Knowledge of residual perturbations in the orbit of Uranus in the early 1840s did not lead to the refutation of Newton's law of gravitation but instead to the discovery of Neptune in 1846. Karl Popper asserts that this case is atypical of science and that the law of gravitation was at least prima facie falsified by these perturbations. I argue that these assertions are the product of a false, a priori methodological position I call, 'Weak Popperian Falsificationism'. Further, (...) on the evidence the law was not prima facie false and was not generally considered so by astronomers at the time. Many of Popper's commentators presuppose WPF and their views on this case and its implications for scientific rationality and method suffer from this same defect. (shrink)

In 1995 Walker & Company published a small book authored by the professional writer Dava Sobel entitled Longitude: The Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Not only did the book sell exceptionally well; it also spawned a three‐hour film, Longitude, starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon, and a new, lavishly illustrated work, The Illustrated Longitude, by Sobel and Harvard's William J. H. Andrewes. It is difficult to think of another book in the (...) history of science that has attained comparable success. Yet it seems that history of science journals have taken scant notice of the book; my efforts to locate reviews of Sobel's volume in history of science journals have turned up only a single review, that being in Italian. This is all the more distressing because the book and film present a very controversial view of Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne. This is not the place to examine Sobel's recipe for success, but it seems relevant background in reviewing a book also written by a professional journalist, also published by Walker, and fairly comparable in format to Sobel's.The history of science is rich in fascinating stories that could delight a variety of readers. The story of the search for longitude in the eighteenth century is certainly one of these; the dramatic quest to discover Neptune in the mid nineteenth century is another. Put overly briefly, the latter is the story of the frustrated efforts of a young, personally diffident but intellectually bold Cambridge graduate, John Couch Adams, to convince either the director of the Cambridge Observatory or England's Astronomer Royal to look for a planet that Adams's calculations had told him must be located at a specific position. It is also the story of the brilliant and arrogant Urbain J. J. Leverrier, who had independently completed comparable calculations and who beat Adams to the discovery by persuading not one of his French colleagues but an astronomer at the Berlin Observatory to launch a search, which within a few hours had located Neptune. It is also the story of the immense controversy that followed and that has in the last few years been given a new twist with the recovery of key documents carried off to Chile from the Royal Greenwich Observatory.Tom Standage, science correspondent for the Economist and author of The Victorian Internet, has taken up the challenge of retelling the Neptune story, which had previously been treated in dozens of articles and in book‐length studies by John Pringle Nichol, Albert Glodin, Morton Grosser, and Patrick Moore. Moreover, Standage presents the Neptune narrative as the centerpiece in a story that stretches from William Herschel's discovery of Uranus to the discovery of Pluto in 1930 and even to the spectroscopic detection in the last few years of dozens of extra–solar system planets. Standage's clear and engaging prose is based on extensive reading in English and French sources, some manuscript work, and interviews with a number of the discoverers of extra–solar system planets. Although the book is bereft of footnotes, an annotated bibliography at its end partially fulfills their function. Numerous illustrations appear, but these tend to be rather dark and small.Although the book is generally reliable, some significant errors appear. For example, whereas Standage reports that William Herschel did not see Uranus alter in size, Herschel observed its diameter nearly double in the two months after his first observation of it. It is John, not William, Herschel who is buried in Westminster Abbey. Benjamin Peirce's last name is misspelled , as is Christiaan Huygens's first name , and it is incorrect to say that Huygens “considered it was unlikely that there was life elsewhere in the solar system” . Also, because Lowell Observatory director Vesto Slipher played such a major role in the discovery of the planet Pluto by creating and directing the research program that enabled a recent high school graduate, Clyde Tombaugh, to be the first to recognize the planet on a photographic plate, it seems inappropriate that Standage makes no mention of Slipher in recounting the discovery of Pluto.Overall this is a highly engaging story, well told and based on good sources. One would hope that it may follow Longitude into film, at least a documentary, and that other authors and publishers will recognize the market for such exciting stories from the history of science. (shrink)

Neste trabalho, é apresentada uma investigação do que poderia ser chamado de formalização lógica do processo de mudança de teorias devido a anomalias. Por anomalia entende-se um fato observado que faz parte do escopo explanatório de uma teoria, mas que vai de encontro à previsão da mesma. Uma abordagem clássica para restaurar o poder explicativo de uma teoria ameaçada por uma anomalia é a postulação de hipóteses novas e provisórias que, em conjunto com as demais hipóteses auxiliares originais, sejam capazes (...) de resolver a anomalia. Após chegar à algumas conclusões sobre a estrutura de tal processo, propomos um framework lógico multimodal e não-monotônico capaz de representar alguns aspectos-chave dessa faceta importante da dinâmica de teorias científicas. Devido à necessidade de acomodar hipóteses provisórias incompatíveis, esse framework incorpora uma forma fraca de paraconsistência. Como um estudo de caso, analisamos o comportamento anômalo do planeta Urano que ameaçou a mecânica celeste Newtoniana por mais de meio século e ensejou a descoberta do planeta Netuno. -/- In this work, an investigation of what could be called the logical formalization of the theory change process due to anomalies is presented. An anomaly is understood as an observed fact that is part of the explanatory scope of a theory, but that goes against its prediction. A classic approach to restoring the explanatory power of a theory threatened by an anomaly is to postulate new and provisional hypotheses that, together with the other original auxiliary hypotheses, are capable of resolving the anomaly. After reaching some conclusions about the structure of such a process, we propose a multimodal and non-monotonic logical framework capable of representing some key aspects of this important facet of the dynamics of scientific theories. Due to the need to accommodate incompatible provisional hypotheses, this framework incorporates a weak form of paraconsistency. As a case study, we analyze the anomalous behavior of the planet Uranus that threatened Newtonian celestial mechanics for more than half a century and prompted the discovery of the planet Neptune. (shrink)

