Experimental Epistemology Research Articles

Testing Times: A symposium on the ethics and epistemology of animal experimentation, Sydney, Australia

Testing Times: A symposium on the ethics and epistemology of animal experimentation, Sydney, Australia

Epistemic dialog between health services and operations research

The study proposes a dialogical approach between OR and Health Services Planning and Epidemiology based on the similarities of their own epistemological experiences, according to Habermas' Theory of Knowledge. As a field of application, healthcare services planning and epidemiology are characterized as Complex Societal Problems, requiring multidisciplinary and multi dimensional approaches. A review of the literature on OR efficiency healthcare services applications is made to confront the perspective of the OR analyst and that of the health manager. Finally, an agenda is proposed to enhance the interaction between the disciplines, by increasing actuality of the OR methods' findings, to guarantee that the results of health services research will really be put in practice by health policy decision makers.

East Asian international graduate students’ epistemological experiences in an American University

This study focused on the perspectives of seven female East Asian international students who were English Speakers of Other Languages (EAISs-ESOL) and one male and four female mainstream faculty members to gain an understanding of the effect of Western and Eastern epistemological systems on these students’ intercultural learning experiences. The students were in a doctoral-level (Ph.D.) curriculum and instruction (C&I) program at an American university. The key research questions were (a) How do EAISs-ESOL enrolled in a C&I program at an American university reflect upon their learning experiences as they work to acquire academic English literacy and master their academic discipline? and (b) What are the epistemological and metacognitive characteristics of the learning experience of the EAISs-ESOL?

Epistemics for Forensics

ABSTRACTForensic science error rates are needlessly high. Applying the perspective of veritistic social epistemology to forensic science could produce new institutional designs that would lower forensic error rates. We make such an application through experiments in the laboratory with human subjects. Redundancy is the key to error prevention, discovery, and elimination. In the “monopoly epistemics” characterizing forensics today, one privileged actor is asked to identify the truth. In “democratic epistemics,” several independent parties are asked. In an experiment contrasting them, democratic epistemics reduced the rate at which biased observers obscured the truth by two-thirds. These results highlight, first, the potential of “epistemic systems design,” which employs the techniques of economic systems design to address issues of veracity rather than efficiency, and second, the value of “experimental epistemology,” which employs experimental techniques in the study of science.

Computer simulation through an error-statistical lens

After showing how Deborah Mayo's error-statistical philosophy of science might be applied to address important questions about the evidential sta- tus of computer simulation results, I argue that an error-statistical perspective offers an interesting new way of thinking about computer simulation models and has the potential to significantly improve the practice of simulation model evaluation. Though intended primarily as a contribution to the epistemology of simulation, the analysis also serves to fill in details of Mayo's epistemology of experiment.

