"Clifford was famous for his public lectures on physics and math and ethics because he explained complex things with easily understood, concrete examples. As you read through his clear, simple explanations of the true bases of number, algebra and geometry you will find yourself getting angry and saying "Why the hell wasn't I taught math this way?" and "Do math ed professors know so little mathematics that they have never heard of Clifford.?" Clifford was destined to be England's Einstein until (...) his untimely death at the age of 34, just 11 days before Einstein's birth. More than 30 years before the Special Theory of Relativity was proposed he had already concluded that the force of gravity was actually due to changes in the curvature of space. He gives explanatory examples in this book that middle school children can understand."--review on Amazon.com viewed July 6, 2020. (shrink)

This special issue should go a long way towards increasing the understanding of Peirce’s semeiotic and its applicability for solving problems in legal studies. In fact, the New Science of Semiotics should result in developing a rigorous and systematic methodology for legal studies making it a true semiotic science which I suggest calling “jurisology.”.

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

This paper shows how Peirce's semeiotic could be turned into a powerful science. The New Science of Semiotics provides not only a new paradigm and an empirical justification for all these applications, but also a rational and systematic procedure for carrying them out as well. Thus the New Science of Semiotics transforms the philosophy of law into the science of legal scholarship, the discipline that I call jurisology.

In this study, we developed and validated an instrument that researchers can use to measure the collective effort of principals and teachers who excise their own unique leadership to genera...

There are two motivations commonly ascribed to historical actors for taking up statistics: to reduce complicated data to a mean value (e.g., Quetelet), and to take account of diversity (e.g., Galton). Different motivations will, it is assumed, lead to different methodological decisions in the practice of the statistical sciences. Karl Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon are generally seen as following directly in Galton’s footsteps. I argue for two related theses in light of this standard interpretation, based on a (...) reading of several sources in which Weldon, independently of Pearson, reflects on his own motivations. First, while Pearson does approach statistics from this "Galtonian" perspective, he is, consistent with his positivist philosophy of science, utilizing statistics to simplify the highly variable data of biology. Weldon, on the other hand, is brought to statistics by a rich empiricism and a desire to preserve the diversity of biological data. Secondly, we have here a counterexample to the claim that divergence in motivation will lead to a corresponding separation in methodology. Pearson and Weldon, despite embracing biometry for different reasons, settled on precisely the same set of statistical tools for the investigation of evolution. (shrink)

The idea of ‘reversion’ or ‘atavism’ has a peculiar history. For many authors in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – including Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Weismann, and Spencer, among others – reversion was one of the central phenomena which a theory of heredity ought to explain. By only a few decades later, however, Fisher and others could look back upon reversion as a historical curiosity, a non-problem, or even an impediment to clear theorizing. I explore various reasons that reversion might (...) have appeared to be a central problem for this first group of figures, focusing on their commitment to a variety of conceptual features of evolutionary theory; discuss why reversion might have then ceased to be an interesting phenomenon; and, finally, close with some more general thoughts about the death of scientific problems. (shrink)

The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic explores a pivotal conceptual moment in the history of evolutionary theory: the development of its extensive reliance on a wide array of concepts of chance. It tells the history of a methodological and conceptual development that reshaped our approach to natural selection over a century, ranging from Darwin’s earliest notebooks in the 1830s to the early years of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s. Far from being a “pompous (...) parade of arithmetic,” as one early critic argued, evolution transformed during this period to make these conceptual and technical tools indispensable. This book charts the role of chance in evolutionary theory from its beginnings to the earliest days of modern evolutionary theory, making it an ideal resource for evolutionary biologists, historians, philosophers, and researchers in science studies or biological statistics. (shrink)

Work throughout the history and philosophy of biology frequently employs ‘chance’, ‘unpredictability’, ‘probability’, and many similar terms. One common way of understanding how these concepts were introduced in evolution focuses on two central issues: the first use of statistical methods in evolution (Galton), and the first use of the concept of “objective chance” in evolution (Wright). I argue that while this approach has merit, it fails to fully capture interesting philosophical reflections on the role of chance expounded by two of (...) Galton's students, Karl Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon. Considering a question more familiar from contemporary philosophy of biology—the relationship between our statistical theories of evolution and the processes in the world those theories describe—is, I claim, a more fruitful way to approach both these two historical actors and the broader development of chance in evolution. (shrink)

Volume 8 of this landmark edition follows Peirce from May 1890 through July 1892—a period of turmoil as his career unraveled at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. The loss of his principal source of income meant the beginning of permanent penury and a lifelong struggle to find gainful employment. His key achievement during these years is his celebrated Monist metaphysical project, which consists of five classic articles on evolutionary cosmology. Also included are reviews and essays from The Nation in (...) which Peirce critiques Paul Carus, William James, Auguste Comte, Cesare Lombroso, and Karl Pearson, and takes part in a famous dispute between Francis E. Abbot and Josiah Royce. Peirce's short philosophical essays, studies in non-Euclidean geometry and number theory, and his only known experiment in prose fiction complete his production during these years. Peirce's 1883-1909 contributions to the Century Dictionary form the content of volume 7 which is forthcoming. (shrink)

