The geosciences include a wide spectrum of disciplines ranging from paleontology to climate science, and involve studies of a vast range of spatial and temporal scales, from the deep-time history of microbial life to the future of a system no less immense and complex than the entire Earth. Modeling is thus a central and indispensable tool across the geosciences. Here, we review both the history and current state of model-based inquiry in the geosciences. Research in these fields makes use of (...) a wide variety of models, such as conceptual, physical, and numerical models, and more specifically cellular automata, artificial neural networks, agent-based models, coupled models, and hierarchical models. We note the increasing demands to incorporate biological and social systems into geoscience modeling, challenging the traditional boundaries of these fields. Understanding and articulating the many different sources of scientific uncertainty – and finding tools and methods to address them – has been at the forefront of most research in geoscience modeling. We discuss not only structuralmodel uncertainties, parameter uncertainties, and solution uncertainties, but also the diverse sources of uncertainty arising from the complex nature of geoscience systems themselves. Without an examination of the geosciences, our philosophies of science and our understanding of the nature of model-based science are incomplete. (shrink)

Research from cognitive science and geoscience education has shown that sketching can improve spatial thinking skills and facilitate solving spatially complex problems. Yet sketching is rarely implemented in introductory geosciences courses, due to time needed to grade sketches and lack of materials that incorporate cognitive science research. Here, we report a design-centered, collaborative effort, between geoscientists, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers, to characterize spatial learning challenges in geoscience and to design sketch activities that use a sketch-understanding program, (...) CogSketch. We developed 26 CogSketch worksheets that use cognitive science–based principles to scaffold problem solving of spatially complex geoscience problems and report observations of an implementation in an introductory geoscience course where students used CogSketch or human-graded paper worksheets. Overall, this research highlights the principles of interdisciplinary design between cognitive scientists, geoscientists, and AI researchers that can inform the collaborative design process for others aiming to develop effective educational materials. (shrink)

Geoscience research may upset people even though it is ethically acceptable. In this paper we attempt to explore three questions about such research. It will turn out that (1) under most circumstances ethical but upsetting geoscience research is morally permissible, (2) revising this research in response to upset-induced external interference is morally impermissible in the absence of strong countervailing pragmatic reasons and attempts to reduce upset, and (3) potentially upsetting geoscience research ought to be communicated truthfully and (...) tailored to each individual situation. These general propositions are applied to a case of ethical but upsetting research that we ourselves are currently involved. (shrink)

Abductive reasoning is central to reconstructing the past in the geosciences. This paper outlines the nature of the abductive method and restates it in Bayesian terms. Evidence plays a key role in this working method and, in particular, traces of the past are important in this explanatory framework. Traces, whether singularly or as groups, are interpreted within the context of the event for which they have evidential claims. Traces are not considered as independent entities but rather as inter-related pieces of (...) information concerning the likelihood of specific events. Exemplification of the use of such traces is provided by dissecting an example of their use in the environmental reconstruction of mountain climate. (shrink)

While the predominant focus of the philosophical literature on scientific modeling has been on single-scale models, most systems in nature exhibit complex multiscale behavior, requiring new modeling methods. This challenge of modeling phenomena across a vast range of spatial and temporal scales has been called the tyranny of scales problem. Drawing on research in the geosciences, I synthesize and analyze a number of strategies for taming this tyranny in the context of conceptual, physical, and mathematical modeling. This includes several strategies (...) that can be deployed in physical modeling, even when strict dynamical scaling fails. In all cases, I argue that having an adequate conceptual model—given both the nature of the system and the particular purpose of the model—is essential. I draw a distinction between depiction and representation, and use this research in the geosciences to advance a number of debates in the philosophy of modeling. (shrink)

Undergraduate geoscience students are rarely exposed to history and philosophy of science. I will describe the experiences with a short course unfavourably placed in the first year of a bachelor of earth science. Arguments how HPS could enrich their education in many ways are sketched. One useful didactic approach is to develop a broader interest by connecting HPS themes to practical cases throughout the curriculum, and develop learning activities that allow students to reflect on their skills, methods and their (...) field in relation to other disciplines and interactions with society with abilities gained through exposure to HPS. Given support of the teaching staff, the tenets of philosophy of science in practice, of conceptual history of knowledge, and of ethics of science for society can fruitfully and directly be connected to the existing curriculum. This is ideally followed by a capstone HPS course late in the bachelor programme. (shrink)

