Philosophy of Science

The first edition corrected against the second; apparatus including lengthy scholarly introduction, substantial selections from other works by Darwin (letters, autobiography, Descent of Man, etc.); background works (Lyell, Malthus, Lamarck, Spencer, Huxley, et al.),and a  guide to authors cited by Darwin.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not even partially "deconstructed" until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific "Third World" cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era. Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the "gaze of experts." In a substantial new introduction, Escobar reviews debates on globalization and postdevelopment since the book's original publication in 1995 and argues that the concept of postdevelopment needs to be redefined to meet today's significantly new conditions. He then calls for the development of a field of "pluriversal studies," which he illustrates with examples from recent Latin American movements.

Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent book is "Territories of Difference".

This article examines several methodological issues associated with combining qualitative and quantitative methods by comparing the increasing interest in this topic with the earlier renewal of interest in qualitative research during the 1980s. The first section argues for the value of Kuhn's concept of paradigm shifts as a tool for examining changes in research fields such as social science research methodology. The next two sections consider the initial rise of the "metaphysical paradigm" that justified the renewed interest in qualitative research and the subsequent problems that have encouraged efforts to replace that paradigm. The final section of the paper advocates a "pragmatic approach" as a new guiding paradigm in social science research methods, both as a basis for supporting work that combines qualitative and quantitative methods and as a way to redirect our attention to methodological rather than metaphysical concerns.

The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences” as phrased by Eugene Wigner is mirrored in the human sciences. This article discusses the inherently mathematical form of cultural constructs considered in anthropology, as exemplified by the structure of kinship terminologies, thereby revealing the way mathematical reasoning is inherent in the logical basis for, and implications of, cultural constructs as systems of ideas.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

This paper aimed to review, and assess the 'effectiveness' of the attempts undertaken to improve prospective and practising science teachers' conceptions of nature of science (NOS). The reviewed attempts could be categorized into two general approches: implicit and explicit. Implicit attempts utilized science process-skills instruction or engagement in science-based inquiry activities to improve science teachers' conceptions of NOS. To achieve the same goal, explicit attempts used instruction geared towards various aspects of NOS and/or instruction that utilized elements from history and philosophy of science. To the extent that teachers' NOS conceptions were faithfully assessed by the instruments used in the reviewed studies, the explicit approach was relatively more effective in enhancing teachers' views. The relative ineffectiveness of the implicit approach could be attributed to two inherent assumptions. The first is that developing an understanding of NOS is an 'affective', as compared to a 'cognitive', learning outcome. The second ensuing assumption is that learners would necessarily develop understandings of NOS as a by-product of engaging in science-realated activities. However, despite the relative 'effectiveness' of the explicit approach, much is still required in terms of fostering among science teachers 'desired' understandings of NOS. The paper emphasizes that explicitness and reflectivness should be given prominence in any future attempts aimed at improving

Educational data mining is an emerging discipline, concerned with developing methods for exploring the unique types of data that come from the educational context. This work is a survey of the specific application of data mining in learning management systems and a case study tutorial with the Moodle system. Our objective is to introduce it in both a theoretical and practical way to all users interested in this new research area. We describe the full process for mining e-learning data step by step as well as how to apply the main data mining techniques used, such as statistics, visualization, classification, clustering, association rule mining, pattern mining and text mining of Moodle data. We have used free data mining tools so that any user can immediately begin to apply data mining without having to purchase a commercial tool or program a specific personalized tool.

Human reasoning in hypothesis-testing tasks like Wason's (1966, 1968) selection task has been de­ picted as prone to systematic biases. However, performance on this task has been assessed against a now outmoded falsificationist philosophy of science. Therefore, the experimental data is reassessed in the light ofa Bayesian model ofoptimal data selection in inductive hypothesis testing. The model provides a rational

Life is an inordinately complex unsolved puzzle. Despite significant theoretical progress, experimental anomalies, paradoxes, and enigmas have revealed paradigmatic limitations. Thus, the advancement of scientific understanding requires new models that resolve fundamental problems. Here, I present a theoretical framework that economically fits evidence accumulated from examinations of life. This theory is based upon a straightforward and non-mathematical core model and proposes unique yet empirically consistent explanations for major phenomena including, but not limited to, quantum gravity, phase transitions of water, why living systems are predominantly CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), homochirality of sugars and amino acids, homeoviscous adaptation, triplet code, and DNA mutations. The theoretical framework unifies the macrocosmic and microcosmic realms, validates predicted laws of nature, and solves the puzzle of the origin and evolution of cellular life in the universe. Life 2012, 2 2

