An argument for the inclusion of the human perspective within science and how it makes science possible.

Ruth Leys raises a number of important questions about the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of the affect theories that have emerged in the critical humanities, sciences, and social sciences in the last decade. There are a variety of frameworks for thinking about what constitutes the affective realm , and there are different preferences for how such frameworks could be deployed. We would like to engage with just one part of that debate: the contributions of Silvan Tomkins's affect theory. We take (...) issue with Leys's formulation that Tomkins's work along with that of Brian Massumi, William Connolly, and Paul Ekman form a group of like-minded theorists. We do not believe this represents an accurate account of the conceptual and empirical commitments of these various authors. By bundling their work together, Leys misses much of what is compellingly critical in each of these writers, and she overlooks what is most invigorating in the debates amongst them. In addition, the specificities of Tomkins's work have been badly served in Leys's essay. In four volumes stretching from 1962 to 1992 Tomkins laid out a complex and captivating theory of the human affect system, in which mechanisms of neurological feedback, social scripts, and facial behavior coassemble as affective events. Our response to Leys's essay is motivated by a wish to see more detailed engagements with this theory—the distinctiveness of which we believe has yet to be fully explored in this new affective turn. (shrink)

Eloquent, urgent, and inspiring, _The Constant Fire_ tackles the acrimonious debate between science and religion, taking us beyond its stagnant parameters into the wider domain of human spiritual experience. From a Neolithic archaeological site in Ireland to modern theories of star formation, Adam Frank traverses a wide terrain, broadening our sights and allowing us to imagine an alternative perspective. Drawing from his experience as a practicing astrophysicist and from the writings of the great scholars of religion, philosophy, and mythology, (...) Frank locates the connective tissue linking science and religion—their commonality as sacred pursuits—and finds their shared aspiration in pursuit of "the True and the Real." Taking us from the burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600 to Einstein and on to today's pressing issues of global warming and resource depletion, _The Constant Fire_ shows us how to move beyond this stale debate into a more profound experience of the world as sacred—a world that embraces science without renouncing human spirituality. (shrink)

Eloquent, urgent, and inspiring, _The Constant Fire_ tackles the acrimonious debate between science and religion, taking us beyond its stagnant parameters into the wider domain of human spiritual experience. From a Neolithic archaeological site in Ireland to modern theories of star formation, Adam Frank traverses a wide terrain, broadening our sights and allowing us to imagine an alternative perspective. Drawing from his experience as a practicing astrophysicist and from the writings of the great scholars of religion, philosophy, and mythology, (...) Frank locates the connective tissue linking science and religion—their commonality as sacred pursuits—and finds their shared aspiration in pursuit of "the True and the Real." Taking us from the burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600 to Einstein and on to today's pressing issues of global warming and resource depletion, _The Constant Fire_ shows us how to move beyond this stale debate into a more profound experience of the world as sacred—a world that embraces science without renouncing human spirituality. (shrink)

ArgumentThis essay offers a reading of Gertrude Stein's lecture “Plays” (1934) alongside the work of several thinkers on emotion, William James, Silvan Tomkins, and Wilfred Bion. The problem of what Stein calls “emotional syncopation” at the theater is understood in the context of James’ theory of emotion. The essay proceeds to unfold Stein's emphasis on varieties of excitement by way of Silvan Tomkins’ writing. It then turns to Wilfred Bion's theory of thinking to argue that the main problem with theater, (...) for Stein, is the difficulty it poses to learning or arriving at genuinely new knowledge. The essay concludes with the suggestion that Stein's plays address the further difficulties of analyzing group dynamics or numbers of individuals, especially in the context of modernist mass media. (shrink)

Recent work by Magnuson, Solomon and Grossman(1) adds to a growing body of evidence indicating that microorganisms possess sophisticated signaling systems that enable them to sense and respond to environmental challenges. Typically, this response results in morphological, physiological and even genetic differentiation, paralleling that observed among higher organisms. These signaling systems may be interpreted as adaptations that maximize the reproductive potential of a population.

