Although there is universal consensus both in the science education literature and in the science standards documents to the effect that students should learn not only the content of science but also its nature, there is little agreement about what that nature is. This led many science educators to adopt what is sometimes called “the consensus view” about the nature of science (NOS), whose goal is to teach students only those characteristics of science on which there is wide consensus. This (...) is an attractive view, but it has some shortcomings and weaknesses. In this article we present and defend an alternative approach based on the notion of family resemblance. We argue that the family resemblance approach is superior to the consensus view in several ways, which we discuss in some detail. (shrink)

Certain segments of science are becoming increasingly commercialized. This article discusses the commercialization of academic science and its impact on various aspects of science. It also aims to provide an introduction to the articles in this special issue. I briefly describe the major factors that led to this phenomenon, situate it in the context of the changing social regime of science and give a thumbnail sketch of its costs and benefits. I close with a general discussion of how the topic (...) of commercialization of academic science is relevant to science education. (shrink)

The papers collected in this Synthese special issue are the result of a conference that one of us (ES) casually suggested and the other (GI) organized, which took place at Bo˘gaziçi University in Istanbul, in May 2008, to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Experience and Prediction. These papers are historical and philosophical in varying degrees. Reichenbach is now often lumped together with the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, but his ideas, especially those in Experience and Prediction, (...) were often developed in opposition to positivism. We hope that the essays collected here will be a resource for philosophers who work on the problems that Reichenbach addressed, and also that these essays will be useful to historians who want to develop a deeper understanding of Reichenbach in his historical context. (shrink)

Fleeing from the Nazi regime, along with many German refugees, Hans Reichenbach came to teach at Istanbul University in 1933, accepting the invitation of the Turkish government and stayed in Istanbul until 1938. While much is known about his work and life in Istanbul, the existing literature relies mostly on his letters and works. In this article I try to shed more light on Reichenbach's scholarly activities and personal life by also taking into account the Turkish sources and the academic (...) context in which Reichenbach taught and worked. (shrink)