Explanations in the life sciences frequently involve presenting a model of the mechanism taken to be responsible for a given phenomenon. Such explanations depart in numerous ways from nomological explanations commonly presented in philosophy of science. This paper focuses on three sorts of differences. First, scientists who develop mechanistic explanations are not limited to linguistic representations and logical inference; they frequently employ diagrams to characterize mechanisms and simulations to reason about them. Thus, the epistemic resources for presenting mechanistic explanations are considerably richer than those suggested by a nomological framework. Second, the fact that mechanisms involve organized systems of component parts and operations provides direction to both the discovery and testing of mechanistic explanations. Finally, models of mechanisms are developed for specific exemplars and are not represented in terms of universally quantified statements. Generalization involves investigating both the similarity of new exemplars to those already studied and the variations between them.

In this paper we argue that unobservable constructs lie at the core of a number of influential theories used in the strategic management literature-including agency theory, transaction cost theory, and the resource-based view of the firm. The debate over how best to deal with the problem of unobservables has raged in the philosophy of science literature for the best part of the current century. On the one hand, there are the positivists, who believe that theories containing unobservable constructs are only useful as tools for making predictions. According to positivists, such theories do not inform us about the deep structure of reality. On the other hand, there are the realists, who believe that our theories can give us knowledge about unobservables. Herein we review this debate, we argue for adopting a realist position, and we draw out the implications for strategic management research.

The paper begins by pointing out the diversity of philosophical positions within information systems, and the range of reactions to this diversity. It then discusses problems within the underlying philosophies of science, particularly positivism and interpretivism. With this as a background, the paper proposes critical realism as an underpinning philosophy that has the potential to overcome both sets of difficulties. The theoretical arguments are practically illustrated by critiques of (positivist) statistical analysis and (interpretivist) soft systems methodology.

Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions.

As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an "infosphere". Personas we adopt in social media, for example, feed into our 'real' lives so that we begin to live, as Floridi puts in, "onlife". Following those led by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, this metaphysical shift represents nothing less than a fourth revolution.

"Onlife" defines more and more of our daily activity - the way we shop, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships; the way we interact with the worlds of law, finance, and politics; even the way we conduct war. In every department of life, ICTs have become environmental forces which are creating and transforming our realities. How can we ensure that we shall reap their benefits? What are the implicit risks? Are our technologies going to enable and empower us, or constrain us? Floridi argues that we must expand our ecological and ethical approach to cover both natural and man-made realities, putting the 'e' in an environmentalism that can deal successfully with the new challenges posed by our digital technologies and information society.

How much of philosophical, scientific, and political thought is caught up with the idea of continuity? What if it were otherwise? This paper experiments with the disruption of continuity. The reader is invited to participate in a performance of spacetime (re)configurings that are more akin to how electrons experience the world than any journey narrated though rhetorical forms that presume actors move along trajectories across a stage of spacetime (often called history). The electron is here invoked as our host, an interesting body to inhabit (not in order to inspire contemplation of flat-footed analogies between 'macro' and 'micro' worlds, concepts that already presume a given spatial scale), but a way of thinking with and through dis/continuity -a dis/orienting experience of the dis/jointedness of time and space, entanglements of here and there, now and then, that is, a ghostly sense of dis/continuity, a quantum dis/continuity. There is no overarching sense of temporality, of continuity, in place. Each scene diffracts various temporalities within and across the field of spacetimemattering. Scenes never rest, but are reconfigured within, dispersed across, and threaded through one another. The hope is that what comes across in this dis/jointed movement is a felt sense of différance, of intra-activity, of Time: 09:19am drt081.tex

This article presents the theoretical and methodological considerations behind a research method which the author calls ‘phronetic planning research’. Such research sets out to answer four questions of power and values for specific instances of planning: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What, if anything, should we do about it? A central task of phronetic planning research is to provide concrete examples and detailed narratives of the ways in which power and values work in planning and with what consequences to whom, and to suggest how relations of power and values could be changed to work with other consequences. Insofar as planning situations become clear, they are clarified by detailed stories of who is doing what to whom. Clarifications of that kind are a principal concern for phronetic planning research and provide the main link to praxis.

