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Researchers who cross a discipline may experience culture shock at the different worlds of science and medicine. This paper outlines the differences in concepts and philosophies and in presentation styles. The acute difficulties when attempting to read or write works in different disciplines are also addressed, as well as the differences in perceptions and values when approaching written works in unfamiliar branches of academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore Kant's account of normativity through the prism of the distinction between the natural and the human sciences. Although the pragmatic orientation of the human sciences is often defined in contrast with the theoretical orientation of the natural sciences, I show that they are in fact regulated by one and the same norm, namely reason's demand for autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines some provisional steps toward a theory of culture grounded in computational thinking. I begin by describing computational thinking, drawing on Marr’s hierarchy for the analysis of information processing systems. I then address the definition of culture, arguing that culture is a property of causal chains, rather than a thing-in-the-world. I briefly address contemporary debates over the nature of culture—embodied versus embedded—and argue for an ecological approach in which culture-in-action unfolds as embodied schemas recognize (and produce) “handles” in the environment. When schemas are “objectively adapted” to the handles, they generate action that is ecologically rational. To explain ecologically rational culture-in-action, I outline a formal approach to cultural learning based on Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-learning theory. I illustrate my approach throughout with examples drawn from the sociology of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper’s main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but connected by long term transdisciplinary representational and inferential structures and constraints. The paper intends to show a given set of knowledge claims based on organizing statistically empirical data can be seen to have been underpinned by a previous, more familiar, and probably more natural, narrative handling of similar evidence. To achieve that this paper moves from medicine in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century in England among gentleman naturalists, following its subject: the shift from narrative depiction of hereditary transmission of physical peculiarities to posterior statistical articulations of the same phenomena. Some early defenders of heredity as an important (if not the most important) causal presence in the understanding of life adopted singular narratives, in the form of case stories from medical and natural history traditions, to flesh out a special kind of causality peculiar to heredity. This work tries to reconstruct historically the rationale that drove the use of such narratives. It then shows that when this rationale was methodologically challenged, its basic narrative and probabilistic underpinings were transferred to the statistical quantificational tools that took their place. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] Safety science may contribute to marginalization of practical knowledge. [•] “Paper trails” and specialists makes experience based knowledge marginalized. [•] An applied science needs to understand the effects it causes, also from a power-perspective. [•] Safety Science should reflect on how our results interact with existing system-specific knowledge. [•] Examples from maritime transport and railways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] This paper addresses the issue of how to understand safety science as a concept. [•] Several definitions of safety are reviewed and discussed. [•] Links are established between the safety concept and risk. [•] Safety science covers knowledge about safety related issues. [•] Safety science also covers the development of conceptual tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Simmel=s forgotten 1895 paper develops a radical, relevant position. [•] Concepts are species-specific, truth is tied to practical success. [•] Simmel shares key commitments with recent interactivist-constructivism bio-cognition. [•] His position can be given an integrated, three-fold bio-cognitive elaboration. [•] Fields are interactivism, unified evolutionary epistemology, learnable normativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends scientific realism from the pessimistic meta-induction from past reference failure. It allows that a descriptive theory of reference implies that scientific terms characteristically fail of determinate reference. But it argues that a descriptive theory of reference also implies an equivalence between scientific theories and quantificational claims in the style of Ramsey. Since these quantificational claims do not use any of the referentially suspect scientific terms, they can be approximately true even when those terms fail to refer determinately. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper analyses the gynaecological literature on endometriosis, particularly endometriosis classification, to evaluate the epistemological concepts it uses. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on a sample of gynaecological literature published between 1985 and 2000, a period that witnessed the explosion of both evidence-based and patient-centred models of medicine, with their duelling emphases on science and experience. It was found that the discourse of science is used strategically in this literature as a formal epistemology to lend weight to authors'' claims and to guide medical thinking and research. However, gynaecologists also use the notion of experience to assert their own credibility and to question the credibility of other experts. In fact, accounts of their own experience and the experiential accounts of their patients are foundational to gynaecologists'' claims-making activities, including their engagement with scientific research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper studies the constellations of attitudes––sentimental, moral, epistemological, and social––that three leading psychologists active in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America took to be essential to the production of scientific knowledge. William James, G. Stanley Hall, and Edward Titchener located the virtues and traits proper to the scientific frame of mind, and combined them into normative images of the man of science, or, ‘scientific personae’ as I use the term here. I argue that their competing formulations of the scientific ethos informed their psychological practice and epistemological commitments. James, Hall, and Titchener mobilized their representations of the man of science in order to reconfigure the field of psychology and redefine its boundaries, as well as to promote forms of sociability and define the proper role of scientists both within the academy and in the wider polity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In his treatises Hero of Alexandria describes a range of devices for producing spectacles and generating wonder that have frequently been treated as marginal by historians of technology and science. In this paper I shall show that these devices and Hero’s emphasis on wonder-making are of central importance to the image that Hero presents of mechanics. Hero uses the concept of wonder to add an intellectual component to the utility of mechanics, to strengthen the epistemological claims of mechanics and to relate mechanical expertise to divine cunning. He is thereby able to present mechanics as a form of knowledge which is epistemically on a par with philosophy, but which still maintains powerful practical consequence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]