Showing papers in "Perspectives on Science in 2000"

Financial Interests and Research Bias

Abstract: In the last two decades, scientists, government officials, and science policy experts have expressed concerns about the increasing role of financial interests in research. Many believe that these interests are undermining research by causing bias and error, suppression of results, and even outright fraud. This paper seeks to shed some light on this view by (1) explicating the concept research bias, (2) describing some ways that financial interests can cause research biases, and (3) discussing some strategies for mitigating or managing the influence of financial interests. These strategies include (a) using government funds to counter-balance privately funded research, (b) increasing public input into government funding decisions, (c) disclosing and managing conflicts of interest in research, (d) auditing data, (e) expanding access to data. Since it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate financial interests from research, the wisest policy is to manage and counter-balance these interests for the go...

The organism is dead. Long live the organism

Abstract: On June 26, 2000 President Clinton announced the completion of a arst draft of the Human Genome in a White House ceremony.2 Attending the ceremony were Francis Collins, the head of the publicly funded Human Genome Project and J. Craig Venter, renegade scientiac entrepreneur and president of Celera Genomics of Rockville, Maryland. Prime Minister Tony Blair also attended, albeit virtually via satellite broadcast from London. By everybody’s account the impact of this carefully staged public announcement was mainly symbolical. President Clinton called the still rather preliminary map of the human genome the “most wondrous map ever produced by humankind” and an “epic-making triumph of science and reason.” The joint appearance of Collins and Venter was intended to symbolize the end of the animosities between the public and the private Genome Projects. This would be all the more important in the future because, as President Clinton suggested, “there is much hard work yet to be done.” Also mending the heated divisions between the two projects was Eric Lander, director of MIT’s Whitehead Institute, who—not for the arst

Herbert A. Simon as a Cyborg Scientist

Abstract: This paper discusses how Herbert Simon's initial interest in decision making became transformed into a focus on understanding human problem solving in response to the concrete conditions of the Cold War and the practical goals of the military.In particular, it suggests a connection between the seachange in Simon's interest and his shift in patronage.As a result, Simon is portrayed as a component of the scientific-military World War II cyborg that further evolved during the Cold War.Moving from decision making to problem solving, Simon's cyborg science not only required large sums of money, but also managed to acquire these.

Models of Herbert A. Simon

Abstract: The work of Herbert A. Simon has drawn increasing attention from modern scholars who argue that Simon's work changed during the Cold War. This is due to the fact that Simon seemingly changed the substance of his research in the 1950s. This paper argues that Simon did not change in any significant way, but was lead by his interest in decision making and rationality into areas of economics, political science, sociology, psychology, organization theory, and computer science. He used elements of different disciplines to address his overall interest and there is therefore a considerable continuity in Simon's work. This paper also provides part of a background for the recent increase of interest in Simon's ideas by providing some details of the RAND Corporation and the Ford Foundation's support of scientific research through the post war years in general, and their connections to the behavioral science research at Carnegie Mellon University in particular.

The Politics of Explanation and the Origins of Ethnography

Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, comparative studies of human culture (ethnology) gave way to studies of the details of individual societies (ethnography). While many writers have noticed a political sub-text to this paradigm shift, they have regarded political interests as extrinsic to the change. The central historical issue is why anthropologinsts stopped asking global, comparative questions and started asking local questions about features of particular societies. The change in questions cannot be explained by empirical factors clone, and following Jarvie, this essay argues that political factors motivate the change. Jarvie's understanding of the role played by egalitarian politics is criticized, and the esay develops a new model of how political or moral values can become constitutive of scientific enquiry. On the erotetic view of explanation, whether one proposition explains another depends on the choice of contrast clas and relevance criterion. Since political or moral values can motivate thes...