We pose and resolve several vexing decision theoretic puzzles. Some are variants of existing puzzles, such as 'Trumped' (Arntzenius and McCarthy 1997), 'Rouble trouble' (Arntzenius and Barrett 1999), 'The airtight Dutch book' (McGee 1999), and 'The two envelopes puzzle' (Broome 1995). Others are new. A unified resolution of the puzzles shows that Dutch book arguments have no force in infinite cases. It thereby provides evidence that reasonable utility functions may be unbounded and that reasonable credence functions need not be countably (...) additive. The resolution also shows that when infinitely many decisions are involved, the difference between making the decisions simultaneously and making them sequentially can be the difference between riches and ruin. Finally, the resolution reveals a new way in which the ability to make binding commitments can save perfectly rational agents from sure losses. (shrink)

This study investigated the relationship between concussions and medication adherence among 247 adults experiencing homelessness in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, who were prescribed medication for a psychiatric disorder. Participants were asked whether they had “ever experienced a blow to the head that caused a concussion,” and medication adherence was measured by asking participants whether they had taken their psychiatric medication yesterday. The data were analyzed using univariate and multivariable logistic regressions. Results showed that more than half of the sample had a (...) concussion history, and homeless adults with a concussion history had higher odds of non-adherence to psychiatric medications compared with those who reported no concussion history [OR = 2.13 ]. Findings suggest that medication non-adherence is associated with incurred concussions. Raising awareness among service providers of the relationship between traumatic brain injury and medication adherence may increase efforts to improve adherence in this underserved population. (shrink)

How do agricultural policies in the EU need to change to increase the sustainability of livestock production, and what measures could encourage sustainable practices whilst minimising trade-offs? Addressing such questions is crucial to ensure progress towards proclaimed targets whilst moving production levels to planetary boundaries. However, a lack of available evidence on the impacts of recent policies hinders developments in this direction. In this review, we address this knowledge gap, by collating and evaluating recent policy analyses, using three complementary frameworks. (...) The review highlights that recent policy reforms, and especially those of the Common Agricultural Policy, have had a large impact on the sustainability of the livestock sector by contributing to intensification and simplification. This has often resulted in negative impacts (e.g. on greenhouse gas emissions and animal welfare) and while financial support has enabled production, it can also lead to a culture of dependency that limits innovation. At the same time, a lack of regulation and concrete targets, and low levels of stakeholder engagement in policy design have led to delays in the delivery of sustainability objectives. Future policies could take on-board more innovative thinking that addresses the interrelatedness of society, animals, and the environment, to deliver effective targets and support. (shrink)

This research examines the relationships among the types of self-serving political messages sent in organizations, the channels through which they are sent, and the targets to whom they are sent. Two theoretical streams converge in this study: Communication as Political Behavior and Media Usage Theory. A review and synthesis of these two bodies of literature yielded three hypotheses, each of which received strong statistical support. The data suggest that the process of encoding and transmitting self-serving messages is strongly related to (...) the specific target to whom they are sent (boss, subordinate, or peer) and the channel through which they are sent (face-to-face, telephone, memo, or e-mail). (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely (...) argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to consider the narrative that Philipp Frank’s decline in the United States started in the 1940s and 1950s. Though this account captures a kernel of truth, it is not the whole story. After taking a closer look at Frank’s published writings and at his proposed book, one can see how he imagined the reunion of logical empiricism. His approach was centered on sociology and on the sociological aspects of science and knowledge. As (...) I will argue, Frank’s longstanding interest in the reunion of the sciences and the humanities can be detected in his sociology and philosophy of science as well as in his reading of Carnap’s critique of metaphysics. But Frank’s intention was never fully recognized, partly due to the atmosphere of American philosophy and sociology in the second half of the twentieth century. As a result, his conception of unified science and logical empiricism died with him. (shrink)

In their major work, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow expressed the opinion of presumably many working physicists, philosophers of physics and even educated laymen when they said, "philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge." Their examples of the fields that have been conquered by physicists include most of the perennial philosophical questions: "what is the (...) nature of the world", "how can we understand the world," "where did we come from," "how did the universe come into existence."Due to numerous disruptions that shocked the... (shrink)

