This paper utilizes the framework of Karl Popper’s 3-world ontology to make the case that forensic science is a specialized coding system that establishes meaningful connections between the world of biology and the world of human society . Forensic science is a cross-disciplinary endeavor that uses scientific methods to determine what transpired in a crime so the legal system can determine how to prosecute the offender. On a Popperian analysis of forensic science, world 1 consists of evidence gathered at the (...) crime scene, which enables investigators to develop a detailed reconstruction of the incident for consideration under the legal and ethical codes of society, which are products of world 3. Understanding forensic science in this way serves two purposes: first, it extends Marcello Barbieri’s code biology into the realm of philosophical considerations in science, law and ethics; and second, it situates forensic science within the larger context of debates in contemporary philosophy of science. (shrink)

Barbieri introduced and developed the concept of organic codes. The most basic of them is the genetic code, a set of correspondence rules between otherwise unrelated sequences: strings of nucleotides on the one hand, polypeptidic chains on the other hand. Barbieri noticed that it implies ‘coding by convention’ as arbitrary as the semantic relations a language establishes between words and outer objects. Moreover, the major transitions in life evolution originated in new organic codes similarly involving conventional rules. Independently, (...) dealing with heredity as communication over time and relying on information theory, we asserted that the conservation of genomes over the ages demands that error-correcting codes make them resilient to casual errors. Moreover, the better conservation of very old parts of the genome demands that they result from combining successively established nested codes such that the older an information, the more numerous component codes protect it. Barbieri’s concept of organic code and that of genomic error-correcting code may seem unrelated. We show however that organic codes actually entail error-correcting properties. Error-correcting, in general, results from constraints being imposed on a set of sequences. Mathematical equalities are conveniently used in communication engineering for expressing constraints but error correction only needs that constraints exist. Biological sequences are similarly endowed with error-correcting ability by physical-chemical or linguistic constraints, thus defining ‘soft codes’. These constraints are moreover presumably efficient for correcting errors. Insofar as biological sequences are subjected to constraints, organic codes necessarily involve soft codes, and their successive onset results in the nested structure we hypothesized. Organic codes are generated and maintained by means of molecular ‘semantic feedback loops’. Each of these loops involves genes which code for proteins, the enzymatic action of which controls a function needed for the protein assembly. Taken together, thus, they control the assembly of their own structure as instructed by the genome and, once closed, these loops ensure their own conservation. However, the semantic feedback loops do not prevent the genome lengthening. It increases both the redundancy of the genome and the information quantity it bears, thus improving the genome reliability and the specificity of the enzymes, which enables further evolution. (shrink)

This paper is intended to complement our previous works on the necessary existence of error-correcting codes endowing genomes with the ability of being regenerated, not merely copied. It sketchily recalls some fundamental definitions and results of information theory and error-correcting codes; provides an overview of our research; shows that the disjunction of replication and regeneration enlightens the divide between germinal and somatic cells; suggests that some phenomena referred to as epigenetic may possibly find an explanation within the framework (...) of error-correcting codes; points out some difficulties, especially those related to sexual reproduction; criticizes the template-replication paradigm, and prompts geneticists to become familiar with information theory. (shrink)

The rapid and dynamic nature of digital transformation challenges companies that wish to develop and deploy novel digital technologies. Like other actors faced with this transformation, companies need to find robust ways to ethically guide their innovations and business decisions. Digital ethics has recently featured in a plethora of both practical corporate guidelines and compilations of high-level principles, but there remains a gap concerning the development of sound ethical guidance in specific business contexts. As a multinational science and technology company (...) faced with a broad range of digital ventures and associated ethical challenges, Merck KGaA has laid the foundations for bridging this gap by developing a Code of Digital Ethics (CoDE) tailored for this context. Following a comprehensive analysis of existing digital ethics guidelines, we used a reconstructive social research approach to identify 20 relevant principles and derive a code designed as a multi-purpose tool. Versatility was prioritised by defining non-prescriptive guidelines that are open to different perspectives and thus well-suited for operationalisation for varied business purposes. We also chose a clear nested structure that highlights the relationships between five core and fifteen subsidiary principles as well as the different levels of reference—data and algorithmic systems—to which they apply. The CoDE will serve Merck KGaA and its new Digital Ethics Advisory Panel to guide ethical reflection, evaluation and decision-making across the full spectrum of digital developments encountered and undertaken by the company whilst also offering an opportunity to increase transparency for external partners, and thus trust. (shrink)

