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Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Choosing Between Graduate Study in a Philosophy Depa... - 0 views

leiterreports.typepad.com/...-philosophy-of-science-pr.html sts philosophy science academic graduate-school academic-programs history
shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    Students interested in the philosophy of science, the history of science, and/or logic may face the choice of whether to pursue a graduate degree in a traditional philosophy department, or in a separate department of history and philosophy of science (HPS), or logic and philosophy of science (LPS).
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The Public Values Failures of Climate Science in the US by Ryan Meyer - Minerva, Volume... - 0 views

www.springerlink.com/...y51g45057072x28x sts science public values philosophy public-understanding decision groups public-policy
shared by Todd Suomela on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 02 Jun 11
     
    "This paper examines the broad social purpose of US climate science, which has benefited from a public investment of more than $30 billion over the last 20 years. A public values analysis identifies five core public values that underpin the interagency program. Drawing from interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I examine the decision processes and institutional structures that lead to the implementation of climate science policy, and identify a variety of public values failures accommodated by this system. In contrast to other cases which find market values frameworks (the "profit as progress" assumption) at the root of public values failures, this case shows how "science values" ("knowledge as progress") may serve as an inadequate or inappropriate basis for achieving broader public values. For both institutions and individual decision makers, the logic linking science to societal benefit is generally incomplete, incoherent, and tends to conflate intrinsic and instrumental values. I argue that to be successful with respect to its motivating public values, the US climate science enterprise must avoid the assumption that any advance in knowledge is inherently good, and offer a clearer account of the kinds of research and knowledge advance likely to generate desirable social outcomes. "
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The Bohr paradox - physicsworld.com - 0 views

physicsworld.com/...33963 physics sts history quantum-mechanics
shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Why? The best explanation I have heard is advanced by the physicist John H Marburger, who is currently science advisor to US President George Bush. By 1930, Marburger points out, physicists had found a perfectly adequate way of representing classical concepts within the quantum framework using Hilbert (infinite-dimensional) space. Quantum systems, he says, “live” in Hilbert space, and the concepts of position and momentum, for instance, are associated with different sets of coordinate axes that do not line up with each other, thereby resulting in the situation captured in ordinary-language terms by complementarity.“It’s a clear, logical and consistent way of framing the complementarity issue,” Marburger explained to me. “It clarifies how quantum phenomena are represented in alternative classical ‘pictures’, and it fits in beautifully with the rest of physics. The clarity of this scheme removes much of the mysticism surrounding complementarity. What happened was like a gestalt-switch, from a struggle to view microscopic nature from a classical point of view to an acceptance of the Hilbert-space picture, from which classical concepts emerged naturally. Bohr brokered that transition.”
  • In his book Niels Bohr’s Times, the physicist Abraham Pais captures a paradox in his subject’s legacy by quoting three conflicting assessments. Pais cites Max Born, of the first generation of quantum physics, and Werner Heisenberg, of the second, as saying that Bohr had a greater influence on physics and physicists than any other scientist. Yet Pais also reports a distinguished younger colleague asking with puzzlement and scepticism “What did Bohr really do?”.
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Rationally Speaking: The very foundations of science - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...ry-foundations-of-science.html sts philosophy induction about(DavidHume) science probability
shared by Todd Suomela on 08 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The first way to think about probability is as a measure of the frequency of an event: if I say that the probability of a coin to land heads up is 50% I may mean that, if I flip the coin say 100 times, on average I will get heads 50 times. This is not going to get us out of Hume’s problem, because probabilities interpreted as frequencies of events are, again, a form of induction
  • Secondly, we can think of probabilities as reflecting subjective judgment. If I say that it is probable that the coin will land heads up, I might simply be trying to express my feeling that this will be the case. You might have a different feeling, and respond that you don’t think it's probable that the coin will lend heads up. This is certainly not a viable solution to the problem of induction, because subjective probabilities are, well, subjective, and hence reflect opinions, not degrees of truth.
  • Lastly, one can adopt what Okasha calls the logical interpretation of probabilities, according to which there is a probability X that an event will occur means that we have objective reasons to believe (or not) that X will occur (for instance, because we understand the physics of the solar system, the mechanics of cars, or the physics of coin flipping). This doesn’t mean that we will always be correct, but it does offer a promising way out of Hume’s dilemma, since it seems to ground our judgments on a more solid foundation. Indeed, this is the option adopted by many philosophers, and would be the one probably preferred by scientists, if they ever gave this sort of thing a moment’s thought.
  • Todd Suomela on 08 Mar 09
     
    short summary of some probabilistic responses to the problem of induction
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