Popper's account of refutation is the linchpin of his famous view that the method of science is the method of conjecture and refutation. This thesis critically examines his account of refutation, and in particular the practice he deprecates as avoiding a refutation. I try to explain how he comes to hold the views that he does about these matters; how he seeks to make them plausible; how he has influenced others to accept his mistakes, and how some of the ideas (...) or responses to Popper of such people are thus similarly mistaken. I draw some distinctions necessary to the provision of an adequate account of the so-called practice of avoiding a refutation, and try to rid the debate about this practice of at least one red herring. I analyse one case of 'avoiding' a refutation in detail to show how the rationality of scientific practice eludes both Popper and many of his commentators. Popper's skepticism about contingent knowledge prevents him from providing an acceptable account of contingent refutation, and so his method is really the method of conjecture and conjecture. He cannot do without the concepts of knowledge and refutation, however, if his account of science is to be plausible or persuasive, and so he equivocates between, amongst other things, refutation as disproof and refutation as the weaker notion of discorroboration. I criticise David Stove's account of this matter, in particular to show how he misses this point. An additional advantage Popper would secure from this equivocation is that if refutations were mere discorroborations they would be easier to achieve, and hence more common in science, than is the case. On Popper's weak notion of refutation, it would be possible to refute true theories since corroboration does not entail truth. There are two other related doctrines Popper holds about refutation which, if accepted, make some refutations seem easier to obtain than is the case. I call these doctrines 'Strong Popperian Falsificationism' (SPF) and 'Weak Popperian Falsificationism' (WPF). SPF is the false doctrine that if a prediction from some theory is refuted then that theory is refuted. Popper does not always endorse SPF. In particular, when confronted with a counterexample to it, he retreats to WPF, which is the false doctrine that if a prediction from some theory is refuted then that theory is prima facie refuted. WPF , or even SPF, can seem plausible if one has in mind predictions derived from theories in strong or conclusive tests of those theories, which I suggest Popper characteristically does. v Popper is disposed to describe any such case of predictive failure which does not lead to the refutation of the theory concerned as one in which that refutation has been avoided. To reinforce his portrayal of the refutation, or the attempted refutation, of major scientific theories as the rational core of scientific practice, Popper treats the so-called practice of avoiding a refutation as untypical of science, and much so-called avoidance he dismisses as unscientific or pseudo-scientific. I argue that his notion of avoiding a refutation is incoherent. Popper is further driven to believe that such avoidance is possible, however, because he conflates sentences with propositions and propositions with propositional beliefs. Also, he wishes to avoid being saddled with the relativisim that is a consequence of his weak account of refutation as discorroboration. Popper believes that ad hoc hypotheses are the most important of the unscientific means of avoiding a refutation. I argue that his account of such hypotheses is also incoherent, and that several hypotheses thought to be ad hoc in his sense are not. Such hypotheses appear to be so largely because of Popper's use of rhetoric and partly because these hypotheses are unacceptable for other reasons. I conclude that to know that a hypothesis is ad hoc in Popper's sense does not illuminate scientific practice. Popper has also attempted to explicate ad hocness in terms of some undesirable, or allegedly undesirable, properties of hypotheses or the explanations they would provide. The first such property is circularity, which is undesirable; the second such property is reduction in empirical content, which is not. In the former case I argue that non-circularity is clearly preferable to non-ad hocness as a criterion for a satisfactory explanation or explanans, as the case may be, and in the latter case that Popper is barking up the wrong tree. Some cases of so-called avoidance are obviously not unscientific. The discovery of Neptune from a prediction based on the reasonable belief that there were residual perturbations in the motion of Uranus is an important case in point, and one that is much discussed in the literature. The manifest failure of astronomers to account for Uranus's motion did not lead to the refutation of Newton's law of gravitiation, yet significant scientific progress obviously did result. Retreating to WPF, Popper claims that Newton's law was prima facie refuted. In general, astronomers have never shared this view, and they are correct in not doing so. I argue that the law of gravitation would have been prima facie refuted only if there had been good reason at the time to believe as false what is true, namely, that an unknown trans-Uranian planet was the cause of those Uranian residuals. Knowledge of the trans-Uranian region was then so slight that it was merely a convenient assumption, one which there was little reason to believe was false, that the known influences on Uranus's motion were the only such influences. I conclude that in believing vi or supposing that it was this assumption that was false, rather than the law of gravitation, Leverrier and Adams, the co-predictors of Neptune, were acting rationally and intelligently. Popper's commentators offer a variety of accounts of the alleged practice of avoiding a refutation, and of this case in particular. I analyse a sample of their accounts to show how common is the acceptance of some of Popper's basic mistakes, even amongst those who claim to reject his falsificationism, and to display the effects on their accounts of this acceptance of his mistakes. Many commentators recognize that anomalies are typically dealt with by changes in the boundary conditions or in other of the auxiliary propositions employed. Where many still go wrong, however, is in retaining the presupposition of WPF which encouraged Popper to hold the contradictory view about anomalies in the first place. Thus Imre Lakatos and others, for example, have developed a 'siege mentality' about major scientific theories; they see them as under continual threat of refutation from anomalies, and so come to believe that dogmatism is essential in science if such theories are to survive as they do. I examine various such doomed attempts to reconcile Popper with the history of science. It is a common failure in this literature to conflate or to fail to see the need to distinguish a belief from a supposition, and an epistemic reason from a pragmatic reason. I argue that only if one does draw these distinctions can one give an adequate account of how anomalies are rationally dealt with in science. The other important strand in Popper's thinking about 'avoidance' of refutation which has seriously misled some of his commentators is his unfounded belief in the dangers of ad hoc hypotheses. I examine the accounts that a sample of such commentators provide of the trans-Uranian planet hypotheses of Leverrier and Adams. These commentators imply or assert what Popper only hints at, namely, that there is something fishy about this hypothesis. I provide a further defence of the rationality of entertaining this hypothesis at the time. I conclude with a few remarks about Popper's dilemma in respect of scientific practice and his long standing emphasis on refutations. (shrink)