The teaching of ethics in science within the disciplines provides an avenue to deepen students’ scientific understanding and to develop their critical thinking skills. This study showcases a module which connects ethics to science within a large introductory geoscience course. The module components, a tutorial plus homework assignment and an exam question, require students to decide on ethical issues using a 5-step approach that mirrors the scientific decision-making process. The assignment is graded using a developed rubric. An analysis of (...) exam question responses reveals that students correctly identify stakeholders and mention contributions by geoscientists, but have difficulties recognizing their own assumptions. Furthermore, many acknowledge the complexity of the ethical issue at hand. The module provides an example of how disciplinary instructors can include ethics in their teaching and assess students’ ethical decision-making process. (shrink)

"The book provides an excellent historical summary of the debates over continental drift theory in this century." —Contemporary Sociology "This is a useful discussion of the way that science works. The book will be of value to philosophers of science... " —Choice "... will find an important place in university and department libraries, and will interest afficionados of the factual and intellectual history of the earth sciences." —Terra Nova "... an excellent core analysis... " —The Times Higher Education Supplement "... (...) an ambitious and important contribution to the new sociology of science." —American Journal of Sociology "... Stewart's book is a noble effort, an interesting and readable discussion, and another higher notch on the scoreboard of critical scholarship that deserves wide examination and close attention." —Geophysics This fascinating book describes the rise and fall and rebirth of continental drift theory in this century. It uses the recent revolution in geoscientinsts' beliefs about the earth to examine questions such as, How does scientific knowledge develop and change? The book also explores how well different perspectives help us to understand revolutionary change in science. (shrink)

The philosophy of the geosciences is an emerging subfield in philosophy of science. Although past and present geoscientific disciplines differ substantially, we argue that they frequently face common epistemological and ethical problems. We survey several of these problems that have already attracted sustained philosophical interest, related to the use of measurements, data, and models to study relatively inaccessible target phenomena, responses to (epistemic) injustices, and the management of epistemic risks.

Abductive reasoning is central to reconstructing the past in the geosciences. This paper outlines the nature of the abductive method and restates it in Bayesian terms. Evidence plays a key role in this working method and, in particular, traces of the past are important in this explanatory framework. Traces, whether singularly or as groups, are interpreted within the context of the event for which they have evidential claims. Traces are not considered as independent entities but rather as inter-related pieces of (...) information concerning the likelihood of specific events. Exemplification of the use of such traces is provided by dissecting an example of their use in the environmental reconstruction of mountain climate. (shrink)

I examine the citation patterns to a revolutionary scientific paper, Hess’ “History of Ocean Basins”, which played a significant role in the plate tectonics revolution in the geosciences. I test two predictions made by the geoscientist Menard (in Science: growth and change. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1971): (1) that the peak year of citations for Hess’ article will be 1968; and (2) that the rate of citations to the article will then reach some lower level, continuing on accumulating citations at (...) some regular but unimpressive rate. Drawing on data covering the period from 1962 to 2019, I show that Menard was close with respect to the first prediction. But I also show that things are less clear with respect to the second prediction. I explain why the data are less clear with respect to the second prediction. (shrink)

Model-data symbiosis is the view that there is an interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship between data and models, whereby models are not only data-laden, but data are also model-laden or model filtered. In this paper I elaborate and defend the second, more controversial, component of the symbiosis view. In particular, I construct a preliminary taxonomy of the different ways in which theoretical and simulation models are used in the production of data sets. These include data conversion, data correction, data interpolation, (...) data scaling, data fusion, data assimilation, and synthetic data. Each is defined and briefly illustrated with an example from the geosciences. I argue that model-filtered data are typically more accurate and reliable than the so-called raw data, and hence beneficially serve the epistemic aims of science. By illuminating the methods by which raw data are turned into scientifically useful data sets, this taxonomy provides a foundation for developing a more adequate philosophy of data. (shrink)

