: An examination of two thought experiments in contemporary physics reveals that the same thought experiment can be reanalyzed from the perspective of different and incompatible theories. This fact undermines those accounts of thought experiments that claim their justificatory power comes from their ability to reveal the laws of nature. While thought experiments do play a genuine evaluative role in science, they do so by testing the nonempirical virtues of a theory, such as consistency and explanatory power. I conclude that, (...) while their interpretation presupposes a whole set of background theories and putative laws, thought experiments nonetheless can evolve and be retooled for different theories and ends. (shrink)

In semiclassical mechanics one finds explanations of quantum phenomena that appeal to classical structures. These explanations are prima facie problematic insofar as the classical structures they appeal to do not exist. Here I defend the view that fictional structures can be genuinely explanatory by introducing a model-based account of scientific explanation. Applying this framework to the semiclassical phenomenon of wavefunction scarring, I argue that not only can the fictional classical trajectories explain certain aspects of this quantum phenomenon, but also that (...) an explanation that does not make reference to these classical structures is, in a certain sense, deficient. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine in detail the similarities and dissimilarities between Werner Heisenberg’s account of closed theories and Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolutions. My analysis draws on a little‐known discussion that took place between Heisenberg and Kuhn in 1963, in which Heisenberg, having just read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, compares Kuhn’s views to his own account of closed theories. I conclude that while Heisenberg and Kuhn share a holist conception of theories, a revolutionary model (...) of theory change, and even a notion of incommensurability, their views diverge fundamentally when it comes to the issue of scientific realism. I show that, contrary to popular opinion, Heisenberg is not an instrumentalist, but rather a pluralistic realist. (shrink)

Resident-to-resident aggression is quite prevalent in long-term care settings. Within popular and empirical accounts, this form of aggression is most commonly attributed to the actions of an aberrant individual living with dementia characterized as the “violent resident.” It is often a medical diagnosis of dementia that is highlighted as the ultimate cause of aggression. This neglects the fact that acts of aggression are influenced by broader structural conditions. This has ethical implications in that the emphasis on individual aberration informs public (...) policy strategies for prevention with a focus on restricting the freedom of individuals using behavioural modification, drugs, or other restraints with the intent to protect others from harm. A more ethical approach requires attention to the structural conditions of long-term care that both foster aggression and constrain prevention efforts. To this end, we turn to a model of relational citizenship that offers a theory of embodied selfhood and relationality as essential to human dignity, thus entailing human rights protections. The application of an ethic based on this model offers a more holistic prevention strategy for resident-to-resident aggression by drawing attention to the critical need and obligation to promote human flourishing through system level efforts. (shrink)

From the Federal Theater Projects of the Great Depression to the disruptive performances of the 1960s and 1970s, theater has played an important role in American radicalism. This special issue of_ _Theater_ reports on socially conscious, politically active theaters in the United States. Despite the evaporation of Cold War passions and the rise of conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, such theater work remains a persistent and evolving presence on the political landscape. Since the first inauguration of George W. Bush, (...) new opportunities have arisen for political performance and for significant new challenges to these artists. T_heater and Social Change_ not only tracks the historical evolution of political theater but also explores the current state and future prospects of different modes, including agit-prop, demonstrations, solo performance, Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, and community-based production. With such notable contributors as Anna Deavere Smith, Jonathan Kalb, Holly Hughes, and Tony Kushner, the issue offers a diverse assemblage of personal statements, conversations, photographs, interviews, and performance text. _Contributors include:_ Reverend Billy, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Arlene Goldbard, Sharon Green, Lani Guinier, Holly Hughes, Jonathan Kalb, Tony Kushner, Judith Malina, Robbie McCauley, John O'Neal, Claudia Orenstein, Bill Rauch, Julie Salverson, Anna Deavere Smith, Alisa Solomon, Roberta Uno. (shrink)

