Philosophy of Science
evolvingthoughts | May 27, 2007
From which this wonderful quote:
There may be rhetoric about the socially constructed nature of Western science, but whenever it matters, there is no alternative. There are no specifically Hindu or Taoist designs for mobile phones, faxes or television. There are no satellites based on feminist alternatives to quantum theory. Even the great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homeopathically diluted petrol, that is, water with only a memory of benzine molecules, maintained by a schedule derived from reading tea leaves, and navigated by…
evolvingthoughts | May 26, 2007
OK, I can't be hedgehogged doing a coherent post today. I'm tired and shagged out after a long talk (lecturing for others who went and had fun somewhere, the bastards!). So instead here are random links and thoughts that happen to be open in my browser right now...
The first is the notion of an "error theory". This is a term derived from the writings of John Mackie, who thinks that objective moral values would be very odd things, and that people who think they are looking for them are just in error (hence "error theory"). This came up because we were doing the Friday evening drinks thing,…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
The recent "What kind of Atheist" posts have led to a discussion on Larry Moran's Sandwalk blog. Go read it, because I'm being as clear there as I'll ever likely be...
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
Razib at Gene Expression has a nuanced and well supported argument about the proportion of religion-supporters versus the proportion of religiosity in various European and Asian cultures. I strongly recommend it.
One of his claims is that the "default" state of humans is a kind of religiosity; I think I agree with him. Humans have all kinds of default "wild type" programs in their psyche and cognition which in a high density population will tend to fall out as religion. Does this mean that atheism is doomed? Or that secularism (which is a different thing) is doomed? I think there will be…
evolvingthoughts | May 25, 2007
Do you remember a series of posts I did on microbial species? Well it evolved into a paper that has just been accepted, with some very constructive criticisms by a reviewer, for History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. I thank all my commenters for suggestions and help.
This paper had a rough history - it was supposed to be included in another journal's special edition but the editor and reviewers seemed not to get the point of it (and, to be fair, a lot of the early drafts were a bit sloppy). But in the revision process I worked out some clearer ideas than I started with, and I am now…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007
A Reformed Dropout, who was in the audience of a talk Paul Griffiths and I gave on Dawkins' The God Delusion at UQ, writes a nice review. It was a fun night. I am glad that some of the attenders thought so too.
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007
Since Linnaeus' birthday is tomorrow, my time, and I stuffed up the last post, here's another little treat for you:
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1770, from 1761 Carl von Linné, or Carolus Linnaeus)
There are many myths about Linnaeus that are due to the properties, real or imagined, of the system named after him (Cain 1994; Koerner 1999; Larson 1968; Winsor 2006). In fact the so-called "Natural System" as it came to be known, was on Linnaeus' own view an artificial one (Cain 1995), and it did not spring forth fully formed from his brow, no matter how much he saw himself as a "second Adam". His…
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
The Smithsonian, it is being reported, toned down an exhibit on the Arctic for fear of reprisals in funding levels from the Bush Administration. While there is no evidence that the Administration directly threatened the Institute, the atmosphere of "do science our way" is so palpable that even the premier scientific institution of the United States would dumb down its knowledge... but apparently it is not the first time the Smithsonian has done this, according to the article. I guess that comes from being a political toy.
In a more general and direct case of attacking science, the…
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have essences, only that there are diagnostic descriptions or definitions that allow naturalists to identify species in the field or in museum collections. But I'm no Linnaean scholar, so if anyone has information to the contrary, let me know.
Not much is known about the early education of poor Swedish…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2007"King Phillip Came Over From German Soil" - anyone remember that? It's a mnemonic, designed to make it easier to recall the Linnean ranks: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. Unfortunately, ranks change (Phylum and Family were inserted in the 1870s at an international meeting in Paris), and a new one has been proposed (and hotly debated): Domain. So what should the mnemonic now be? "Dumb King Phillip..."?
