For many theologians and philosophers, scientism is among the greatest of intellectual sins. In its most commonly cited form, scientism consists in claiming that science is the only source of real knowledge and, therefore, that what science does not discover does not exist. Because the charge of scientism is frequently levied, it is important to be clear about what exactly is being claimed in its name. I argue that scientism can best be understood as a fallacy, specifically as a kind (...) of category mistake. Being clear about this requires an examination of the relationship of scientism to the question of demarcation between science and nonscience, a question that has potential implications for theology. (shrink)

The “demarcation problem,” the issue of how to separate science from pseu- doscience, has been around since fall 1919—at least according to Karl Pop- per’s (1957) recollection of when he first started thinking about it. In Popper’s mind, the demarcation problem was intimately linked with one of the most vexing issues in philosophy of science, David Hume’s problem of induction (Vickers 2010) and, in particular, Hume’s contention that induction cannot be logically justified by appealing to the fact that (...) “it works,” as that in itself is an inductive argument, thereby potentially plunging the philosopher straight into the abyss of a viciously circular argument. (shrink)

This paper reviews how research on the demarcation problem has developed, starting from Popper’s criterion of falsifiability and ending with recent naturalistically oriented approaches. The main differences between traditional and contemporary approaches to the problem are explicated in terms of six postulates called the traditional assumptions. It is argued that all of the assumptions can be dismissed without giving up on the demarcation problem and that doing so might benefit further discussions on pseudoscience. Four present-day research movements on (...) evaluating the boundaries of science are introduced: (1) philosophy of pseudoscience, (2) social epistemology of dissent, (3) agnotology, and (4) evaluation of expertise. Researchers working within these areas have abandoned some or all traditional assumptions. (shrink)

Legal philosophers have been preoccupied with specifying the differences between two systems of normative guidance that are omnipresent in all modern human societies: law and morality. Positivists propose a solution to this ‘Demarcation Problem’ according to which the legal validity of a norm cannot depend on its being morally valid, either in all or at least some possible legal systems. The proposed analysis purports to specify the essential and necessary features of law in virtue of which this is true. (...) Yet, the concept of law is an ‘artefact concept’, that is, a concept that picks out a phenomenon that necessarily owes its existence to human activities intended to create it. Artefact concepts, even simple ones like ‘chair’, are notoriously resistant to analyses in terms of their essential attributes, precisely because they are hostages to human ends and purposes, and also cannot be individuated by their natural properties. Twentieth-century philosophy of science dealt with a kindred Demarcation Problem: how to demarcate epistemically reliable forms of inquiry from epistemically unreliable ones, that is, how to demarcate science from pseudo-science or nonsense. Like the legal philosophers, they sought to identify the essential properties of a human artefact (namely, science). They failed, and spectacularly so, which led some philosophers to wonder, ‘Why does solving the Demarcation Problem matter?’ This essay develops the lessons for legal philosophy from this episode and its philosophical aftermath, and concludes that, in order not to become embroiled in pointless Fullerian speculations about the effects of jurisprudential doctrines on behaviour, we should abandon the Demarcation Problem in jurisprudence. (shrink)

Background: For many years the body of literature known as ‘care ethics’ or ‘ethics of care’ has been discussed as regards its status and nature. There is much confusion and little structured discussion. The paper of Klaver et al. (2014) was written as a discussion article to which we respond. Objectives: We aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the status and nature of care ethics. Research design: Responding to ‘Demarcation of the ethics of care as a discipline’ (...) by Klaver et al. (2014) and ‘Three versions of an ethics of care’ by Edwards (2009), we identified shared concerns and formulated criticisms of both texts in order to develop an alternative view. Participants and research context: This paper has been written from the academic context of a master in care ethics an policy. Ethical considerations: We have tried to be fair and respectful to the authors discussed. Findings: Both Klaver et al. (2014) and Edwards (2009) raise important concerns about the question if care ethics can be considered an academic discipline, and to what extend it can be seen as a moral theory. Despite shared concerns, their arguments fail to convince us in all respects. Discussion and conclusion: We propose to conceive care ethics as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, incorporating a dialectical relation between empirical research and theoretical reflection. Departing from the notion of caring as a practice of contributing to a life-sustaining web, we argue that care ethics can only profit from a loosely organized academic profile that allows for flexibility and critical attitude that brings us close to the good emerging in specific practices. This asks for ways of searching for a common focus and interest that is inherently democratic and dialogical and thus beyond demarcation. (shrink)