The essays in Rhetorical Spaces grow out of Lorraine Code's ongoing commitment to engaging philosophical issues as they figure in people's everyday lives. The arguements in this book are informed at once by the moral-political implications of how knowledge is produced and circulated and by issues of gendered subjectivity. In their critical dimension, these lucid essays engage with the incapacity of the philosophical mainstream's dominant epistemologies to offer regulative principles that guide people in the epistemic projects that figure centrally in (...) their lives. In its constructive dimension, Rhetorical Spaces focuses on developing productive, case-by-case analyses of knowing other people in situations where social-political inequalities create asymmetrical patterns of epistemic power and privilege. Framing all of the essays is the conception of rhetorical spaces which shows that prevailing intellectual-political climates can work to enhance or to thwart possibilities of establishing cognitive authority for the members of a society who belong to groups other than the dominant ones. Finally, bridging the gap between theory and practice, Lorraine Code shows how the issue of reconfiguring structures of authority and expertise are not just matters of individual responsibility, but require a radical restructuring of the communities and social orders in which people know and act. (shrink)

Molecular codes can be considered a special type of mapping among molecular species in biochemical systems. The formalization of molecular codes allows to identify these in network models of real world systems. Analyzing algorithmically identified codes leads to the observation that codes does not necessarily stand alone, but that we can identify certain relations among codes. In this paper I will define two types of relations that can occur among codes, code linkage and code (...) nesting, and will discuss implications of this finding. (shrink)

Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory (...) and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation. (shrink)

In het kader van de Leerstoel Rector Dhanis (UFSIA, Antwerpen) werd door een studiegroep bestaande uit artsen en verpleegkundigen, ethici en juristen, een interdisciplinaire studie ondernomen over 'klinische ethiek' en 'hoe recht en politiek omgaan met problemen die thuishoren in de klinische praktijk'. In deze bundel wordt het ethische denken in een aantal casussen betreffende neonatalen en dementerenden kritisch besproken. De adviezen van het Raadgevend Comite voor Bio-Ethiek over sterilisatie van mentaal gehandicapten en over klonering worden onderzocht op hun relevantie (...) voor de klinische praktijk. (shrink)

The path-breaking Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories is an accessible, multidisciplinary insight into the complex field of feminist thought. The Encyclopedia contains over 500 authoritative entries commissioned from an international team of contributors and includes clear, concise and provocative explanations of key themes and ideas. Each entry contains cross references and a bibliographic guide to further reading; over 50 biographical entries provide readers with a sense of how the theories they encounter have developed out of the lives and situations of their (...) authors. Areas covered: * traditional taxonomies of feminist theory (eg socialist thought) * theoretical subdivisions (eg ecofeminism and feminist spirituality) * discipline-specific issues (eg philosophy and anthropology) * the conceptual apparatus of gender theory (eg biologism) * methodologies (eg deconstruction and narrative theory) * intersections (eg with racial theory, queer theory) * political issues (eg citizenship, reproductive rights). (shrink)

Having adequate knowledge of the world is not just a matter of survival but also one of obligation. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the nature of intellectual virtue. By focusing on the idea that knowing is a creative process guided by imperatives of (...) epistemic responsibility, Code provides a fresh perspective on the theory of knowledge. From this new perspective, Code poses questions about knowledge that have a different focus from those traditionally raised in the two leading epistemological theories, foundationalism and coherentism. While not rejecting these approaches, this new position moves away from a primary concentration on determinate products and towards an examination of ever-changing processes. Arguing that knowledge never exists as an ungrounded abstraction but rather emerges through dialogue between variously authoritative "knowers" situated within particular social and historical contexts, she draws extensively on examples from lived social experience to illustrate the ways in which human beings have long tried to recognize and meet their epistemic responsibilities. This edition of Epistemic Responsibility includes a new preface from Lorraine Code"--Provided by the publisher. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant? The Question A question that focuses on the knower, as the title of this chapter does, ...

The arguments in this book are informed at once by the moral-political implications of how knowledge is produced and circulated and by issues of gendered subjectivity. In their critical dimension, these lucid essays engage with the incapacity of the philosophical mainstream's dominant epistemologies to offer regulative principles that guide people in the epistemic projects that figure centrally in their lives. In its constructive dimension, ____Rhetorical__ ____Spaces__ focuses on developing productive, case-by-case analyses of knowing other people in situations where social-political inequalities (...) create asymmetrical patterns of epistemic power and privilege. (shrink)

Feminist epistemologists who attempt to refigure epistemology must wrestle with a number of dualisms. This essay examines the ways Lorraine Code, Sandra Harding, and Susan Hekman reconceptualize the relationship between self/other, nature/culture, and subject/object as they struggle to reformulate objectivity and knowledge.

