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Metaphors that compare the computer to a human brain are common in computer science and can be traced back to a fertile period of research that unfolded after the Second World War. To conceptualize the emerging "intelligent" properties of computing machines, researchers of the era created a series of virtual objects that served as interpretive devices for representing the immaterial functions of the computer. This paper analyses the use of the terms "artificial" and "virtual" in scientific papers, textbooks, and popular articles of the time, and examines how, together, they shaped models in computer science used to conceptualize computer processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued, in this paper, that the core operation underlying any measurement—the inverse modelling under uncertainty—is equivalent to quantitative abductive reasoning which consists in the selection of the best estimate of a measurand (i.e., a quantity to be measured) in a set of admissible solutions, using a priori information: (i) on the measurand, (ii) on the measuring system coupled with an object under measurement, and (iii) on the influence of the environment including the user of the measurement results. There are two key premises of this claim: a systematic interpretation of measurement in terms of inverse problems, proposed earlier by the author, and a logical link between inverse problems and abduction, identified by the Finnish philosopher of science Ilkka Niiniluoto. The title claim of this paper is illustrated with an expanded example of measuring optical spectrum by means of a low-resolution spectrometer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to recover the topic of the philosophy of scientific method from its late nineteenth-century roots. The subject matter of scientific method sprouted from key inferential ingredients identified by Charles Peirce. In this paper, the historical path is traversed from the viewpoint of contemporary Cognitive Structural Realism (CSR). Peirce's semiotic theory of methods and practices of scientific inquiry prefigured CSR's reliance on embodied informational structures and experimentation upon forms of relations that model generic scientific domains. Three results are shown to follow from this convocation: (i) a naturalization of Peirce's interconnected abductive, deductive and inductive stages of the logic of science, here characterized de novo in terms of CSR. (ii) a perspective to scientific modeling that incorporates processes of abstraction and generalization as originated from Peirce's logic of science, and (iii) diagrammatic reasoning as a pivotal method in analyzing scientific reasoning in experimental practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguments discrediting the value-free ideal of science have left us with the question of how to distinguish desirable values from biases that compromise the reliability of research. In this paper, I argue for a characterization of cognitive biases as deviations of thought processes that systematically lead scientists to the wrong conclusions. In particular, cognitive biases could help us understand a crucial issue in science today: how systematic error is introduced in research outcomes, even when research is evaluated as of good quality. To conclude, I suggest that some debiasing mechanisms have great potential for countering implicit methodological biases in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following its initial development in the 1920's and 1930's, by mid-century the concept of "levels of organization" began to disperse throughout the life science textbook literature. Among other early textbooks that first applied the levels concept, Eugene P. Odum's usage of the notion in his textbook series Fundamentals of Ecology (and his later series Ecology) stands out due to the marked emphasis placed on the concept as a foundational, erotetically-oriented organizing principle. In this paper, I examine Odum's efforts toward advocating the levels concept in ecology in light of the concept's wider uptake in biology around that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a way to understand the meaning of reality (in science) on the basis of the concepts of persistence and resistance. It first supports the ontological view that reality consists of persistent potentialities, which resist being excluded from existence. A study of the cases of the Higgs boson and the hypothetical Ϝ-particle helps to illustrate how real entities persist and resist. The paper then suggests that, perceptually speaking, the results of ordinary perception or observational processes persistently appear under appropriate conditions, and they resist disappearance even when the appropriate conditions are not completely prepared. Finally, it argues that, epistemologically speaking, a truthful theory resists being falsified and persists across replicable observations and experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will address scientific collaboration at the Zoophysiological Laboratory during the 1911–1945 directorship of Nobel Prize winner August Krogh. Using authorship information and acknowledgments from the laboratory's publications, this paper maps the many researchers involved in the work. In total, 193 different people contributed to the work at the Zoophysiological Laboratory. The paper further analyzes what labor, materials, ideas, and knowledge were exchanged between the individuals in the laboratory. While science has become more collaborative throughout the twentieth century, this paper underlines that collaboration was very much part of the research process in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on the emergence and integration of "hybrid children" (konketsuji) anthropology into the Human Adaptability section of the International