This paper proposes a solution to a puzzle regarding when people switch from one skilled area of specialization to another, in which they have had little training. Certain analogies between the previous area and the area switched to enable this. I use Susan Carey as an example.

Baumard proposes that life history slowing in populations over time is the principal driver of innovation rates. We show that this is only true of micro-innovation rates, which reflect cognitive and economic specialization as an adaptation to high population density, and not macro-innovation rates, which relate more to a population's level of general intelligence.

An advanced degree in criminal justice can open doors far outside traditional criminal justice practice, making it a highly in-demand course. This current study aimed to assess the viability of J.H. Cerilles State College to offer a Master of Science in Criminal Justice with Specialization in Criminology (MSCJ) in 2021. A descriptive survey type of research was employed as the methodology for this study. The 215 respondents from students, graduates, and professionals in the field from private and government (...) institutions were chosen via random sampling to answer the online survey questionnaire. Management viability, market viability, operation viability, location viability, and industry viability were all evaluated. There was evidence to suggest that offering MSCJ in the college is doable, provided that the curriculum will be tailored to account for community needs and industry demands. In meeting future demand for this field of study, constant improvements in school facilities, instruction, research, and extension should be made. The methodology utilized in this study can be replicated in a future feasibility assessment, which may also include other areas that were not covered in this study. (shrink)

We review evidence for multifaceted functional specialization of somatosensory information processing, both within and outside classical somatosensory cortex. We argue that the nature of such specialization has not yet been clarified adequately to regard the proposed action/perception dichotomy as being established. However, we believe this is a good working hypothesis that can motivate further work.

A study of the relationship of trends towards specialization and universalization of scientific knowledge is most fruitful when sociological and epistemological methods are compared. Sociological methods describe the growth of scientific knowledge quantitatively as an increase in volume, whereas epistemological methods do it qualitatively in terms of an increase in the level of generalization. The sociological explanation of the specialization of researchers is based on the limited resources of the study time, the epistemological explanation of the differentiation of (...) disciplines is in the ontological differences of the objects of research. On the contrary, epistemological universalization – the formulation of generalizing theories is conditioned by the social need to ensure the connectivity of the network of technical practices. The history of the development of natural sciences shows a tendency towards absorption of the less developed paradigms by more developed ones. In other words, scientific knowledge increases cumulatively both in quantitative and qualitative terms. (shrink)

While the history of science in Polish language has a long history, both intellectual and institutional, it became less visible internationally following the fall of the Iron Curtain. This article looks into the institutional state of history-of-science writing in Poland, and discusses several key focal points that emerged in recent years. By distinguishing between the core history of science, written at institutions devoted to this discipline, and broader academic discussions concerning science's past, I claim that, in (...) recent decades, more important topical and theoretical innovation has come from what we can term the “esoteric” circle (referring to Ludwik Fleck)—that is, scholars who do not identify themselves as historians of science. Given that those scholars from abroad who are interested in Polish history of science are in fact general historians, we get a strong impression that we are witnessing a deeper turn in the field, one with diminishing specialization and greater attention paid to situating science in a broader range of societal processes. (shrink)

The famous gulf between the arts and the sciences comes from the current pervasiveness of scientific illiteracy. The resultant increased fragmentation of science threatens scientific research; the resultant increase of the portion of the population of the advanced world that shows general ignorance of science threatens Western culture and democracy, and thus science itself. Historians and popularizers of science can help reduce this gulf. Introducing science historically can help solve many acute social and political problems. (...) Historians of science can try to bring this about. Discussions of the social role of intellectuals require a great deal of a sense of proportion, since most people are still barely educated, hardly familiar with science, much less with its history. Science nonetheless influences lives. Current increased inaccessibility of science boosts the prevailing excessive scientific specialization that scientific and technological progress have imposed. Consequently, the search diminishes severely for comprehensive overviews of the world and even of specific parts of it, leading to disorientation that imperils even the normal functioning of science. There is then a vital need for a search for remedy. Philosophers and historians and popularizers of science can help develop the tools necessary for this vital search. (shrink)

In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved in (...) such a transition. I will clarify the role of the scientific community in revolutionary changes and characterize the incommensurability across specialties as possessing both semantic and methodological aspects. The discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA will serve both as an illustration of my main argument and as reply to one criticism raised against Kuhn—namely, that his model cannot capture cases of revolutionary yet non-disruptive episodes of scientific progress. Revisiting Kuhn’s ideas on specialization will shed new light on some often overlooked features of scientific change. (shrink)

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works of (...) Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

Both in the bibliography and in the citation in the text, Michelle Gibbons’ article below has been mistakenly attributed to “Gibson.” The proper reference to the article should be: Gibbons, M.. Reassessing discovery: Rosalind Franklin, scientific visualization, and the structure of DNA. _Philosophy of Science, 79_, 63–80.

