"What is Empirical Testing?"

Science is epistemically special, or so I will assume: it is better able to produce knowledge about the workings of the world than other knowledge-directed pursuits. Further, its superior epistemic powers are due to its being in some sense especially empirical: in particular, science puts great weight on a form of inductive reasoning that I call empirical confirmation. My aim in this paper is to investigate the nature of science's "empiricism", and to provide a preliminary explanation of the connection between empirical confirmation and epistemic efficacy. I will try to convince you that the place to find an account of empirical confirmation is the dusty, long-neglected instantialist account of scientific inference offered by mid-century logical empiricists. Some revision of instantialism will be required. As for what isadvantageous in empirical confirmation, I propose that it is an unusual degree of independence from background belief.      Return

* * *

"Stratifying a Population By Race"

Social scientists attempt to understand variations within a population in a socioeconomic or biomedical trait, e.g., household income, school achievement, unemployment, risk of heart disease or rate of diabetes-related death, by stratifying the population using a demographic variable like sex, age, race or ethnicity and studying the statistical relationship between the variable and the trait. In order to do so, they assign each member of the population or sample a race or ethnicity and assume that there is one correct way to make the assignment, e.g., by ancestry, other-reports or ancestry. I argue that there is no one correct way to assign an individual to a racial or ethnic category and that what race or ethnicity an individual should be assigned depends of the trait whose variation the social or biomedical scientist is attempting to understand; as a result, a member of the population might be assigned one race for the purpose of understanding a variation in one socioeconomic or biomedical trait and a different race for the purpose of understanding a variation in a different one, white in relation to sickle-cell disease and black in relation to academic achievement. I propose an approach to race and ethnicity similar to one some economists have adopted towards indices like poverty and unemployment, viz. that there is no best way to define ‘poverty’ or ‘unemployment’ and which definition is best depends on what the term is to be used for. My proposal would improve the research in the social and biomedical sciences on racial difference and oppose the common view that race is an intrinsic property of persons. Return

* * *

"Quantum State Collapse Along a Light Cone: History and Objections"

The physicist I. Bloch in his 1967 paper “Some Relativistic Oddities in the Quantum Theory of Observation” came to the conclusion that the instantaneous collapse of the quantum state, as it has traditionally been conceived, presented a problem for compatibility with relativity. This problem has been called “Bloch’s Paradox”. Rather offhandedly, Bloch suggested that the problem might be avoided by taking the state transition due to a measurement to occur along a Lorentz invariant surface in Minkowski spacetime (i.e., the spacetime of special relativity). In particular, Bloch focused attention on the past light cone of the measurement event. The idea of positing the past (or future) light cone of a measurement event as the collapse transition surface in spacetime has a natural attractiveness to it because of the privileged status of the light cone structure in relativity theory. In this talk, I review the historically significant interactions with this proposal in the literature and critically examine objections to it. (The essence of the proposal and most of the objections to it can be understood pictorially with the help of spacetime diagrams.) Ultimately, the proposal fails to perform the explanatory work we seek from the process of state collapse in EPR situations. Reflection upon this failure provides insights which motivate embracing a hypersurface-dependent account of quantum state collapse of the sort first advocated by Aharonov and Albert in 1984. Return

* * *

"Race, Medicine, and Money: Contextualizing the Emergence of 'Ethnic' Drugs"

This presentation endeavors to place into context recent developments surrounding the United States Food and Drug Administration recent approval of BiDil as the first ever race-specific drug—in this case to treat heart failure in African Americans. It traces the development of BiDil, from its origins in the 1980’s and explores how practices of law, commerce and science and intertwined to transform BiDil from a drug to treat everyone regardless of race into a racially marked—and marketed—pharmaceutical. It focuses in particular on both commercial incentives and statistical manipulation of medical data as framing the drive to bring BiDil to market as a race-specific drug. In current discourse about pharmacogenomics, targeting a racial audience is perceived as necessary because at this point the technology and resources do not exist to scan efficiently every individual’s genetic profile. The presentation argues that medical researchers may say they are using race as a surrogate to target biology in drug development, but corporations are using biology as a surrogate to target race in drug marketing.     Return

* * *

"On Reflection (...more or less)"