One of the challenging problems in large scale cyber-argumentation platforms is that users often engage and focus only on a few issues and leave other issues under-discussed and under-acknowledged. This kind of non-uniform participation obstructs the argumentation analysis models to retrieve collective intelligence from the underlying discussion. To resolve this problem, we developed an innovative opinion prediction model for a multi-issue cyber-argumentation environment. Our model predicts users’ opinions on the non-participated issues from similar users’ opinions on related issues using intelligent (...) argumentation techniques and a collaborative filtering method. Based on our detailed experimental results on an empirical dataset collected using our cyber-argumentation platform, our model is 21.7% more accurate, handles data sparsity better than other popular opinion prediction methods. Our model can also predict opinions on multiple issues simultaneously with reasonable accuracy. Contrary to existing opinion prediction models, which only predict whether a user agrees on an issue, our model predicts how much a user agrees on the issue. To our knowledge, this is the first research to attempt multi-issue opinion prediction with the partial agreement in the cyber-argumentation platform. With additional data on non-participated issues, our opinion prediction model can help the collective intelligence analysis models to analyze social phenomena more effectively and accurately in the cyber argumentation platform. (shrink)

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

We report on the small-scale (0.5 13 h - 1M, a large-scale bias of ~2.0 and a satellite fraction of 12 ± 2 per cent. Thus, these galaxies occupy haloes with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II luminous red galaxy sample © 2012 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society © doi:10.1093/mnras/sts314.

In 1949, Philipp Frank claimed that he and Rudolf Carnap built up a new center for the scientific world conception in Prague between 1931 and 1935. The aim of this paper is to provide historical evidence and further materials to approach this claim of Frank. Definite answers, however, require more space and contextualization, so I will just sketch some partial but hopefully promising narratives and rudimentary answers. I claim that though Carnap and Frank indeed tried to build (...) a new center, they were unsuccessful, and possibly there were many reasons for this. This is the general claim; regarding Carnap, I will also show his way to the German University of Prague and his philosophical, scholarly, and cultural life in Prague. (shrink)

Sympathy and other moral emotions described by David Hume (1740/1978) and Adam Smith (1759/1966) motivate people to incur a host of costs they could easily avoid. Such emotions pose a challenge to evolutionary biologists, who have long stressed the primacy of narrow self-interest in Darwinian selection. In earlier work, I argued (Frank, 1987, 1988) that natural selection might have favored moral sentiments because of their capacity to facilitate solutions to one-shot social dilemmas. Here, I present a capsule summary of (...) the basic argument. (shrink)

Giving advice to Henry Bolingbroke was a pastime that could be very rewarding or very dangerous. Consider the following two cases. In May 1401, a little over nineteen months after Henry had deposed his cousin Richard and ascended the throne, his friend and confessor Philip Repyngdon, at that time the abbot of St. Mary de Prè in Leicester and chancellor of Oxford, sent Henry a long letter about the condition of the realm. Henry had personally requested such a report, according (...) to the version of the letter preserved in Adam of Usk's Chronicle: “Whereas your singular serenity did require of me, the least of your servants, when last I went out from before you with heavy heart, that, if I should hear aught adverse, I should make it known unto your excellency without delay, now, as your most obedient servant, do I take my pen in hand to show what I have heard and seen.” And Repyngdon had apparently heard and seen a lot, as he claimed that “law and justice are banished from the realm; thefts, murders, adulteries, fornications, extortions, oppressions of the poor, hurts, wrongs, and much reproach, are rife; and one tyrant will doth serve for law.”. (shrink)