An investigation of what might be called the logical formalization of the process of theory change due to anomalies is presented. By anomaly, we mean an observed fact falling into the explanatory scope of a theory that does not agree with the theory prevision. A classical approach to restore the explicative power of a theory faced with an anomaly is to propose new, tentative auxiliary hypotheses which, along with part of the old set of auxiliary hypotheses, are able to solve (...) the anomaly. After laying down some conclusions about the structure of such process, we propose a multi-modal and non-monotonic logical framework able to represent some key aspects of this important facet of the dynamics of scientific theories. Due to the necessity of accommodating incompatible tentative hypotheses, this framework incorporates a weak form of paraconsistency. As a case study, we analyze the anomalous behaviour of the planet Uranus that threatened the Newtonian celestial mechanics for more than half a century and gave rise to the discovery of Neptune. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to describe the operation of a four-year prevention and awareness campaign organized by an evangelical social action network that mobilized Brazilian local churches to confront the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents before and during the FIFA 2014 World Cup. The aspects explored in this article are: the birth of the campaign; the manner in which an evangelical network served as a catalyst to mobilize the church to confront sexual violence; and the lessons learned (...) from this experience. It was found that the problem of sexual exploitation of children and adolescents can be addressed through an enlightened and engaged church that accepts the biblical mandate to act with justice and mercy to the “least of the least” in our society: children. The church is a sleeping giant that must be awakened to break the silence of sexual violence and be a strong advocate for vulnerable children. (shrink)

This paper sheds new light on the prevalence of evolutionary ideas in Scotland in the early nineteenth century and establish what connections existed between the espousal of evolutionary theories and adherence to the directional history of the earth proposed by Abraham Gottlob Werner and his Scottish disciples. A possible connection between Wernerian geology and theories of the transmutation of species in Edinburgh in the period when Charles Darwin was a medical student in the city was suggested in an important 1991 (...) paper by James Secord. This study aims to deepen our knowledge of this important episode in the history of evolutionary ideas and explore the relationship between these geological and evolutionary discourses. To do this it focuses on the circle of natural historians around Robert Jameson, Wernerian geologist and professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh from 1804 to 1854. From the evidence gathered here there emerges a clear confirmation that the Wernerian model of geohistory facilitated the acceptance of evolutionary explanations of the history of life in early nineteenth-century Scotland. As Edinburgh was at this time the most important center of medical education in the English-speaking world, this almost certainly influenced the reception and development of evolutionary ideas in the decades that followed. (shrink)

The discovery of Neptune was one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century astronomy. Using nothing but calculus and some observations of the Uranus’ anomalous motion, Adams and Le Verrier got to determine, independently, the possible place and mass of a hypothetical planet, which would produce its observational discovery. In this paper I will demonstrate that the methods used by these astronomers were influenced by Newton’s method of analysis and synthesis. Considering this, I will also expose, that some astronomy’s (...) general epistemological principles could be deduced when we consider these investigation methods. (shrink)

This comment on Steven Boer's “Object-Dependent Thoughts” develops two examples: (1) a counterexample to the "axiom of the seamlessness of truth," namely, that there are no propositions, one true and one false, such that knowing the true one requires believing the false one; (2) a story about the first sighting of Neptune, by John Galle on September 23, 1846, that illustrates how one can understand Galle's remark "That is the planet whose position Leverrier calculated" without believing that there is (...) something to which Galle refers. (shrink)

Geocentric Greek astronomers called seven heavenly bodies visible to the naked eye (sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) πλανητες—wanderers—because unlike all the other αστρα, their relative positions were constantly changing. While the Romans changed the Greek names of the individual planets to those still in use, they retained the generic name, which now occurs in many European languages. In acentric modern astronomy a planet is a satellite of a star. In addition to the five actual planets known to (...) the Greeks, Earth, Uranus, and Neptune also orbit the sun, a smallish star about half the distance from the centre of the Milky Way to its outer reaches. Earth is the only planet on which life is known for certain to exist. The search is on for concrete evidence of existing or formerly existing life on Mars (Dunbar B. et al. Perseverance Mars rover. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance. Retrieved 06/16/2021, 2021). Technology for detecting the chemical signature of life in the atmospheres of some planets of other stars may become available in the near future (Fujii Y. et al. Astrobiology 18 (6): 739–778, 2018)—proving a point made by (Lovelock J. Gaia: A new look at life on earth. Oxford University Press, New York, 1979) that life is a whole-planet phenomenon. That is, the Earth does not just harbour or support life; it has a life of its own. The Earth is a living planet in relationship to which individual organisms are as ephemeral cells (Vernadsky VI. Am Sci 33:1–12, 1945). (shrink)

The possibility of a love strong enough to overcome the corruption and violence of the world of film noir is a promise that frequently seduces the protagonist, but it ultimately proves to be illusory—and often fatal. Many film noirs share three major elements with Veronica Mars: a corrupt world in which the story is set; a love interest; and protagonist who becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth whatever the costs. The centerpiece of Veronica Mars's transformation of the film noir paradigm (...) is making the noir detective a teenage girl. In film noir the inhabitants of a corrupt world attempt to free themselves from bad situations but find themselves doomed to fail. One of the most radical and interesting ways in which Veronica Mars reimagines the genre is by reversing the genders between the film noir's protagonist and its femme fatale. (shrink)

This work will focus on some aspects of descriptive names. The New Theory of Reference, in line with Kripke, takes descriptive names to be proper names. I will argue in this paper that descriptive names and certain theory in reference to them, even when it disagrees with the New Theory of Reference, can shed light on our understanding of (some) non-existence statements. I define the concept of descriptive name for hypothesised object (DNHO). My thesis being that DNHOs are, as I (...) will specify, descriptions: a proposition expressed by the utterance ‘n is F’, where ‘n’ is a DNHO, is not singular at all; it is a descriptive proposition. To sum up, concerning proper names, the truth lies closer to the New Theory of Reference, but descriptivism is not altogether false. As for DNHOs descriptivism is, in some cases, the right fit. (shrink)