This memoiristic essay is a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Fuzzy Studies: On the consequence of blur.” While probing his personal memories and making a case for devaluing our intellectual constructs, the author, an anthropologist, examines paintings by Paul Cézanne and Pieter Bruegel, poems by Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden. The essay argues that each self-deluding “reality” we construct is only temporary, destined to fall back into the elusive, undifferentiated zone of overlap and ambiguity from which it (...) has emerged. Therefore, the author urges, we should temper the intellectual “rage for order” with an openness to chaos and contingency, along with sustained and careful attention to creative works and religious practices in which the mind appears to grasp its limits. In this way, we may substitute what Stevens called “ghostlier demarcations” for our clear, exact, and self-deceptive certainties. (shrink)

In demarcating science from pseudo-science and non-science, traditional suggestions make verifiability or falsifiability the decisive criteria. it is in the context of questioning and problem-stating that the activities of verifying and falsifying really receive their significance. the purpose of the work is to demarcate science by proposing criteria for scientific problem-stating. logic of discovery can supply the criteria (cf. bolzano, cf. also traditional problem lists).

: The Hellenistic reception of Babylonian horoscopic astrology gave rise to the question of what the planets really do and whether astrology is a science. This question in turn became one of defining the Greco-Latin science of astronomy, a project that took Aristotle's views as a starting-point. Thus, I concentrate on one aspect of the various definitions of astronomy proposed in Hellenistic times, their demarcation of astronomy and physical theory. I explicate the account offered by Geminus and its subordination (...) of astronomy to arguments made in physical theory about what really is the case. I then show how Ptolemy treats the same topic but maintains that this science is sufficient on its own to determine the realia it studies. In this way, I identify two moments in an obvious process of intellectual change that had profound consequences for the history of astronomy and cosmology over the next 1500 years. My hope is that this will advance our understanding of the reception of horoscopic astrology in Hellenistic times and also serve to locate Ptolemy more fully in his intellectual context. (shrink)

This article aims to initiate a discussion on the demarcation of the ethics of care. This discussion is necessary because the ethics of care evolves by making use of insights from varying disciplines. As this involves the risk of contamination of the care ethical discipline, the challenge for care ethical scholars is to ensure to retain a distinct care ethical perspective. This may be supported by an open and critical debate on the criteria and boundaries of the ethics of (...) care. As a contribution, this article proposes a tentative outline of the care ethical discipline. What is characteristic of this outline is the emphasis on relational programming, situation-specific and context-bound judgments, a political–ethical perspective, and empirical groundedness. It is argued that the ethics of care is best developed further by means of an intradisciplinary approach. Two intradisciplinary examples show how within the frame of one discipline, other disciplines are absorbed, both with their body of knowledge and their research methodology. (shrink)

The problem of demarcation continues to attract attention, in part because solutions are perceived to have enormous social significance. The civic motivation, however, I argue is in tension with the heterogeneity of the sciences. Philosophers of science would be better employed reflecting on the features, causes, and consequences, of created, scientific controversies. These arise when relevant experts are in broad agreement about what conclusions can sensibly be drawn from available evidence, but the public perceives an expert community deeply divided (...) and conclusions that are plagued by profound and systemic uncertainty. In the second part of the paper I explore this concept further. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the problem of identification of laws of nature and their demarcation from other kinds of regularities. The problem is approached from the viewpoint of several metaphysical, epistemological, logical and methodological criteria. Firstly, several dominant approaches to the problem are introduced. Secondly, the logical and semantic explicatory framework – Transparent Intensional Logic – is presented for the sake of clarification of logical forms of sentences that are supposed to express the laws of nature. Finally, a complementary (...) strategy to the demarcation problem is proposed, including reconsideration of relevant metaphysical, epistemological, logical and methodological requirements and principles behind the former conceptions. (shrink)

The relationship of man himself to his environment is an inseparable part of ecology; for he also is an organism and other organisms are a part of his environment. Ecology, therefore, broadly conceived and rightly understood, instead of being an academic science merely, out of touch with humanistic interests, is really that part of every other biological science which brings it into immediate relation to human kind. The proper place of humans in ecological study has been a recurring issue for (...) ecology. Of course humans are part of Nature writ large, but are they part of the ecologist's nature? The question bothered biologists even before the discipline of ecology was firmly institutionalized.... (shrink)