Duygular; insanın epistemik, etik ve estetik yönleriyle doğrudan ilişkili varoluşsal özniteliklerdir. İnsan anlam-lı, değerli ve güzel bir hayat kurarken akılla birlikte duygulardan motivasyon almaktadır. Duygular, çok fonk-siyonlu yapısıyla insanın niyet, tutum, tavır ve eylemlerini belirleme, harekete geçirme, yönlendirme, etkile-me, dönüştürme, frenleme ve bazen de manipüle etme araçlarıdır. Bu nedenle ahlak başta olmak üzere insan eylemlerini problem edinen her araştırma, duyguları ele almak durumun¬dadır. İnsanı tam anlamıyla tanıma-nın yolu, pratik yaşantısı içerisinde ortaya çıkan duygusallığını anlamaktan geçer. Dolayısıyla teorik olanın durağanlığı ile (...) hayatın akışkanlığı arasındaki uçurumda duygular, felsefi bir soruşturmanın konusu olmakta-dır. Duygunun dinamik yapısını ve sınır çizilemeyen doğasını dilin sınırları içerisinde ifade etmek kolay değildir. Bu-nunla birlikte insan için duygular, kendini, evreni, doğayı, maddeyi, bireyleri, toplumları, iyiyi, kötüyü, değerli olanı ve olmayanı anladığı, olgu ve olaylarla başa çıktığı, pratik hayatını yönettiği, karar verme süreçlerinde, niyetlerinde, yönelimlerinde ve seçimlerinde etkin, tüm bu süreçlere içkin, dinamik, fonksiyonel ve bilişsel öznitelikler olarak öne çıkmaktadır. İnsan, günlük yaşamı içinde çok çeşitli duygu durumlarını tecrübe etmek-tedir. Böylece o, tecrübe ettiği bu duygu durumları ile sürekli değişen ruh hallerine sahip olmaktadır. Bu tec-rübeler, dış etkenlere bağlı olabildiği gibi insanın içsel dinamiklerinin etkisiyle de ortaya çıkabil¬mektedir. Sosyal yaşantısı itibariyle insan, duygusal tepkiler veren ve duygusal etkiler alan dinamik bir ahlak yaşantısı-na sahiptir. Bu bağlamda duygular, insanın kendi benliği ile yaşadığı toplumun benliği arasında denge kurma-sını sağlamakta ve insanın temel yönelimlerini belirlemektedir. Duygular, insana eylem motivasyonu kazan-dıran, onun tasavvurlarına, geçmiş, şimdi ve gelecekle ilgili değerlendirmelerine yön veren, harekete geçirici yetilerdir. Pişmanlık, bizzat benliğe yönelen ve onun ahlâkîliğini içsel olarak düzenleyip inşa eden ahlâkî bir özdenetim duygusudur. Bu duygu gerek bireysel ve gerekse sosyal yaşamda insanı etkileyen doğasıyla özel-likle ahlâkî değer dünyasında merkezi bir rol oynamaktadır. Pişmanlık, en yalın haliyle insanın geçmişteki eylemine ya da eylemsizliğine dönük olumsuz yargısını içeren acı bir his biçiminde ortaya çıkmakta ve keşke ifadesiyle dile gelmektedir. Pişmanlık duygusu insanda içsel tesirlerin etkisiyle oluşmaktadır. Çoğu ahlak duygusu gibi pişmanlık da hem fenomenolojik bir duyuş hem de bilişsel bir yargı içermektedir. Psikolojik ve kavramsal açıdan karmaşık bir duygu olan pişmanlık; üzüntü, hayal kırıklığı, özlem, nostalji ve bazen bir şey-den pişmanlık duymamanın verdiği rahatlama gibi bir dizi duyguyu ortaya çıkarmaktadır. Pişmanlık aynı zamanda güçlü, motive edici bir üzüntü ve işlerin istendiği gibi gitmediğine dair tutkulu bir şikâyet olarak da kendini gösterebilmektedir. O, bugünümüzü ve geleceğimizi şekillendiren genellikle geçmişe dönük bir acı deneyimidir. Pişmanlık, genellikle kişinin yaptığı şeyi onaylamadığını, farklı şekilde olmasını arzuladığını, üzüldüğünü, utandığını veya suçlu olduğunu ifade eden ve farkındalıkla ortaya çıkan bir duygudur. Pişmanlık, insanı geçmişteki ve şimdiki hatalarından ders çıkarmaya ve gelecekteki davranışlarını düzeltmeye teşvik eden, insanın özdenetim yeteneğinin bir parçasıdır. Bu duygu, kişinin kendi eylemleriyle ilgili içsel muhasebe-sinin bir sonucu olarak ortaya çıkan düzeltici ve iyileştirici ahlaki bir özdenetim duygusudur. Pişmanlık, insa-nın ahlaki doğasının zorunlu bir sonucudur. Bu duygu onun seçim yapabilen bir varlık olmasından, yani ahlaki özgürlüğünden kaynaklanmaktadır. Pişmanlığın oluşabilmesi için ahlaki eylemin en az iki seçenek arasından yapılacak bir seçim sonucunda gerçekleşmiş olması gerekir. Bu nedenle, pişmanlığın ön koşulu özgürlüktür. Akıl ve duygunun düşüncelerimiz ve eylemlerimiz üzerindeki karşılıklı rolleri, özellikle pişmanlık olgusunda belirgindir. Dolayısıyla ister pratik ister teorik alanda olsun pişmanlık, sadece insanın duygusal yanıyla değil, bilişsel yanıyla da ilgili bir duygudur. Pişmanlığın, geçmişte yaşanmış veya bugün etkisi devam eden bir olgu üzerinde kişinin hatasını fark etmesiyle oluşan bir üzüntü hali olması, onun bir değerlendirme duygusu oldu-ğunu gösterir. Duyguların harekete geçirici yönü pişmanlıkta geriye doğru işlevsiz olacağından, bu teşvik edici yön gelecekte pişmanlık yaratan durumun tekrarını önleme yönünde kendini göstermektedir. Böylece geç-mişte yaşanan üzücü bir durum, olumsuzdan olumluya, yıkıcıdan yapıcıya doğru ahlaki bir evrime zemin hazırlayacaktır. Bu makalede duygu etiğinin ilkeleri, kavramsal ve kuramsal çerçevesi göz önünde bulundurulmak suretiyle pişmanlık duygusunun mahiyeti, değeri ve fonksiyonelliği felsefî açıdan analiz edilip yorumlanacaktır. Emotions are