Veronica inhabits a world that's swarming with bad or, at best, morally ambiguous characters, a world that's perhaps more like our own than many of us would care to admit. Most neighborhoods in Neptune are a lot swankier than the simulated prison on the Heart campus; they have ample creature comforts and generally pleasant surroundings. Philosophers have traditionally looked at factors like temperament and personality traits in their search for the causes of human wickedness. In this chapter, the author (...) talks about Zimbardo's study that lends considerable support to the old adage that power corrupts. Serious moral reflection has an annoying habit of getting in the way of other things we want to do, like gratifying our desires and fitting in with others. That's why we have such a strong incentive to ignore the reproaches of conscience or to try to rationalize them away. (shrink)

Donnellan famously argued that while one can fix the reference of a name with a definite description, one cannot thereby have a de re belief about the named object. All that is generated is meta-linguistic knowledge that the sentence “If there is a unique F, then N is F” is true. Donnellan’s argument and the sceptical position are extremely influential. This article aims to show that Donnellan’s argument is unsound, and that the Millian who embraces Donnellan’s scepticism that the reference-fixer (...) cannot secure the relevant de re belief faces a serious problem: Millianism about names plus scepticism about the reference-fixer’s de re belief conflicts with what seems to be an analytical thesis about the relationship between semantic content and understanding. The upshot is that the Millian has good reason to seek an alternative to scepticism. (shrink)

What can be learnt from Paul B. Preciado’s ecological framing of trans* and migrant world-making in An Apartment on Uranus? How might trans* and migrant solidarities affirm life in the context of capitogenic climate catastrophe and what Françoise Vergès has named the ‘racial capitalocene’? Through these guiding questions, I connect recent calls to ‘decolonize trans* imaginaries’ with translocal hispanophone knowledges that reaffirm the plurality of gender/sexuality in las Amé ricas before the conquest by braiding together strands of Preciado’s writing (...) with Latin American decolonial transfeminists such as María Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. Reviewing recent debates on how ‘border imperialism’ unevenly shapes and restricts trans* and migrant mobility, I address criticisms of Preciado’s analogies between trans* and migrant experiences, by considering how his writings on these themes offer an intersectional reflection on the multiple cracks of the nation-state, the fictions of race and regimes of binary gender to reveal the cracks of capitalism. (shrink)

Summary This article compares the discoveries of the planets Neptune and Pluto and the unsuccessful search of intra-Mercurial planets. Its conclusion is, that the search of intra-Mercurial planets was started on the basis of reasonable assumptions and competently pursued, that the success in the search of Neptune and Pluto and the failure in the search of intra-Mercurial planets was not due to greater competence of the successful planet searchers, but to good luck of the successful researchers and bad (...) luck of the unsuccessful researchers. (shrink)

Summary This article compares the discoveries of the planets Neptune and Pluto and the unsuccessful search of intra-Mercurial planets. Its conclusion is, that the search of intra-Mercurial planets was started on the basis of reasonable assumptions and competently pursued, that the success in the search of Neptune and Pluto and the failure in the search of intra-Mercurial planets was not due to greater competence of the successful planet searchers, but to good luck of the successful researchers and bad (...) luck of the unsuccessful researchers. (shrink)

The main theoretical issues in the study of the history of the Archaean Controversy in Britain, which arose in the first three papers of the present series, are summarized and discussed—in particular the problem of stratigraphical work in rocks where no fossils can be discerned. The ‘Archaean’ geologists showed some leanings towards Neo-Neptunism and this, together with the fact that their work challenged the Murchison/Survey view of British geology, was one of the reasons for the controversy. At a deeper level, (...) however, the question concerned the doctrine of uniformitarianism: Were metamorphic rocks to be found at any part of the stratigraphical column, or were they confined to the earliest period of the Earth's history? The establishment of the concept of Precambrian rocks and a suitable stratotype boundary is essentially a social question that has to be determined within the geological community. Some of the social processes whereby these matters are decided internationally are considered, and it is noted that the best location of the ‘Golden Spike’ for the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary has only just been settled . The paper also explores some nineteenth-century ideas about the nature of metamorphism, and the early conditions of the world. (shrink)

De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. How should a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature look like? In spite of extended discussion of the issue since it was brought to the attention of the philosophical community in the late fifties by Quine (1956), we are far from having a plausible response. Discussing the matter in connection with the status (...) of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori, Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving ‘one meter’ or ‘Neptune’ famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content that is contingent he distinguished to that end between knowing a true proposition expressed by an utterance, and knowing that an utterance expresses a true proposition. Evans (1979) replied that, for a very specific sort of cases involving “descriptive names”, a related proto-two-dimensionalist account should be preferred, on which it is not the singular contingent content, but rather a general descriptive one which is knowable a priori. In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion (2000, 2001) has recently attacked Donnellan's proposal, arguing in favour of the most straightforward interpretation of Kripke's claim: in the relevant cases, the very same singular content can be both contingent and knowable a priori. This paper appeals to a generalized version of two-dimensional semantics to advance an account of the Kripkean cases along the lines of Evans's, and argues that Jeshion's compelling arguments against Donnellan's view do not apply to this version. (shrink)

Veronica Mars is a kick-ass private investigator, smart and street-wise. But what can her character tell us about larger life issues, such as knowledge and skepticism, trust and friendship, revenge, race, gender, and feminism? What makes her tick? And why is Logan such a sarcastic bad boy, anyway? Veronica Mars and Philosophy features a thought-provoking collection of essays centered on philosophical issues brought forth in Veronica Mars, the critically acclaimed neo-noir detective series set in the fictional town of Neptune, (...) California. Fans and newcomers alike will gain unique insights into the philosophical make-up of a hit show that tackled both crime and some of the larger mysteries of life. Introduces significant philosophical concepts that arise in the cult TV show, Veronica Mars Tackles topics relevant to contemporary youth culture, including trust and friendship, revenge, knowledge and skepticism, race, class, gender, and feminism Offers insights into darker themes explored in the series, which is noted for the complexity and intricate plotting of its storylines Delves deeply into the psychology of Veronica Mars during her transition from high school to college Written for fans of the television show, philosophy students or readers interested in popular culture Timed for release with the highly anticipated Veronica Mars feature film. (shrink)