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of homeopathy from the perspective of the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science. In this context, Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend’s solution to the problem will be given respectively and their criteria will be applied to homeopathy, aiming to shed some light on the controversy over its scientific status. It then examines homeopathy under the lens of demarcation criteria to conclude that homeopathy is regarded as science by Feyerabend and is considered as (...) pseudoscience by Popper and Kuhn. By offering adequate tools for the analysis of the foundations, structure and implications of homeopathy, demarcation issue can help to clarify this medical controversy. The main argument of this article is that a final decision on homeopathy, whose scientific status changes depending on the criteria of the philosophers mentioned, cannot be given. (shrink)

Although epidemiology as a scientific study of disease in populations claimed an independent disciplinary status already in the mid–nineteenth century, its history in the twentieth century can be seen as a continuous and often contentious attempt to define the field’s social and intellectual boundaries vis-à-vis a variety of neighboring scientific fields and public health practices. In a period dominated by laboratory biomedical sciences, epidemiologists repeatedly tried to spell out how their discipline met the requirements of scientificity despite its focus on (...) disease as a collective phenomenon and its reliance on nonlaboratory methods. This article asks about the relationship between the changing institutional and intellectual contexts of British epidemiological practice and the epidemiologists’attempts to define both science in general and epidemiology in particular. An examination of the epidemiologists’boundary-making endeavors is also used to reflect on the circumstances in which scientists engage in the discourse of disciplinary demarcations. (shrink)

This paper is based on a criterion recently proposed by Richard Fumerton for demarcating philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I suggest to extend it to a demarcation criterion between philosophy and science in general, and put it in the context of the historical changes of boundaries between the philosophical and the scientifi c fi eld. I point to a number of philosophical claims and approaches that have been made utterly obsolete by the advancement of science, and conjecture that (...) a similar thing may happen in the future with today’s philosophy of mind: under the supposition that cognitive science manages to progress very successfully in a certain direction, our concepts for mental states could change, and the type of philosophical interest we put in them, thus reshaping thewhole debate on the subject. (shrink)

A hallmark of positive‐sense RNA viruses is the formation of membranous shelters for safe replication in the cytoplasm. Once considered invisible to the immune system, these viral shelters are now found to be antagonized through the cooperation of autophagy proteins and anti‐microbial GTPases. This coordinated effort of autophagy proteins guiding GTPases functions against not only the shelters of viruses but also cytoplasmic vacuoles containing bacteria or protozoa, suggesting a broad immune‐defense mechanism against disparate vacuolar pathogens. Fundamental questions regarding this process (...) remain: how the host recognizes these membranous structures as a target, how the autophagy proteins bring the GTPases to the shelters, and how the recruited GTPases disrupt these shelters. In this review, these questions are discussed, the answers to which will significantly advance our understanding of the response to vacuole‐like structures of pathogens, thereby paving the way for the development of broadly effective anti‐microbial strategies for public health. (shrink)

Within recent years, scientific misconduct has become an increasingly important topic, not only in the scientific community, but in the general public as well. Spectacular cases have been extensively covered in the news media, such as the cases of the Korean stem cell researcher Hwang, the German nanoscientist Schön, or the Norwegian cancer researcher Sudbø. In Science's latest annual "breakthrough of the year" report from December 2006, the descriptions of the year's hottest breakthroughs were accompanied by a similar description of (...) "the breakdown of the year: scientific fraud". Official guidelines for dealing with scientific misconduct were introduced in the 1990s. At this time, research agencies, universities and other research institutions around the world developed guidelines for good scientific practice and formed committees to handle cases of scientific misconduct. In this process it was widely debated how to define scientific misconduct. Most definitions centered on falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (the so-called FFP definition), but suggestions were also made for definitions that were broader and more open-ended, such as the 1995 suggestion from the US Commission of Research Integrity to replace FFP with misappropriation, interference and misrepresentation (the so-called MIM definition). The MIM definition was not adopted in the US, but MIM-like definitions have been adopted in several other countries. In this paper, I shall describe these MIM-related definitions of scientific misconduct and analyze the arguments that have been advanced in their favor. I shall discuss some of the difficulties inherent in the MIM-related definitions, such as the distinction between misrepresentation and mistake, and the demarcation of misrepresentation in areas characterized by uncertainty or by diverging research paradigms. I shall illustrate the problems inherent in the MIM-definition through a particular case: the ruling of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) about Bjørn Lomborg's best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist in which he argued that contrary to what was claimed in the “litany” of the environmentalists, the state of the environment is getting better rather than worse. Lomborg was reported to the DCSD by several environmental scientists, and this controversial case from 2003 ended with a verdict that characterized Lomborg’s conclusions as misrepresentations, but acquitted Lomborg of misconduct due to his ignorance. I shall analyze this verdict and the problems it reveals with respect to the MIM-related definitions of misconduct. (shrink)