The mind-body problem is one of the last great intellectual mysteries facing humankind. The hard core of the mind-body problem is the problem of qualitative character: the what-it's-likeness of conscious states. What is the nature of qualitative character? Can it be explained in terms of the intentional content of experience? What is the nature of the so-called secondary qualities---colors, sounds, smells, and so on? Finally, is Physicalism about qualitative character correct? In other words, are a person's qualitative mental properties determined, (...) as a matter of 'strict' or 'metaphysical' necessity, by her physical and functional properties? ;My dissertation is a collection of essays that address these questions. They are self-standing but interrelated. Collectively, they develop a case for skepticism concerning Physicalism about qualitative mental properties. It is common to argue against Physicalism on a priori grounds: that it is shown to be false by the conceivability of Zombies, that it is incompatible with the 'explanatory gap', that it falls victim to Frank Jackson's Mary argument, and so on. The argument I develop does not rely on the usual a priori considerations. The structure of the argument is simple. In the first essay I argue that in the case of qualitative mental properties the only form of Physicalism which we have reason to accept is what I call 'Identity Physicalism': roughly, the view that qualitative mental properties are identical with physical or functional properties. If it can be shown to be false, we have no reason to accept the Physicalist's modally very strong claim that there is a metaphysically necessary connection between a person's qualitative mental properties, on the one hand, and her physical-functional properties, on the other. In the remaining essays, I use empirical considerations to argue that Identity Physicalism is false in the case of qualitative mental properties. The result is a skeptical position with regard to Physicalism. ;But the dissertation is not entirely negative. Along the way to arguing for this negative conclusion, I develop a package of positive views which are largely independent of it. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper the author offers a frank reassessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He dismisses the Tractatus as philosophically irrelevant but points to the unshaken validity of the main tenents of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially the idea of speech acts being inevitably interwoven with extralinguistic, bodily practices. In the second part the author identifies radical limitations of Wittgenstein’s thought, which he tries to eliminate by combining it with Foucault’s understanding of power and Derrida’s understanding of (...) iterability. The latter link opens the path to viewing language-games as theatrical spectacles. In the third part of the paper the author illustrates the revised model of language-games/spectacles by relating it to two films, Scenes from a Marriage and Faithless. This connection enables the author to enrich the model with an affective dimension which comes to the fore in Bergman’s analysis of the breakup of a marriage. (shrink)

The idea of translating Gerdil into English is brilliant, the translation is very good and the introduction of William Frank precise and inspiring.... Rousseau proposes a complete break with tradition. A new man will arise who is severed from the whole heritage of the past. With him the history of mankind begins anew. In one sense we have here a transposition in the field of philosophy of education of the Cartesian cogito. The subject begins with himself. To this philosophical (...) project Gerdil opposes the idea of tradition. We have not made ourselves. Our parents have procreated us. The parents do not only procreate their offspring, they also introduce them into the natural and social reality, that is they educate. No education is possible without a lively dialogue with history and society. Since the beginning man stands in a close relationship to others, is made for the human society.... In these our times one form of modernity is collapsing and the mood of the day is an unclear postmodernity that in some of its versions could well be a return to barbarianism. All the more important is then that another form of modernity be rediscovered and brought to the attention of the American public. - Rocco Buttiglione, University of St. Pius V, Rome A timely translation of a compelling 18th century critique of Rousseau by the neglected Italian author, Hyacinth S. Gerdil. Gerdil's Anti-Emile may have been written as a critique of Rousseau's Emile, but it can equally be read as a critique of the philosophy embraced by the American educational establishment. Through the influence of John Dewey, Rousseau came to inform much of the educational theory regnant in the United States, with disastrous consequences, now acknowledge by nearly all. In a valuable preface to his translation, Professor Frank, drawing upon his experience both here and abroad, not only places Emile in context, but defends Gerdil's time-transcending, classical view of education against its modern detractors. "Gerdil," Frank tells us, "addressed his Anti-Emile to elders responsible for education, be they parents, teachers, or political authorities, who might find themselves swayed by the powerful rhetoric of Rousseau's Emile." The same may be said of this translation and its informative prefatory material, for it is clearly a study that will be valued by anyone interested in principled education. - Jude P. Dougherty, Catholic University of America Cover image: "Adam and Eve" by Tintoretto. St. Augustine's Press acknowledges the kind permission granted by la Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice, for the use of the image. All rights reserved by la Scuola Grande di San Rocco. (shrink)

In a recent and provocative paper, Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu and Frank Keil (2015) have argued, on the basis of experimental evidence, that ‘searching the internet leads people to conflate information that can be found online with knowledge “in the head”’ (2015, 675), specifically, by inclining us to conflate mere access to information for personal knowledge (2015, 674). This chapter has three central aims. First, we briefly detail Fisher et al.’s results and show how, on the basis of recent (...) work in virtue epistemology (e.g., Tiberius and Walker 1998; Roberts and Wood 2007; Tanesini 2016), their interpretation of the data supports the thesis that searching the internet is conducive to the vice of intellectual arrogance. Second, we argue that this arrogance interpretation of the data rests on an implicit commitment to cognitive internalism. Thirdly, we show how the data can be given a very different explanation in light of the hypothesis of extended cognition (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008) – one which challenges the extent to which Fisher et al. are entitled to insist that subjects are actually conflating access to knowledge for personal knowledge in the first place. We conclude by suggesting how, against the background of extended cognition rather than cognitive internalism, we have some reason to think that searching the internet might actually foster (in certain circumstances) virtuous intellectual humility. (shrink)