Veronica Mars is a kick-ass private investigator, smart and street-wise. But what can her character tell us about larger life issues, such as knowledge and skepticism, trust and friendship, revenge, race, gender, and feminism? What makes her tick? And why is Logan such a sarcastic bad boy, anyway? _Veronica Mars and Philosophy_ features a thought-provoking collection of essays centered on philosophical issues brought forth in _Veronica Mars_, the critically acclaimed neo-noir detective series set in the fictional town of Neptune, (...) California. Fans and newcomers alike will gain unique insights into the philosophical make-up of a hit show that tackled both crime and some of the larger mysteries of life. Introduces significant philosophical concepts that arise in the cult TV show, _Veronica Mars_ Tackles topics relevant to contemporary youth culture, including trust and friendship, revenge, knowledge and skepticism, race, class, gender, and feminism Offers insights into darker themes explored in the series, which is noted for the complexity and intricate plotting of its storylines Delves deeply into the psychology of Veronica Mars during her transition from high school to college Written for fans of the television show, philosophy students or readers interested in popular culture Timed for release with the highly anticipated _Veronica Mars_ feature film. (shrink)

Although the historical‐causal picture of reference Kripke sketches in Naming and Necessity is highly influential, Kripke in fact says very little about what reference is and how it comes about. In this paper I point out that the possibility of asking WH‐questions (i.e. ‘what?’, ‘who?’, ‘which?’) about a sound or inscription pattern (e.g., what does that refer to?) shows that in case of names especially, their reference, if there is one, will be preserved by a causal‐historical chain constituted by transmissions (...) of the (physical) patterns themselves, even in absence of language users or any linguistic intentions. I sketch out a causal‐informational theory of reference, that holds that the causal aspect of refence transmission is due to two‐factors. On the other hand there are informational chains constituted by data transmissions, on the other, also communicational rules by which speakers can interpret the data as information of something are needed. In most part the causal‐informational theory sketched in the paper can be viewed as complementing Kripke’s original causal picture. However, I will argue that Kripke's account of fixing the reference of proper names in ‘initial baptisms’ is inadequate. I will argue that most cases of seemingly fixing the reference via use of a definite description (e.g., the naming of Neptune) in fact presuppose a prior causal‐informational connection to the named object, thus essentially fixing the reference in the same way as in cases of baptism by ostension. I will further argue that in the cases that do not fall into the previous category, the baptism by definite description simply fail to fix any reference. I thus conclude that there is no such thing as fixing the reference of a proper name by definite description. (shrink)

In Plato's Euthyphro two suggestions are offered to account for the accusation of impiety brought against Socrates. The first comes from Euthyphro , who takes it that the accusation is directed primarily against Socrates' ‘divine sign.’ The second is made by Socrates himself , who puts forward the view that he is being brought to trial because he refuses to accept such tales about the gods as Hesiod told regarding the maltreatment of Uranus by Cronus and of Cronus by (...) Zeus—tales which Euthyphro not merely believes but regards as justifying his action in prosecuting his own father. Both these suggestions used to be taken at their face-value, as, for example, by Grote . But according to J. Burnet , followed by A. E. Taylor , neither is meant to be taken seriously. (shrink)

Veronica Mars is a kick-ass private investigator, smart and street-wise. But what can her character tell us about larger life issues, such as knowledge and skepticism, trust and friendship, revenge, race, gender, and feminism? What makes her tick? And why is Logan such a sarcastic bad boy, anyway? Veronica Mars and Philosophy features a thought-provoking collection of essays centered on philosophical issues brought forth in Veronica Mars, the critically acclaimed neo-noir detective series set in the fictional town of Neptune, (...) California. Fans and newcomers alike will gain unique insights into the philosophical make-up of a hit show that tackled both crime and some of the larger mysteries of life. Introduces significant philosophical concepts that arise in the cult TV show, Veronica Mars Tackles topics relevant to contemporary youth culture, including trust and friendship, revenge, knowledge and skepticism, race, class, gender, and feminism Offers insights into darker themes explored in the series, which is noted for the complexity and intricate plotting of its storylines Delves deeply into the psychology of Veronica Mars during her transition from high school to college Written for fans of the television show, philosophy students or readers interested in popular culture Timed for release with the highly anticipated Veronica Mars feature film. (shrink)

