Download or read book Going Amiss in Experimental Research written by Giora Hon and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like any goal-oriented procedure, experiment is subject to many kinds of failures. These failures have a variety of features, depending on the particulars of their sources. For the experimenter these pitfalls should be avoided and their effects minimized. For the historian-philosopher of science and the science educator, on the other hand, they are instructive starting points for reflecting on science in general and scientific method and practice in particular. Often more is learned from failure than from confirmation and successful application. The identification of error, its source, its context, and its treatment shed light on both practices and epistemic claims. This book shows that it is fruitful to bring to light forgotten and lost failures, subject them to analysis and learn from their moral. The study of failures, errors, pitfalls and mistakes helps us understand the way knowledge is pursued and indeed generated. The book presents both historical accounts and philosophical analyses of failures in experimental practice. It covers topics such as "error as an object of study", "learning from error", "concepts and dead ends", "instrumental artifacts", and "surprise and puzzlement". This book will be of interest to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science as well as to practicing scientists and science educators.
Download or read book Split and Splice written by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-04-21 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An esteemed historian of science explores the diversity of scientific experimentation. The experiment has long been seen as a test bed for theory, but in Split and Splice, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger makes the case, instead, for treating experimentation as a creative practice. His latest book provides an innovative look at the experimental protocols and connections that have made the life sciences so productive. Delving into the materiality of the experiment, the first part of the book assesses traces, models, grafting, and note-taking—the conditions that give experiments structure and make discovery possible. The second section widens its focus from micro-level laboratory processes to the temporal, spatial, and narrative links between experimental systems. Rheinberger narrates with accessible examples, most of which are drawn from molecular biology, including from the author’s laboratory notebooks from his years researching ribosomes. A critical hit when it was released in Germany, Split and Splice describes a method that involves irregular results and hit-or-miss connections—not analysis, not synthesis, but the splitting and splicing that form a scientific experiment. Building on Rheinberger’s earlier writing about science and epistemology, this book is a major achievement by one of today’s most influential theorists of scientific practice.
Download or read book Scientific Concepts and Investigative Practice written by Uljana Feest and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent philosophy and history of science has seen a surge of interest in the role of concepts in scientific research. Scholars working in this new field focus on scientific concepts, rather than theories, as units of analysis and on the ways in which concepts are formed and used rather than on what they represent. They analyze what has traditionally been called the context of discovery, rather than (or in addition to) the context of justification. And they examine the dynamics of research rather than the status of the finished research results. This volume provides detailed case studies and general analyses to address questions raised by these points, such as: - Can concepts be clearly distinguished from the sets of beliefs we have about their referents? - What - if any - sense can be made of the separation between concepts and theories? - Can we distinguish between empirical and theoretical concepts? - Are there interesting similarities and differences between the role of concepts in the empirical sciences and in mathematics? - What underlying notion of investigative practice could be drawn on to explicate the role of concept in such practice? - From a philosophical point of view, is the distinction between discovery and justification a helpful frame of reference for inquiring into the dynamics of research? - From a historiographical point of view, does a focus on concepts face the danger of falling back into an old-fashioned history of ideas?
Download or read book Knowledge in Translation written by Patrick Manning and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-09-19 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second millennium CE, long before English became the language of science in the twentieth century, the act of translation was crucial for understanding and disseminating knowledge and information across linguistic and geographic boundaries. This volume considers the complexities of knowledge exchange through the practice of translation over the course of a millennium, across fields of knowledge—cartography, health and medicine, material construction, astronomy—and a wide geographical range, from Eurasia to Africa and the Americas. Contributors literate in Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Minnan, Ottoman, and Persian explore the history of science in the context of world and global history, investigating global patterns and implications in a multilingual and increasingly interconnected world. Chapters reveal cosmopolitan networks of shared practice and knowledge about the natural world from 1000 to 1800 CE, emphasizing both evolving scientific exchange and the emergence of innovative science. By unraveling the role of translation in cross-cultural communication, Knowledge in Translation highlights key moments of transmission, insight, and critical interpretation across linguistic and faith communities.