In a recent and provocative paper, Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu and Frank Keil (2015) have argued, on the basis of experimental evidence, that ‘searching the internet leads people to conflate information that can be found online with knowledge “in the head”’ (2015, 675), specifically, by inclining us to conflate mere access to information for personal knowledge (2015, 674). This chapter has three central aims. First, we briefly detail Fisher et al.’s results and show how, on the basis of recent (...) work in virtue epistemology (e.g., Tiberius and Walker 1998; Roberts and Wood 2007; Tanesini 2016), their interpretation of the data supports the thesis that searching the internet is conducive to the vice of intellectual arrogance. Second, we argue that this arrogance interpretation of the data rests on an implicit commitment to cognitive internalism. Thirdly, we show how the data can be given a very different explanation in light of the hypothesis of extended cognition (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2008) – one which challenges the extent to which Fisher et al. are entitled to insist that subjects are actually conflating access to knowledge for personal knowledge in the first place. We conclude by suggesting how, against the background of extended cognition rather than cognitive internalism, we have some reason to think that searching the internet might actually foster (in certain circumstances) virtuous intellectual humility. (shrink)

This volume has two primary aims: to trace the traditions and changes in methods, concepts, and ideas that brought forth the logical empiricists’ philosophy of physics and to present and analyze the logical empiricists’ various and occasionally contrary ideas about the physical sciences and their philosophical relevance. These original chapters discuss these developments in their original contexts and social and institutional environments, thus showing the various fruitful conceptions and philosophies behind the history of 20th-century philosophy of science. Logical Empiricism and (...) the Natural Sciences is divided into three thematic sections. Part I surveys the influences on logical empiricism’s philosophy of science and physics. It features chapters on Maxwell’s role in the worldview of logical empiricism, on Reichenbach’s account of objectivity, on the impact of Poincaré on Neurath’s early views on scientific method, Frank’s exchanges with Einstein about philosophy of physics, and on the forgotten role of Kurt Grelling. Part II focuses on specific physical theories, including Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s positions on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, Reichenbach’s critique of unified field theory, and the logical empiricists’ reactions to quantum mechanics. The third and final group of chapters widens the scope to philosophy of science and physics in general. It includes contributions on von Mises’ frequentism; Frank’s account of concept formation and confirmation; and the interrelations between Nagel’s, Feigl’s, and Hempel’s versions of logical empiricism. (shrink)

This massive study makes an important contribution to the history of philosophy for two reasons. First of all, it stands as the most complete and careful philosophical analysis of Ockham's thought to date. Adams's expositions and analyses will become the gloss which generations of students will have to reckon with as they confront the text of Ockham. Secondly, this work represents an exemplary method of philosophical commentary, one that proves to be a remarkably illuminating way into the mind of (...) a medieval scholastic disputant. Because Ockham's thought is intensely dialectical and argumentative, Adams appropriately exposes his doctrines through an exacting recovery of his argument within its dialogical context. For example, in the crucial chapter 2, "Universals Are Not Things other than Names," we come to understand Ockham's nominalism as it emerges from his rejection of moderate realism; Adams presents this rejection through a reconstruction of Ockham's encounter with the living tradition of Aquinas, Scotus, Walter Burleigh, William of Alnwick, Nervaeus Natalis, and Henry of Harclay. As the dialectic proceeds from figure to figure, the issue of the universal reshapes itself with great sophistication. Adams's formidable analytic powers and her sharp focus on the key philosophical issue enable her to succeed in this method. The reader also gets the sense that Adams herself believes one can come to truth through philosophical argument, and not just the truth of what Ockham taught but the truth of what he sought. This earnestness enables her to keep a fix on the dialectic's "emerging rule" which becomes the source of unity in what could otherwise degenerate into a bewildering complexity of historical detail or the vanity of analytic logic-chopping. (shrink)