The Role of Matter Theory in Baconian and Cartesian Cosmologies

Abstract: Within twenty years of one another, Bacon and Descartes proposed cosmologies which relied heavily on matter theory. In both, the distribution of matter in the cosmos determined what centers of rotation there were, and rotating bodies were carried around by the motion of an all-encompassing celestial fluid in which they were embedded. But the role of matter theory in the two accounts is very different, both in motivation and in the level at which it is active in guiding physical theory. Matter theory in Baconian cosmology stands as a foundational discipline, being virtually constitutive of physical theory, as it had been for natural philosophers from Thales onwards, whereas in Descartes it is subservient to the needs of his optics and his mechanics. Comparison of the two cases shows how the role of matter theory came to be radically modified in seventeenth-century cosmology.

The Problem of Secondary Causation in Descartes: A Response to Des Chene

Abstract: In this paper I address the vexed question of secondary causation in Rene Descartes' physics, and examine several influential interpretations, especially the one recently rpoposed by Dennis Des Chene. Iargue that interpreters who regard Cartesian bodies as real socondary causes, on the grounds that the modes of body include real forces, contradict Descartes' account of modes. On the other hand, those who deny that Descartes affirms secondary causation, on the grounds that forces cannot be modes of extension, commit Descartes to the problematic view that the undetermined and immutable will of God is the sole cause of determinate and variable motions. Des Chene's contextualist aproach to Descartes' texts leads him to an intermediate position that combines elements of both interpretations. However, in my view, Des Chene's interpretation likewise fails to resolve aparent tensions in Descartes' claims. i thus propose to separate the issue of force'. On the basis of this approach, and a study of Jesuit commenta...

Arabic versus Greek Astronomy: A Debate over the Foundations of Science

Abstract: This short note is occasioned by the publication of a review essay by A. I. Sabra in this journal, under the title “Conaguring the Universe: Aporetic, Problem Solving, and Kinematic Modeling as Themes of Arabic Astronomy.” Sabra’s review itself was in turn occasioned by the recent publication of four books (all in the 1990s), two of which were written as dissertations by Sabra’s own students and under his own supervision, and the last two were written by the present author. As a review essay, Sabra’s assessment of the books under consideration is rather fair, and as far as his assessment of the present writer’s books is decidedly oattering, and, for all practical purposes, engaging enough to invite the reader to examine those books. Had Sabra’s essay review been only a review, however, it would not have been necessary to bring it once more to the attention of the readers of Perspectives on Science, except maybe to make a corrective statement or two whenever the essay strayed into error. But it proclaims to do more than that. In 52 densely printed pages, it attempts to determine the purpose and character of a whole tradition of astronomical writings that occupied a major place in Islamic civilization for slightly more than a millennium, from the ninth to the twentieth century, a Herculean task in itself. The tradition in question was the one commonly known as the hay’a tradition, whose very name is still problematic since no one has ever been able to demonstrate that the term hay’a had any Greek antecedents. Its beginnings though can be incontestably dated back to the middle of the ninth century if not before, as is evident from the work Kitab al-hay’a (Book on Astronomy) by Qusta. b. Luqa (o. 860), who was not mentioned in Sabra’s essay. Its purpose, as I shall argue below, seems to have been an attempt to set new foundations for the science of astronomy, thus giving

Conceptual Clarification and Policy-Related Science: The Case of Chemical Hormesis

Abstract: This paper examines the epistemological warrant for a toxicological phenomenon known as chemical hormesis. First, it argues that conceptual confusion contributes significantly to current disagreements about the status of chemical hormesis as a biological hypothesis. Second, it analyzes seven distinct concepts of chemical hormesis, arguing that none are completely satisfactory. Finally, it suggests three ramifications of this analysis for ongoing debates about the epistemological status of chemical hormesis. This serves as a case study supporting the value of philosophical methodologies such as conceptual clarification for addressing contemporary scientific disputes, including policy-related scientific disputes that may be heavily influencedby social and political factors.

Radiobiological Hormesis, Methodological Value Judgments, and Metascience

Abstract: Scientists are divided on the status of hypothesis H that low doses of ionizing radiation (under 20 rads) cause hormetic (or non-harmful) effects.Military and industrial scientists tend to accept H...