In this lively and accessible book Lorraine Code addresses one of the most controversial questions in contemporary theory of knowledge, a question of fundamental concern for feminist theory as well: Is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant? Responding in the affirmative, Code offers a radical alterantive to mainstream philosophy's terms for what counts as knowledge and how it is to be evaluated. Code first reviews the literature of established epistemologies and unmasks the prevailing assumption in Anglo-American philosophy that "the (...) knower" is a value-free and ideologically neutral abstraction. Approaching knowledge as a social construct produced and validated through critical dialogue, she defines the knower in light of a conception of subjectivity based on a personal relational model. Code maps out the relevance of the particular people involved in knowing: their historical specificity, the kinds of relationships they have, the effects of social position and power on those relationships, and the ways in which knowledge can change both knower and known. In an exploration of the politics of knowledge that mainstream epistemologies sustain, she examines such issues as the function of knowledge in shaping institutions and the unequal distribution of cognitive resources. What Can She Know? will raise the level of debate concerning epistemological issues among philosophers, political and social scientists, and anyone interested in feminist theory. (shrink)

In this lively and accessible book Lorraine Code addresses one of the most controversial questions in contemporary theory of knowledge, a question of fundamental concern for feminist theory as well: Is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant? Responding in the affirmative, Code offers a radical alterantive to mainstream philosophy's terms for what counts as knowledge and how it is to be evaluated. Code first reviews the literature of established epistemologies and unmasks the prevailing assumption in Anglo-American philosophy that "the (...) knower" is a value-free and ideologically neutral abstraction. Approaching knowledge as a social construct produced and validated through critical dialogue, she defines the knower in light of a conception of subjectivity based on a personal relational model. Code maps out the relevance of the particular people involved in knowing: their historical specificity, the kinds of relationships they have, the effects of social position and power on those relationships, and the ways in which knowledge can change both knower and known. In an exploration of the politics of knowledge that mainstream epistemologies sustain, she examines such issues as the function of knowledge in shaping institutions and the unequal distribution of cognitive resources. What Can She Know? will raise the level of debate concerning epistemological issues among philosophers, political and social scientists, and anyone interested in feminist theory. (shrink)

I evaluate post-Quinean naturalized epistemology as a resource for postcolonial and feminist epistemology. I argue that naturalistic inquiry into material conditions and institutions of knowledge production has most to offer epistemologists committed to maintaining continuity with the knowledge production of specifically located knowers. Yet naturalistic denigrations of folk epistemic practices and stereotyped, hence often oppressive, readings of human nature challenge the naturalness of the nature they claim to study. I outline an ecologically modelled epistemology that focuses on questions of epistemic (...) responsibility and community, while refusing the reductivism of totalizing theory, and producing realistic moral-epistemic analyses of specific, local epistemic resources to ground its normative injunctions. (shrink)

A relatively late arrival on the philosophical scene, feminist epistemology has evolved and undergone multiple refinements since, in 1981, I posed the then still outrageous question: “is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant?” At the time, that question was beginning to receive affirmative answers, within philosophy, from the essays in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka's Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, from Nancy Hartsock's Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, and (...) from Alison Jaggar's Feminist Politics and Human Nature, with its chapter on feminist epistemology, all published in 1983. These writings were mapping a new epistemic terrain within professional philosophy that was also being opened out in the work of such non‐philosophers as Dorothy Smith, Carol Gilligan, and Nancy Chodorow. Nonetheless, in the philosophical projects of the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, even as feminist moral and political philosophy were growing to constitute an impressive body of critical‐constructive literature, the suggestion that analogous interventions were not merely indicated, but urgently required, in epistemology, philosophy of science, and even logic still sounded like a preposterous manifestation of ideological excess. Knowledge, science, and logic seemed, virtually by definition, to stand secure as the repositories and guardians of truth and objectivity, occupants of a space isolated and protected from the vagaries of politics and of gendered specificities. (shrink)

Fifteen essays examine the work of German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer to provide feminist interpretations of his views on science, language, history, ...