(1994). Annex: The survey questionnaires. World Futures: Vol. 39, The Evolution of European Identity: Surveys of the Growing Edge A Report by the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 161-164.

The Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences (FWS) graduate program at Virginia Tech held a student-led, discussion-based, 9-week seminar in the philosophy of science during the fall 1999 semester. This seminar presented the sociologist of science with the opportunity to investigate questions such as, How does a contemporary scientific discipline use the philosophy of science? What do scientists hope to gain from an understanding of demarcation issues? And how do they perceive themselves as a science? Issues (...) of demarcation between science and pseudo-science are prevalent in FWS. The role of public funding is at the forefront of the department’s concerns, as governmental agencies are responsible, to a dominant degree, for funding research that the public assumes will benefit them. Thus, the concerns of the department are of utility, or the perception thereof. An investigation of the sort proposed here is practical yet restrictive. The topics are preselected and noncomprehensive because the seminar organizers in FWS chose select readings pertinent to their discipline. Discussions revolved around such topics as the definition of science, methodology, credibility, specialization within FWS, the value (or lack thereof) of theory in FWS, the manager-scientist distinction, and the use of models. The intent of this article is to provide a brief ethnographic view of the seminar. It will review some of the seminar topics and relate them to the broader issue of scientific self-definition and the concept of science as a social mechanism. It is not an evaluative article about FWS but a descriptive article about how a scientific discipline regards itself. (shrink)

Is the objective that the European Union set itself in 2000, that is, to be -the most competitive knowledge-based society and economy- by 2010 still realistic? The momentous year has arrived, but it is discouraging to note that very few steps have been made in the direction that was fixed. What has gone wrong? Were the philosophical, epistemological and economic conditions adequate to achieve the desired result? This book the result of a research project commissioned by the European Commission critically (...) investigates the society of knowledge and the way in which the European Union has proceeded towards it, examining first of all the premises and the contributions that the disciplines of Science and Technological Studies can provide. In this way, we have proposed innovative theoretical and epistemological bases for a multidisciplinary approach making use of the Modelling Approach to Science and therefore insisting on the function that human sciences can have for a society of knowledge that hinges not so much on an industrialist scenario, but a humanist one that eschews hyper-specialization and instead privileges creativity, flexibility, imagination and innovation economy.". (shrink)

This chapter discusses Kuhn’s conception of the history of science by focussing on two respects in which Kuhn is an historicist historian and philosopher of science. I identify two distinct, but related, aspects of historicism in the work of Hegel and show how these are also found in Kuhn’s work. First, Kuhn held tradition to be important for understanding scientific change and that the tradition from which a scientific idea originates must be understood in evaluating that idea. This (...) makes Kuhn a historicist in a sense we may call conservative. Secondly, Kuhn held that there is a pattern to the development of science. In the light of the fact that he held scientific change to be law-like, we can call this second aspect of Kuhn’s historicism determinist. I discuss the relationship of Kuhn’s historicist historiography to the philosophical purposes he had for his history of science, namely to refute a conception of scientific progress as driven towards increasing truth by something like ‘the scientific method’. I argue that while this determinism refutes certain positivist conceptions of scientific change, it also requires internalism—the view that the causes of scientific change come from within science, not from outside. Consequently, Kuhn’s historiography of science contrasts with that implicit in much of post-Kuhnian science studies. (shrink)

This paper challenges the first Gettier counterexample to the tripartite account of knowledge. Noting that 'the man who will get the job' is a description and invoking Donnellan's distinction between their 'referential' and 'attributive' uses, I argue that Smith does not actually believe that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. Smith's ignorance about who will get the job shows that the belief cannot be understood referentially, his ignorance of the coins in his pocket (...) shows that it cannot be understood attributively. An explanation for why Smith appeared to have justified true belief is given by distinguishing between 'belief' and 'belief in truth'. Smith believes the sentence 'the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket' to be true (he mistakenly believes that Jones will get the job, of whom he knows that he has ten coins in his pocket) (hence his 'belief'), the sentence is true (hence 'truth'), and he has sufficient reason to assent to it (hence his 'justification'). But he does not believe the proposition expressed. Hence he does not know it either. (shrink)

This text addresses the problems of complex systems in understanding natural phenomena and the behaviour of systems related to human activity, from a science and humanities perspective. It discusses molecular behaviour and structures, and offers examples of ecological and environmental modelling.