Most liberal political theorists of education argue that it is better to teach students to tolerate diversity, than to protect the potentially illiberal commitments of some members of the political communities. In fact, neither approach is wholly satisfying, yet they remain the focus of much political theorizing about education. This article suggests that this misguided focus is, in part, a consequence of a focus, by liberal political theorists of education, upon the 1987 Mozert v. Hawkins court case. Mozert raised serious (...) questions about the nature of toleration in liberal society, but from an educational standpoint, the Mozert case led political theorists to consider what curricular content is appropriate for liberal political education, rather than on the practices that democratic citizens must cultivate. I turn to Hannah Arendt to offer a critical account of the liberal responses to Mozert and then call for a theory of democratic education that fosters practices of democratic decision-making and has, as its aim, not merely to foster respect for diversity, but to allow future citizens to practice critical engagement with diversity. (shrink)

Classical mechanics and quantum mechanics are two of the most successful scientific theories ever discovered, and yet how they can describe the same world is far from clear: one theory is deterministic, the other indeterministic; one theory describes a world in which chaos is pervasive, the other a world in which chaos is absent. Focusing on the exciting field of 'quantum chaos', this book reveals that there is a subtle and complex relation between classical and quantum mechanics. It challenges the (...) received view that classical and quantum mechanics are incommensurable, and revives another, largely forgotten tradition due to Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac. By artfully weaving together considerations from the history of science, philosophy of science, and contemporary physics, this book offers a new way of thinking about intertheory relations and scientific explanation. It will be of particular interest to historians and philosophers of science, philosophically-inclined physicists, and interested non-specialists. (shrink)

The United Nations (UN), facing increasingly intense challenges in the fulfillment of its mission, also harbors the potential for enhanced effectiveness, relevance, and legitimacy in the form of the human rights-based approach. The human rights-based approach (HRBA) is one model for translating the organization’s values into a more adaptive, inclusive, dynamic, and responsive system of processes and outcomes. In the arena of politics, its meeting with a meaningful degree of receptiveness could signal a growing acceptance of the validity of structural (...) approaches to development and other issues despite traditional defensive positions on human rights. Application of the HRBA in programming is leading to greater appreciation for addressing core disparities and promoting empowerment for sustainable outcomes. It is also cultivating new qualities in development practitioners, advancing creativity, openness and responsiveness in organizational culture. In feeding its evolution in this way, the UN as a system has the potential for deeper, longer-term mission fulfillment and thus ensuring its viability. (shrink)

Prior research supports the learnability of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition Alternative Model of Personality Disorders. However, researchers have yet to compare novice ratings on the AMPD’s Level of Personality Functioning Scale and the 25 pathological personality traits with expert ratings. Furthermore, the AMPD has yet to be examined with the idiographic Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure. We compared the aggregated AMPD clinical profile of a group of psychology doctoral students who learned the AMPD to high levels (...) of reliability to that of an expert rater using the crucible of the classical case of “Madeline G.” Examination of AMPD and SWAP ratings of “Madeline G.” revealed excellent overall concordance but suggests that novice raters tend to perceive lower levels of personality impairment. (shrink)

This article addresses the complexities of institutional transfer by exploring the case of EMILY's List and WIN WIN, two women's organizations in the US and Japan respectively that seek to increase the number of women in office by providing funds early in candidatescultures of giving’ exist, they do not necessarily preclude the success of an EMILY's List-type organization in Japan. Instead, WIN WIN made significant strategic organizational decisions that have impeded its ability to have a significant impact on female candidacy (...) at the national level. Specifically, WIN WIN's lack of accountability to its members combined with its broader commitment to gender consciousness have limited its success. (shrink)

Esta investigación está dedicada a la influencia filosófica hermética de la obra La gitanilla de Cervantes. Debido a muchos tipos diferentes de alegorías literarias que existen en los manuscritos del Siglo de Oro, este trabajo se centra en las alegorías intertextuales de la interpretación hermética a nivel de alegorías con juegos de palabras que están saturados en las obras de Cervantes. Además, este trabajo se centra en la falta de comprensión del contexto intertextual de filosofía hermética lo que lleva al (...) problema de la determinación y, por lo tanto, a ignorarlas en las obras de Cervantes y especialmente en la obra La gitanilla. (shrink)