There are a host of mnemonics for biology (and even more for medicine). Jason Grossman, sometime commentator and fulltime good guy, sent me this suggestion:
I needed a…
evolvingthoughts | May 19, 2007
In reading Jack Smart's excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on the Identity Theory, I was again struck by the role that the distinction between type and token plays in philosophy of mind. This distinction was originally made by Charles Sanders Peirce back in (if memory serves) the 1870s (he also distinguished "tone", but that hasn't traveled well). I think it may even apply to biological taxonomy and the species problem.
Smart says that a type of mental state may, on some accounts, have different tokens. I won't get into this here (I'm a full blown identity theorist, and if folk…
omnibrain | May 17, 2007A great abstract I found via improbable research blog:
How to write consistently boring scientific literature
Kaj Sand-Jensen (ksandjensen@bi.ku.dk), Freshwater Biological Laboratory, Univ. of Copenhagen, Helsingørsgade 51, DK-3400 Hillerød, Denmark.
Abstract
Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to…
evolvingthoughts | May 16, 2007
Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.
Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.
Gosse's son, Edmund, wrote a rather unhappy memoir about growing up with a devout and strict father, called Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, in which he mentions this book:
My Father had never admired…
evolvingthoughts | May 15, 2007
So, Oprah is sending The Secret back to Australia. It's starting to get TV coverage here. Oy. Look guys, when we export Woo to the US, we really don't want it returned, OK?
The Secret appears to be (backed by "leading philosophers? Yeah, right) basically the idea that if you really really want something, and visualise it, it will happen. Imagine what the universe would need to be like for that to happen...
First of all, it would need to care about human desires. The universe really, really doesn't care. The universe is entirely indifferent to us, our goals, preferences and desires. Most…
evolvingthoughts | May 13, 2007
In a number of cases recently, I have been struck at how ahistorical scientists are about their own discipline or field. For many years, working in a medical research institute, I noted that few citations in published papers were from more than five years before this paper was written. It was as if there was a rolling wall of fog following medical research at a five year remove. Some papers were cited before then - they were like distant mountains that one could see above the fog, the giants of the past.
One such paper was the paper by John Kerr and his colleagues in 1972 on apoptosis. It…
evolvingthoughts | May 10, 2007
All I did was get my beloved Powerbook 12" serviced, and what happens? The Interlub goes wild with great stuff. Or was it always, and I only noticed because I was unable to blog? So, here is a rough and ready roundup of interesting things.
Before I do, I'd like to note that Paul Griffiths and I had a wonderful time last night talking to the Philosophy Students Association about Dawkins' The God Delusion. You, my loyal readers, already know my views on this, so I won't rehearse them here. But Paul made a comment I had to think about overnight. He does that. It was basically about religious…
evolvingthoughts | May 1, 2007
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture. I'm not mocking, as Australia hasn't seen it yet. But I got sent a review copy, so here are my thoughts, below the fold. It starts on 54 May on PBS, I'm told, so check your local schedules, as they say.
I really really really wanted to like this series. Miller is one of my TV heroes, and was famously a member of…
evolvingthoughts | April 30, 2007
Craig Miller dropped by and we got to reading some Locke, as visitors to my office are wont to find themselves doing:
The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing…
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2007
I don't know from framing. Until the current to-do started up, I had merely heard the term used in the context of Lakoff, whose book I tried once to read but got too annoyed and moved on. But one thing I do think I know a bit about, based on experience in public relations, publishing, journalism (a miniscule and amateur bit, to be sure) and public debates, is communication. It's a pity I can't do it as well as I ought.
But here are some thoughts about the difference between communication and "spin". Others can tell if I am dealing with framing or not.
For a start, communication involves…
evolvingthoughts | April 25, 2007
The BBC is reporting that the parchment manuscript that had a palimpsest of Archimedes' treatise on floating bodies, also turns out to have two other lost works: a text by Hyperides, a 4thC BCE politician of Athens, but much more excitingly, a 3rdC CE commentary on Aristotle's Categories, in which modern logic was first defined (along with other works by Aristotle), by Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Some, for instance Calamus, are critical of the Christian monks that, in the 13thC CE, scraped these works off the parchment to reuse it for a prayer book. But this is possibly due to the fact that…