Science and pseudo-science:
Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf has written a post on the relative merits of "correct" and "interesting", at least as far as science is concerned. Quoth PhysioProf: It is essential that one's experiments be "correct" in the sense that performing the...
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Posted on April 7, 2008 1:35 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What matters, from the point of view of engaging in the scientific discourse, is what you can demonstrate to other participants in that discourse. As far as your scientific activity is concerned, your other beliefs are your own private affair.
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Posted on March 24, 2008 5:17 PM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A regular reader of the blog emailed me the following: Have you ever considered setting up a section for laymen in your blog where posts related to the philosophy of science, how research is conducted, how scientists think etc. are...
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Posted on August 22, 2007 10:36 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Who cares what philosophers of science think?
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Posted on July 16, 2007 2:01 PM • 59 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Does philosophy of science do scientists any good?
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Posted on July 13, 2007 4:52 PM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the May 18th issue of Science, there's a nice review by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg [1] of the literature from developmental psychology that bears on the question of why adults in the U.S. are stubbornly resistant to...
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Posted on May 30, 2007 5:47 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
On the post in which I resorted to flowcharts to try to unpack people's claims about the process involved in building scientific knowledge, Torbjörn Larsson raised a number of concerns: The first problem I have was with "belief". I have...
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Posted on February 26, 2007 1:12 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is another attempt to get to the bottom of what's bugging people about the case of Marcus Ross, Ph.D. in geosciences and Young Earth Creationist. Here, I've tried to distill the main hypotheticals from my last post on the...
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Posted on February 24, 2007 9:21 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist "to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both 'impeccable' in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest," I'm going to say something...
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Posted on February 22, 2007 5:56 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
By now, you may have heard (via Pharyngula, or Sandwalk, or the New York Times) about Marcus Ross, who was recently granted a Ph.D. in geosciences by the University of Rhode Island. To earn that degree, he wrote a dissertation...
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Posted on February 21, 2007 1:11 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
... Page 3.14 shares the transcript. Go read what we said when Ben Cohen and I shot the cyberbreeze about Karl Popper and the allure he holds for scientists. I can't promise it will leave you ROTFLYAO, but it might...
Posted on December 7, 2006 6:16 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Revere stirs the pot (of chicken soup) to ask why alternative therapies are presumptively regarded as pseudo-science. The reflexive response of the quackbusters has been that alternative therapies fall on the wrong side of some bright line that divides what...
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Posted on December 2, 2006 9:13 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It was another full day at the BCCE, starting with an excellent plenary address by Peter Atkins (who wrote my p-chem text, plus dozens of other books) and David Harpp (of the Office of Science and Society). Each of them...
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Posted on August 1, 2006 11:55 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the things that happens when I lay out a problem (say, the difficulties for scientists in communicating with non-scientists about scientific matters) is that my excellent commenters remind me not to stop there. They press me for a...
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Posted on July 17, 2006 9:32 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less...
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Posted on June 20, 2006 1:42 PM • 8 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Hey, do you remember that oft cited Newsweek article from 1986 that proclaimed that the chances of a 40-year-old single, white, college educated woman getting married were less than her chances of getting killed in an act of terrorism? It...
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Posted on June 5, 2006 9:31 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Janet D. Stemwedel (whose nom de blog is Dr. Free-Ride) is an assistant professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. Before becoming a philosopher, she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. Email her at dr.freeride@gmail.com.