The detailed analysis allows to discern seven kinds of integration, namely: I₁ consisting in the synthesis of scientific disciplines from their elements, including disciplinary unification I₁; I₂ inclusion of a science in (reduction to) another, more general; I₃ - links between different sciences, especially establishing of common elements; I₄ - interdisciplines bridging various sciences; I₅ - combination of two (or more) disciplines into a new (complex) science; I₆ - a general approach to several domains or multidisciplinary unification; I₇ (...) - transdisciplinary sciences about relations of the same type in various traditional domains. These kinds of integration are interwoven with processes of differentiation, viz. D₁ - internal differentiation of the sciences resulting of I₁; D₂ - interdisciplinary differentiation concomitant I₄, and D₃ - specialization of I₇ sciences in several sections. As a result integration and differentiation are combined in the pairs I₁ - D₁, I₇ - D₃, and D₂ - I₄. The processes of integration (and differentiation) may be presented schematically in the following (not strictly isolated one of another) sequence: in the 17th century started I₁ followed by D₁, and in the last decades by I₁'; during the 18th and the 19th c. cases of I₂ and I₃ appear; I₄ (together with D₂) is unfolding since the late 19th century. Finally, I₇ (and D₃), as well as I₅ and I₆ pertain to the latter half of our century. Representative are for one thing I₁, I₄, and I₇ outlining the main stages of integration and at the same time connected with respective kinds of differentiation. (shrink)

In the modern knowledge society there is a high need for highly qualified scientists and engineers. At the same time the conditions of the consumer society reduce the prestige of intellectual activity, which becomes one of many ordinary goods. There is also a sharp contradiction between the growing specialization and differentiation in the sciences, on the one hand, and everyday consciousness, on the other, which falls behind the scientific advances. One of the urgent tasks of scientific policy, therefore, is (...) to eliminate dangerous gaps between science as a social institution and the modern society. This policy must be directed towards the integration of science into a cultural society and ensuring personnel reproduction in science by creating new tools (social and human technologies) – special types of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary trading zones. Currently, this type of social technology is not developed in Russia; underdeveloped are the scientific methods of their design as well. It is expected that scientific and techno-social filling of the gaps will take place by developing methods of research, modeling and design of trading zones on the basis of critical social epistemology (S. Fuller, I. Kasavin), history and sociology of science (P. Galison, H. Collins). (shrink)

This article has two objectives: the first, to analyze the professionalization process of assisted reproduction (AR) in order to see how AR is consolidating into an independent field within medicine, and the second, to see how AR arrived and was assimilated into Mexican culture. As opposed to other projects that have traced back the story of a particular specialty to see how it emerged as such, this article looks at an ongoing process: specialization in action. By analyzing the data (...) collected through three years of multisited ethnography using tools offered by the sociology of professions and the history of medical specialization, I identify specific moments in which AR is gaining cognitive, normative, and evaluative consolidation, structure, and independence. This leads me to suggest that AR might separate from gynecology and become an independent specialty within medicine. I offer examples to support this argument and show how AR has developed into a biomedical service, a professional biomedical field, and a biomedical business. (shrink)

The only complete study of Buber as a political thinker. Shed new light upon Buber's I Thou, while also attempting to understand Buber's Zionist thought and activity in a new and fresh manner.

Commentators have often complained about specialization in the history of science. This essay discusses recent intellectual trends within our discipline in the light of significant changes in graduate training: both a relatively recent consensus as to the types of sources that are appropriate to analyze in a dissertation and the tremendous growth in the number of new dissertations completed each year in our field. It suggests that this kind of focus on pedagogical concerns provides useful analytic tools for (...) historians investigating other fields in various times and places. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to trace the integration of education, science and production through the development of regional cluster policy. At the present stage of development of postindustrial society in the global economy, the processes of globalization and specialization of national markets significantly increase competition between countries, between regions and between producers within the country. In these circumstances, the state authorities of the Russian Federation, while maintaining global leadership in the energy sector, define as long-term development (...) goals of the country, the creation of a competitive economy based on knowledge and high technologies. Following this doctrine in the Russian regions in the period from 2012 to 2014 cluster policy is implemented on the basis of Federal and regional innovation strategies. An important role in this process belongs to the activities of leading higher educational institutions - national research universities, which contribute to stimulate an active scientific activity of students and the introduction of scientific achievements into production. One of the pilot cluster projects, funded by the Federal budget became the territorial cluster ‘ Pharmaceutics, medical technology and information technology ‘ formed in the Tomsk region with a unique starting opportunities for the development of sustainable regional innovation system is a developed scientific and educational complex, small and medium-sized innovative enterprises with the latest technological developments in pharmaceuticals and medical technology. In two years, the activity cluster, implemented with the financial support of public authorities, has been successful. In the future, there are plans to expand the range of pharmaceutical products and the collaboration with other clusters Tomsk. Cluster policy contributes to the emergence of stakeholders and large economic enterprises, thus providing a close relationship between science, business and regional authorities. (shrink)

