This is not breaking news (unless your news cycle is more geological), but it strikes me as relevant on the day that I deliver my penultimate lecture in the newly-created ethics module in the Introduction to Engineering class at my university:
Can you trust an ethicist to behave ethically?
Category Archives: Philosophy
Questions I have for Paul Davies after reading his NYT op-ed.
This New York Times op-ed, to be precise. My questions for Paul Davies can be boiled down to these two:
- What kinds of explanations, precisely, are you asking science to deliver to you?
- Just why do you think it is the job of science to provide such explanations?
What are we *really* like? (Thoughts on meeting people you know from online in real life.)
In the aftermath of the ScienceBloggers’ assault on Manhattan, Mark Chu-Carroll put up a nice post on the ways in which bloggers’ real-life manner seemed to match or depart from their online personae.
Maybe philosophy’s to blame, but I think there’s a deep and interesting question here.
Passing thoughts about conference presentations.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was sucked out of the blogosphere for much of last week by the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC) 2007 Summer Symposium .
I did not live-blog the conference. I did use overheads. Why, other than being a tremendous Luddite, would I use overheads?
Does analytic philosophy give you Asperger’s Syndrome?
Or is there just something wrong with this instrument for self-evaluation?
Does writing off philosophy of science cost the scientists anything?
In my last post, I allowed as how the questions which occupy philosophers of science might be of limited interest or practical use to the working scientist.* At least one commenter was of the opinion that this is a good reason to dismantle the whole discipline:
[T]he question becomes: what are the philosophers good for? And if they don’t practice science, why should we care what they think?
And, I pretty much said in the post that scientists don’t need to care about what the philosophers of science think.
Then why should anyone else?
Scientists don’t need to care what historians, economists, politicians, psychologists, and so on think. Does this mean no one else should care?
If those fields of study had no implications for people taking part in the endeavors being studied, then no, I don’t think anyone should care about them. Not the people endeavoring, nor anyone else. The process of study wouldn’t lead to practical applications or even a better understanding of what was being studied – it would be completely worthless.
Let me take a quick pass at the “why care?” question.
A branch of learning that ‘need not be learned’?
Prompted by my discussion of Medawar and recalling that once in the past I called him a gadfly (although obviously I meant it in the good way), Bill Hooker drops another Medawar quotation on me and asks if I’ll bite:
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem to be able to get on very well without it. Most scientists receive no tuition in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no better as scientists than those who have not. Of what other branch of learning can it be said that it gives its proficients no advantage; that it need not be taught or, if taught, need not be learned?
Bill’s take is “scientific methodology” here can be read “philosophy of science”. So, what do I think?
Why does Medawar hate the scientific paper?
Following up on the earlier discussions of intentional unclarity and bad writing in scientific papers, I thought this might be a good opportunity to consider an oft-cited article on scientific papers, P.B. Medawar’s “Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent?” [1] He answers that question in the affirmative only three paragraphs in:
The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.
Tenure-track faculty and departmental decision making.
Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions:
Should tenure-track faculty members who are not yet tenured vote on new hires?
Paul S. Davies, one of the professors who pressed to exclude the junior professors from voting, stressed that such a shift in the rules would protect them. “If you have junior people voting, they have tenure in the back of their minds, and that would be a motivation to hire someone less impressive than yourself,” he said. In any department with disagreements, Davies added, junior faculty members would also have to worry about offending (or would seek to please) the people who would soon vote on their tenure.
Davies also linked his views to a concern about “standards.” Davies and George W. Harris, the other philosopher who raised the issue of junior faculty members voting, have charged that the department as a whole is reluctant to push nice people to work harder. The two have also raised questions about whether politics and gender enter in some hiring choices, although they have not restricted those concerns to junior faculty members.
“There has to be a check on conflicts of interest between those doing the hiring and the future of the institution in terms of maintaining or even raising standards when standards are at stake,” said Harris. “Here there is no oversight, nor is there in many other places.”
I am tenure-track but still untenured (although I hope to be tenured by this time next year), and I would like to offer some reasons for letting junior faculty vote on new tenure-track hires in their department.
2007 Science Spring Showdown: Kuhn vs. Theory coverage!
PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
Janet: Welcome to team coverage of the much anticipated Chair Bracket match between Kuhn and Theory!
Ben: Yes, I think we can agree on our assumptions that this will be quite a battle.
Janet: I certainly hope so, Ben. Otherwise, we’re going to spend the whole game talking past each other!