Biological Program (HA-IBP) in Japan during the 1950s and 1970s, this paper presents how transnational dynamics and mechanisms played out in shaping and maintaining the racist aspects while simultaneously allowed them to be included in the HA-IBP framework. It argues that Japanese anthropologists operated a double play between their national and transnational spaces, that is, they attenuated racist aspects of their research in their international activities while authenticating race in their national work. This paper will conclude with reflections on the transnational nationalism of konketsuji anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thiago Pinto Barbosa's paper traces the transnational scientific trajectory of Indian anthropologist Irawati Karvé, showing how Karvé applied her race science training in Germany (based on German colonial skull collections from East Africa and New Guinea) to study human difference in decolonizing South Asia. The essays in this special issue shed new light on the transnational movement and exchange of researchers, data, theories, and scientific objects in the anthropological and genetic study of human populations in the twentieth century. The notable prominence of women in this issue, both as scientists and as research subjects, raises questions about whether physical anthropology and human genetics offered more professional opportunities for women than other contemporary scientific disciplines. Historiographical Interventions This issue aims to join in conversation important new developments in two historical subfields: transnational histories of modern science, and histories of racial science bridging physical anthropology and human genetics. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, we build upon Bruno Latour's political writings to address the current impasse regarding algorithms in public life. We assert that the increasing difficulties at governing algorithms—be they qualified as "machine learning," "big data," or "artificial intelligence"—can be related to their current ontological thinness: deriving from constricted views on theoretical practices, algorithms' standard definition as problem-solving computerized methods provides poor grips for affective dissensions. We then emphasize on the role historical and ethnographic studies of algorithms can potentially play in the politicization of algorithms. By both digging into the genealogy of algorithms' constricted definition and by making their contemporary constitutive relationships more visible, both historical and ethnographic studies can contribute to vascularizing algorithms and making them objects of enlarged disputes. We conclude by giving a flavor of the political potential of the vascularization efforts we call for, using materials from an ethnographic study conducted in a computer science laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers have yet to provide a systematic analysis of the relationship between historical science and model-based science. In this paper I argue that prototypical model-based sciences exhibit features understood to be central to historical science. Philosophers of science have argued that historical scientists are distinctly concerned with inference to the best explanation, that explanations in historical science tend to increase in complexity over time, and that the explanations take the form of narratives. Using general circulation models in climate science as a reference, I illustrate how simulation models in model-based science share these features exhibited by historical science. That model based sciences share these features raises important philosophical questions about how we should understand prototypical types of scientific enquiry, including the relationship between experimental science, historical science, and model-based science. I conclude by exploring several options for how to accommodate the noted similarities within a more general taxonomy of the sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers of science have paid close attention to climate simulations as means of projecting the severity and effects of climate change, but have neglected the full diversity of methods in climate science. This paper shows the philosophical richness of another method in climate science: the practice of using paleoclimate analogues to inform our climate projections. First, I argue that the use of paleoclimate analogues can offer important insights to philosophers of the historical sciences. Rather than using the present as a guide to the past, as is common in the historical sciences, paleoclimate analogues involve using the past as a guide to the future. I thereby distinguish different methods in the historical sciences and argue that these distinctions bear on debates over whether the historical sciences can produce generalizations or predictions. Second, I suggest that paleoclimate analogues might actually be considered a type of climate model, and, as such, their use expands on common characterizations of models to include those that are full-scale, naturally occurring, and non-manipulable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the examination of a passage of the Dialogo sopra i massimi sistemi del mondo that has been largely ignored by the scholarship, in this paper I want to reveal the true nature of Galileo's epistemology in terms of its epistemic ideal, that is that theory is capable of providing true and certain knowledge about natural phenomena coming from sensation. The investigation examines all the occurrences of the expression sensate esperienze in its singular and plural forms, both in the Latin and in the vernacular. The research proceeds diachronically through an analysis of Galileo's writings taken in order to show the progressive development of his epistemology. The paper will demonstrate how in thinking about sensate