Author Archives: Matthew J. Brown

About Matthew J. Brown

Professor of Philosophy, Boydston Chair of American Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University.

Three Direct Roles for Values in Science: A Sketch of a Sketch

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Heather Douglas (2000, 2009) has argued that inductive risk requires that scientists make value judgments in the “internal” processes of scientific reasoning, e.g., data characterization and interpretation and judging whether the evidence supports a hypothesis, but that the role for value judgments must be limited to an indirect role. There has been some controversy about just what the direct/indirect roles distinction amounts to (Elliott, Steele), but the basic idea is easy enough to understand: something plays a direct role in a decision if it acts as a reason for deciding one way or the other; it plays an indirect role if it instead helps determines second-order questions about the uptake of reasons, e.g., about what counts as a reason or about determining the necessary weight of reasons before deciding.
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The Great Chicken Caper, Part II: Zazzles Regained, OR It’s M*F*ing Zazzles Time

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When we left off in Part I of this tale, we had lost a chicken, found two totally unrelated chickens, left them at our house, and sped off to some event.

When we returned later that evening, we tried to figure out what to do about these random chickens, at least for the night. Our dogs go out into the back yard regularly, and we’ve establish the tensions in chicken-dog relations already. We found the random chickens perched for the night, one on top of our secondary chicken coop (really a dog crate), the other in our boxwood tree, with a death grip on one of the branches. (The one on the coop was the friendly, biddable one, while Little Miss Death-Grip was the one that was so hard to catch in the first place.) Since there were three of us, we managed to guard the chickens from the dogs when they went out, decided more or less to let the chickens stay where they had settled in, and deal with it in the morning.
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Values, Assumptions, and the Science of Consciousness

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This is a repost of a post I did on the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology site, in response to Robert Sawyer’s talk. I’ve posted the video here at the top for those who are interested. 

There were many interesting things brought up by Robert Sawyer in his interesting talk and the various discussions.  I’m glad that we had him as a guest at the Center.  One topic that caught my eye was his focus on the nascent science of consciousness and the associated ideas of human vs. machine intelligence.  I’d like to share some thoughts about the science of consciousness in relation to larger issues of values in science.

From my perspective on the intersection of values with medicine, science, and technology, one very interesting question about different approaches to consciousness is the way that that the starting assumptions in each approach reflect different value-perspectives.  This is especially pressing in an area like consciousness studies, where philosophical considerations loom so large, and there is so little unambiguous data or uncontroversial interpretation of the facts to constrain theorizing.  Critical engagement with the values implicit in such assumptions can be a powerful tool in assessing current approaches and suggesting alternatives, as has been powerfully shown by, among others, feminist scientists and feminist philosophers of science like Ruth Doell and Helen Longino.

I’m “thinking out loud” on some of this, so please bear with me, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

To even hope and try for a science of consciousness is to prefer explanation, understanding, human progress in the present, etc. to mystery, faith, the ineffable, salvation in the hereafter, etc.  This may seem to be a trivial move, but I think it isn’t.  For example, in various writings, Stephen Jay Gould defended the idea of non-overlapping magisteria, which laid issues of ultimate meaning and moral value orthogonal to the proper realm of science.  Gould went so far to say that the idea of the soul was not a scientific hypothesis for proof or refutation.  If this doesn’t strictly imply a stance on the possibility of a science of consciousness, it certainly suggests one.

More interesting, perhaps, is the way that specific proposals for a science of consciousness still implicate issues of value.  Take the premise of Sawyer’s WWW books, that the internet might become an intelligent, conscious entity.  Now, this is a consciousness far different from ourselves: it has no body, no ordinary physical needs or activities of the sort that the human brain spends most of its time dealing with.  While of course it has inputs and outputs, those aren’t tied to embodied perception or motor-activity.  And the only other actual forms of intelligence we encounter (if any!) are creatures more like ourselves, in fact even more tied to their embodiment: apes, monkeys, dolphins, etc.  On the other hand, what Sawyer is suggesting, in effect, is that any sufficiently complex information-processing system with the right features could become conscious.

Now, if an entity like the internet can become conscious, this presents a challenge to biologically/evolutionary-based accounts of consciousness, in which the best guess is that the conscious mind came about because it conveys some adaptive advantage to living creatures.  This need not be understood as the claim that all our mental activity is aimed at survival (such a view was demolished by evolutionary psychologist William James as early 1878), but it is crucial on such views to understand that the reason we have a conscious mind is because of the survival advantage it gives us, and that impacts the kind of thing consciousness is and its structure, makes both tied to our embodied, living activities.