Download or read book Tangled Diagnoses written by Ilana Löwy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late nineteenth century, medicine has sought to foster the birth of healthy children by attending to the bodies of pregnant women, through what we have come to call prenatal care. Women, and not their unborn children, were the initial focus of that medical attention, but prenatal diagnosis in its present form, which couples scrutiny of the fetus with the option to terminate pregnancy, came into being in the early 1970s. Tangled Diagnoses examines the multiple consequences of the widespread diffusion of this medical innovation. Prenatal testing, Ilana Löwy argues, has become mainly a risk-management technology—the goal of which is to prevent inborn impairments, ideally through the development of efficient therapies but in practice mainly through the prevention of the birth of children with such impairments. Using scholarship, interviews, and direct observation in France and Brazil of two groups of professionals who play an especially important role in the production of knowledge about fetal development—fetopathologists and clinical geneticists—to expose the real-life dilemmas prenatal testing creates, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the sociopolitical conditions of biomedical innovation, the politics of women’s bodies, disability, and the ethics of modern medicine.
Download or read book Physics and Literature written by Aura Heydenreich and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physics and Literature is a unique collaboration between physicists, literary scholars, and philosophers, the first collection of essays to examine together how science and literature, beneath their practical differences, share core dimensions – forms of questioning, thinking, discovering and communicating insights.This book advances an in-depth exploration of relations between physics and literature from both perspectives. It turns around the tendency to discuss relations between literature and science in one-sided and polarizing ways. The collection is the result of the inaugural conference of ELINAS, the Erlangen Center for Literature and Natural Science, an initiative dedicated to building bridges between literary and scientific research. ELINAS revitalizes discussion of science-literature interconnections with new topics, ideas and angles, by organizing genuine dialogue among participants across disciplinary lines. The essays explore how scientific thought and practices are conditioned by narrative and genre, fiction, models and metaphors, and how science in turn feeds into the meaning-making of literary and philosophical texts. These interdisciplinary encounters enrich reflections on epistemology, cognition and aesthetics.
Download or read book Vivarium written by Gerd B. Muller and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The scientific achievements and forgotten legacy of a major Austrian research institute, from its founding in 1902 to its wartime destruction in 1945. The Biologische Versuchsanstalt was founded in Vienna in 1902 with the explicit goal to foster the quantification, mathematization, and theory formation of the biological sciences. Three biologists from affluent Viennese Jewish families—Hans Przibram, Wilhelm Figdor, and Leopold von Portheim–founded, financed, and nurtured the institute, overseeing its development into one of the most advanced biological research institutes of the time. And yet today its accomplishments are nearly forgotten. In 1938, the founders and other members were denied access to the institute by the Nazis and were forced into exile or deported to concentration camps. The building itself was destroyed by fire in April 1945. This book rescues the legacy of the “Vivarium” (as the Institute was often called), describing both its scientific achievements and its place in history. The book covers the Viennese sociocultural context at the time of the Vivarium's founding, and the scientific zeitgeist that shaped its investigations. It discusses the institute's departments and their research topics, and describes two examples that had scientific and international ramifications: the early work of Karl von Frisch, who in 1973 won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; and the connection to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Contributors Heiner Fangerau, Johannes Feichtinger, Georg Gaugusch, Manfred D. Laubichler, Cheryl A. Logan, Gerd B. Müller, Tania Munz, Kärin Nickelsen, Christian Reiß, Kate E. Sohasky, Heiko Stoff, Klaus Taschwer
Download or read book Science and Technology in the Global Cold War written by Naomi Oreskes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-10-31 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigations of how the global Cold War shaped national scientific and technological practices in fields from biomedicine to rocket science. The Cold War period saw a dramatic expansion of state-funded science and technology research. Government and military patronage shaped Cold War technoscientific practices, imposing methods that were project oriented, team based, and subject to national-security restrictions. These changes affected not just the arms race and the space race but also research in agriculture, biomedicine, computer science, ecology, meteorology, and other fields. This volume examines science and technology in the context of the Cold War, considering whether the new institutions and institutional arrangements that emerged globally constrained technoscientific inquiry or offered greater opportunities for it. The contributors find that whatever the particular science, and whatever the political system in which that science was operating, the knowledge that was produced bore some relation to the goals of the nation-state. These goals varied from nation to nation; weapons research was emphasized in the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, but in France and China scientific independence and self-reliance dominated. The contributors also consider to what extent the changes to science and technology practices in this era were produced by the specific politics, anxieties, and aspirations of the Cold War. Contributors Elena Aronova, Erik M. Conway, Angela N. H. Creager, David Kaiser, John Krige, Naomi Oreskes, George Reisch, Sigrid Schmalzer, Sonja D. Schmid, Matthew Shindell, Asif A. Siddiqi, Zuoyue Wang, Benjamin Wilson