The traditional verbal/nonverbal dichotomy is inadequate for completely describing cerebral lateralization. Musical functions are not necessarily mediated by the right hemisphere; evidence for a specialist left-hemisphere mechanism dedicated to the encoded speech signal is weakening, and the right hemisphere possesses considerable comprehensional powers. Right-hemisphere processing is often said to be characterized by holistic or gestalt apprehension, and face recognition may be mediated by this hemisphere partly because of these powers, partly because of the right hemisphere's involvement in emotional affect, and (...) possibly through the hypothesized existence of a specialist face processor or processors in the right. The latter hypothesis may, however, suffer the same fate as the one relating to a specialist encodedness processor for speech in the left. Verbal processing is largely the province of the left because of this hemisphere's possession of sequential, analytic, time-dependent mechanisms. Other distinctions are special cases of an analytic/holistic dichotomy. More fundamentally, however, the left hemisphere is characterized by its mediation of discriminations involving duration, temporal order, sequencing, and rhythm, at thesensory level, and especially at themotorlevel. Spatial aspects characterize the right, the mapping of exteroceptive body space, and the positions of fingers, limbs, and perhaps articulators, with respect to actual and target positions. Thus there is a continuum of function between the hemispheres, rather than a rigid dichotomy, the differences being quantitative rather than qualitative, of degree rather than of kind. (shrink)

The watershed for the latter discipline was the establishment of the Hegelian philosophy, with its thesis that the history of philosophy was philosophy itself. Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy appeared posthumously but his influence was already confirmed. The first really inclusive history of science which is of more than antiquarian interest, William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences, was published almost simultaneously in 1837. For Whewell as well as for Hegel, history and philosophy were connected; Whewell's History (...) was written in close relation to his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, which he in one place called the "moral" of the other work. Surveying the astonishing advances of science, especially in the previous century and a half, he expressly aimed to clarify the method responsible for them. Philosophically, he was a curious hybrid between Kant and Francis Bacon, seeing in scientific development the progressive articulation of certain a priori "Ideas." But despite these early and vigorous beginnings, the study of the history of science has generally lagged behind that of its sister study, perhaps because the impetus of scientific expansion and specialization has discouraged scientists from examination of their own intellectual antecedents, and at the same time has debarred non-scientists from sufficient technical understanding to perform the task adequately. The edges of the old wound between the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften healed apart rather than together, to the detriment of both. (shrink)

Democracy has been a flawed hegemony since the fall of communism. Its flexibility, its commitment to equality of representation, and its recognition of the legitimacy of opposition politics are all positive features for political institutions. But democracy has many deficiencies: it is all too easily held hostage by powerful interests; it often fails to advance social justice; and it does not cope well with a number of features of the political landscape, such as political identities, boundary disputes, and environmental crises. (...) Although democracy is valuable it fits uneasily with other political values and is in many respects less than equal to the demands it confronts. In this volume prominent political theorists and social scientists present original discussions of such central issues. Democracy's Values deals with the nature and value of democracy, particularly the tensions between it and such goods as justice, equality, efficiency, and freedom. (shrink)

As a theoretical framework in the Science and Technology Studies (sts) scholarship, the sociotechnical imaginaries approach (sta) has provided a conceptual framework and methodology that not only overcome the deterministic understanding of technological development but also theorized the relationship between society on the one hand, and science and technology on the other. However, as will be pointed out, a limitation of the sta renders it incapable of problematizing what I will call as the technopolitics of specialization, defined (...) as the organization of unequal positions based on the capitalist centers’ control over techno-epistemic networks set against the backdrop of a neocolonial relation. Such an incapacity glosses over the persistence of neocolonialism and dependency especially in the Global South. -/- This paper aims to reimagine the theoretical framework of the sociotechnical imaginaries by developing a critical review of its approach. The paper will place in dialogue the most recent and relevant conceptual developments of the sta and the dependency theory of Samir Amin. The paper will present how the most relevant literature concerning the sta work on the assumption that every polity has control over existing techno-epistemic networks from which imaginaries are independently defined. The paper will argue that given the notion of international specialization developed by Samir Amin and presupposed today in the sta, the technopolitics of specialization monopolizes control of the techno-epistemic networks thereby constraining the imaginaries of peripheral countries. (shrink)

Scientific networks are often investigated by means of citation analyses. Yet, interpretation of such networks in terms of semantic (and often disciplinary) content heavily depends on supplementary knowledge, notably about author research specialties. Similar situations arise more generally in many types of social networks whose semantic interpretation relies on supplementary information. Here, author community net-works are inferred from a topic model which provides direct insights into the semantic specificity of the identified “hidden communities of interest” (HCoI). Using a philosophy of (...) science corpus of full-text articles (N=16,917), we investigate its underlying communities by measuring topic profile correlations be-tween authors. A diachronic perspective is built by modeling the research networks over different time-periods and mapping genealogical relationships be-tween communities. The results show a marked in-crease in philosophy of science communities over time and trace the progressive appearance of the specialization areas that structure the field today. (shrink)