De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. How should a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature look like? In spite of extended discussion of the issue since it was brought to the attention of the philosophical community in the late fifties by Quine (1956), we are far from having a plausible response. This is glaringly revealed by the contrasting recent (...) takes on the issue by writers such as Soames (2005) – who adopts the view by Donnellan (1979) to be outlined presently – and Jeshion (2001), otherwise sharing a similar direct-reference approach to the prototypical expression of those contents. Discussing the matter in connection with the status of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori in the just mentioned article, Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving ‘one meter’ or ‘Neptune’ famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content that is contingent; he distinguished to that end between knowing a true proposition expressed by an utterance, and knowing that an utterance expresses a true proposition. (Thus, for instance, if, while listening to an utterance in a language that I do not know, I am told by a reliable person who knows the language and whom I trust that the utterance is true, I come thereby to know that the sentence expresses a truth, without knowing the truth that it expresses.) Evans (1979) replied that, for a very specific sort of cases involving “descriptive names”, a related proto-two-dimensionalist account should be preferred, on which it is not the singular contingent content, but rather a general descriptive one which is knowable a priori. In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion (2000, 2001) has recently attacked Donnellan's proposal, arguing in favour of the most straightforward interpretation of Kripke's claim: in the relevant cases, the very same singular content can be both contingent and knowable a priori. In this paper, I will appeal to a generalized version of two-dimensional semantics to advance an account of the Kripkean cases along the lines of Evans's, and I will argue that Jeshion's compelling arguments against Donnellan's view do not apply to this version. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mother-Daughter Relations and the Maternal in Irigaray and ChodorowAlison StoneGod the Father and Jesus the Son; Abraham and Isaac; Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus; Zeus and Dionysus; Hamlet and his father; Fyodor Karamazov and his three sons—representations of and fantasies about father-son relationships are central to Western culture and philosophy. Within philosophy, one thinks of Hegel’s conception of the dialectic in terms of the divine trinity, Nietzsche’s preoccupation with (...) Christ and Dionysus, or Kierkegaard’s meditations on Abraham’s near-murder of Isaac. In contrast, mother-daughter relationships have been shrouded in near-universal silence—much more so than representations of either mothers and sons (Oedipus and Jocasta; Mary and Jesus) or fathers and daughters (Agamemnon and Iphigenia; Lear and Cordelia). Female and feminist theorists, writers, and artists have done much to bring mother-daughter relationships into representation and to reimagine the maternal beyond its traditional subservience to father-son dynasties.Amongst continental feminists, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have, of course, made major contributions to this task. Within Anglophone feminism, too, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have sought to rectify Freud’s overemphasis on the paternal and on father-son relations. Nancy Chodorow’s important work in this area paints a portrait of contemporary mother-daughter relations which seems, at first sight, strikingly similar to Irigaray’s. Both thinkers suggest that mothers and their infant daughters experience a unique level of mutual identification. But under patriarchy—specifically, given exclusively female childrearing for Chodorow and given the absence of any symbolization of female subjectivity for Irigaray—daughters are forced to turn to the father [End Page 45] to achieve any psychical independence from their mothers. The independence that daughters thus attain coexists with ongoing psychical identification with their mothers, so that women oscillate endlessly between separation from and mergence with their mothers. If the dominant template for father-son relations involves violent rivalry followed by guilt-ridden father-worship as the cement of fraternal society, as Freud described in Totem and Taboo (Freud 2001), the template for mother-daughter relations involves hostile separation constantly undone by ongoing fusion. This difference in templates maps the social-symbolic difference between the paternal position of power/authority/law and the maternal position of powerlessness/silence/body.However, the manifest similarities between Irigaray’s and Chodorow’s pictures are embedded in deep theoretical differences. The details of their descriptions of mother-daughter relations differ, and they give different explanations for why these relations follow a logic of separation and fusion: female mothering for Chodorow, the paternal symbolic order for Irigaray. They make different proposals for how to change these relations: shared parenting for Chodorow versus symbolic transformation for Irigaray. They hold conflicting conceptions of the self and of language, reflecting their heterogeneous psychoanalytic backgrounds in Anglo-American object relations versus French Lacanianism and poststructuralism. These deep differences raise questions about whether Chodorow and Irigaray are discussing mother-daughter relations in the same sense at all.Bringing Irigaray and Chodorow together across their different intellectual contexts, this article compares and partially synthesizes their visions of the maternal and of mother-daughter relations. By integrating their perspectives, we can move beyond the “impasse” between Lacanian and object-relations feminisms that dominated psychoanalytic feminist debates in the 1980s and 1990s (Brennan 1991)—debates that have crucially shaped continental feminists’ orientation towards questions of sexual difference, language and representation, and the embodied psyche.The impasse in question has at least two strands. First, for object-relations feminists such as Chodorow, our pre-Oedipal relations with our mothers shape us so that we acquire “core” selves with a fairly stable gender. This approach elevates the mother in importance (compared to classical psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the father), but it loses sight of psychic and gender instability. This can make Chodorow’s views seem rather dated given the impact of Judith Butler’s work and her emphasis on the unstable, shifting nature of gender. Lacanian feminists such as Jacquelyn Rose (Rose 1986) reemphasize psychic instability, but they do so by stressing that the subject is split between paternal language and the pre-Oedipal maternal realm, which means that these theorists also... (shrink)

La teogonía de Derveni construye un relato complejo sobre la organización del mundo y el poder divino desde el comienzo de los tiempos. El último rey divino, el dios supremo del universo, Zeus, que también es su demiurgo, devora el falo de su padre, Urano, para poder así regresar él mismo a una generación anterior a la primera, dando inicio bajo su reinado a un nuevo ciclo cósmico. Para Plotino, la castración de Urano representa la transcendencia del Uno-Bien respecto a (...) la Inteligencia, simbolizada por Crono; y el Alma, Zeus, que escapa a la voracidad de su padre, constituye el primer dios demiurgo, cuya función es la de servir de mediador entre lo inteligible y el mundo sensible. Derveni theogony constructs a complex narrative about the organization of the world and the divine power from the beginning of time. The last divine king, the supreme god of the universe, Zeus, who is also his demiurge, devours the phallus of his father, Uranus, in order to return himself to a generation before the first, giving birth under his reign to the beginning of a new cosmic cycle. For Plotinus, the castration of Uranus represents the transcendence of the One-Good with regard to Intelligence, symbolized by Kronos; and the Soul, Zeus, who escapes from the voracity of his father, is the first demiurge god, whose function is to serve as mediator between the intelligible and the sensible world. (shrink)

Gerhard Schurz [2001, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 32, 65-107] has proposed to reconstruct auxiliary hypothesis addition, e.g., postulation of Neptune to immunize Newtonian mechanics, with concepts from non-monotonous inference to avoid the retention of false predictions that are among the consequence-set of the deductive model. However, the non-monotonous reconstruction retains the observational premise that is indeed rejected in the deductive model. Hence, his proposal fails to do justice to Lakatos' core-belt model, therefore fails to meet what Schurz (...) coined "Lakatos' challenge". It is argued that Lakatos's distinction between core and belt of a research program is not mapable onto premise-set and consequence-set and that Schurz's understanding of a ceteris paribus clause as a transfinite list of interfering factors is problematic. I propose a simple reading of Lakatos's use of the term ceteris paribus clause and motivate why the term hypothesis addition, despite not being interpretable literally, came to be entrenched. (shrink)