Realists about mental disorder have been hasty about dismissing social explanations of how mental disorder is constituted. However, many social ontologies are realist ontologies. In order to create a meaningful distinction between realism and social metaphysics about mental disorder, I propose that realism about mental disorder is best understood as Individual Trait Realism (ITR) about them. For ITR, mental disorders exist in virtue of traits. I defend the view that ITR is compatible with social metaphysics, arguing that, in asking whether (...) constituents in the social sphere figure the metaphysics of psychopathology, we are asking questions on three different strata of explanation: the strata of demarcation, instantiation, and individual traits. Distinguishing between these strata allows for nuanced realism that need not reject the social constitution of mental disorder. (shrink)

Fringe science has been an important topic since the start of the revolution in the social studies of science that occurred in the early 1970s. The revolution was what Collins and Evans refer to as the "second wave of science studies," while this paper is best thought of as an exercise in "third wave science studies." The first wave was that period which reached its apogee in the aftermath of the Second World War when science was seen as unquestionably the (...) pre-eminent form of knowledge-making, and the role of philosophy and sociology was to understand how it was so and how societies could be arranged to nurture it best; the second wave was "social constructionism" which became folded into post-modernism in... (shrink)

Given what we know about the nature of knowledge and scientific work it no longer makes sense to think of scientific knowledge as demarcated from “ordinary” knowledge through its methods or the characteristics of the scientific community. As the social studies of science have shown, boundaries become ambiguous when viewed close up so that science merges with ordinary knowledge. But does this mean that distinctions between knowledge claims rest on nothing more than social conventions, powerful as these might be? The (...) articles in this special issue address this question from a variety of perspectives, while this introduction sets out this broader framework and highlights the themes that unite the individual articles. Our central argument is that although boundary work is difficult, complex, and contingent, it is too important to be left to chance or tradition. We need to rescue expertise from the antiessentialist consensus that there is nothing but attribution. (shrink)

Es wird eine Unterscheidung zwischen für eine einzelne Wissenschaft eigentümlichen Problemen und technologischen Problemen vorgeschlagen. Dieser Unterscheidung liegt eine Auffassung zugrunde, nach welcher jede Wissenschaft einen speziellen Ausblick auf die Welt erarbeitet, einen Ausblick, der nur diejenigen Aspekte eines wirklichen Vorgangs heraussucht und sich aneignet, welche für diese Wissenschaft eigentümlich sind. Im Gegensatz dazu erfaßt die Technologie Vorgänge in der Gesamtheit ihrer Aspekte. Auf der Grundlage dieser Unterscheidung werden die Grundzüge des Verfahrens, welches zur Lösung von technologischen Problemen führt , (...) diskutiert. (shrink)

The mediatization concept rests on the increasing centrality of media in everyday spheres. Within academia, mediatization is explored in various ways, such as through the use of social media, news media, and researchers’ adoption of certain media logic(s). While many studies focus on media logic(s) as an explanatory device, it can also be seen as a contextual relationship between actors enacted for various purposes. This paper explores how academics enact media logic(s) in climate communication and for what purpose. By drawing (...) on interviews with initiators of open letters on climate change, this paper illustrates that media logic(s) is evoked as a publishing strategy and a way to demarcate academics from news media journalists. The study thus suggests a conceptual shift from debates about what media logic(s) is to what it does in specific communication contexts. (shrink)

What sets the practice of rigorously tested, sound science apart from pseudoscience? In this volume, the contributors seek to answer this question, known to philosophers of science as “the demarcation problem.” This issue has a long history in philosophy, stretching as far back as the early twentieth century and the work of Karl Popper. But by the late 1980s, scholars in the field began to treat the demarcation problem as impossible to solve and futile to ponder. However, the (...) essays that Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry have assembled in this volume make a rousing case for the unequivocal importance of reflecting on the separation between pseudoscience and sound science. (shrink)