Review: US Foreign Policy since 1945

US FOREIGN POLICY SINCE 1945 Second edition Alan P. Dobson and Steve Marsh London and New York: Routledge, 2006. xviii, 204pp, US$25-95 paper (ISBN 0415360900).Those in quest of a comprehensive and empirically rich treatment of American foreign policy since the ending of the second World War-one moreover that at the same time is able to be reasonably concise-can stop searching, for this is their book. In some 250 or so action- and factcrammed pages, authors Alan Dobson and Steve Marsh take the reader through a vigorous and often critical assessment of the high and low points in American diplomacy during a six-decade era mostly dominated by the pursuit of a grand strategy of containment, both of the Soviet Union as a state, and of communism as an ideology. The book is a collaborative effort on the part of two British scholars of American foreign policy and transatlantic relations, Dobson at Dundee University in Scotland, and Marsh at Cardiff University in Wales.The authors' British background is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it is refreshing to have such an informed analysis of US foreign policy presented by non-American s. This is certainly no knock on Americans' assessments of their country's diplomatic record, but it is useful to have the benefit of insights provided by outsiders with detailed knowledge of the field. secondly, because the British tradition of international relations scholarship is one that emphasizes historical and normative assessments more than does the American school of IR (so often said to be afflicted with an obsession for positivist theorizing), the reader is provided a different epistemological experience from that normally found in similar accounts written by political scientists in the US. Indeed, one could almost say this book is as much a study in diplomatic history as it is in political science (again, no knock intended).Yet if the disciplinary divide within IR finds the political scientists to be more inclined than their historian counterparts a) to generalize, and b) to judge, then the Dobson and Marsh book clearly demonstrates its political science credentials. For the book's core generalization, you could even say its story line, centres upon the grand strategy of containment, the ups and downs of which the authors trace in exquisite detail. It is also containment that provides the standard by which they judge America's foreign policy. Dobson and Marsh do not suffer from any misplaced nostalgia for the Cold War, nor do they give the impression of thinking that containment as strategy was easy to implement, or particularly ethical in its operations. On the all-important question of whether it worked, they are hesitant to ratify the thesis that the US won the Cold War, but they certainly acknowledge the obvious, that it did not lose it.At times their discussion of the vagaries of containment reminded me of what Dr. Johnson once said about a dog walking on its hind legs, the surprise being not that it did it poorly, but that it was able to do it at all. For most of the analysis of containment concentrates not upon what managed to go right, but on what went wrong with the various policies adopted in its name, leaving this reader, at least, to wonder how the US escaped losing the Cold War. Partly this has to do with their desire to be normative theorists, and to weigh the merits of a policy not only in terms of its objectives, but especially in terms of the means required to satisfy those ends. At times, their frequent scolding of American decision-makers has them running the risk of being dismissed as just another set of wimpish, and nagging, Europeans who simply do not get it.Yet those who would dismiss their argument on this basis mistake the authors' normative intent: far from operating within a mindset that could be deemed anti-American, theirs is imbued with a very American foreign policy perspective that can be called Jeffersonianism, and is characterized by a dual concern to limit foreign policy initiatives to what is essential to be done to protect US interests, and constantly to minimize the degradation that foreign policy can often visit upon domestic political and economic agendas, including and especially the safeguarding of civil liberties and the enhancement of democratic governance. …

The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First Person versus Third Person Approaches

There has been a movement recently to bring to bear on the conduct of philosophical thought experiments (henceforth “thought experiments”) the empirical techniques of the social sciences, that is, to treat their conduct as in the nature of an anthropological investigation into the application conditions of the concepts of a group of subjects. This is to take a third person, in contrast to the traditional first person, approach to conceptual analysis.This has taken the form of conducting surveys about scenarios used in thought experiments. It has been called “experimental philosophy” by its practitioners and has been applied across a range of fields: the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. The results of these surveys have been used to support conclusions about the application conditions of particular concepts of interest in philosophy. They have also been used to support (and been motivated by) skeptical claims about the traditional approach to conceptual analysis. The

Claude Bernard and An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine: "Physical Vitalism," Dialectic, and Epistemology

This article explores the profound impact of the thought of Claude Bernard (1813-78) and his philosophy of experimentalism elaborated in his masterwork An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. I argue that Bernard's far-ranging theoretical impact on medicine and biology marks the end of conventional vitalism and the elusive notion of a "vital force" as a legitimate scientific concept. His understanding of medicine is as epistemologically significant in its time as Newton's contribution was to the physical sciences in the seventeenth century. This essay treats Bernard's philosophical ambitions seriously, exploring his important, even central, role in the mental world of nineteenth-century France. This includes his influence on Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and other late-nineteenth century thinkers. The subtext of Bernard's experimental epistemology is also contrasted with a key idealist philosopher of the period, the German Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), and placed in the context of the larger European philosophical sphere. In contrast to much of mid-nineteenth-century philosophy, Bernard, in creating the framework for experimental medicine, argued for an experimental approach in which a priori assumptions were to be strictly constrained. Bernard's thoughts on the nature of experiment put an end to "systems" in medicine, ironically by replacing all previous medical philosophies with the all-embracing "system" of experiment. And yet, while "vital forces" fade after Bernard, a form of vitalism still flourishes. Even in Bernard's own work, in the struggle with concepts like determinism, complexity, and causality, there is a realization of the unique character of living function in a kind of "physical vitalism."