Despite government policy and initiatives for remote areas, indigenous people are amongst the most disadvantaged and do exhibit higher levels of unemployment in the Australian community. A number of commentators have suggested that better educational opportunities for this minority group will considerably improve their socio-economic status and employment opportunities. This myth is exposed in this article, which reports evidence from an educational–vocational programme for Yolngu who are the indigenous people of East Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. The (...) Arnhem Learning Education and Regional Training programme is conducted, mainly at Nhunlunbuy, in partnership with Rio Tinto Alcan and the Charles Darwin University, with the primary objective of preparing indigenous people for mainstream sustainable jobs. The presented content suggests that while higher educational status is important, this sole strategy is unlikely to comprehensively address outstanding issues that are confronting indigenous people and their labour market concerns. (shrink)

One claim found in the received historiography of the biometrical school (comprised primarily of Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and W. F. R. Weldon) is that one of the biometricians' great flaws was their inability to look past their population-focused, statistical, gradualist understanding of evolutionary change – which led, in part, to their ignoring developments in cellular biology around 1900. I will argue, on the contrary, that the work of the biometricians was, from its earliest days, fundamentally concerned with connections (...) between statistical patterns of inheritance and the underlying cellular features that gave rise to them. Such work remained current with contemporary knowledge of chromosomes, cytology, and development; in this article, I explore the first case. The biometricians were thus well positioned to understand the relationship between the patterns of Mendelian inheritance and the statistical distributions with which they primarily occupied themselves. Ignorance of this connection, then, is not the reason why they rejected Mendelism. Further, both Galton and Weldon – though each in their own unique way – decided to turn to biological detail as a way to better justify the generality of their statistical approaches to heredity. Perhaps paradoxically, then, for these biometricians, detail offered an approach to theoretical generality. (shrink)

Background: Nurses, social workers, and medical residents are ethically mandated to engage in policy advocacy to promote the health and well-being of patients and increase access to care. Yet, no instrument exists to measure their level of engagement in policy advocacy. Research objective: To describe the development and validation of the Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale, designed to measure frontline healthcare professionals’ engagement in policy advocacy with respect to a broad range of issues, including patients’ ethical rights, quality of care, culturally (...) competent care, preventive care, affordability/accessibility of care, mental healthcare, and community-based care. Research design: Cross-sectional data were gathered to estimate the content and construct validity, internal consistency, and test–retest reliability of the Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale. Participants and context: In all, 97 nurses, 94 social workers, and 104 medical residents were recruited from eight acute-care hospitals in Los Angeles County. Ethical considerations: Informed consent was obtained via Qualtrics and covered purposes, risks and benefits; voluntary participation; confidentiality; and compensation. Institutional Review Board approval was obtained from the University of Southern California and all hospitals. Findings: Results supported the validity of the concept and the instrument. In confirmatory factor analysis, seven items loaded onto one component with indices indicating adequate model fit. A Pearson correlation coefficient of.36 supported the scale’s test–retest stability. Cronbach’s α of.93 indicated strong internal consistency. Discussion: The Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties in this initial test. Findings should be considered within the context of the study’s limitations, which include a low response rate and limited geographic scope. Conclusion: The Policy Advocacy Engagement Scale appears to be the first validated scale to measure frontline healthcare professionals’ engagement in policy advocacy. With it, researchers can analyze variations in professionals’ levels of policy advocacy engagement, understand what factors are associated with it, and remedy barriers that might exist to their provision of it. (shrink)

Informed by the philosophy of the virtual, Keith Ansell Pearson offers up one of the most lucid and original works on the central philosophical questions. He asks that if our basic concepts on what it means to be human are wrong then, what is this to mean for our ideas of time, being, consciousness? A critical examination ensues, one informed by a multitude of responses to a large number of philosophers. Under discussion is the mathematical limits as found in (...) Russell, questions on Relativity, Kant's notion of judgement, Popper, Dennett, Dawkins and Proust. He brings into the rapport the concepts of Bergson and their explosive insights into the idea of time. (shrink)

The bitterness and protracted character of the biometrician–Mendelian debate has long aroused the interest of historians of biology. In this paper, we focus on another and much less discussed facet of the controversy: competing interpretations of the inheritance of mental defect. Today, the views of the early Mendelians, such as Charles B. Davenport and Henry H. Goddard, are universally seen to be mistaken. Some historians assume that the Mendelians' errors were exposed by advances in the science of genetics. Others believe (...) that their mistakes could have been identified by contemporaries. Neither interpretation takes account of the fact that the lapses for which the Mendelian eugenicists are now notorious were, in fact, mostly identified at the time by the biometricians David Heron and Karl Pearson. In this paper we ask why their objections had so little impact. We think the answer illustrates an important general point about the social prerequisites for effective scientific critique. (shrink)

In The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply-held beliefs of the Western world. Arguing for a material, not divine, origin of species, he showed that new species are achieved by "natural selection." The Origin communicates the enthusiasm of original thinking in an open, descriptive style, and Darwin's emphasis on the value of diversity speaks more strongly now than ever. As well as a stimulating introduction and detailed notes, this edition offers a register of the many (...) writers referred to by Darwin in the text. (shrink)