The recent interest in exploring whether authoritative figures of the Reformed tradition employed a concept of theōsis or deification in their soteriology continues to grow. However, it is yet unclear how the supposed implicit Reformed doctrine of deification relates to the more explicit concept of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, many of the arguments for theōsis in the theology of John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, or T. F. Torrance seem to rely on confusing these two soteriological concepts. This makes (...) it almost impossible to assess if it is theōsis or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (or some interesting combination) that is being appealed to in Reformed thinking. This paper makes a step towards unpicking the knot between the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and theōsis in Reformed theology by offering five possible ways to demarcate these two concepts. It is concluded that the final ‘Mereological Demarcation’ is currently the most acceptable. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions regarding the status of emotion as a scientific domain usually get framed in terms of the question whether emotion is a natural kind. That approach to the issues is wrongheaded for two reasons. First, it has led to an intractable philosophical impasse that ultimately misconstrues the character of the relevant debate in emotion science. Second, and most important, it entirely ignores valence, a central feature of emotion experience, and probably the most promising criterion for demarcating emotion from cognition (...) and other related domains. An alternate philosophical hypothesis for addressing the issues is pro- posed. It is that emotion is a naturally occurring valenced phenomenon that is.. (shrink)

The Extended Mind Hypothesis has given rise to stimulating philosophical debates about the boundaries of the realm of the cognitive. This paper first investigates the usefulness of a “mark of the cognitive,” and then focuses on two accounts that aim to provide such a mark, put forward by Fred Adams and Rebecca Garrison on one side and Mark Rowlands on the other. The paper provides a critical assessment of these accounts and uses empirical work on emotion regulation in infants to (...) unearth some crucial challenges that any attempt at offering a mark of the cognitive should address. (shrink)

Philosophers have often wanted to state a principled way of demarcating empirical from non-empirical thought. This was a major concern of the Vienna Circle. In my view, this is an important intellectual project. Although it is not so common now to address the issue directly, it hovers in the background of many discussions. Non-empirical thought comes in different kinds. Perhaps some is a priori. Common candidates are mathematical, logical, modal and moral thought. Some non-empirical thought might be non-cognitive. Common candidates (...) are moral, aesthetic and religious thought. Or some non-empirical thought might be pseudo-empirical. Common candidates are astrological, theistic, Marxist or psychoanalytic thought; such thought masquerades as empirical, but in fact is not. These are all ways that thought can fail to be empirical. Here I shall focus for the most part on the case of morality, where there has been a lively debate about the empirical status of moral thought. I shall probe the prospects for a demarcation principle that can be used to decide whether or not moral thought is empirical. Some philosophers have recently presented what seems like a compelling case for thinking that moral thought is empirical, and so engaging with their arguments will raise the issue of what the empirical/nonempirical distinction amounts to, and also the issue of how to tell which forms of thought are empirical and which are not. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is a significant but often overlooked metaphysical distinction to be made between contextualism and contrastivism. The orthodox view is that contrastivism is merely a form of contextualism. This is a mistake. The contextualist view is incompatible with certain naturalist claims about the metaphysical nature of concepts within whichever domain is being investigated, while the contrastivist view is compatible with these claims. So, choosing one view over the other will involve choosing to affirm or (...) deny a significant metaphysical claim. As such, a demarcation ought to be put in place between contextualism and contrastivism. (shrink)