Geosciences have been increasingly interested in ethics due to the challenges thrown by advancements of studies and researches in the area of geosciences towards global community. This results in the emergence of a new discipline during the last decade of 20th century named ‘Geo-Ethics’. The great task assigned to this discipline is to provide an ethical face to geosciences so that these may be maximum useful to global community. Although it is very difficult to define any growing discipline and that (...) is the case with geo-ethics, this paper aims to discuss the nature and core principles of this emerging discipline, an amalgamation of geosciences and ethics. Geo-ethics, an application of a value-system in the area of studies and researches of geosciences, is a part of applied ethics. Its proposed principles are: Refrain from superstitions and supernatural affairs, Interconnectedness, Rationality, Non-rigidness and Coherence, Non-maleficence, Beneficence, Justice. (shrink)

With the development of geoscience, users are eager to obtain preferred service from geospatial information intelligently and automatically. However, the information grows rapidly while the service gets more complicated, which makes it difficult to find out the targeted information for an exact service in geospatial issues. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to promote the geospatial service from information to knowledge with spatiotemporal semantics. Both prompted and professional knowledge are further refined to be published as a service. (...) In terms of an exact task, numerous related services are recombined to a service chain under user requirement. Finally, the proposed method is applied to monitor the environment on the Air Quality Index and soil moisture in the Sensor Web service platform, the results of which indicate geospatial knowledge service is more efficient to support spatial decision-making. (shrink)

Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought’s own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we ‘socialize the Anthropocene’ without also opening ‘the social’ to climate, geology and earth system change? Revisiting the earth science behind the Anthropocene thesis and drawing (...) on social research that is using climatology and earth systems thinking to help understand socio-historical change, this article explores some of the possibilities for ‘geologizing’ social thought. While critical social thought’s attention to justice and exclusion remains vital, it suggests that responding to Anthropocene conditions also calls for a kind of ‘geo-social’ thinking that relates human diversity and social difference to the potentiality and multiplicity of the earth itself. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore disciplinary variation in valuation practices by comparing the way research groups accumulate credibility across four epistemic cultures. Our analysis is based on case studies of four high-performing research groups representing very different epistemic cultures in humanities, social sciences, geosciences and mathematics. In each case we interviewed about ten researchers, analyzed relevant documents and observed a couple of meetings. In all four cases we found a cyclical process of accumulating credibility. At the same time, we found (...) significant differences in the manifestation of the six main resources that are part of the cycle, the mechanisms of conversion between these resources, the overall structure and the average speed of the credibility cycle. The different ways in which the groups use data and produce arguments affect the whole cycle of accumulating credibility. In some cultures, journal publications are the main source of recognition, but in others one can earn significant amounts of recognition for conference contributions or service to the academic community. Moreover, the collaboration practices in the respective fields strongly influence the connection between arguments and publications. In cultures where teams of researchers collaboratively produce arguments, it is more strongly embedded in the process of writing publications. We conclude that the credibility cycle can only be used as an analytical tool to explain the behavior of researchers or research groups when taking differences across epistemic cultures into account. (shrink)

In Rock, Bone, and Ruin, Adrian Currie offers an account of how historically oriented researchers in paleontology, archaeology, and the geosciences make the most out of their epistemically unlucky circumstances. He argues that there are three things, in particular, that can help scientists gain traction in unlucky circumstances: methodological omnivory, epistemic scaffolding, and “empirically grounded speculation”. Together, these three aspects of the practice of historical science help explain its successes. I largely agree with Currie’s account of methodological omnivory and epistemic (...) scaffolding, but I want to raise some critical questions about his discussion of speculation. (shrink)

This paper explores the history of a unique assemblage of researchers in the geodetic and allied sciences organised at Ohio State University (OSU) in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. From about 1950 to 1970, the OSU geodetic sciences group was the most significant group of geodetic researchers in the world. Funded almost entirely by military and intelligence agencies, they pioneered the technologies, organised the research initiatives, ordered the data sets, and trained the generation of geodesists who eventually (...) created the Cold War Figure of the Earth to both prosecute and prevent global nuclear war. They devised elaborate mechanisms to pursue in secrecy and isolation research that had hitherto been performed collaboratively and globally. They invented methods to maintain professional associations and protocols, both to distribute-and disguise-the fruits of their geodetic research. In accomplishing this, their work also undermined the basic hypothesis of isostasy that had been foundational to geodesy for the previous century.Fundamental progress in the geosciences and military and intelligence directives were inextricably linked during the Cold War, although the extent of their convergence has been masked by the security protocols organised to disguise it. With the declassification of key programmes underway, it is now both possible and necessary to substantially revise the history of Cold War-era geosciences and their associated technologies. (shrink)