In bodily awareness body parts are felt to occupy locations relative to the rest of the body. Bodily sensations are felt to be, in Brian O’Shaughnessy’s terms ‘in-a-certain-body-part-at-a-position-in-body-relative-physical-space’. In this paper I put forward a dispositional account of the structure of the spatial content of bodily awareness, which takes inspiration from Gareth Evans’s account of egocentric spatial content in The Varieties of Reference. On the Dispositional View, bodily awareness experiences have spatial content in virtue of a set of connections having (...) been established between somatosensory and proprioceptive inputs on the one hand, and motor outputs on the other hand. This kind of account, according to which spatial content depends constitutively on bodily action, has been challenged by a set of neurological cases and behavioural studies on healthy subjects. The evidence has been used to motivate a functional distinction between two kinds of body representation: representations for perception and representations for action. I review and assess some of the main sources of evidence for this distinction, arguing that the evidence presents a challenge to the dispositional view only if we accept the unjustified assumption that differences in task performance can only be explained in terms of a difference in representation. I close by proposing, and offering some empirical support for, an alternative explanation of the empirical results. The availability of the alternative explanation means that further work is needed to establish whether or not there is any challenge to the Dispositional View. (shrink)

One of the main goals of multicultural education is to prepare young people to participate in meaningful pedagogical and social issues. To achieve this goal, educators need to cultivate the basic rudiments of compassion and goodwill in the younger generation, rooted in a sense of empathy for others. Without a sense of compassion, the younger generation is unlikely to be motivated to reflect and act on the needs of the people around them. Therefore, it is necessary to start by involving (...) students in getting to know different ethnic cultures, where they can show compassion not only to people, but also to certain situations. Such knowledge forms the basis for interaction with different points of view and worldviews, as well as with the causes of pedagogical, psychological and social problems and the ways taken to solve them. (shrink)

The Bayesian model of multisensory cue integration proposed by Ernst and Banks provides an attractive model for understanding a way that our sensory systems may interact. Moreover, it has been suggested that the process of multisensory integration that it models underpins conscious experiences with multisensory representational contents merged across modalities. Should we therefore take empirical support for the Bayesian model as evidence of the multimodality of perception? Focusing on evidence of integration across vision and touch, I argue that apparent support (...) for the model does not warrant the rejection of the view that each of our conscious perceptual experiences is associated with one and only one sense modality. (shrink)

Simulations using idealized numerical models can often generate behaviors or patterns that are visually very similar to the natural phenomenon being investigated and to be explained. The question arises, when should these model simulations be taken to provide an explanation for why the natural phenomena exhibit the patterns that they do? An important distinction for answering this question is that between ‘how-possibly’ explanations and ‘how-actually’ explanations. Despite the importance of this distinction there has been surprisingly little agreement over how exactly (...) this distinction should bedrawn. I shall argue that inadequate attention has been paid to the different contexts in which an explanation can be given and the different levels of abstraction at which the explanandum phenomenon can be framed. By tracing how scientists are using model simulations to explain a striking periodic banding of vegetation known as tiger bush, I will show how our understanding of the distinction between how-possibly and how-actually model explanations needs to be revised. (shrink)

This article intervenes in a critical debate about the use of consent to distinguish sex from rape. Drawing from critical contract theories, it argues that sexual consent is a cruel optimism that often operates to facilitate, rather than alleviate, sexual violence. Sexual consent as a cruel optimism promises to simplify rape allegations in the popular cultural imagination, confounds the distinction between victims and agents of sexual violence, and establishes certainty for potential victimizers who rely on it to convince themselves and (...) others that their partners implicitly or explicitly agreed to sex. In each of these cases, the power of consent rests in its tendency to obscure sexual violence in a set of questions around victimhood and agency, rather than to clarify whether or when it has occurred. Following in the critical contract tradition, this article argues that the optimistic attachment to the clarifying power of consent helps to explain the persistent commitment to better sexual consent as a ‘solution’ to the problems of rape and sexual violence, and that this ‘solution’ is insufficient to the task. (shrink)