experiences Galileo had in mind as epistemic paradigm that of the epistemology of anatomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a reconstruction of the development of Rudolf Carnap's views from the Aufbau until the 1960s, this paper provides an account of the philosopher's understanding of non-cognitivism, which is here seen as in line with the so-called scientific world-conception of left-wing logical empiricism. The starting point of Carnap's conception is the claim that every human decision depends on certain attitudes that cannot be justified at a cognitive level, that are neither based on empirical facts nor logical reasoning. The key features of Carnap's non-cognitivism, however, go beyond this general basis and involve several fundamentally moral commitments, such as a commitment toward science, and the embracing of moral attitudes as the result of a long-term process of rational discourse. I argue that these commitments contained in Carnap's non-cognitivism/scientific world-conception establish a genuinely political worldview that is characteristic of left-wing logical empiricism and converges with socialism and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Thomas Kuhn's intellectual history by examining sources that have been understudied so far: the Lowell Lectures of 1951 (The Quest for Physical Theory) and the hitherto unpublished Notre Dame Lectures of 1980. The analysis of these texts aims to reconstruct Kuhn's development of a semantics that can account for scientific progress. This analysis will show that the alleged "linguistic turn" attributed to the author is actually a renewed interest in problems that existed well before publishing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will present the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's main reflections on the scientific enterprise, its relation to the metaphysical tradition, and how the German author drew on the nineteenth century cosmological discussion to develop a worldview that ultimately endorses a dynamic and more creative form of science, whose representations and values should not be separated from human interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps no term in the geological lexicon excites more passions than uniformitarianism, whose motto is "the present is the key to the past." The term is controversial in part because it contains several meanings, which have been implicated in creating a situation of "semantic chaos" in the geological literature. Yet I argue that debates about uniformitarianism do not arise from a simple chaos of meanings. Instead, they arise from legitimate disagreements about substantive questions. This paper examines these questions and relates them to several "forms of understanding" pursued by researchers in geohistory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case of severe uncertainty in the development of autonomous and intelligent systems in Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robotics. After discussing how uncertainty emerges from the complexity of the systems and their interaction with unknown environments, the paper describes the novel framework of explorative experiments. This framework presents a suitable context in which many of the issues relative to uncertainty, both at the epistemological level and at the ethical one, in this field should be reframed. The case of autonomous robot systems for search and rescue is used to make the discussion more concrete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the transnationalism of racial anthropological frameworks and its role in the understanding of human difference during India's decolonization and nation-building. With attention to the circulation of scientific objects, I focus on the practices and articulations of Irawati Karve (1905–1970), an Indian anthropologist with a transnational scientific trajectory and nationalistic political engagements. I argue that Karve's adaptation of an internationally validated German racial approach to study caste, ethnic and religious groups contributed to the further racialization of these categories as well as to the racialization of nationalistic projects in Maharashtra and India. I conclude with a reflection on the transnationalization of the coloniality of racialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Norwegian Association for Heredity Research played a key role in the rise of genetics as a research field in Norway. The immediate background of its establishment in 1919 was the need for an organization that could clarify scientific issues regarding eugenics and coordinate Norwegian representation in the organized international eugenics movement. The Association never assumed this role. Instead, Norway was represented in the international eugenics movement by the so-called Norwegian Consultative Eugenics Commission, whose leader, Jon Alfred Mjøen, was dismissed as a pseudo-scientist by Norwegian geneticists. The paper explores the Association's role in defining and delimiting scientific expert knowledge in the field of genetics and eugenics in Norway. It demonstrates how struggles about academic authority on the national arena were intertwined with struggles about representation and impact in the international eugenics movement and how transnational scientific networks where mobilized to legitimize and delegitimize notions about Nordic race supremacy, racial mixing and the politics of eugenic sterilizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transnational exchanges associated with the emergence of racial blood group studies in Greece. It explores the overlap between anthropological and medical perspectives as well as the concurrences and tensions between national and transnational concerns. By following the work of the main Greek physical anthropologist of the interwar period, the paper asks how politics