The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First Person versus Third Person Approaches

Recent third person approaches to thought experiments and conceptual analysis through the method of surveys are motivated by and motivate skepticism about the traditional first person method. I argue that such surveys give no good ground for skepticism, that they have some utility, but that they do not represent a fundamentally new way of doing philosophy, that they are liable to considerable methodological difficulties, and that they cannot be substituted for the first person method, since the a priori knowledge which is our object in conceptual analysis can be acquired only from the first person standpoint.

On the legacy of W.S. McCulloch

In this paper, we review McCulloch’s legacy, from his early work in neurophysiology, and its relationship to his philosophical quest for an ‘experimental epistemology’ to his role in the cybernetics movement during the 1940s and 1950s and his contributions to the development of computer science and communication theory. There are three parts in chronological sequence. First, the period up to his work at Yale University with Dusser de Barenne, where he concentrated on the experimental study of the functional organization of sensory cortex. Second, the time of his Psychiatric Chair at the University of Chicago and the organization of the Macy Foundation Conferences. To this period corresponds the genesis and publication of the most influential and quoted work by McCulloch and Pitts: A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Neurons Activity. Third, the period of his research activity at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology where he, Lettvin, Maturana and Pitts produced epochmaking papers on epistemological neurophysiology, the modelling of the reticular formation and other work with da Fonseca and Moreno-Díaz. We finally refer to the International Conference that took place in McCulloch’s memory at the 25th anniversary of his death. Our main conclusion is that McCulloch’s writings are still a source of inspiration from neurophysiology to artificial intelligence and robotics.

Generative Role of Experiments in Physics and in Teaching Physics: A Suggestion for Epistemological Reconstruction

In physics teaching experimentality is an integral component in giving the starting point of knowledge formation and conceptualization. However, epistemology of experiments is not often addressed directly in the educational and pedagogical literature. This warrants an attempt to produce an acceptable reconstruction of the epistemological role of experiments in physics by drawing insight from history and philosophy of physics. Towards that end, the experiments’ role in the 19th-century physics is discussed. We propose here a reconstruction, which is based on the idea that in epistemology of experiments the inductive-like generative justification of knowledge is central. A generative view makes it possible to retain those aspects of experiments which make them purposeful for learning and can give a starting point for students’ own construction of knowledge. The reconstruction also helps to conceive the experiments with their correct historical role and helps to bring back the generative use of experiments in teaching, which, after all, has never vanished from the practice of physics.

Truth Is What Works : Francisco J. Varela on Cognitive Science, Buddhism, the Inseparability of Subject and Object, and the Exaggerations of Constructivism--A Conversation

Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001) studied biology in Santiago de Chile, obtained his doctorate 1970 at Harvard University with a dissertation on the insect eye, and worked there for some time in the laboratory of Torsten Wiesel, the later Nobel Laureate for medicine. From his scientific beginnings as a researcher in biology, he not only studied and practiced biology but, resisting the dominating mainstream, pursued a research program that ignored and broke down traditional disciplinary boundaries. This research program is best characterized as experimental epistemology, a concept introduced by the neuropsychiatrist and cybernetician Warren S. McCulloch. Francisco J. Varela's great aspiration was to examine and answer the philosophical ur-question of cognition with scientific precision and with the help of the best possible theoretical framework. [End Page 35] Having obtained his doctorate, he went back to Chile to work as a professor of biology together with Humberto R. Maturana. He contributed to the writing of the theory of autopoiesis, which was to cause a furor in the world of science as a universally applicable explanatory model. After the overthrow of Allende and the installation of the dictatorship by the putsch general Pinochet, Francisco J. Varela first escaped to Costa Rica, then became a professor at the American University of Colorado and University of New York, and finally returned in 1980 to the University of Chile in Santiago for five years. Temporary positions as guest professor for neurobiology, philosophy, and cognitive science in Germany, Switzerland, and France led him to Paris in the end, where he worked as research director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique until his death on May 28, 2001. In his research work embracing cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and immunology, Francisco J. Varela, constantly inspired by his fundamental interest in the key questions of epistemology, gave the epistemological debate a new orientation. In his thinking he refuses to accept the strict separation of subject and object, of knower and known, which as a rule unites realists and constructivists alike. Francisco J. Varela rejects the fundamental dualism dividing mind and world, which had shaped Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings. He does not subscribe to the idea that human individuals can invent their own realities—blindly and arbitrarily, and without experiencing any resistance from the external world and all other things given. He equally distances himself, however, from the diametrically opposite position that overstates the eigenpower of the world of objects. The external world and all other things given cannot determine what happens in an organism. Varela's claim is that individual and world create each other. The Computational Model of the Mind Poerksen: The ancient key questions of philosophy are at the center of modern cognitive science. What is the essence of the mind? Do our conceptions represent a given world, which is independent from our minds? What is the formative power of external objects over our perceptions? How does cognition function? The search for an adequate answer and an improved understanding of the human mind has led many cognitive scientists to entertain the assumption that the brain is actually a kind of computer. Memory is taken to be a store. Thinking and perceiving are understood as data processing in the sense that an independent external world is computationally transformed into symbols and represented in the organism in this manner. You are very critical of this view. Why? Varela: If the brain is considered as a kind of computer, then cognitive research is limited to discovering certain self-sufficient shapes—the symbols—together with the rules [End Page 36] governing them—the programs. But this search for symbols and programs will never be profitable because it...

The Incompleteness of Each Tradition: Toward an Ethic of Complexity (L'incompiutezza di Ogni Tradizione: Verso Un'etica Della Complessita)

This article addresses the power of human technologies to wreak destruction on a planetary scale, such as genetic manipulation and weapons of mass destruction. It proposes the need for a new ethic that would be planetary in scale. Its central aim would be to include the great historical and contemporary diversity of human cognitive and epistemological experience. An “ethic of complexity” can weave together the threads of our common heritage. Although humanity's evolutionary past has been shown to be quite diverse, recent genetic and anthropological research has shown it also to be surprisingly unified. New images and metaphors are providing humanity with a vision that transcends familiar ethnic hatreds and so-called clashes of civilizations. The new planetary culture can be a shining example of unity-in-diversity, or unitas multiplex. It will be robustly diverse, intermixed to the core, and filled with awe at the rich lineages of our common past.

The Quest for Meaning in Public Choice

Abstract. The logical foundations of constitutional government are of basic importance if people are to be self‐governing. All forms of political order are Faustian bargains subject to numerous risks. If constitutional choice applies to all patterns of human association, the complexity of associated relationships and the potential threats to the viability of associated relationships in the aggregate exceed the limits of human cognition. The development of analytical capabilities depends on using frameworks, theories, and models for formulating hypotheses about conditions and consequences, undertaking diagnostic assessments, and conceptualizing and designing alternative possibilities. The relationship of ideas to deeds in an experimental epistemology is necessary to achieve a warrantable art and science of association.

Évangélisme et Lumières

Evangelical revivalism and the Enlightenment have been traditionally viewed as contradictory movements, whose coexistence is considered as one of the great paradoxes of the xviiith century. This study suggests that the two movements, which were varied in their composition, were after all not so opposed. The American evangelical clergy, through its university training, its immersion in moral philosophy, and its ongoing dialogue with like-minded British evangelicals, partook in experimental epistemology. Its messianic hope was also the religious equivalent of the Enlightenment’s optimism.

From logical neurons to poetic embodiments of mind: Warren S. McCulloch's project in neuroscience.