It has frequently been suggested that quantum mechanics may provide a genuine case of ontic vagueness or metaphysical indeterminacy. However, discussions of quantum theory in the vagueness literature are often cursory and, as I shall argue, have in some respects been misguided. Hitherto much of the debate over ontic vagueness and quantum theory has centered on the “indeterminate identity” construal of ontic vagueness, and whether the quantum phenomenon of entanglement produces particles whose identity is indeterminate. I argue that this way (...) of framing the debate is mistaken. A more thorough examination of quantum theory and the phenomenon of entanglement reveals that quantum mechanics is best interpreted as supporting what I call the “vague property” construal of ontic vagueness, where vague properties are understood in terms of determinable properties without the corresponding determinates. (shrink)

This paper examines the ‘justice’ and ‘care’ orientations in ethical theory as characterized in Carol Gilligan's research on moral development and the philosophical work it has inspired. Focus is placed on challenges to the justice orientation – in particular, to the construal of impartiality as the mark of the moral point of view, to the conception of moral judgment as essentially principle-driven and dispassionate, and to models of moral responsibility emphasizing norms of formal equality and reciprocity. Suggestions are made about (...) the implications of these challenges, and of the care orientation in ethics, for the ethical theory taught, the issues addressed, and the skills and sensitivities encouraged through bioethical education. Keywords: bioethical education, ethics of care, impartiality, moral judgment, moral psychology CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This study investigated grammatical gender processing in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children using a visual world paradigm with a 4-picture display where the target noun was heard with a gendered article that was either in a context where all distractor images were the same gender as the target noun or in a context where all distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun. We investigated 32 bilingual children who were exposed to Spanish since infancy and began learning English by (...) school entry. Along with the eye-tracking experiment, all children participated in a standardized language assessment and told narratives in English and Spanish, and parents reported on their child's current Spanish language use. The differential proportion fixations to target were analyzed in two time regions with linear mixed-effects models. Results show that prior to the target word being spoken, these bilingual children did not use the gendered articles to actively anticipate upcoming nouns. In the subsequent time region, it was shown that there are differences in the way they use feminine and masculine articles, with a lack of use of the masculine article and a potential facilitatory use of the feminine article for children who currently use more Spanish than English. This asymmetry in the use of gendered articles in processing is modulated by current Spanish language use and trends with results found for bilingual and second-language learning adults. (shrink)

The etiology of Tauopathies, a diverse class of neurodegenerative diseases associated with the Microtubule Associated Protein (MAP) Tau, is usually described by a common mechanism in which Tau dysfunction results in the loss of axonal microtubule stability. Here, we reexamine and build upon the canonical disease model to encompass other Tau functions. In addition to regulating microtubule dynamics, Tau acts as a modulator of motor proteins, a signaling hub, and a scaffolding protein. This diverse array of functions is related to (...) the dynamic nature of Tau isoform expression, post‐translational modification (PTM), and conformational flexibility. Thus, there is no single mechanism that can describe Tau dysfunction. The effects of specific pathogenic mutations or aberrant PTMs need to be examined on all of the various functions of Tau in order to understand the unique etiology of each disease state. (shrink)