What I suggest we can see in this brief overview of the literature is an extensive interpenetration on both sides of these debates between scientific, political, and social values. Important shifts in political and social values were of course occurring over the same period, some of them in parallel with, and perhaps even contributing to, these transitions I have been speaking of in evolutionary discourse. The developments that I think of as at least suggestive of possible parallels include the progressive (...) encroachment of public values into the private domain of post-World War II American life, the cold war, the rise of consumerism, and the flowering of what Christopher Lasch calls a “narcissistic individualism.”35 In popular language, the 1960s gave birth to the “me” generation. Perhaps the most tantalizing analogue is suggested by Barbara Ehrenreich's argument for the emergence of a new meaning of masculinity — an ideal of masculinity measured not by commitment, responsibility, or success as family provider, but precisely by the strength of a man's autonomy in the private sphere, his resistance to the demands of a hampering female.36 It is tempting to speculate about possible connections between changes in scientific discourse and developments in the social and political spheres, but such connections, however suggestive, would clearly have to be demonstrated.For now, however, I want to focus on another kind of change —a transformation not so much in the social or political sphere as in the scientific sphere. I make this turn, or return, in support of a more complex account of scientific change that incorporates reverberations within the scientific communty along with social and political changes.In the 1960s, all of biology was undergoing a major transformation in direct response to the dramatic successes of molecular biology. These successes seemed to completely vindicate the values on which the molecular revolution was premised — namely, simplicity and mechanism. Following the victory of Watson and Crick, and of others after them, the fever of that endeavor swept through biology leaving in its wake a new standard of science, and of scientific discourse — one predicated on clarity, simplicity, and analyzability; on the definition of legitimate questions as those capable of clear and unambiguous answers. Every biological discipline felt it — even evolutionary biology, which in some respects was at the furthest pole. Perhaps precisely because it seemed conceptually so remote, evolutionary biology may have felt it most of all. Lewontin inadvertently provides us with some direct support for this view. Indeed, he begins his introduction to Population Biology and Evolution with the following remarks: The twenty years since World War II have seen a vindication in biology of our faith in the Cartesian method as a way of doing science. Some of the most fundamental and interesting problems of biology have been solved or are very nearly solved by an analytic technique that is now loosely called “molecular biology.” But it is not specifically the “molecular” aspect of biology of the last twenty years that has led to its success. It is, rather, the analytic aspect, the belief that by breaking systems down into their component parts, by simplifying them or using simpler organisms, one can learn about more complex systems. As it happens, the problems that were attacked and are being attacked by this method lead to answers in terms of molecules and cell organelles.... There is a host of problems in biology, however, that has been much neglected in these twenty exciting years, because the answers to them cannot be meaningfully framed in molecular and cellular terms.37Lewontin is referring, of course, to problems in evolution. The remainder of his remarks is devoted to an argument for the applicability of the method, if not the content, of molecular biology to these problems. He writes, “It is not the case that molecular biology is Cartesian and analytic while population biology is holistic. Population biology is properly analytic and operates, within the framework of its own problems, by the process of simplification, analysis, and resynthesis.”38 With these remarks, he leads into the criticism of the “holists” who have “held up progress.”This new ethic of simplicity, clarity, and mechanism — embodying the very virtues lauded by Williams — was explicitly carried into evolutionary biology in the name of scientific progress. As it happened, the values implied also fit conveniently well with other values — each set of values providing crucial support for the other.However substantive the scientific gains may have been in some respects, the net effect of this ethic has also been a systematic “perceptual bias” — a bias with profound practical consequences for the entire program of methodological individualism in evolutionary biology, if not elsewhere as well. It may well be that the whole is equivalent to the reconstituted aggregate of its parts, if, in the process of aggregation or summation, all possible interactions among the parts are included. But if certain kinds of interactions are systematically excluded, our confidence in that program necessarily founders. My claim here is that such systematic exclusion does occur, and that it occurs on a number of different levels. To briefly review the interlocking kinds of “bias” that I see occurring in practice, I suggest the following schematic listing:On the most general level: The ethic of simplicity — the privileging of certain values, even certain methodologies, as having an a priori superior claim to scientific credibility.Only slightly less general, and crucially related, is the equation of “scientific” with “tractible”: Given the techniques of analysis available, the equation of science with what we can do inevitably leads to a systematic technical bias favoring simplicity. That is, because we don't know how to model complex dynamics, nonlinear interactions are systematically biased against because of the limitations of our technical know-how. The consequences of this equation of the scientific with the tractible are greatly compounded by the additional equation between what we can do and what is — that is, by our temptation to confuse tractibility with reality.Finally, and also closely related, a further kind of elision occurs even within the confines of tractibility. This kind of elision — taking the form almost of inferring tractibility from one's prior assumptions of what is real — is exemplified by the history of a mathematical ecology of mutualism. Even when mutualism can be introduced into the same technical machinery, it is still not pursued. The basic assumption is that competition is what is real, not because it is easier to model, but because it is what we expect. When the actual difficulties of modeling competition are then in turn suppressed, as in the Robert May story, what we have, given the temptation to equate the tractible with the real, is the possibility of a truly self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