interpenetrates into this case study in a scientifically consequential way and conversely how innovation in research allows anthropologists to intervene with politically timely questions. It showcases how wartime mobilities generated anthropological data that weaved and strengthened the fabric of the Greek national narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will not present a case study of the historical development of a virtual entity. Rather, I will develop an outlook on virtual entities in the sciences and propose a corresponding method for studying them (historically). In essence, my presentation can be considered a synthesis of different observations from the history and philosophy of science and has its roots in my dissertational research on the development of the virtual particle. Starting with a reflection on the role of presentism for the study of concept formation and development processes, I will show, through the example of the virtual particle, how current debates and interpretations can inform our access to a historical reconstruction. Following these reflections, I will argue for a pragmatist account of concepts as tools for the scientific practitioners. According to the approach presented in my article, concepts perform their functions through representations, and I will lay special focus on verbal representations and their different functions within scientific reasoning. In conclusion, I will frame the outcome of my discussion in terms of a proposal that might, through further research, enrich our understanding of virtual entities in the sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how scientific understanding is enhanced by virtual entities, focusing on the case of the synthetic cell. Comparing it to other virtual entities and environments in science, we argue that the synthetic cell has a virtual dimension, in that it is functionally similar to living cells, though it does not mimic any particular naturally evolved cell (nor is it constructed to do so). In being cell-like at most, the synthetic cell is akin to many other virtual objects as it is selective and only partially implemented. However, there is one important difference: it is constructed by using the same materials and, to some extent, the same kind of processes as its natural counterparts. In contrast to virtual reality, especially to that of digital entities and environments, the details of its implementation is what matters for the scientific understanding generated by the synthetic cell. We conclude by arguing for the close connection between the virtual and the artifactual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the notion of virtuality in the Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory of 1924. We situate the virtual entities of BKS within the tradition of the correspondence principle and the radiation theory of the Bohr model. We show how, in this context, virtual oscillators emerged as classical substitute radiators and were used to describe the otherwise elusive quantum transitions. They played an effective role in the quantum theory of radiation while remaining categorically distinct and ontologically separated from the quantum world of the Bohr model. The notion of virtuality thus differs markedly from its counterpart in quantum mechanics or QFT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the rise and fall of passive voice in the publications of the Royal Society from 1665 to 2020. Though it came to be seen as the very voice of scientific objectivity, passive voice remained in the clear ascendency for just over a century. The rise of passive voice coincided with the progressively diminished role of an observer who directly apprehends the world through the senses. The recent re-emergence of active voice is more of a puzzle. I argue that the unsettled history of voice reflects the unsettled relationship of science to agency and conscious experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the formative role of substances of intoxication in the social and scientific establishment of the biological subject in late nineteenth-century Germany. Sourcing the emergence of substances of intoxication as "vital substances" from Brunonianism, this narrative traces their initial significance for Romantic physiology, followed by their rejection from neo-mechanical scientific physiology. Emphasis is placed on late nineteenth-century psychological research on the effects of intoxicants on the mind as the site of a dynamic encounter between theories of the mind and the body, particularly through Kraepelin's concept of intoxication as model psychosis, and his related research. The biological subject, here, is anti-vitalistic, and, yet, conceptually distinct from neo-mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I analyze the physical content of the main information concepts in the history of physics of the last seven decades. I argue that this physical character should be evaluated not by appealing to analytical-linguistic confusion (Timpson 2013) or to the usefulness of its applicability (Lombardi et al. 2016a), but properly from its capacity to allow us to acquire significant knowledge about the physical world. After systematically employing this epistemic criterion of physical significance I will conclude by rejecting the main strategies of ontological inflation and physical content of the main information concepts in the classical thermal physics literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a range of peace process scenarios, the expert's knowledge has become a fundamental tool for generating information systems as a mechanism for the storage and circulation of data. These information artifacts are supposed to faithfully document situations of human rights violations and contribute to the design of public policy and the construction of collective