Narratives of artificial intelligence frame public perceptions and expectations, and have a performative role, potentially leading to increased attention and resource allocation, acceptance of AI, or resistance to the technology. However, research on AI narratives frequently produces generalized and decontextualized accounts. This paper argues for closer examination of the specific processes that shape AI narratives in particular contexts. To explore this, nine AI-related exhibitions held in German museums from 2022 to 2023 were analyzed. The study draws on interviews with curatorial (...) teams and exhibition materials to investigate what narratives of AI museums are formed and how those relate to the dominant AI narratives described in previous research. It is shown that curators are critical of dominant AI narratives and aim to deconstruct common myths and present more nuanced portrayals of AI. Yet, they also face challenges in balancing this critical stance with the need for creating engaging, accessible exhibitions. The analysis reveals that while some curatorial strategies successfully counter AI stereotypes, others fail or inadvertently reproduce mainstream imaginaries. Curators discover that avoiding problematic understandings of AI in the way they had initially intended is challenging or even impossible. In other cases, when elements of mainstream AI discourse resurface in museum exhibits despite the critical stance of the curators, they remain unexamined, or are regarded as insignificant and inconsequential. (shrink)

Recent work in quantum information science has produced a revolution in our understanding of quantum entanglement. Scientists now view entanglement as a physical resource with many important applications. These range from quantum computers, which would be able to compute exponentially faster than classical computers, to quantum cryptographic techniques, which could provide unbreakable codes for the transfer of secret information over public channels. These important advances in the study of quantum entanglement and information touch on deep foundational issues in both physics (...) and philosophy. This interdisciplinary volume brings together fourteen of the world's leading physicists and philosophers of physics to address the most important developments and debates in this exciting area of research. It offers a broad spectrum of approaches to resolving deep foundational challenges - philosophical, mathematical, and physical - raised by quantum information, quantum processing, and entanglement. This book is ideal for historians, philosophers of science and physicists"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Scientific models invariably involve some degree of idealization, abstraction, or nationalization of their target system. Nonetheless, I argue that there are circumstances under which such false models can offer genuine scientific explanations. After reviewing three different proposals in the literature for how models can explain, I shall introduce a more general account of what I call model explanations, which specify the conditions under which models can be counted as explanatory. I shall illustrate this new framework by applying it to the (...) case of Bohr's model of the atom, and conclude by drawing some distinctions between phenomenological models, explanatory models, and fictional models. (shrink)

Pornographic speech harms women by playing a key role in sustaining the social conditions through which women's liberty and equality are undercut. Though there is a principled moral and constitutional basis for pursuing a legal strategy in fighting pornography, we should not overestimate the effectiveness of the law or underestimate its potential dangers. The struggle against pornography must be waged through education, expressive exploration, and protest, not through the law.

Morally contoured empathy is a form of reasonable partiality essential to the healthy care of dependents. It is critical as an epistemic aid in determining proper moral responsiveness; it is also, within certain richly normative roles and relationships, itself a crucial constitutive mode of moral connection. Yet the achievement of empathy is no easy feat. Patterns of incuriosity imperil connection, impeding empathic engagement; inappropriate empathic engagement, on the other hand, can result in self-effacement. Impartial moral principles and constraints offer at (...) best meager protection against these perils, and hence serve poorly in securing morally contoured empathy. More nuanced and practical guidance should be sought in normatively substantive conceptions of our roles and relationships and their defining moral stakes. These, joined with more abstract moral tools, can facilitate rich, narratively textured interpretations of moralitys demands. While the content of our normative conceptions must be continually debated, engaging in this debate is vital to the achievement of proper empathy, and thus to effective, respectful, morally healthy care of dependents. (shrink)

Given dramatic increases in recent decades in the pace of scientific discovery and understanding of the functional organization of the brain, it is increasingly clear that engagement with the neuroscientific literature and research is central to making progress on philosophical questions regarding the nature and scope of human freedom and responsibility. While patterns of brain activity cannot provide the whole story, developing a deeper and more precise understanding of how brain activity is related to human choice and conduct is crucial (...) to the development of realistic, just, and intellectually rigorous models of human agency and moral responsibility. In this special issue, we acknowledge that “free will” and “moral responsibility” are not concepts with which neuroscience can directly engage, and instead focus on self-governance, and the capacities that contribute to self-governance, which are more tractable for scientific investigation and are prerequisites for the presence of moral responsibility. (shrink)