We critically engage two traditional views of scientific data and outline a novel philosophical view that we call the pragmatic-representational view of data. On the PR view, data are representations that are the product of a process of inquiry, and they should be evaluated in terms of their adequacy or fitness for particular purposes. Some important implications of the PR view for data assessment, related to misrepresentation, context-sensitivity, and complementary use, are highlighted. The PR view provides insight into the common (...) but little-discussed practices of iteratively reusing and repurposing data, which result in many datasets’ having a phylogeny—an origin and complex evolutionary history—that is relevant to their evaluation and future use. We relate these insights to the open-data and data-rescue movements, and highlight several future avenues of research that build on the PR view of data. (shrink)

Computational modeling of sketch understanding is interesting both scientifically and for creating systems that interact with people more naturally. Scientifically, understanding sketches requires modeling aspects of visual processing, spatial representations, and conceptual knowledge in an integrated way. Software that can understand sketches is starting to be used in classrooms, and it could have a potentially revolutionary impact as the models and technologies become more advanced. This paper looks at one such effort, Sketch Worksheets, which have been used in multiple classroom (...) experiments already, with students ranging from elementary school to college. Sketch Worksheets are a software equivalent of pencil and paper worksheets commonly found in classrooms, but they provide on-the-spot feedback based on what students draw. They are built on the CogSketch platform, which provides qualitative visual and spatial representations and analogical processing based on computational models of human cognition. This paper explores three issues. First, we examine how research from cognitive science and artificial intelligence, combined with the constraints of creating new kinds of educational software, led to the representations and processing in CogSketch. Second, we examine how these capabilities have been used in Sketch Worksheets, drawing upon experiments with fifth-grade students in biology and college students in engineering design and in geoscience. Finally, we examine some open issues in sketch understanding that need to be addressed to better model high-level aspects of vision, and for sketch understanding systems to reach their full potential for supporting education. (shrink)

BackgroundInstitutions, funding agencies and publishers are placing increasing emphasis on good research data management (RDM). RDM lapses in medical science can result in questionable data and cause the public’s confidence in the scientific community to crumble. A fledgling medical school in a young university in Singapore has mandated every funded research project to have a data management plan (DMP). However, researchers’ adherence to their DMPs was unknown until the school embarked on routine data auditing. We hypothesize that research data auditing (...) improves RDM awareness, compliance and reception in the school.MethodsWe conducted surveys with research PIs and researchers before and after data auditing to evaluate differences in self-reported RDM awareness, compliance and reception. As it is mandatory to deposit research data in a central data repository system in the school, we tracked data deposition by each laboratory from 2 weeks before to 3 months after data auditing as a marker of actual RDM compliance.ResultsResearch data auditing had an overall positive effect on self-reported RDM awareness, compliance and reception for both research PIs and researchers. Research PIs agreed more that RDM was important to scientific reproducibility, were more aware of proper RDM, had higher RDM strength in their laboratories and were more compliant with the DMP. Both research PIs and researchers believed data auditing helped them to be more compliant with data deposition in the repository. However, data auditing had no significant impact on laboratories’ data deposition rates over time, which could be due to the short sampling period.ConclusionsResearch PIs and researchers generally felt that data auditing was effective in improving RDM practices. It helped to evaluate their RDM practices objectively, propose corrective actions for RDM lapses and spread awareness of the university’s data management policies. Our findings corroborated other studies in medical research, geosciences, engineering and ethics that data auditing promotes good RDM practices. Hence, we recommend research institutions worldwide to adopt data auditing as a tool to reinforce research integrity. (shrink)

In attending to surfaces, as they wrap, layer and grow within sentient bodies, material formations and cosmological sates, this volume presents a series of ten anthropological studies stretching across five continents and in observation of earthly practices of making, knowing, living and dying. Through theoretically reflecting on time spent with Aymara and Mapuche Andean cultures, the Malagasy people of Madagascar, craftspeople and designers across Europe and Oceania, amongst the architectures of Australia and South Korea, and within the folds of books, (...) screens, landscape and the sea, the anthropologists in this volume communicate diverse ways of considering, working with and knowing surfaces. Together, these writings advance a knowledge of the world which resists any definitive settlement of existential categories and rather seeks to know the world in its emergence and transformation, as entities grow, cohere, shift, dissolve, decay and rebirth through the contact and exchange of surfaces, persisting with varying time, power and effect. The book principally invites readers from anthropology, the creative arts and environmental studies, but also across the wider humanities and social sciences as well as those in neighbouring scientific fields of archeology, biology, geography, geoscience, material science, neurology and psychology interested in the intersections of mind, body, materials and world. (shrink)