Images of and references to women are so rare in the vast corpus of his published work that there seems to be no "woman question" for Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yet the authors of the fifteen essays included in this volume show that it is possible to read past Gadamer's silences about women and other Others to find rich resources for feminist theory and practice in his views of science, language, history, knowledge, medicine, and literature. While the essayists find much of value (...) in Gadamer's work, he emerges from their discussion as a controversial figure. Some contributors see him as promoting genuine respect for and engagement with Otherness: others claim that in a Gadamerian conversation the Other has no voice. For some, Gadamer's immersion in tradition is an impediment to feminist inquiry; for others, cognizant of the need to understand tradition well in order to contest its intransigence or benefit from its insights, his way of engaging tradition is especially productive. Some contributors take issue with the separation he maintains between philosophy and politics; others find problems in his relative silence on matters of embodiment; still others maintain that a "fusion of horizons" amounts to a colonizing of difference. But a common aim of each of these controversies is to discern what feminists can learn from Gadamer as well as what limitations feminist reinterpretations of his work must inevitably encounter. Contributors are Linda Martín Alcoff, William Cowling, Gemma Corradi Fiumara, Marie Fleming, Silja Freudenberger, Susan Hekman, Susan-Judith Hoffmann, Grace M. Jantzen, Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, Laura Kaplan, Robin Pappas, Robin May Schott, Meili Steele, Veronica Vasterling, Georgia Warnke, and Kathleen Roberts Wright. (shrink)

I offer an examination of trust relations in scientific inquiry as they seem to contrast with a lack of trust in an example of knowledge imposed from above by an unaccountable institutional power structure. On this basis I argue for a re-reading of John Hardwig's account of the place of trust in knowledge, and suggest that it translates less well than social epistemologists and others have assumed into a model for democratic epistemic practice.

Order and Organism shows how Alfred North Whitehead's thought can reconcile some of the most insistent demands of common sense with the esoteric results of modern physics and mathematics.

Aristotle shares with Plato the attitude that the world, ‘the all,’ is a kosmos, a well-ordered and beautiful whole which, as such, can be rendered intelligible, or understood, by the intellect. One understands things, generally speaking, by tracing them back to their sources, origins or principles and causes or explanatory factors, and seeing in what manner they are related to these principles. We know, or understand, a thing when we grasp ‘the why’ or cause. Consequently, understanding is systematic. Some things (...) we understand through themselves - these are the first principles and as such are not understood by tracing them back to causes. We understand other things by systematically relating them in appropriate ways to what is known through itself. These other things are known through, or by means of, their causes and principles. (shrink)

Assumptions about what it is to be human are implicit in most philosophical reflections upon ethical and epistemological issues. Although such assumptions are not usually elaborated into a comprehensive theory of human nature, they are nonetheless influential in beliefs about what kinds of problem are worthy of consideration, and in judgments about the adequacy of proposed solutions. Claims to the effect that one should not be swayed by feelings and loyalties in the making of moral decisions, for example, presuppose that (...) human beings are creatures whose nature is amenable to guidance by reason rather than emotion and are creatures capable of living well when they act as impartially as possible. Analogously, claims to the effect that knowledge, to merit that title, should be acquired out of independent cognitive endeavour uncluttered by opinion and hearsay, suggest that human beings are creatures who can come to know their environment through their own unaided efforts. And claims to the effect that knowledge, once acquired, is timelessly and universally true depend upon assumptions about the constancy and uniformity of human nature across historical and cultural boundaries. (shrink)

Assumptions about what it is to be human are implicit in most philosophical reflections upon ethical and epistemological issues. Although such assumptions are not usually elaborated into a comprehensive theory of human nature, they are nonetheless influential in beliefs about what kinds of problem are worthy of consideration, and in judgments about the adequacy of proposed solutions. Claims to the effect that one should not be swayed by feelings and loyalties in the making of moral decisions, for example, presuppose that (...) human beings are creatures whose nature is amenable to guidance by reason rather than emotion and are creatures capable of living well when they act as impartially as possible. Analogously, claims to the effect that knowledge, to merit that title, should be acquired out of independent cognitive endeavour uncluttered by opinion and hearsay, suggest that human beings are creatures who can come to know their environment through their own unaided efforts. And claims to the effect that knowledge, once acquired, is timelessly and universally true depend upon assumptions about the constancy and uniformity of human nature across historical and cultural boundaries. (shrink)

Who is the autonomous moral agent? The individual? The exemplary/typical knowing, acting, suffering, or thriving human being? Such questions in diverse modalities, originating in multiple circumsta...