Yesterday, in my Twentieth Century Philosophy class, we worked our way through Bertrand Russell‘s essay on “Appearance and Reality” (excerpted, along with “The Value of Philosophy” and “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description” from Russell’s ‘popular’ work The Problems of Philosophy.) I introduced the class to Russell’s notion of physical objects being inferences fromContinue reading “The Philosophical Education Of Scientists”
Tag Archives: philosophy of science
Academic Writing In Philosophy: On Finding Older Writing Samples
Yesterday, while cleaning up an old homepage of mine, I found some old papers written while I was in graduate school. Overcome by curiosity–and rather recklessly, if I may say so–I converted the old Postscript format to PDF, and took a closer look. The first is titled ‘No Cognition Without Representation’; its abstract reads: AContinue reading “Academic Writing In Philosophy: On Finding Older Writing Samples”
Carl Sagan’s Glorious Dawn: The Promise of Cosmos
The YouTube video titled “A Glorious Dawn” starring Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking (their voices run through Auto-Tune), and snippets from Sagan’s epic Cosmos, has now racked up almost nine million views and twenty-seven thousand comments since it was first put up sometime back in 2009. (Mysteriously, in addition to its seventy-seven thousand ‘Likes’ it hasContinue reading “Carl Sagan’s Glorious Dawn: The Promise of Cosmos”
How Best to Introduce Scientific Reasoning
A couple of days ago on Facebook, by way of crowd-sourcing syllabi preparation for an undergraduate critical thinking course that includes a unit–three to six class sessions–on scientific reasoning, David Grober-Morrow threw out the following query What do you most wish that undergraduates (science and non-science majors) understood about scientific reasoning? This is a veryContinue reading “How Best to Introduce Scientific Reasoning”
Is Economics a Science?
Eric Maskin, 2007 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, responds to Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain’s characterization of economics: They claim that a scientific discipline is to be judged primarily on its predictions, and on that basis, they suggest, economics doesn’t qualify as a science. Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not theContinue reading “Is Economics a Science?”
The Physics-Philosophy ‘Kerfuffle’
The ongoing spat between physicists and philosophers–sparked by David Albert’s negative review of Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing–is the latest instance of a simmering conflict that seems to recur between the academic practitioners of discipline ‘X’ and philosophers who specialize in ‘philosophy of X.’ One kind of complaint madeContinue reading “The Physics-Philosophy ‘Kerfuffle’”
The Quantity Problem with Peer Review in the Sciences
Jack Hitt’s recent article in the New York Times touting the virtues of crowdsourcing peer review, of public comments on to-be-published or just-published scientific research, prompts me to offer a few thoughts on the problems in traditional peer review in a discipline—computer science—that I have had some exposure to in the past. In this post,Continue reading “The Quantity Problem with Peer Review in the Sciences”
The Practice of Science According to Article Abstracts and Headers
Sometimes close reading of article headers can pay rich dividends. On Monday morning, my Philosophy of Biology class and I were slated to discuss a debate crucial to understanding adaptationist paradigms: the role of bodyplan (Bauplan) constraints in restricting an organism’s occupancy of possible points in developmental space, which complicates our understanding of the supposed ubiquityContinue reading “The Practice of Science According to Article Abstracts and Headers”
Adaptation, Abstraction
This spring semester, teaching Philosophy of Biology–especially the Darwinian model of adaptation and environmental filtration– has reminded me of the philosophical subtleties of ‘abstract model’ and ‘abstraction’. More generally, it has reminded me that philosophy of science achieves particularly sharp focus in the philosophy of biology, and that classroom discussions are edifying in crucial ways.Continue reading “Adaptation, Abstraction”
Samir Chopra 