Reply to Saliba

Abstract: Professor Saliba takes exception to views expressed in my Review Essay (“Conaguring the Universe: Aporetic, Problem Solving, and Kinematic Modeling as Themes of Arabic Astronomy,” Perspectives on Science 1998, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 288–330). His criticisms and reservations mainly relate to questions about the character and the value of what I have called the hay’a project in Islamic astronomy, how and when this project was launched, and about contrasts with other projects and approaches in the same discipline, especially concerning the important question of the relations between physics and mathematics as viewed by the practitioners of the discipline. The following brief comments, kindly solicited by the editors of Perspectives on Science, are meant to sharpen some of our more serious differences, and, hopefully, to remove some misunderstandings. First, with regard to the term hay’a, Saliba makes too much of the term itself as an indication of when a new, and speciacally Islamic, project came into existence. Hay’a is a common Arabic word which means shape, agure or form; and, whether or not it originally rendered a Greek term, it could equally apply to the Aristotelian form (we now say “conaguration”) of the universe as a structure of homocentric spheres, and to the Ptolemaic system of eccentric spheres and epicycles. As Saliba knows, the term appears in the title of one manuscript of the Arabic version of Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses, and could be applied to something as simple as the agure (hay’a) of the earth. That the term came to refer to the science of astronomy in general is therefore not surprising: it emphasized a tendency, prevalent among a large number of Islamic astronomers, to view astronomical theory as primarily concerned to represent the heavens in terms of nested solid spheres obeying some physically accepted principles of motion. Thus an early use of the word hay’a does not by itself imply the motivations and

SCIENCE, MARX, and HISTORY: Are There Still Research Frontiers?

Abstract: Half a century of political Marxism and Soviet social science deoected Marxist thought from its canonical sources. Communism and Marxism were so intertwined by events of the twentieth century that it is difacult to see what remains of the latter after the demise of the former. Speciacally,three foundational principles—“being determines consciousness,” the Asiatic Mode of Production,and “the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas”—have been corrupted by heartfelt ideological commitments. A review of those principles against the background of Marxist writing on the history of science stakes out research frontiers that remain to be reconnoitered. Marxism has left an indelible mark on many aelds of scholarship, perhaps nowhere more visibly than in the history of science. Ideologue and ideology have enriched the aeld and enlivened discussions of the connections between science and society. Boris Hessen, V. Gordon Childe, and J.D. Bernal led the way, while Joseph Needham’s study of the history of Chinese science and technology is a towering achievement of twentiethcentury scholarship. Now that government by communist parties can be seen in historical perspective it may be timely to review dispassionately these intellectual repercussions in a aeld that has been disproportionately inouenced by Marxist ideas. With the beneat of hindsight it should be possible to see how the principles of the founding fathers were reshaped by the political requirements of the “struggle to create a socialist society,” sometimes resulting in interpretations that were politically correct but canonically obscure.

On Laws and Ends: A Response to Hattab and Menn

Abstract: From the topics discussed by Hattab and Menn, I examine two of special importance. The first is that of active powers: does the Cartesian natural world contain any, or is the aparent efficacy of natural agents always to be referred to God? In arguing that it is, I consider, following Hattab, Descartes' characterization of natural laws as “secondary causes.” The second topic is that of ends. Menn argues, and I agree, that in late Aristotelianism Aristotle's own conception of an “art in things” has been abandoned. The point is reinforced when one considers the general divine ends which must be invoked in cases of aborted action. In them no individual agent attarns its end. Yet Nature as a whole continues to act toward ends. I suggest that those general ends, to which Suarez, for example, refers, may have served later philosophers, especially Malebranche, in combining the Cartesian notion of law with a teleological interpretation of nature that Descartes, for his part, rejected.