This essay critically assesses two strategies of accommodation used by defenders of impartialism in ethics to argue that the care orientation represents no genuine challenge to impartialist theoretical paradigms. One strategy focuses on impartiality as a constraint on moral deliberation, the other as a constraint on moral justification. While highlighting respects in which the commitment to impartiality is more consonant with the care orientation than many advocates of care have acknowledged, this essay attempts to clarify crucial ways in which each (...) accommodationist strategy falls, thus locating some of the more important contributions and challenges the care orientation offers to moral theory. (shrink)

Despite widespread evidence that fictional models play an explanatory role in science, resistance remains to the idea that fictions can explain. A central source of this resistance is a particular view about what explanations are, namely, the ontic conception of explanation. According to the ontic conception, explanations just are the concrete entities in the world. I argue this conception is ultimately incoherent and that even a weaker version of the ontic conception fails. Fictional models can succeed in offering genuine explanations (...) by correctly capturing relevant patterns of counterfactual dependence and licensing correct inferences. Using the example of Newtonian force explanations of the tides, I show how, even in science, fiction can be a vehicle for truth. (shrink)

Moral distress can consist in anxiety or concern about one’s capacity to meet challenges to one’s integrity; it can also consist in the sense that one has failed to meet these challenges, betraying fundamental moral values or commitments. When the sense of moral failure is compounded by feelings of frustration or impotence, of being constrained or impeded in one’s ability to act as one believes one ought, one experiences moral disempowerment. Drawing on narratives of moral distress emerging from work in (...) the clinical context, this essay explores a distinction between cases in which moral distress does, and does not, center around the experience of moral disempowerment. When moral distress is tied to moral disempowerment, the acute personal toll is joined with broader moral costs, for effective moral agency is stymied. If we are to support individuals’ resilience and effectiveness in working constructively with moral distress, we need to understand and redress the social, systemic, and institutional factors contributing to moral disempowerment. (shrink)

The article engages with feminist care theories and practices of community building in the context of armed conflict. Based on an ethnographic study of the security concerns of Israeli citizens living in the Gaza Envelope and their positions regarding the siege on Gaza, we find that in this region, vernacular security is closely linked with care, social reproduction and communitarianism. Communitarian ethics is intertwined with separatist, state-centred discourses on national ‘trauma and resilience’. In this context, Jewish-Israeli women care for their (...) own communities as a way to ensure survival and civilian resilience. They generally disengage from moral dilemmas concerning the suffering of Palestinians. On a deeper level, the practice of security as care combines the hegemonic Israeli security paradigm of women’s soldierhood with an institutional and cultural obsession with trauma-oriented activities. Showing strong ethno-nationalist identifications, these women tend to overlook and even support the state’s violent siege on Gaza, which is seen as a zero-sum game. We conclude that the gendered dimensions of communitarian ethics in Israel are relevant for understanding the limitations and challenges of contemporary cosmopolitan feminism and a global politics of care. (shrink)

This paper describes a long-standing, though little-known, debate between Paul Dirac and Werner Heisenberg over the nature of scientific methodology, theory change, and intertheoretic relations. Following Heisenberg’s terminology, their disagreements can be summarized as a debate over whether the classical and quantum theories are “open” or “closed.” A close examination of this debate sheds new light on the philosophical views of two of the great founders of quantum theory.