There is a critical inconsistency in the literature on analogical retrieval. On the one hand, a vast set of laboratory studies has found that people often fail to retrieve past experiences that share deep relational commonalities, even when they would be useful for reasoning about a current problem. On the other hand, historical studies and naturalistic research show clear evidence of remindings based on deep relational commonalities. Here, we examine a possible explanation for this inconsistency—namely, that remindings based on relational (...) principles increase as a function of expertise. To test this claim, we devised a simple analogy‐generation task that can be administered across a wide range of expertise. We presented common events as the bases from which to generate analogies. Although the events themselves were unrelated to geoscience, we found that when the event was explainable in terms of a causal principle that is prominent in geoscience, expert geoscientists were likely to spontaneously produce analogies from geoscience that relied on the same principle. Further, for these examples, prompts to produce causal analogies increased their frequency among nonscientists and scientists from another domain, but not among expert geoscientists (whose spontaneous causal retrieval levels were already high). In contrast, when the example was best explained by a principle outside of geoscience, all groups required prompting to produce substantial numbers of analogies based on causal principles. Overall, this pattern suggests that the spontaneous use of causal principles is characteristic of experts. We suggest that expert scientists adopt habitual patterns of encoding according to the key relational principles in their domain, and that this contributes to their propensity to spontaneously retrieve relational matches. We discuss implications for the nature of expertise and for science instruction and assessment. (shrink)

The quality of doctoral-level chemistry (N=145), computer science (N=58), geoscience (N=91), mathematics (N=115), physics (N=123), and statistics/biostatistics (N=64) programs at United States universities was assessed, using 16 measures. These measures focused on variables related to: program size; characteristics of graduates; reputational factors (scholarly quality of faculty, effectiveness of programs in educating research scholars/scientists, improvement in program quality during the last 5 years); university library size; research support; and publication records. Chapter I discusses prior attempts to assess quality in graduate (...) education, development of the study plans, and the selection of disciplines and programs to be evaluated. Chapter II discusses the methodology used, focusing on each of the assessment measures. Chapters III to VIII present, respectively, findings from the analyses of the chemistry, computer science, geoscience, mathematics, physics, and statistics/biostatistics programs. Chapter IX includes a summary of results, correlations among measures, several additional analyses, and suggestions for future studies. Among the findings reported are those indicating that mathematics programs had, on the average, the largest number of faculty (N=33) in December 1980 followed closely by physics (N=28) and chemistry (N=23), and that 80 percent of computer science students had job commitments by graduation. (Survey instruments and supporting documentation are included in appendices.) (JN). (shrink)

This article compares the sequential position, action, and design of teasing sequences in classroom and mundane interaction. This collection of teases comes from a university Geosciences classroom, and the analysis demonstrates that, like teases in ordinary conversation, classroom teases are sequentially bound and designed in extreme fashions. Nonetheless, classroom teasing sequences are unique in terms of the actions and precise designs of teasables and teases as well as the sequential contingencies that create opportunities for teasing. This paper contributes to past (...) conversation analysis research showing how teases as sequences of embodied action are subject to local contingencies and constraints. (shrink)

In both scientific and popular circles it is often said that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. Although the urgency of our present environmental crises is not in doubt, such claims of a present mass extinction are highly controversial scientifically. Our aims are, first, to get to the bottom of this scientific debate by shedding philosophical light on the many conceptual and methodological challenges involved in answering this scientific question, and, second, to offer new philosophical perspectives (...) on what the value of asking this question has been — and whether that value persists today. We show that the conceptual challenges in defining ‘mass extinction’, uncertainties in past and present diversity assessments, and data incommensurabilities undermine a straightforward answer to the question of whether we are in, or entering, a sixth mass extinction today. More broadly we argue that an excessive focus on the mass extinction framing can be misleading for present conservation efforts and may lead us to miss out on the many other valuable insights that Earth’s deep time can offer in guiding our future. (shrink)