Steven Pinker’s recent Enlightenment Now aside, Enlightenment values have been in for a rough ride of late. Following Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critique of Enlightenment as the source of fascism, recent studies, amplified by Black Lives Matter, have laid bare the ugly economic underbelly of Enlightenment. The prosperity that enabled intellectuals to scrutinize speculative truths in eighteenth-century Paris salons relied on the slave trade and surplus value extracted from slave labor on sugar plantations and in other areas Europeans controlled. (...) Indeed, deprived of its ugly economic underbelly, Enlightenment was barely conceivable; furthermore, its reliance on surplus value extraction from oppressed labor was accompanied by a racism that, with the exception of the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a few other thinkers, was arguably inherent to Enlightenment. However, I am not proposing yet another revelation of Enlightenment’s complicity in exploitation of, or disregard for, the Other. Rather, I want to highlight the damage being done today by an insidious strategy of labelling as “pseudo-science” entire domains of non-Western knowledge such as Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, thereby rendering them no-go zones for serious minds. Even though the term pseudo-science had yet to be coined, the beginnings of this tendency are already evident in Enlightenment-era works such as Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description … de la Chine. The perpetuation of this dismissive treatment of non-Western natural knowledge creates a significant obstacle to superseding a “scientific revolution” whose confines have long been burst: it is increasingly recognized that traditional/indigenous knowledge affords a vast reservoir of materials, skills and insights of which the world has desperate need, no more urgently than in response to the covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

C.A. Macdonald's incisive note, ‘On the Unifier-Multiplier Controversy', gave me fresh thoughts regarding the method of actindividuation which he defends against Jonathan Bennett's and my own misgivings. I believe a second look at the Reductive Unifying account, in light of Macdonald's apology for it, will help us size up the issues, notably those involving causation and time.I shall follow previous debaters and dwell upon examples of mayhem, where one individual kills another by carrying out a more rudimentary action. Here is (...) Donald Davidson's case. A queen murders her royal husband by emptying a vial of poison into his ear as he sleeps. To be exact: she rotates her wrist, and the lethal drug cascades toward his ear. (shrink)

Laudan’s argument against the possibility of a demarcation criterion for scientific theories rests on establishing that any criterion must be a necessary and sufficient condition. But Laudan’s argument at most establishes that any criterion must provide a necessary condition and a possibly different sufficient condition. His own claims suggest that such a criterion is possible.

Interest in the demarcation problem is undergoing a boom after being shelved and even given up for dead. Nevertheless, despite current philosophical discussions, there are no substantial advances i...

This paper argues that recent arguments to the effect that the debate between presentism and eternalism lacks any metaphysical substance ultimately fail, although important lessons can be gleaned from them in how to formulate a non-vacuous version of presentism. It suggests that presentism can best be characterized in the context of spacetime theories. The resulting position is an ersatzist version of presentism that admits merely non-present entities as abstracta deprived of physical existence. Ersatzist presentism both escapes the charges of triviality (...) and promises to offer a route to solving the grounding problem which befalls its more traditional cousins. (shrink)

Double standards are widespread throughout biomedicine, especially in research on reproductive health. One of the clearest cases of double standards involves the feminine gendering of reproductive responsibility for contraception and the continued lack of highly effective, reversible methods for cisgender men. While the biomedical establishment accepts diversity and inclusion as important social values for clinical trials, their continued use of inequitable standards undermines their ability to challenge unfair social hierarchies by developing male contraception. Thus, the gender/sex bias present in contraceptive (...) research raises the “New Demarcation Problem”: If we accept that values can and will play important roles in science, how can we nevertheless distinguish positive influences of values from more corrosive bias? I argue that biomedical researchers ought to aim their clinical trials at equity and utilize methodologies that actually achieve that aim. More specifically, I contend that we can avoid the problem of double standards by gender/sex in contraceptive research by utilizing more equitable standards. My demarcation strategy captures dynamic interplay between values and their effects, with direct policy implications for institutions conducting, funding, and evaluating clinical trials. For male contraceptive trials, this involves shifting risk assessment from an individual model to a shared model for sexual partners. (shrink)