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science written by Martin Curd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-24 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science is an indispensable reference source and guide to the major themes, debates, problems and topics in philosophy of science. It contains sixty-two specially commissioned entries by a leading team of international contributors. Organized into four parts it covers: historical and philosophical context debates concepts the individual sciences. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science addresses all of the essential topics that students of philosophy of science need to know - from empiricism, explanation and experiment to causation, observation, prediction and more - and contains many helpful features including chapters on individual sciences (such as biology, chemistry, physics and psychology), further reading and cross-referencing at the end of each chapter. Expanded and revised throughout, this second edition includes new chapters on Conventionalism, Social Epistemology, Computer Simulation, Thought Experiments, Pseudoscience, Species and Taxonomy, and Cosmology.
Download or read book Shifting Standards written by Allan Franklin and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-11-24 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shifting Standards, Allan Franklin provides an overview of notable experiments in particle physics. Using papers published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, as his basis, Franklin details the experiments themselves, their data collection, the events witnessed, and the interpretation of results. From these papers, he distills the dramatic changes to particle physics experimentation from 1894 through 2009. Franklin develops a framework for his analysis, viewing each example according to exclusion and selection of data; possible experimenter bias; details of the experimental apparatus; size of the data set, apparatus, and number of authors; rates of data taking along with analysis and reduction; distinction between ideal and actual experiments; historical accounts of previous experiments; and personal comments and style. From Millikan's tabletop oil-drop experiment to the Compact Muon Solenoid apparatus measuring approximately 4,000 cubic meters (not including accelerators) and employing over 2,000 authors, Franklin's study follows the decade-by-decade evolution of scale and standards in particle physics experimentation. As he shows, where once there were only one or two collaborators, now it literally takes a village. Similar changes are seen in data collection: in 1909 Millikan's data set took 175 oil drops, of which he used 23 to determine the value of e, the charge of the electron; in contrast, the 1988-1992 E791 experiment using the Collider Detector at Fermilab, investigating the hadroproduction of charm quarks, recorded 20 billion events. As we also see, data collection took a quantum leap in the 1950s with the use of computers. Events are now recorded at rates as of a few hundred per second, and analysis rates have progressed similarly. Employing his epistemology of experimentation, Franklin deconstructs each example to view the arguments offered and the correctness of the results. Overall, he finds that despite the metamorphosis of the process, the role of experimentation has remained remarkably consistent through the years: to test theories and provide factual basis for scientific knowledge, to encourage new theories, and to reveal new phenomenon.
Download or read book How Should We Rationally Deal with Ignorance written by Nadja El Kassar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-27 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses two questions that are highly relevant for epistemology and for society: What is ignorance and how should we rationally deal with it? It proposes a new way of thinking about ignorance based on contemporary and historical philosophical theories. In the first part of the book, the author shows that epistemological definitions of ignorance are quite heterogeneous and often address different phenomena under the label "ignorance." She then develops an integrated conception of ignorance that recognizes doxastic, attitudinal, and structural constituents of ignorance. Based on this new conception, she carves out suggestions for dealing with ignorance from the history of philosophy that have largely been overlooked: virtue-theoretic approaches based on Aristotle and Socrates, consequentialist approaches derived from James, and deontological approaches based on Locke, Clifford, and Kant. None of these approaches individually provide a satisfying approach to the task of rationally dealing with ignorance, and so the author develops an alternative maxim-based answer that extends Kant’s maxims of the sensus communis to the issue of ignorance. The last part of the book applies this maxim-based answer to different contexts in medicine and democracies. How Should We Rationally Deal with Ignorance? will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in epistemology, political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the social sciences.