memory. Following Latour's (1993) original coinage of the term coproduction, this paper analyzes how the Inter-Institutional System of Information for Justice and Peace (SIIJYP) was designed to define victims of war and means of reparation from the State in Colombia. From an actor network theory perspective, we explain how victimizers become the main beneficiaries of the application of the SIIJYP. To comprehend this unintended social impact of the technological artifact and how it becomes an artifact that functions as an aseptic mediator of the historical-judicial truth, and the policy of transitional justice, we examine the relations between human and nonhuman actors, how information is collected, organized, hierarchized, and negotiated, as well as the consequences of the technical and legal construction of the notion of victims of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to some authors, Latour's attention to politics during the last decades is the result of his proposing a different approach to politics that entails, with respect to his overall project, one of two situations. Either his epistemological proposal has suffered a "normative turn"—which necessarily breaks with the previous assumptions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT); or, if ANT's view on technosciences remains valid, his political proposal becomes not possible as a new normative approach. In this paper, I will focus on the critique voiced by John Law, as well as Graham Harman. I will argue that this is a false dilemma because there has not been a change in Latour's conceptual basis, nor a lack of coherence within his thought that would undermine the democratic commitment of his Political Epistemology. I will justify this by exposing the fact that Latour's overall project, as part of Science Studies, has not lately followed a "political" but an "ontological" turn, which has been underling his works since the very beginning of ANT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Science Is Politics By Other Means" (SIPBOM) was coined in The Pasteurization of France, Latour's 1984 empirical study of the birth of microbiology. Yet, it encapsulates an outstanding political theory of science that Latour has never formalized and that has remained unnoticed to this day. The theory is comprised of two dimensions. The first one is the ontological labor performed by science, that is, the laboratory production of new nonhumans. The second one is the ability of science to devise and implement novel policies targeted at the new beings it produces. These "other means" are incorporated in political projects and contribute to the shaping of society. Fifteen years later, Latour published Politics of Nature ([1999] 2004), a full-blown political treatise equally devoted to the political character of science. It would be mistaken, however, to assume that it falls in the same SIPBOM paradigm as the Pasteur study. The compositionist theory it offers redefines politics as the institution of the nonhumans that make up external reality, a task that has traditionally been monopolized by Science. In this sense, "science is politics by other means" has become "politics is science by other means," these "other means" now referring to "cosmopolitics," that is, the due process advocated by compositionism. The first claim of the present paper is that the respective weight ascribed to politics and ontology is different in The Pasteurization of France and in Politics of Nature. The second claim is that compositionism is not as successful as Latour's early theory to account for the politicity of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes new ways of characterizing eighteenth-century French Cartesianism. Besides two widely-accepted elements—the belief in "strict mechanism" and the idea that to demonstrate in physics does not involve mathematics, but reference to mechanical models—I add two more, hitherto neglected, features. First, a strong emphasis on experimentalism, namely the view that experiments are crucial to natural-philosophical practice. Second, an epistemological thesis that I call "conjecturalism," which consists in doubting that natural philosophy would attain an ultimate truth on the nature of things. To explore these facets of Cartesianism, I focus on the works of the Jesuit Noël Regnault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causes of tidal motions were widely debated from antiquity up to the eighteenth century. These discussions got a second wind in the early modern period, in the wake of a growing number of cosmological alternatives that challenged the dominant Aristotelian-Ptolemaic stance. The 1687 publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica was a defining moment in the discussions and consequently made universal gravitation the most credible and generally accepted explanation. This paper investigates the aftermath of Newton's discovery and demonstrates how his understanding of tidal motion crowded out competing theories within a broader European context. My main point of reference is Roger Boscovich's De aestu maris (1747). In his work, the leading Jesuit scholar of the time contrasted Newton's interpretation to those of other major authorities, namely Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and René Descartes, and went on to claim the superiority of the British scientist's achievements over anything written prior to the Principia. As this essay argues, alongside a significant body of literature produced under the umbrella of the Jesuit order, Boscovich's De aestu maris subsequently contributed to the formation of the popular image of Newton as a "scientific hero." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the least common, yet predictable astronomical occurrences, the transits of Venus were to become among the most keenly anticipated events for early modern cosmologists. Basing himself on Johannes Kepler's Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627), former Cambridge student Jeremiah Horrocks (1616–1641) made the first recorded observation of a transit from Much Hoole, Lancashire in 1639. Alongside the description of his observations, Horrocks' Venus in sole visa contains four poems alongside the work's prose descriptions, figures, and tables. His verses call on the long tradition of Latin scientific poetry employed for the predictable purposes of eulogy and homage, but they also serve to justify and clarify the author's position on scientific issues of his time. Despite the long-recognized importance of Horrocks' observations, his hexameter compositions have been largely ignored in later scholarship. In the latest translation of the Venus in sole visa (2012), one poem—the longest and arguably the best—is omitted altogether. This paper offers a study of Horrocks' Latin poetry, his models and engagement with its subject matter. It reveals Horrocks' efforts to promote his predecessors' achievements, his position on questions central to the debates of his time, and the claims for authority he made for the work of others, as well as for his own. The present article also includes a new, modern translation of Horrocks' longest, and recently forgotten poem as an appendix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer models and simulations have become, since the 1960s, an essential instrument for scientific inquiry and political decision making in several fields, from climate to life and social sciences. Philosophical reflection has mainly focused on the ontological status of the computational modeling, on its epistemological validity and on the research practices it entails. But in computational sciences, the work on models and simulations are only two steps of a longer and richer process where operations on data are as important as, and even more time and energy-consuming than modeling itself. Drawing on two study cases—computational embryology and computational epidemiology—this article contributes to filling the gap by focusing on the operations of producing and re-using data in computational sciences. The different phases of the scientific and artisanal work of modelers include data collection, aggregation, homogenization, assemblage, analysis and visualization. The article deconstructs the ideas that data are self-evident informational aggregates and that data-driven approaches are exempted from theoretical work. More importantly, the paper stresses the fact that data are constructed and theory laden not only in their fabrication, but also in their reusing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of science communication is plagued by challenges. Communicators face the difficulty of responding to unjustified public skepticism over issues like climate change and COVID-19 while also acknowledging the fallibility and limitations of scientific knowledge. Our goal in this paper is to suggest a new model for science communication that can help foster more productive, respectful relationships among all those involved in science communication. Inspired by the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, we develop an experience model, according to which science communication consists in people's experiences with science and the meanings they develop from those experiences. Three principles are central to the model: experience is cumulative, context matters, and audiences have agency. We argue that this model has significant implications both for communication research and practice, which we illustrate by applying it to the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy. We show how science communicators can help to identify and alleviate structural factors that contribute to skepticism as well as fostering opportunities for meaning making around shared experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of moral uncertainty in explaining the morally disruptive character of new technologies. We argue that existing accounts of technomoral change do not fully explain its disruptiveness. This explanatory gap can be bridged by examining the epistemic dimensions of technomoral change, focusing on moral uncertainty and inquiry. To develop this account, we examine three historical cases: the introduction of the early pregnancy test, the contraception pill, and brain death. The resulting account highlights what we call "differential disruption" and provides a resource for fields such as technology assessment, ethics of technology, and responsible innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing success of the evidence-based policy movement is raising the demand of empirically informed decision making. As arguably any policy decision happens under conditions of uncertainty, following our best available evidence to reduce the uncertainty seems a requirement of good decision making. However, not all the uncertainty faced by decision makers can be resolved by evidence. In this paper, we build on a philosophical analysis of uncertainty to identify the boundaries of scientific advice in policy decision making. We start by introducing a distinction between empirical and non-empirical types of uncertainty, and we explore the role of two non-empirical uncertainties in the context of policy making. We argue that the authority of scientific advisors is limited to empirical uncertainty and cannot extend beyond it. While the appeal of evidence-based policy rests on a view of scientific advice as limited to empirical uncertainty, in practice there is a risk of over reliance on experts beyond the legitimate scope of their authority. We conclude by applying our framework to a real-world case of evidence-based policy, where experts have overstepped their boundaries by ignoring non-empirical types of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows the journey of two small fluid units throughout the nineteenth century in Anglo-American medicine and pharmacy, explaining how the non-uniform "drop" survived while the standardized minim became obsolete. I emphasize two roles these units needed to fulfill: that of a physical measuring device, and that of a rhetorical communication device. First, I discuss the challenges unique to measuring small amounts of fluid, outlining how the modern medicine dropper developed out of an effort to resolve problems with the "minimometer," which measured minims. Second, I explain how drops, utilized in "the open drop method" of administering general anesthesia, effectively communicated a gradual process and epistemically valuable heuristic to the audience of practitioners, whose attention to individual medical outcomes was important for verifying the proper dosage. The standardized minim was never able to achieve success as the drop's intended replacement; the non-uniform drop better served the relevant epistemic goals within the practical contexts for which these units were designed. The surprising historical trajectory of drops should cause us to question the common equivocation of "standardization" with "progress" in the history and philosophy of measurement. This study also exemplifies how examining non-standard measurement practices can be instructive for better understanding the role and function of standardization within epistemology of measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measurement results are stated in terms of sentences ascribing measured values, as obtained via measurement processes, to measurands, as defined by measuring agents. Since both the definition of the measurands and the characterization of the processes depend on models constructed on the basis of relevant theories, the issue arises of the theory dependence of the truth of those sentences. This paper aims at assessing the question by introducing suitable distinctions about the sense and reference of the terms used to refer to individual and general quantities, in a framework where measurement is construed as an agent-dependent, model-based, purpose-driven activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the mechanisms of knowledge production of twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology. How robotics influences investigations into the structure, development, and change of organic forms? Which definition of form is presupposed by this new approach to the study of form? I answer these questions by investigating how robots are used to understand and generate new questions about the locomotion of extinct animals in the first case study and in high-performance fishes in the second case study. After having illustrated the landscape of twentieth-century morphology, I will reflect on the definition of form adopted in twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology as well as on the differences between this approach to the study of form and the so-called nature-inspired disciplines, such as bionics or biomimetics. In the conclusion, I suggest that we are now in a material turn in morphology, characterized by the coexistence of the robotic, the virtual, and the real, which enables an understanding of how the structures and dynamics of shapes change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Form follows function, but it does not follow from function. Form is not derivable from the latter. To realize a desired technical function, a form must first be found that is able to realize it at all. Secondly, the question arises as to whether an envisaged form realizes the function in an appropriate way. Functions are multiply realizable—various different forms can bear the very same function. One needs to find a form of a technical artifact that realizes an envisaged function sufficiently efficient, robust, or whatever criteria might be imposed. This paper scrutinizes biomimetics as one way to find a good solution to the realization problem. Drawing on an approach from the philosophy of simulations, it reconstructs the biomimetic relation as being mediated by a theoretical model. It is shown that the robustness of the functioning system is usually reached in different ways in biological and in technological systems, which explains differences in morphogenetic mechanisms or principles found in these fields. This reconstruction helps to understand problems with robustness in synthetic biology that occur when technical design principles are implemented in a biological system. The mimetic relation between the biological and the technical realm is found to be asymmetric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether "biomimetic" or "bioinspired," the projects of bioengineering tend to refer their devices or inventions to the biological systems that provide models or originals for detachable functionalities. And yet, they do not satisfy the picturing relation of original and copy. They are mimetic or imitative in the sense of reenacting a function in a different setting with its own principles of composition or its own parameters that select for salience. The taking up of salient features for the purposes of producing a performance of functionality results not in the copy of an original but in its parody. Parodies are not judged for their veracity but for their effectiveness. They have a heuristic value in the context of design and for knowing the world through making and building. In somewhat experimental fashion, this paper seeks to develop a vocabulary for the parodistic qualities of Synthetic Biology, genome editing, or other bioengineering practices. In order to do so, it introduces categories from aesthetics to qualify modeling relations, one of these categories being the notion of "parody" itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thus, the concept of normative uncertainty involves value-based considerations in those aspects of decision-making related to epistemology, ethics, law, and planning. As such, philosophy has much to add to our understanding of future risks in science and technology and, more specifically, the role of uncertainties. In this Special Issue, we will focus on the class that Rumsfeld calls I unknown unknowns i . This Special Issue titled "Severe Uncertainty in Science, Medicine and Technology" aims to shed new light on the understanding of severe uncertainty and its multifaceted implications. [Extracted from the article]