This book is intended as a reference source of “universal scientific laws, physical principles, viable theories, and testable hypotheses” from ancient times to the present. Robert Krebs states that he includes only the physical and biological sciences, including geology, but in fact there are also several mathematical and logical entries ranging from the Greeks to Gödel. The book contains over four hundred entries, in alphabetical order, averaging less than a page each, plus a glossary of nearly four hundred technical terms. (...) Evidently, it is intended as a library reference for a general audience. It does not seem to be directed toward professional historians of science. The author is a retired university science administrator in the health sciences field.Opening the book at random, I find four entries on the facing pages: “Carnot's Theories of Thermodynamics,” “Caspersson's Theory of Protein Synthesis,” “Cassini's Hypothesis for Size of the Solar System,” and “Cavendish's Theories and Hypothesis.” It is hard to know what the principle of selection is, other than comprehensive coverage. But although it is impressive, the coverage is spotty. The famous story of Adams, Leverrier, and Neptune is not included, for example—perhaps because no new law is involved.To a historical scholar, such a project has obvious pitfalls; I will list some of them. First, it is whiggish in selecting and evaluating the entries from our standpoint and in often omitting now‐discredited content. For example, the entry on Carnot does not mention caloric, although it does mention the model of water flowing over a waterwheel. The book encourages the idea that discoveries and other major results are more or less punctiform, the achievements of particular individuals at particular times. To be fair, in his introduction Krebs does describe science as an ongoing, self‐correcting process in which “laws” sometimes turn out to be false or to need correction. The book is historically uncritical, since it accepts at face value that eponymous results were actually achieved by the person celebrated in the name. The entries are necessarily too brief to indicate much of the wider historical context, or even the technical context, in which the law or theory under discussion was developed. Krebs's statement of his intent, in the introduction to the volume, is theory centered and seems to take physics as a model, although in fact there are many entries from the biomedical sciences that do not neatly fit this model. The author's attempt to characterize his subject matter—scientific laws—is philosophically naïve. Finally, even if we leave aside the difficulty of making complex technical results accessible to a general audience in a very limited space, no single author can be expert enough to maintain a high standard throughout a volume of such scope. Krebs identifies no panel of expert consultants enlisted to check his entries.The entries that I sampled sometimes contained less‐than‐sharp formulations, inaccuracies, and even contradictions. For example, Krebs describes Aristotle, in cliché fashion, as a “philosopher” rather than as a “scientist concerned with observations and evidence” , but two paragraphs later it turns out that Aristotle based his account of spontaneous generation on observations! Krebs says that motion was self‐explanatory for Aristotle because things strive to reach their natural places. The entry on Euler mislabels his work on bodies moving with multiple degrees of freedom as the three‐body problem. Fermat's last theorem is said to remain unsolved, yet Krebs obviously prides himself on being up to date. The entry on Planck is historically inaccurate and physically misleading. And so on.For all that, I found the book rather interesting and useful. No reader leafing through it will fail to find this entry or that intriguing. Since the entries are short and discrete, the book makes good bedtime reading. And, given that the laws, principles, and effects are commonly called by these names, the book can serve as a source of general knowledge—but only as a starting point. Given the uneven quality, caveat lector! (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Gaia?Massimo Pigliucci (bio)The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet, Michael Ruse, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. 272 pages.“The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet tells a story that comes out of the 1960s, a story that reflects all of the beliefs and enthusiasms and tensions of that decade.” So begins Michael Ruse’s fascinating, if at times puzzling, exploration of James Lovelock’s famous idea that our (...) planet is, in a serious scientific sense, a living organism with a tendency of taking care of (her)self. But why tell this particular story, especially considering that Gaia hardly makes an appearance in today’s scientific or philosophical publications, and doesn’t even seem quite that popular with the lay public as it used to be? Because, as Ruse tells us near the end of the book, at the onset of chapter seven: “the paradox that set us on our path [is] why the scientific community reacted so negatively to the Gaia hypothesis, whereas the public reaction was so positive.”As it turns out, there is a good answer to that conundrum, one that Ruse himself lays out clearly in the last chapter of the book, and which makes the reader wonder why this should count a paradox at all. But we will get there in due time. First, the basics: the so-called Gaia hypothesis is the brainchild of iconoclastic inventor-turned-independent-scientist James Lovelock, who later got significant help in elaborating (and promoting) his ideas from another iconoclast, biologist Lynn Margulis. By the time you get to the end of Ruse’s engaging book, however, you won’t have gained a particularly good understanding of what the hypothesis actually consists. But that’s not Ruse’s fault, it is Lovelock’s (and Margulis’). At times it sounds like the entirely uncontroversial claim that the Earth’s [End Page 117] biosphere is a somewhat homeostatic system—i.e., a biophysical system that is resistant to major changes, at the least within a certain range (the planet’s atmosphere, after all, did change dramatically early on, increasing its oxygen content as a result of the evolution of photosynthetic organisms—the anaerobic life forms that had up to that point been dominant did not appreciate the novelty). At other times the claim is downright preposterous: the Earth literally is a living organism (according to Lovelock) (Chapter 7),1 a finding that allegedly puts in question the whole Darwinian view of biological evolution (according to Margulis) (Chapter 7), a position that can only be characterized as nonsense on stilts. At yet other moments, Gaia is presented as just a metaphor to help us wrap our minds around the complexities (and homeostatic properties) of the world’s ecosystems (Chapter 8). It is this never-ending oscillation between the trivial and the bizarre that has led the majority of scientists to write off Gaia, to the chagrin of Lovelock, Margulis, and a large number of New Age tree huggers from the 1960s.Indeed, the scientific reaction to Gaia was swift and ranging from the condescending to the unforgiving. Evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith—never one to mince words—called it “an evil religion” (Chapter 2). Another evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould (whose own disagreements with Maynard Smith became legendary) said that “Gaia strikes me as a metaphor, not a mechanism” (Chapter 2). Ecologist Robert May, who eventually became president of the Royal Society, called Lovelock “a holy fool” (Chapter 2). The highly respected theoretical biologist W.D. Hamilton said that in order for the hypothesis to work, it would require “treaties between Neptune and Zeus, a Gaian Interpol, conventions about bills of lading for chemical transport by air and water, and so on” (Chapter 7). Finally, Richard Dawkins accused Lovelock of committing the fallacy of “the BBC theorem,” assuming (or wishfully thinking) that the world is a harmonious place, just like in naive BBC nature documentaries (Chapter 2).You get the gist: pretty much from the beginning, and with very few exceptions, the scientific establishment rejected Gaia on the grounds that it is not a scientific hypothesis at all, and that its main tenets actually go against pretty... (shrink)