Special Relativity Theory (SRT) has two postulates, one stating that the laws of physics are the same for all observers, and the other stating that the speed of light is the constant 186,000 miles per second, regardless of any reference frames. As a result of these postulates, SRT renders predictions such as: 1) No object can travel faster than 186,000 miles per second (the speed of light itself); 2) On approaching the speed of light, a moving object contracts in length in the direction of motion, while 3) a clock traveling with the object slows down; 4) The mass of an object multiplied by the square of the speed of light gives energy ( E mc2 ); i.e., mass could be converted to energy and vice versa; 5) Observers do not agree on the simultaneity of events - two events that are simultaneous for one observer might not be simultaneous for another.

There are evident inconsistencies among these predictions. There is also a philosophical problem relating to the nature of reality. Could there be more than one reality in Nature; that is, can reality be subjective, and only a matter of interpretation? This paper explores the evident inconsistencies and the philosophical problem by developing arguments and providing numerical examples.

Although epistemic values have become widely accepted as part of scientific reasoning, non-epistemic values have been largely relegated to the “external” parts of science (the selection of hypotheses, restrictions on methodologies, and the use of scientific technologies). I argue that because of inductive risk, or the risk of error, non-epistemic values are required in science wherever non-epistemic consequences of error should be considered. Illustrated with examples from dioxin studies, I show how non-epistemic consequences of error can and should be considered in the internal stages of science: choice of methodology, characterization of data, and interpretation of results.

This article takes a look at metamaterials in electromagnetics from a general point of view. The terminology of complex electromagnetic materials is discussed critically. A unique definition for metamaterials does not exist, but certain salient points can be distinguished in the ongoing discussion within the research community and in various formal suggestions for this definition in the literature. Also several different classes of special materials are identified as candidates for metamaterials and their particular characteristics are discussed. Finally it is pointed out that the boundary between "ordinary" materials and metamaterials is difficult to draw because also many everyday natural materials are dielectric mixtures which may display very surprising and non-linear macroscopic response functions.

Much like the field of community psychology, feminist scholarship is defined by its values and process. Informed by the political ideologies of the 1970s women's movement (liberal, radical, socialist feminism, and womanism), feminist scholars reinterpreted classic concepts in philosophy of science to create feminist epistemologies and methodologies. Feminist epistemologies, such as feminist empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodernism, recognize women's lived experiences as legitimate sources of knowledge. Feminist methodologies attempt to eradicate sexist bias in research and find ways to capture women's voices that are consistent with feminist ideals. Practically, the process of feminist research is characterized by four primary features:

This paper replies to the first 36 commentaries on my target article on “Is human information processing conscious?” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1991, pp. 651-669). The target article focused largely on experimental studies of how consciousness relates to human information processing, tracing their relation from input through to output, while discussion of the implications of the findings both for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind was relatively brief. The commentaries reversed this emphasis, and so, correspondingly, did the reply. The sequence of topics in the reply roughly follows that of the target article. The discussion begins with a reconsideration of the details of the empirical findings, whether they can be extrapolated to non-laboratory settings, and the extent to which one can rely on their use of subjective reports. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of what is meant by “conscious processing” and of how phenomenal consciousness relates to attentional processing. We then turn to broader philosophical and theoretical issues. I point out some of the reasons why I do not support epiphenomenalism, dualist-interactionism, or reductionism, and elaborate on how first- and third-person views of the mind can be regarded as complementary and mutually irreducible. I suggest how the relation of conscious experiences to their neural correlates can be understood in terms of a dual-aspect theory of information, and how this might be used to resolve some of the paradoxes surrounding the causal interactions of consciousness and brain. I also suggest that, viewed from a first-person perspective, consciousness gives purpose to existence, which allows a different way of viewing its role in evolution.