Explanation is commonly considered one of the central goals of science. Although computer simulations have become an important tool in many scientific areas, various philosophical concerns indicate that their explanatory power requires further scrutiny. We examine a case study in which atomistic simulations have been used to examine the factors responsible for the transport selectivity of certain channel proteins located at cell membranes. By elucidating how precisely atomistic simulations helped scientists draw inferences about the molecular system under investigation, we respond to some concerns regarding their explanatory power. We argue that atomistic simulations can be tools for managing molecular complexity and for systematically assessing how the occurrence of the explanandum is sensitive to a range of factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chemistry is engaged with a subject that is not static but evolving in time, in chemical space, namely, the collection of all substances and reactions reported over time. If we accept that premise, we can identify the path dependencies and self-reinforcing mechanisms that determined its current space and selected it across historical alternatives. In particular, data analysis allows us to identify two crucial turning points. One was the introduction of structural theory in 1860, the other a technological shift around 1980. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I discuss a particular aspect of the Dutch reception of the ideas of René Descartes, namely the use of his Traité de l'homme by Henricus Regius. I analyze the use that Regius made of the theory of the movement of muscles, passions, hunger, and more generally of the neurophysiology expounded by Descartes in his book (not printed until 1662–1664). In my analysis, I reconstruct the internal evolution of Regius's neurophysiology, I illustrate its sources beyond Descartes (i.e., Jean Fernel and Santorio Santorio), and I show that he was certainly acquainted with some of its contents as early as 1641 (when he used it with the mediation of Descartes), before relying on it—as variously discussed in secondary literature—in his Fundamenta physices (1646), when he appropriated from it without Descartes's authorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complexity sciences have become famous worldwide thanks to several popular books that served as echo chambers of their promises. These consisted in departing from "classical science" defined as deterministic, reductionist, analytic and mono-disciplinary. Their founders and supporters declared that complexity sciences were going to give rise (or that they have given rise) to a post-Laplacian, antireductionist, holistic and interdisciplinary approach. By taking a closer look at their content and practices, I argue in this article that, because of their physics-oriented, computationalist, and mathematical assumptions, complexity sciences have paradoxically produced knowledge at odds with these four tenets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed co-citation patterns in 332,498 articles published in Anglophone psychology journals between 1946 and 1990 to estimate (1) when cognitive psychology first emerged as a clearly delineated subdiscipline, (2) how fast it grew, (3) to what extent it replaced other (e.g., behaviorist) approaches to psychology, (4) to what degree it was more appealing to scholars from a younger generation, and (5) whether it was more interdisciplinary than alternative traditions. We detected a major shift in the structure of co-citation networks between approximately 1955 and 1975 and draw novel conclusions about the developments commonly referred to as "the cognitive turn." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Hypernormal science" has minimal potential for contestation on matters of principle and practice so that information exchange can be unproblematic. Sciences comprise hypernormal domains and more contestable "normal" domains where knowledge diffusion, like acquiring linguistic fluency, depends on face-to-face interaction. Hypernormal domains belonging to molecular biology are contrasted with normal domains in gravitational wave detection physics. Sciences as a whole should not be confused with their typical domains. The analysis has immediate implications for proposed transitions out of the Covid-19 lockdown, proposed solutions to the replication crisis, and, perhaps, our understanding of the early development of social studies of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In philosophy of science, abstraction tends to be subsumed under representation, often being described as the omission of a target's features when it is represented. This approach to abstraction sidesteps cognitive aspects of abstraction processes. However, cognitive aspects of abstraction are important in understanding the role of historically grounded epistemic criteria supporting modeling in science. Drawing on recent work on the relation between metaphor and abstraction, we introduce the concept of paths of abstraction, and use historical and contemporary examples to point to their role in guiding the development of relevance criteria which support modeling strategies in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]