After more than half a century of eclipse, the mind (in contradistinction to brain and behavior) emerged in the 1950s as a legitimate object of experimental and quantitative research in natural science. This paper argues that the neural nets project of Warren S. McCulloch, in frequent collaboration with Walter Pitts, spearheaded this cognitivist turn in the 1940s. Viewing the project as a spiritual and poetic quest for the transcendental logos, as well as culturally situated epistemology, the paper focuses on McCulloch's and Pitts' efforts of logical modeling of the mind and on the social conditions that shaped that mission. From McCulloch's "experimental epistemology," the mind - purposes that ideas - emerged out of the regularities of neuronal interactions, or nets. That science of mind thus became a science of signals based on binary logic with clearly defined units of perception and precise rules of formation and transformation for representing mental states. Aimed at bridging the gulf between body and mind (matter and form) and the technical gulf between things man-made and things begotten, neural nets also laid the foundation for the field of artificial intelligence. Thus this paper also situates McCulloch;'s work within a larger historical trend, when cybernetics, information theory, systems theories, and electronic computers were coalescing into a new science of communication and control with enormous potential for industrial automation and military power in the Cold War era. McCulloch's modeling the mind as a system of command and control contributed to the actualization of this potential.

Exploring Variability in Language Anxiety: Two Groups of Prc Students Learning Esl in Singapore

This is an exploratory study of ESL students' general language learning anxiety in a study-abroad context. Results of the present study suggest that variability in ESL students' language anxiety can also be attributable to students' differences in age, learning and epistemological experiences and other socio-economic factors. It is suggested that these differences might be equally viable in accounting for this psychological construct in the process of helping ESL learners out of their learning difficulties.

Toward Qualitative Understandings of Health Phenomena or a Pedagogical Epiphany from a Long-Time Medical Humanities Professor Who Thought She was on the Right Track

This is the story of one medical educator’s attempt to combine literary and epistemological inquiry in a 4th-year elective called Women’s Health: Views from Literature, Communities, and Clinical Medicine. The assumption fueling this attempt was that medical students’ thinking rarely moves outside rationalist constructs, and because of this, they often confuse the nature or distinguishing features of something or someone—its quality—with what the numbers tell them. Thus, the class content and experiences were purposely developed to engage the students with knowledge from a variety of qualitative domains and would be, as such, an epistemological experience. This article details how the class worked and how it did not.

The Roles of Experiment

In this paper I examine some of the roles that experiment plays in science. One of its important roles is to test theories, but it can also call for a new theory, either by showing that the accepted theory is incorrect, or by exhibiting a new phenomenon that needs explanation. Experiment can also provide hints toward the structure or mathematical form of a theory. It can also provide evidence for the existence of the entities involved in our theories. Finally, it may also have a life of its own, independent of theory. I will illustrate these roles using episodes from the history of contemporary physics including: 1) the discovery of parity nonconservation; 2) the discovery of Bose-Einstein condensation; 3) the demonstration that the “Fifth Force,” a proposed modification of Newton’s Law of Gravitation, did not exist; and 4) the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson. I will also discuss an epistemology of experiment, a set of strategies that provides grounds for reasonable belief in experimental results.

The Chemical Workshop Tradition and the Experimental Practice: Discontinuities within Continuities

The ArgumentThe overall portrayal of early modern experimentation as a new method of securing assent within a philosophical discourse sketched in many of the recent studies on the historical origin of experimentation is questioned by the analysis of the experimental practice of chemistry at the Paris Academy. Chemical experimentation at the Paris Academy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century originated in a different tradition than the philosophical. It continued and developed the material culture of the chemical work shops of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and explored epistemic objects which had rather loose connections to philosophy. On the other hand, I argue against the classical dichotomy between the work of the mind that of the hand, and for an epistemology of experimentation that acknowledges that experimental manipulation goes hand in hand with reflexion. In particuler, I argue against the view that chemists at the Paris Academy were “pragmatists” who merely gathered experimental facts and classified substances and operations without perplexing themselves over general conceptions. I claim that the chemists at the Paris Academy constructed a general conception framework which shaped the significance of their experiments. This conception that I call conception of the chemical combination, compound and reaction was rather quickly reified into an experimental fact. Despite its generality it was a genuine chemical conception rather independent of philosophy.