Ever since Socrates, philosophers have been in the business of asking ques- tions of the type “What is X?” The point has not always been to actually find out what X is, but rather to explore how we think about X, to bring up to the surface wrong ways of thinking about it, and hopefully in the process to achieve an increasingly better understanding of the matter at hand. In the early part of the twentieth century one of the most (...) ambitious philosophers of sci- ence, Karl Popper, asked that very question in the specific case in which X = science. Popper termed this the “demarcation problem,” the quest for what distinguishes science from nonscience and pseudoscience (and, presumably, also the latter two from each other). (shrink)

It is argued that two aspects of the progress of mature science characterize, at least in combination, no other fields; hence, that these aspects can usefully serve as a demarcation criterion. Scientific progress is: (1) cumulative, regardless of crisis or revolution, from the viewpoint of concrete applications; (2) capable of unrestricted growth towards universal coerciveness of argument and evidence. Before these aspects of progress are discussed, some clarifications are made and corrections offered to Kuhn's view of the nature of (...) scientific progress across revolutions; afterwards, the suggested criterion is used to distinguish, concretely, various fields from science. Finally, it is shown that the "style" of scientific progress is not a useful demarcation criterion. (shrink)

The paper investigates the propriety of applying the form versus matter distinction to arguments and to logic in general. Its main point is that many of the currently pervasive views on form and matter with respect to logic rest on several substantive and even contentious assumptions which are nevertheless uncritically accepted. Indeed, many of the issues raised by the application of this distinction to arguments seem to be related to a questionable combination of different presuppositions and expectations; this holds in (...) particular of the vexed issue of demarcating the class of logical constants. I begin with a characterization of currently widespread views on form and matter in logic, which I refer to as 'logical hylomorphism as we know it'—LHAWKI, for short—and argue that the hylomorphism underlying LHAWKI is mereological. Next, I sketch an overview of the historical developments leading from Aristotelian, non-mereological metaphysical hylomorphism to mereological logical hylomorphism (LHAWKI). I conclude with a reassessment of the prospects for the combination of hylomorphism and logic, arguing in particular that LHAWKI is not the only and certainly not the most suitable version of logical hylomorphism. In particular, this implies that the project of demarcating the class of logical constants as a means to define the scope and nature of logic rests on highly problematic assumptions. (shrink)

Discussions on the congruence, compatibility, and contradictions between science and religion have been going on since the rise of modern science. In our own times, there are many efforts to build bridges of harmony between the two. Most of these are anchored to particular religious traditions or denominations and also to specific disciplines, notably cosmology, physics, and biology. Though these discussions serve commendable purposes for members of specific faiths and/or disciplines, they are also, for precisely this reason, of restricted appeal. (...) There are not too many discussions of the topic that consider science and religion from a global perspective. It will therefore be useful to define science and religion in terms of their unique characteristics, draw the line of demarcation between them, and show where they overlap. This is what this paper attempts to do. (shrink)

Analytic theology is a thriving research program at the intersection of theology and analytic philosophy. Prior to Oliver Crisp and Michael Rea’s launch of “analytic theology” in 2009, the discipline functioned under the moniker “philosophical theology.” Considerable ink has been spilled on what is analytic theology in the past decade, and most recently by William Wood (2021). Some theologians (e.g., Abraham 2009) have argued that it is systematic theology while others (e.g., Coakley 2013) have been content to remain in a (...) family resemblance class rooted in philosophical theology. At the same time, analytic theology has welcomed Christian philosophers (e.g., Beall 2021) who have migrated into Christian doctrine via philosophy of religion. These philosophers are not systematic theologians, but, rather, philosophical theologians. This essay analyzes the relation between analytic theology, philosophical theology, and philosophy by examining their starting points and how they perceive and access truth, and then proposes a spectrum to graph their overlapping zones of research. I conclude that philosophical theology stands at the heart of the disciplines and thus remains an appropriate term for analytic theologians and Christian philosophers working somewhere in the vicinity of Jerusalem. (shrink)

How to draw the line between depression-as-disorder and non-pathological depressive symptoms continues to be a contested issue in psychiatry. Relatively few philosophers have waded into this debate, but the tools of philosophical analysis are quite relevant to it. In this paper, I defend a particular answer to this question, the Contextual approach.On this view, depression is a disorder if and only if it is a disproportionate response to a justifying cause or else is unconnected to any justifying cause. I present (...) four objections to this approach and then defend it from them. Along the way, I explain why it matters whether we get this question right. (shrink)