human attributes that are directly related to the epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic aspects of human beings. While man builds a meaningful, valuable, and beautiful life, gets motivation from emotions along with the mind. Emotions, with their multifunctional aspect, are means for determining, activating, directing, influencing, transforming, restraining, and sometimes manipulating human intentions, attitudes, and actions. For this reason, any research that treats human actions, especially morality, has to deal with emotions. The way to know the human being is to understand his emotions in his practical life. Therefore, in the gap between the stability of the theoretical and the dynamism of life, emotions become the subject of philosophical research. It is not easy to express the dynamic aspect and unbounded nature of emotion with-in the limits of language. However, for human beings, emotions are effective in their decision-making pro-cesses, intentions, orientations, and choices, in which they understand themselves, the universe, nature, matter, individuals, societies, goodness, evil, valuable and non-valued things, cope with facts and events, manage their practical life, stands out as dynamic, functional and cognitive attributes inherent in all these processes. Man experiences a wide variety of emotional states in his daily life. Thus, he has constantly changed moods with these emotional states he experiences. These experiences can be caused by external factors as well as by the influence of the internal dynamics of the human being. In terms of his social life, man has a dynamic moral life that gives emotional reactions and receives emotional effects. In this context, emotions enable man to establish a balance between himself and the self of the society in which he lives and determine his basic orientations. Emotions are motivating faculties that motivate a man to act and guide his imaginations, and evaluations of the past, present, and future. Regret is an emotion of moral self-control that addresses the self and internally organizes and constructs its morality. This emotion plays a central role, especially in the field of moral values, with its nature that affects man both in individual and social life. Re-gret, in its simplest form, appears in the form of a bitter feeling that includes the negative judgment of man's past action or inaction and is expressed with the expression of a wish. The emotion of regret is formed by the effect of internal influences in humans. Like most moral emotions, regret includes both a phenomenological sense and a cognitive judgment. Regret which is a psychologically and conceptually com-plex emotion, reveals a series of emotions such as sadness, disappointment, longing, nostalgia, and some-times the relief of not regretting something. Regret can also manifest itself as a strong, motivating sadness and a passionate complaint that things are not going as planned. It is an experience of pain, often retrospec-tive, that shapes our present and future. Regret is an emotion that arises with awareness, usually expressing disapproval of what the person did, wishing it to be different, upset, ashamed, or guilty. Regret is part of human self-control, which encourages man to learn from past and present mistakes and to correct future behavior. This emotion is a corrective and healing sense of moral self-control that arises as a result of one's internal accounting for one's actions. Regret is a necessary consequence of man's moral nature. This emo-tion stems from the fact that he is a being that can choose, that is, his moral freedom. For regret to occur, the moral action must have taken place as a result of a choice to be made among at least two alternatives. Therefore, the prerequisite for repentance is freedom. The reciprocal roles of reason and emotion on our thoughts and actions are particularly evident in the phenomenon of regret. For that reason, regret, whether in the practical or theoretical field, is an emotion related not only to the emotional side of human but also to the cognitive side. The fact that regret is a state of sadness that occurs when a person realizes his mistake on a phenomenon that has been experienced in the past or whose effect continues today, shows that it is an emotion of evaluation. Since the activating aspect of the emotions will be backward dysfunctional in regret, this incentive aspect manifests itself in the direction of preventing the repetition of the regretful situation in the future. Thus, a sad situation in the past will pave the way for a moral evolution from negative to posi-tive, from destructive to constructive. In this article, the nature, value, and functionality of the regret will be analyzed and interpreted from a philosophical point of view, taking into account the principles of emotion ethics, and its conceptual and theoretical framework. (shrink)

Rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence are leading to an increasing human reliance on machine decision making. Even in collaborative efforts with Decision Support Systems, where a human expert is expected to make the final decisions, it can be hard to keep the expert actively involved throughout the decision process. DSSs suggest their own solutions and thus invite passive decision making. To keep humans actively ‘on’ the decision-making loop and counter overreliance on machines, we propose a ‘reflection machine’. This system asks (...) users questions about their decision strategy and thereby prompts them to evaluate their own decisions critically. We discuss what forms RMs can take and present a proof-of-concept implementation of a RM that can produce feedback on users’ decisions in the medical and law domains. We show that the prototype requires very little domain knowledge to create reasonably intelligent critiquing questions. With this prototype, we demonstrate the technical feasibility to develop RMs and hope to pave the way for future research into their effectiveness and value. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

The state-of-art research in the field of life’s organization confronts the need to investigate a number of interacting components, their properties and conditions of sustainable behaviour within a natural system. In biology, ecology and life sciences, the performance of such stable system is usually related to homeostasis, a property of the system to actively regulate its state within a certain allowable limits. In our previous work, we proposed a deterministic model for systems’ homeostasis. The model was based on dynamical system’s (...) theory and pairwise relationships of competition, amensalism and antagonism taken from theoretical biology and ecology. However, the present paper proposes a different dimension to our previous results based on the same model. In this paper, we introduce the influence of inter-component relationships in a system, wherein the impact is characterized by direction (neutral, positive, or negative) as well as its (absolute) value, or strength. This makes the model stochastic which, in our opinion, is more consistent with real-world elements affected by various random factors. The case study includes two examples from areas of hydrobiology and medicine. The models acquired for these cases enabled us to propose a convincing explanation for corresponding phenomena identified by different types of natural systems. (shrink)

McCullough et al. propose adaptations that motivate forgiveness when the potential benefits of continuing the relationship outweigh the costs incurred by the transgression. The costs incurred are definite, whereas future benefits of forgiveness are only probabilistic. This situation exposes the forgiver to cheating in the form of repeat transgression. Adaptations motivating genuine forgiveness are therefore unlikely to evolve.

When Wittgenstein moved from Manchester to Cambridge he was following a path from the study of the natural sciences to the study of philosophy which was then not unusual, and has since become increasingly common. Russell had preceded him in that intellectual emigration and many more were to follow. Of the three philosophy departments I have been in, two were headed by natural scientists. Both my research supervisors in philosophy were natural scientists. Less surprising, but still significant, a considerable proportion (...) of Presidents of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science were originally trained as natural scientists. Yet it is a subject still unrecognized by the Royal Society. The editors of both the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science and the journal Analysis were both originally natural scientists. Eminent scientists seem to feel impelled to discuss there own subjects in a wider context of philosophy. Bohr, Schrodinger, Kilmister, Hoyle, Hawking and Penrose, are but a few from a long list. (shrink)

Reliable reconstruction of historical – cultural past, including the past related to medical culture, remains an important methodological task. However, most documents and materials traditionally used for such reconstructions are often "mythologems", influenced by official ideology. Inevitably, the historical-cultural context is replaced by the historical-clinical one. The researcher is transferred from the field of culture to the space of professional constructions that impoverish our ideas about such elusive phenomena as medical ethics, body practices, attitudes to illness and health. The article (...) substantiates the possibility of using literary texts as complementary discourses for such reconstructions. Important topics in the development of medicine can be clarified using literary reflection. (shrink)