In philosophy, persons are often distinguished by a propensity for reflection—a conscious and concerted mentation effecting control of behavior. In psychology, research on unconscious processing suggests that this philosophical conception of persons is unrealistic; ethically significant human behavior is very often beyond reflective control. A psychologically lifelike conception of persons will therefore de-emphasize reflective control; instead, the human ethical distinctiveness marked with such philosophical honorifics as “person,” “agency,” “practical rationality,” and “the self” is found in the collaboratively developed rationalizing explanations of behavior by which humans living in groups regulate their lives.     Return

* * *

"Maupertuis on attraction as an inherent property of matter"

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis' famous and influential Discours sur les différentes figures des astres, which represented the first public defense of attractionism in the Cartesian stronghold of the Paris Academy, sometimes suggests a metaphysically agnostic defense of gravity as simply a regularity. However, Maupertuis' considered account in the essay, I argue, is much more subtle. I analyze Maupertuis' position, showing how it is generated by an extended consideration of the possibility of attraction as an inherent property and fuelled by an understanding of Lockean skepticism about knowledge of real essences that is more nuanced perhaps even than Locke's own.       Return

* * *
 
 

"Temporal Dimensions of Reductionism in Biology"

Although reduction clearly concerns spatial dimensions, such as relations between macroscale and microscale properties, at least three relevant temporal dimensions can be distinguished: historical, iterated compositional, and emergent process. The first two are prevalent in prior philosophical discussions but the third is surprisingly absent given its centrality in experimental biology. This neglected dimension is shown to be more appropriate for the representation of time in reductive explanations of development. My analysis uncovers an array of previously unrecognized questions about reductionism that revolve around potentially competing explanatory preferences and the diversity of temporal measures available to investigators.       Return

* * *

"Cartographic Knowledge and Emerging Dutch Colonialism: the View from Population Biology"

There has been a comeback in understanding human migration through biogeography, as can be seen in popular authors like Jared Diamond. This paper will tentatively suggest some ways that the concept of population in Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky can aid in studying shifts in the patterns of settlement and long-distance control in our species. For instance, there was a rapid change in the ways that populations around the Indian Ocean world related with Holland around the turn of the seventeenth century. Historians usually attribute this shift to the Dutch accumulation of cartographic and economic information about the region. They find a environmentalist framework such as Diamond's overly reductionist, incapable of explaining forces such as monopoly capitalism or religious zeal. This paper will argue that to properly understand the spatial functioning of colonialism, an adapted biogeographical notion of "population" can still be useful. For humans, however, empirical due needs to be given to factors such as money and maps, as such communication channels are necessary for spurring movement and social organization. Causality does not go one-way from the biophysical to the cultural as in Diamond, but only emerges through and within uneven webs in which culture and biology are already entwined.        Return

* * *

"Galileo without Modernity? Preliminary Reflections on the Project of Writing Galileo Today."

What are the new trends in Galileo studies? None, I would suggest, because work on Galileo remains trapped, as it has been for three quarters of a century, in the modernist narratives of the "Scientific Revolution." These narratives also continue to anchor the modernizing project of mainstream history and philosophy of science (HPS), for ever since the founding fathers of the discipline institutionalized Galileo as the father of modern science by making him a central pillar in the discipline-defining edifice of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution (modernity through the passage From Galileo to Newton in Hall's classic formulation), writing about Galileo has essentially worked to reproduce the discipline of HPS through a continual reenactment of these founding stories of origin. Is it possible to liberate Galileo studies from the echo chamber of this discipline-bound conceptual framework? My paper explores these possibilities by asking whether there are alternatives to the "Galileo, First Modern Scientist" framework, and by exploring the implications of breaking free from this discipline-defining and modernity-enacting hermeneutic. Return

* * *

"Getting Real about Genetics and Genomics: An Antirealist Perspective"

Inflated accounts of knowledge in genetics and genomics are reinforced by the epistemological idea that successful research is organized by comprehensive theoretical frameworks that identify fundamental entities and processes. According to this epistemology, the success (or failure) of genetics and genomics depends on a comprehensive, theoretical framework that identifies the fundamentals of heredity and development. In this paper, I advance a deflationary epistemology for understanding genetics and genomics. Research in these sciences, I contend, is organized around investigative strategies involving the manipulation of a broad range of biological processes; it is not structured by comprehensive theorizing about the fundamentals of information, genetic programs, or developmental systems..       Return

* * *