At its inception, geoethics was envisioned as a type of professional ethics concerned with the moral implications of geoscientific research, applications, and practices. More recently, however, some scholars have proposed versions of geoethics as public and global ethics. To better understand these developments, this article considers the relationship between geoethics and environmental ethics by exploring different aspects of the human-nature relation (i.e., the moral status and role of humans in relation to the non-human world). We start by noting that the (...) main strains of geoethical thought elaborated so far represent examples of environmental virtue ethics and defend moral weak anthropocentric positions (e.g., “ethical”, “responsible” or “enlightened” anthropocentrism). Some scholars propose that such weak anthropocentric geoethics can synthesize the different positions in environmental ethics and move beyond them toward a novel and distinct approach. We compare the meaning and the use of the term “anthropocentrism” in both environmental ethics and geoethics, stressing that although geoethics is inevitably epistemically anthropocentric (i.e., anthropogenic), it does not need to be morally anthropocentric. We consider the compatibility of non-anthropocentric stances with current geoethical theory and argue for the integration of normative non-anthropocentric accounts (e.g., ecocentric) into geoethical debates and geoscience education. (shrink)

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are central to any educational system. The term started with the National Science Foundation as “SMET” and was changed to STEM at a later date due to phonetic reasons. The term was not widely used until Virginia Tech University began offering a “STEM education” degree in 2005 (Friedman 2005). The term STEM covers a broad spectrum of different disciplines. While, in general, STEM is used as an umbrella term for the natural sciences, engineering, (...) mathematics, and technology-related fields, there are some variations in its usage. For example, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) characterizes STEM as including chemistry, computers and information technology, engineering, geoscience, life sciences, mathematical sciences, physics and astronomy, psychology, social sciences, educational research, and STEM education (Gonzalez and Kuezi 2012). Whereas this approach considers the social sciences to be of central importance to STEM and the STEM workforce (Spalter-Roth 2004), in the United Kingdom, STEM is seen to include fields such as medicine, dentistry, and architecture but exclude the social sciences and education (United Kingdom, House of Lords, Science, and Technology, Committee 2012). (shrink)

With Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotical theory two different kinds of creative metaphorical reasoning in science can be identified. The building of remainder metaphors is especially important for creating new scientific models. We show that the conveyor belt metaphor provides an excellent example for Peirce's theory. The conveyor belt metaphor has recently been invented in order to describe the oceanic transport system. The paradigm of the oceanic conveyor belt strongly influenced the geoscience community and the climate change discussion.

The essay examines the function and the meaning of documentary images by examining the geological image collection of the Swiss natural philosopher Conrad Gessner. Gessner?s interest in pictorial documentation can only be understood in the context of his special interest in the formal aspects of nature. His approach marked a turning point in the history of natural philosophy and would be unthinkable without the pictorial techniques used to collect and document the objects of his research. By reconsidering philosophical definitions of (...) form and matter, he set geoscience on a new philosophical foundation. This reorientation is closely connected to the metaphysics of nature. Both aspects were essential to the establishment of a new scientific approach, in which the old epistemological technique of studying texts was coupled to a new source of knowledge: the study of images. (shrink)

In the spirit of explanatory pluralism, this chapter argues that causal and noncausal explanations of a phenomenon are compatible, each being useful for bringing out different sorts of insights. After reviewing a model-based account of scientific explanation, which can accommodate causal and noncausal explanations alike, an important core conception of noncausal explanation is identified. This noncausal form of model-based explanation is illustrated using the example of how Earth scientists in a subfield known as aeolian geomorphology are explaining the formation of (...) regularlyspaced sand ripples. The chapter concludes that even when it comes to everyday "medium-sized dry goods" such as sand ripples, where there is a complete causal story to be told, one can find examples of noncausal scientific explanations. (shrink)

It is without doubt that the earth sciences were rocked to the core by a revolution in the late sixties with the initial acceptance of Harry Hess’s hypothesis of seafloor spreading and subsequent development and acceptance of plate tectonics. The major aim of this essay is to show precisely why this revolution is not Kuhnian. However, my reasons for claiming that Kuhn’s model fails to apply are at variance with Ruse [27] but in much agreement with R. Laudan [18]. I (...) shall highlight our differences as space permits.There are two general accounts of the rise of continental drift and plate tectonics which satisfy Kuhn’s model of scientific growth and change. (1) The geosciences prior to the acceptance of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics were in a pre-paradigm state. Earth scientists solved no problems within geological domains, but only argued among themselves about which of the various schools of thought provided the best framework for attacking geological problems. (shrink)