Download or read book Error and Uncertainty in Scientific Practice written by Marcel Boumans and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assessment of error and uncertainty is a vital component of both natural and social science. This edited volume presents case studies of research practices across a wide spectrum of scientific fields. It compares methodologies and presents the ingredients needed for an overarching framework applicable to all.
Download or read book Science Psychoanalysis and the Brain written by Shimon Marom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-30 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an invitation to dialogue, created by a practising physiologist, intended for the hands of dynamically oriented theory-sensitive psychologists and physiologists.
Download or read book Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research written by Vicky Arnold and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2008-07-07 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes an article that compares the strengths and weaknesses of using a single type of research method to investigate accounting phenomenon and explains why using multiple methods provides a richer understanding of particular issues. This book includes articles, which are useful in facilitating behavioral research.
Download or read book Explaining Photosynthesis written by Kärin Nickelsen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounting the compelling story of a scientific discovery that took more than a century to complete, this trail-blazing monograph focuses on methodological issues and is the first to delve into this subject. This book charts how the biochemical and biophysical mechanisms of photosynthesis were teased out by succeeding generations of scientists, and the author highlights the reconstruction of the heuristics of modelling the mechanism—analyzed at both individual and collective levels. Photosynthesis makes for an instructive example. The first tentative ideas were developed by organic chemists around 1840, while by 1960 an elaborate proposal at a molecular level, for both light and dark reactions, was established. The latter is still assumed to be basically correct today. The author makes a persuasive case for a historically informed philosophy of science, especially regarding methodology, and advocates a history of science whose narrative deploys philosophical approaches and categories. She shows how scientists’ attempts to formulate, justify, modify, confirm or criticize their models are best interpreted as series of coordinated research actions, dependent on a network of super- and subordinated epistemic goals, and guided by recurrent heuristic strategies. With dedicated chapters on key figures such as Otto Warburg, who borrowed epistemic fundamentals from other disciplines to facilitate his own work on photosynthesis, and on more general topics relating to the development of the field after Warburg, this new work is both a philosophical reflection on the nature of scientific enquiry and a detailed history of the processes behind one of science’s most important discoveries.
Download or read book What is a Chemical Element written by Eric R. Scerri and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive overview of an important notion to the field of chemistry: the chemical element.
Download or read book Life Atomic written by Angela N. H. Creager and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-10-02 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began mass-producing radioisotopes, sending out nearly 64,000 shipments of radioactive materials to scientists and physicians by 1955. Even as the atomic bomb became the focus of Cold War anxiety, radioisotopes represented the government’s efforts to harness the power of the atom for peace—advancing medicine, domestic energy, and foreign relations. In Life Atomic, Angela N. H. Creager tells the story of how these radioisotopes, which were simultaneously scientific tools and political icons, transformed biomedicine and ecology. Government-produced radioisotopes provided physicians with new tools for diagnosis and therapy, specifically cancer therapy, and enabled biologists to trace molecular transformations. Yet the government’s attempt to present radioisotopes as marvelous dividends of the atomic age was undercut in the 1950s by the fallout debates, as scientists and citizens recognized the hazards of low-level radiation. Creager reveals that growing consciousness of the danger of radioactivity did not reduce the demand for radioisotopes at hospitals and laboratories, but it did change their popular representation from a therapeutic agent to an environmental poison. She then demonstrates how, by the late twentieth century, public fear of radioactivity overshadowed any appreciation of the positive consequences of the AEC’s provision of radioisotopes for research and medicine.