Toward the end of the 18th century, the Scottish geologist James Hall carried out a series of experiments. They were designed to explore the genesis of rock formations in connection with the controversy between “neptunism” and “volcanism”. These experiments are documented in a museum collection that is located today in the British Geological Survey headquarters in Keyworth near Nottingham. The collection consists of ca. 250–300 individual items and includes samples of Hall's experiments and experimental equipment, as well as several of (...) the original rock specimens that had belonged to him. This article provides a short description of that collection. (shrink)

Karl Popper defines an ad hoc hypothesis as one that is introduced to immunize a theory from some (or all) refutation but which cannot be tested independently. He has also attempted to explicate ad hocness in terms of certain other allegedly undesirable properties of hypotheses or of the explanations they would provide, but his account is confused and mistaken. The first such property is circularity, which is undesirable; the second such property is reduction in empirical content, which need not be. (...) In the former case, I argue that non-circularity is in any event preferable to non-ad hocness as a necessary condition for a satisfactory explanation or an explanans, as the case may be, and I try to sort out various persistent errors surrounding this comparison. In the latter case, I suggest that Popper is barking up the wrong tree, that important scientific progress sometimes does consist in just such reductions in empirical content as he proscribes. This provides a further reason for not taking ad hoc hypotheses as Popper conceives them to pose the danger for science he believes they do. (shrink)

Neptunus et Apollo dicuntur Troiam muro cinxisse; his rex Laomedon uouit quod regno suo pecoris eo anno natum esset immolaturum. id uotum auaritia fefellit. alii dicunt †parum eum promisisse. The story that Neptune and Apollo together built the walls of Troy for Laomedon is well known from Homer. At the end of their year's service the perfidious king refused to pay the agreed wages. Ovid tells the familiar story in one of his transitional sections in the Metamorphoses. Hyginus' account (...) poses the textual problem indicated above. H. I. Rose comments on ‘parum’ as follows: ‘procul dubio corruptum hoc neque arridet Schmidtii coniectura promsisse. fuitne partum equarum? hoc enim plerumque narratur, equos quos a Ioue accepisset promisisse Laomedontem mercedis nomine…sed Herculi; quod facile ad deos mercennarios transferri potuit; atque non equos sed equas fuisse tradit Apollod. II, 104’. Rose rightly rejects Schmidt's emendation ‘promsisse’. ‘Promisisse’ has every sign of soundness and the difficulty lies, as Rose sees, with ‘parum’. Rose's own conjecture ‘partum equarum’, however, will not do. Apart from the oddity of the expression, one would need a good deal more persuasion than Rose offers to accept that the well-known promise of Zeus' horses which Laomedon made to Hercules was transferred from Hercules to Neptune and Apollo. There is no suggestion anywhere in the sources that Laomedon promised to give Neptune and Apollo the famous horses as payment for building the walls. (shrink)

This chapter talks about status anxiety by drawing examples from Veronica Mars. There are differences in status, in one's standing in society. Some are at the top, some are at the bottom, and some are in the middle. Everyone is worried about where he or she fits on the hierarchy of standing and importance. Some lower primates sort themselves, with alpha males beating their chests, feeding first, and claiming privileged mating rights. We humans would like to think we are above (...) such vulgar displays, yet a quick glance at Neptune or at our own town reveals that we may be more subtle, but only a little. Where we fit in, what our status is, matters. It matters to the way others treat us, but, maybe more importantly, it matters to the way we think of ourselves. The way others treat us influences the way we think of ourselves. (shrink)

Neptunus et Apollo dicuntur Troiam muro cinxisse; his rex Laomedon uouit quod regno suo pecoris eo anno natum esset immolaturum. id uotum auaritia fefellit. alii dicunt †parum eum promisisse. The story that Neptune and Apollo together built the walls of Troy for Laomedon is well known from Homer. At the end of their year's service the perfidious king refused to pay the agreed wages. Ovid tells the familiar story in one of his transitional sections in the Metamorphoses. Hyginus' account (...) poses the textual problem indicated above. H. I. Rose comments on ‘parum’ as follows: ‘procul dubio corruptum hoc neque arridet Schmidtii coniectura promsisse. fuitne partum equarum? hoc enim plerumque narratur, equos quos a Ioue accepisset promisisse Laomedontem mercedis nomine…sed Herculi; quod facile ad deos mercennarios transferri potuit; atque non equos sed equas fuisse tradit Apollod. II, 104’. Rose rightly rejects Schmidt's emendation ‘promsisse’. ‘Promisisse’ has every sign of soundness and the difficulty lies, as Rose sees, with ‘parum’. Rose's own conjecture ‘partum equarum’, however, will not do. Apart from the oddity of the expression, one would need a good deal more persuasion than Rose offers to accept that the well-known promise of Zeus' horses which Laomedon made to Hercules was transferred from Hercules to Neptune and Apollo. There is no suggestion anywhere in the sources that Laomedon promised to give Neptune and Apollo the famous horses as payment for building the walls. (shrink)