Resumo: No início da década de 80, a Sociedade Brasileira de Geologia promoveu pesquisa-diagnóstico que confirmou a necessidade e importância de formação pedagógica para os professores dos cursos de graduação em Geologia. Parte das sugestões e reivindicações que surgiram então no âmbito da comunidade geológica, no sentido de contemplar essa formação, foram atendidas com o oferecimento do Curso de Especialização em Ensino de Geociências na UNICAMP, a partir de 1984. Destinado a professores de disciplinas geológicas e afins, usualmente graduados em (...) Geologia, Geografia, Engenharia e Ciências Biológicas, o curso é estruturado em três fases, nas quais o participante executa atividades respectivamente de planejamento de ensino, aplicação desse planejamento e, finalmente, avaliação do conjunto da experiência. O trabalho do participante na própria instituição de origem constitui o ponto de partida para seu aprofundamento teórico e também a meta a ser atingida, na forma de trabalho renovado. A análise sistemática do curso permitiu detectar deficiências e propor mudanças visando aperfeiçoá-lo. Palavras-chave: Educação permanente; Geociências; Metodologia de ensino. In the beginnings of the 80's the Brazilian Geological: Society sponsored a research that confirmed the need and importance of pedagogic development for undergraduate courses's teachers in geology. A group of suggestions and demands that arose in the midst of the geological community, aiming at this development were met with the offer of the "Specialization Course in the Teaching of Geosciences" at UNICAMP since 1984. Directed to teachers of geological subjects and similar ones, usually graduate in geology, geography, engineering and biological sciences, this course is organized in three stages, where the student is engaged in activities of teaching planning, use of this planning and assessment of this overall trial. The previous work of the participant in his/her original institution set the starting point to the theoretical in-depth study, and also the goals to be attained. This research is oriented to the systematic analysis of this course, aiming at detecting deficiencies and proposing changes that may lead to its improvement. Descriptors: Continuing education; Earth science; Teaching methods. (shrink)

This Special Publication will be an important tool for geoscientists, aimed at increasing the awareness of their societal role and responsibility in conducting education, research and practice activities. What are the responsibilities of a geoscientist? And what motivations are needed to push geoscientists to practice the Earth sciences in an ethical way? The major environmental challenges affecting human communities require not only a strictly scientific and technical preparation by the geoscientists, but also a reflection on their broader obligations towards society. (...) It is important that geoscientists consider geoethics as an indispensable framework on which to base their training and activity. The principles of geoethics can guide them to pursue the common good by weighing the benefits and costs of each choice, and identifying eco-friendly and society-friendly solutions that guarantee the respect of the right balance between human life and the dynamics of the Earth. Communication and dissemination of geosciences should become core activities in building a knowledge-based society, which is able better to protect itself and the Earth ecosystems in order to guarantee a life in harmony with our planet for future generations. (shrink)

The development of nineteenth-century geodetic measurement challenges the dominant coherentist account of measurement success. Coherentists argue that measurements of a quantity are epistemically successful if their numerical outcomes converge across varying contextual constraints. Aiming at numerical convergence, in turn, offers an operational aim for scientists to solve problems of coordination. Geodesists faced such a problem of coordination between two indicators of the earth’s ellipticity, which were both based on imperfect ellipsoid models. While not achieving numerical convergence, their measurements produced novel (...) data that grounded valuable theoretical hypotheses. Consequently, they ought to be regarded as epistemically successful. This insight warrants a dynamic revision of coherentism, allowing to judge the success of a metric based on both its coherence and fruitfulness. On that view, scientific measurement aims to coordinate theoretical definitions and produce novel data and theoretical insights. (shrink)

Philosophers and metrologists have refuted the view that measurement’s epistemic privilege in scientific practice is explained by its theory-neutrality. Rather, they now explicitly appeal to the role that theories play in measurement. I formulate a challenge for this view: scientists sometimes ascribe epistemic privilege to measurements even if they lack a shared theory about their target quantity, which I illustrate through a case study from early geodesy. Drawing on that case, I argue that the epistemic privilege of measurement precedes shared (...) background theory and is better explained by its pre-theoretic function in enabling a distinctive kind of inquiry. (shrink)