Giovanni Arrighi’s last book is compared with Andre Gunder Frank’s Re-Orient. The implications of Arrighi’s study of the East/West-comparison for comprehending world-historical evolution and the political issues of the current conjuncture are considered.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Towards a Realist Philosophy of History by Adam TimminsAviezer TuckerTIMMINS, Adam. Towards a Realist Philosophy of History. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2022. 192 pp. Cloth, $95.00The debate about scientific realism, whether science represents reality or just discovers measurements and correlations that are followed by theoretical stories about them, is at the center of the philosophy of science. One potent and frequently discussed antirealist argument has been Larry Laudan’s (...) “pessimistic induction”: Historically, all scientific theories, especially in physics, have been proven false. Hence, all contemporary scientific theories will be proven false and science cannot represent reality. This pessimistic induction relies on knowledge of the history of science, on historiographic realism. Luckily for the pessimistic induction, the history of historiography, the scientific representation of the human past, supports an optimistic induction: Since the revolutions associated with Ranke in historiography, Lyle in geological history, and Darwin in biological history, the historical sciences have made progress but have not [End Page 368] overhauled the founders’ representations of the past. We know more about the human past than Ranke did and much more about the biological past than Darwin did, but the modern historical sciences have not overturned their theories and conclusions. Though there are many new methodologies, historians still go to the archives to compare primary sources, and biologists still study fossils and assume natural selection.Though scientific antirealism assumes historiographic realism, it has received scant philosophic attention. Often it is perceived or presented as a naive “empiricist” concept of historiography that imagines historians “observe” history and then describe it in historiography. Radical antirealist theories of historiography that reduce it to fiction, myth, or manipulative ideology use this image of realism as naive empiricism to dialectically support its equally naive antirealist antithesis. Both ignore the evidential, mostly testimonial, justifications of historiography.Adam Timmins’s project is to articulate and justify a sophisticated historiographic realism that fits historiographic practices and premises. He argues that historiography is “successful in providing information and understanding about the historical past that is constrained by and reflects what actually happened in the past itself.”Timmins’s historiographic realism springs out of the philosophy of language rather than epistemology or philosophy of science. This distinguishes it from Murray Murphey’s historiographic realism, which argued that historiographic ontology is theoretical. Famously, Murphey compared George Washington to the electron as two well-corroborated but unobservable theoretical entities. Timmins retorts that Washington is a proper name and not a theoretical concept, and it is impossible to conduct experiments with Washingtons. Timmins inquires how the language historians use may be interpreted as referring to past events and how historiography can represent history. He does not devote much attention to how historians justify their statements about history to a degree that may warrant a realistic interpretation of historiography. Rather, Timmins assumes so. He proceeds through polemical dialogues with philosophers of historiography who took antirealist stances like Leon Goldstein, Frank Ankersmit, and Jouni Kuukkanen.Timmins’s realism is founded on the belief in a universally accepted core of historiographic facts. He does not inquire about the theoretical foundations of historiographic inferences that allow the emergence of such a consensus. Rather than consider historiographic epistemology, the critical methods of historiography, Timmins considers linguistic communities and entrenched uses of language. He confronts the problem of reference to the past in the absence of its perception by asserting that historiographic representations are of “mental files” that have names (for example, “the Renaissance,” “the Second World War”) and evolving core facts about those historical events (for example, Petrarch and Da Vinci in the Renaissance, the main battles in the war). Though the exact contents of these files may differ between historians, they still refer to the same events and have the same labels. Timmins suggests that experts gradually introduce fluid norms of reference on the basis of broadly accepted facts [End Page 369] whose references caused information chains that led to them. He suggests that complex or colligated concepts are in the mind but refer through mediation to some directly referenced events. For example, the First World War is a concept that through the mediation of facts like its main battles refers to real... (shrink)

Logical Empiricism and the Physical Sciences: From Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy of Physics introduces us to the philosophy of physics of logical empiricism. However, here the expression “philosophy of physics” does not refer to a consolidated area of philosophy but to the set of concepts, methods, and analyses relating to general relativity, quantum mechanics, and other physical theories that were developed by the members of the logical empiricist movement. Because of the thoroughness with which it treats an issue so (...) unjustly disregarded in the literature, Logical Empiricism and the Physical Sciences is an essential work not only for HOPOS readers interested in the intellectual origins of recent philosophy of physics but also for those interested in general philosophy of science. The main aim of this book is to overturn many of the inherited prejudices about how the logical empiricists—Carnap, Reichenbach, Frank, Neurath, and Feigl, among others—related philosophically to the physics of their time. (shrink)