the activities of state authorities to overcome mass starvation and homelessness of children and adolescents during the Holodomor-Genocide of 1932–1933s consisted in overcoming street homelessness as a social phenomenon by removing children from the streets, placing them in unsuitable premises due to a lack of residential care facilities, returning them to families or placing them under collective and individual foster care. Such measures only partially served to improve the situation of a tiny proportion of children, but could not address the issue fundamentally, since it was not a primary concern of the Stalin’s regime itself. After all, the main reason for the growth of homelessness was the mass starvation of the Ukrainian peasants caused by his anti-human policy of liquidating the Ukrainian peasantry through mass repression and terror and plundering food by the so-called “dekulakization”, which implied the physical destruction of the peasant and his descendants and further enslavement of those who remained, and driving them into collective farms.


Author(s):  
T. I. Tyukaeva

The history of scientific development in Algeria, which has not been long, represents a series of continual rises and falls. The Algerian leadership and researchers have been making efforts to create Algeria's national science through protection from the western scientific tradition, which is reminiscent of the colonial period of the country, and at the same time adoption of scientific knowledge and scientific institutions functioning principles from abroad, with no organizational or scientific experience of their own. Since the time the independent Algerian state was established, its scientific development has been inevitably coupled with active support of European countries, especially France, and other western and non-western states. Today the Algerian leadership is highly devoted to the modernization of the national scientific and research potential in strong cooperation with its foreign partners. The article concentrates on examining the present period (the 2000s) of the scientific development in Algeria. The main conclusion is that there still is a number of problems - for Algeria until now lacks an integral scientific community with the state preserving its dominating role in science and research activities. Despite these difficulties, the Algerian science has made an outstanding progress. The efficiently built organizational scientific structure, the growing science and technology cooperation with foreign countries as well as the increasing state expenses in science allow to hope for further success of the Algerian scientific development.


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