On Dennis Des Chene's Physiologia

Abstract: Dennis Des Chene's Physiologia: Natural philosophy in late Aristotelian and Cartesian Though reconstructs the discourse of late scholastic natural philosophy, and assesses Descartes' agreements and disagreements. In a critical discussion, I offer a different interpretation of late scholastic theories of final causality and of God's concursus with created efficient causes. Fonseca's and Suarez' conceptions of final causality in nature depend on their claim that a single action can be the action can be the action of two agents at once-in particular, of God and of a creature. I discuss both their teory of action and its implications for natural teleology. I then compare Descartes, emphasizing his demolition of the Aristotelian hierarchy of causes, with unmoved movers(culminating in God) regulating the action of inferior moved movers. Aristotle argues that unmoved causes are needed to produce a stable world-order; be takes arts(Texval) as his models of unmoved causes, and uses this model to suport natural tel...

Is Science an Evolutionary Process? Evidence from Miscitations of the Scientific Literature

Abstract: This article describes a psychological test of Hull's (1998) theory of science as an evolutionary process by seeing if it can account for how scientists sometimes remember and cite the scientific literature. The conceptual adequacy of Hul's theory was evaluated by comparing it to Bartlett (1932) seminal theory of human remembering. Bartlett found that remembering is an active, reconstructive process driven by a schema that biases recall in the direction of prototypicality and personal involvement. This account supports Hull's theory of science because it shows that the characteristics of reconstructive remembering are consistent with the generic properties of an evolutionary process. the empirical adequacy of Hull's theory was evaluated by comparing the predictions made from this evolutionary viewpoint against evidence from the history of science. Six cases studies of well-known psychological experiments that had been subject to repeated miscitation errors were collected and reviewed. All six case studies...

To See Or Not To See: The Uses of Photometers and Measurements of Reflective Power

Abstract: Armed with a photometer originally designed for evaluating telescopes, Richard Potter in the early 1830s measured the re(integral)ective power of metallic and glass mirrors. Because he found significant discrepancies between his measurements and Fresnel's predictions, Potter developed doubts concerning the wave theory. However, Potter's measurements were colored by a peculiar procedure. In order to protect the sensitivity of the eye, Potter made certain approximations in the measuring process, which exaggerated the discrepancies between the theory and the data. Potter's measurements received strong criticisms from wave theorists, not because they felt they needed to defend their theory, but because they believed that Potter was wrong in using the eye as an essential apparatus in the experiments. Potter's photometric measurements and the subsequent debate reveal the existence of two incompatible sets of measuring procedures, each of which consisted of a body of practices concerning how photometric instruments should be used properly. In the debate, the differences regarding measuring procedures shaped the participant's judgments of experimental evidence and eventually their evaluations of the optical theories.

Recent Work on Aristotelian Biology

Abstract: The past several decades have seen a proliferation of scholarly work on Aristotle’s biological writings. The recent publication of James Lennoz’s collected essays, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology, seems a atting occasion to look at some aspects of this literature, since he, together with his co-worker Allan Gotthelf, has been one of its most conspicuous contributors. The proceedings of a conference on Aristotelian biology, held at Bad-Homburg in 1995, and published in 1997 under the editorship of Wolfgang Kullmann and Sabine Follinger, includes essays by a representative group of such specialists. G.E.R. Lloyd’s Aristotelian Explorations of 1996, though not entirely concerned with the biology, does deal principally with this area; and a more recent work by Kullmann, published in 1998, Aristoteles und die moderne Wissenschaft, though more ambitions in its overall aims, also bears in large part on the interpretation of the biological writings. Without attempting to delve into the periodical literature (which, for those interested, seems to be pretty well covered in the bibliographies of the works in question), I shall present some of the issues for the interpretation of Aristotle’s biological works raised in these volumes.1 In part, the work in question has served chieoy to illuminate the texts, a telos that is always worth pursuing for a thinker as complex and often as obscure as Aristotle. Before I proceed to more controversial questions, let me just mention a few of these cases. Both Lloyd and Lennox, for example, take up the problem of spontaneous generation in Aristotle (in Lloyd’s