Terri Traudt, Joan Liaschenko, and Cynthia Peden-McAlpine’s study contributes to a much-needed reorientation in thinking about and working with the challenges of moral distress. In providing a vital example of nurses able to navigate morally distressing situations in positive and constructive ways, and offering an analysis of the component elements of these nurses’ success, the study helps identify promising directions we might take in addressing the epidemic of moral distress. It also invites important questions, concerning the challenges faced by clinicians (...) who do not who work in healthy “moral communities,” who lack the ethical competencies, and who don’t have the presumptive authority and recognition enjoyed by the seasoned clinicians studied here. We explore some of these questions, and suggest ways we might build on the insights of Traudt and colleagues’ study. (shrink)

We introduce what we call the Emergent Model of forgiving, which is a process-based relational model conceptualizing forgiving as moral and normative repair in the wake of grave wrongs. In cases of grave wrongs, which shatter the victim’s life, the Classical Model of transactional forgiveness falls short of illuminating how genuine forgiveness can be achieved. In a climate of persistent threat and distrust, expressions of remorse, rituals and gestures of apology, and acts of reparation are unable to secure the moral (...) confidence and trust required for moral repair, much less for forgiveness. Without the rudiments of a shared moral world — a world in which, at the very least, the survivor’s violation can be collectively recognized as a violation, and her moral status and authority collectively acknowledged and respected — expressions of remorse, gestures and rituals of apology, or promises of compensation have no authority as meaningful communicative acts with reparative significance. Accordingly, we argue that repair in the wake of traumatic violence involves ‘world-building,’ which supports the ability of survivors to move from despair to hope, from radical and disabling distrust to trust and engagement, and thus from impotence to effective agency. Our Emergent Model treats forgiveness as a slowly developing outcome of a series of changes in a person’s relationship to the trauma and its aftermath, in which moral agency is regained. We argue that forgiveness after grave wrongs and world-shattering harm, when it occurs, emerges from other phenomena, such as cohabitation within a community, gestures of reconciliation, working on shared projects, the developing of trust. On this view, forgiveness is an emergent phenomenon; it entails taking and exercising normative power—coming to claim one’s own moral authority in relation to oneself, one’s assailant, and one’s community. The processes that ultimately constitute forgiving are part and parcel of normative repair more broadly construed. (shrink)

We critically engage two traditional views of scientific data and outline a novel philosophical view that we call the pragmatic-representational view of data. On the PR view, data are representations that are the product of a process of inquiry, and they should be evaluated in terms of their adequacy or fitness for particular purposes. Some important implications of the PR view for data assessment, related to misrepresentation, context-sensitivity, and complementary use, are highlighted. The PR view provides insight into the common (...) but little-discussed practices of iteratively reusing and repurposing data, which result in many datasets’ having a phylogeny—an origin and complex evolutionary history—that is relevant to their evaluation and future use. We relate these insights to the open-data and data-rescue movements, and highlight several future avenues of research that build on the PR view of data. (shrink)

The ontic conception of explanation, according to which explanations are "full-bodied things in the world," is fundamentally misguided. I argue instead for what I call the eikonic conception, according to which explanations are the product of an epistemic activity involving representations of the phenomena to be explained. What is explained in the first instance is a particular conceptualization of the explanandum phenomenon, contextualized within a given research program or explanatory project. I conclude that this eikonic conception has a number of (...) benefits, including making better sense of scientific practice and allowing for the full range of normative constraints on explanation. (shrink)

: The feminist ethic of care has often been criticized for its inability to address four problems--the problem of exploitation as it threatens care givers, the problem of sustaining care-giver integrity, the dangers of conceiving the mother-child dyad normatively as a paradigm for human relationships, and the problem of securing social justice on a broad scale among relative strangers. We argue that there are resources within the ethic of care for addressing each of these problems, and we sketch strategies for (...) developing the ethic more fully. (shrink)

There is a growing recognition that fictions have a number of legitimate functions in science, even when it comes to scientific explanation. However, the question then arises, what distinguishes an explanatory fiction from a nonexplanatory one? Here I examine two cases—one in which there is a consensus in the scientific community that the fiction is explanatory and another in which the fiction is not explanatory. I shall show how my account of “model explanations” is able to explain this asymmetry, and (...) argue that realism—of a more subtle form—does have a role in distinguishing explanatory from non- explanatory fictions. (shrink)