A metatheoretical and historiographical re-analysis of the Evolutionary Synthesis (the process) and the Synthetic Theory (the result) leads to the following conclusion: The Synthetic Theory is not a reductionistic, but rather a structuralistic theory with a limited range of relevant hierarchical levels. Historically the Synthesis was not a sudden event but a rational long-term project carried out between 1930 and 1950 by a large number of biologists in several countries. In the second part of our paper the contributions of several German biologists to the Synthesis are analyzed.

This paper introduces novice researchers to the differences in philosophical perspectives and the major research implications arising from them. It is our contention that research should not be methodologically led, rather that methodological choice should be consequential to the researcher's philosophical stance and the social science phenomenon to be investigated. Several philosophical approaches are possible in the science of research, however we perceive that more extreme approaches can be delimiting. We argue that only an intermediate philosophical approach allows the researcher to match philosophy, methodology, and the research problem.

Much of perception, learning and high-level cognition involves finding patterns in data. But there are always infinitely many patterns compatible with any finite amount of data. How does the cognitive system choose 'sensible' patterns? A long tradition in epistemology, philosophy of science, and mathematical and computational theories of learning argues that patterns 'should' be chosen according to how simply they explain the data. This article reviews research exploring the idea that simplicity does, indeed, drive a wide range of cognitive processes. We outline mathematical theory, computational results, and empirical data underpinning this viewpoint.

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

The specification and implementation of computational artefacts occurs throughout the discipline of computer science. Consequently, unpacking its nature should constitute one of the core areas of the philosophy of computer science. This paper presents a conceptual analysis of the central role of specification in the discipline.

After briefly describing my early collaborative work at the University of Allahabad, that had laid the foundation of my research life, I present here some of our research on photosynthesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, randomly selected from light absorption to NADP + reduction in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria. These include the fact that (i) both the light reactions I and II are powered by light absorbed by chlorophyll (Chl) a of different spectral forms; (ii) light emission (fluorescence, delayed fluorescence, and thermoluminescence) by plants, algae, and cyanobacteria provides detailed information on these reactions and beyond; (iii) primary photochemistry in both the photosystems I (PS I) and II (PS II) occurs within a few picoseconds; and (iv) most importantly, bicarbonate plays a unique role on the electron acceptor side of PS II, specifically at the two-electron gate of PS II. Currently, the ongoing research around the world is, and should be, directed towards making photosynthesis better able to deal with the global issues (such as increasing population, dwindling resources, and rising temperature) particularly through genetic modification. However, basic research is necessary to continue to provide us with an understanding of the molecular mechanism of the process and to guide us in reaching our goals of increasing food production and other chemicals we need for our lives. Keywords Bicarbonate effect · Chlorophyll a fluorescence · Photosystem II · Primary photochemistry · State changes · Thermoluminescence "The firefly seems afire, the sky looks flat; Yet sky and fly are neither this nor that" Panchatantra (see Ryder 1925)

This article argues that theory building in the social sciences, management and psychology included, should be inductive. It begins by critiquing contemporary philosophy of science, for example, Popper's falsifiability theory, his stress on deduction, and the hypothetico-deductive method. Next, the author presents some history on the concept of induction in philosophy and of inductive theory building in the hard sciences (e.g., Aristotle, Bacon, Newton)

The physical-human dichotomy in geography is long standing, revolving around the topics studied and outlooks adopted by the two groups of geographers. Three reasons are identified for its continuation—the present structure of academic geography , constrained interactions between physical and human geographers, and their publication strategies. Critics suggest that physical and human geography have become divergent strains because the physical environment has been accorded little relevance in human geographic studies, also putting forward the failure of physical geographers to integrate the human influence on physical processes and neglecting space in their studies. Citing examples, this paper argues that physical and human geography influence each other. It also demonstrates that physical geographers have sufficiently considered both space and time, and even space-time, through the concepts of scale and ergodicity. Some measures have been proposed to resuscitate the links between these two branches. These are reconnecting university and school geography, merging departments, teaching courses on geographical philosophies and theory building, engaging in integrative discourses, innovative classroom strategies , joint fieldwork, using geoinformatics, and conducting collaborative research. The paper concludes that physical and human geographers must communicate with each other more and engage in cross-disciplinary studies. Otherwise, they might undermine their responsibilities as geographers and spatial thinkers/analysts.