Beyond this simple disagreement, perhaps, is a difference of values.  Saying that consciousness is neither embodied nor a property of activity creates a separation of mind and body, theory and practice, thought and activity and insists that mind, theory, thought are the kinds of things that matter to an intelligent, conscious entity.  John Dewey (another early American psychologist) frequently argued that such a preference was reflective of class divisions going back to ancient Greece, where the slaves labored and the wealthy contemplated.  Dewey argued that a more inclusive look at the breadth of human experience showed that intelligence, mind, consciousness, etc. were all practices aimed at the getting of needful things, the improvement of life, the direction of activity.  Even the most apparently contemplative activity, when functioning properly, ought to be seen as rendering some practice more intelligent, as guiding some matter of embodied need or satisfaction.

It seems to me that certain views of consciousness which tie it to the brain and ignore the body, or focus on the individual to the exclusion of the social element in experience, might be open to similar critiques, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

History and Philosophy of Science, Fall 2012

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Jump to: Required Texts | Course Schedule | Assignments | Late Work and Attendance

Office Hours

Time TBA, office JO 4.120. You can also schedule an appointment.

Course Updates

You can find updates about the course by reading the course blog (via RSS). You can also check for short updates on Twitter using the hashtag #HPS3328.

Course Description

Science plays an enormously influential role in our society. As a social institution, it commands enormous respect and social influence, as well as vast sums of funding. It produces results that are greatly sought after, for both good and ill. At the same time, science generates great controversy when it collides with various religious, economic, and educational agendas. The adjective “scientific” garners almost immediate respectability to whatever it is applied, and, in some circles, it is a prerequisite for being taken seriously. Yet to many it also bespeaks alienation, abstraction, and a void of meaning, useless in our attempt to understand values. Some even deride science as mere ideology and power-mongering, as sexist, racist, or elitist.

Science is open to interpretation and critique; as a result, it stands in need of explanation, elaboration, justification, limitation, or change. History and philosophy of science attempts to understand how and why science works, to explain its successes and occasionally uncover its failures, to interpret its results, and to discover, what, if any, are its limits. Historians and philosophers of science also try to situate science in the broader scheme of human activities and social institutions, and to understand the way in which our particular cognitive, social, political, and moral situation impacts its development.

In this course, we will try to better understand what counts as science and explore whether we can demarcate science from non-science or pseudo-science. We will ask what the aim of science is, what it is trying to produce. We will explore a variety of challenges to our common ways of understand how and why science works, as well as challenges to whether science works as we believe that it does. We will explore the too-often ignored connections between the scientific process and our ethical and political values, attempting to determine whether and to what extend such human values play a role in science, and to what extent such a role is legitimate and compatible with the objectivity or reliability of scientific knowledge.

Student Learning Objectives

  1. Students will analyze and interpret a significant body of primary works in philosophy of science.
  2. Students will develop their ability to read, analyze, and write about complex texts.
  3. Students will demonstrate knowledge of the major questions and traditions in the philosophy of science.
  4. Students will be able to critically analyze and discuss the nature of, value of, and challenges to science as an intellectual and cultural institution.

Required Texts

Books are on order at Off Campus Books (561 West Campbell Road near Fuzzy’s)

Schedule of Topics and Readings

Require readings are listed for each class period, and you are expected to complete them before class. Some classes include additional readings that clarify or extend the required readings. These readings can help you better understand the readings for that class period or provide useful starting-points for research on that topic. Note: online readings on JSTOR can only be accessed from on campus, via the library website, or by running the VPN.

0. Introductions

M 8/27

  • What is Philosophy of Science? History of Science?
  • Why Do We Want a Theory of Science?
  • Why History and Philosophy of Science?
    • PGS 1.1-1.4
  • Syllabus Review

I. What is science?

In this class, we will consider some very basic ideas about the nature and history of science, as well as the attempt by philosophers and others to explain the difference between science and non-science or pseudo-science.

W 8/29

W 9/5

M 9/10

W 9/12

  • Demarcating Science – Philosophical
    • Karl Popper, “Science: Conjectures and Refutations” [C&C]
    • Imre Lakatos, “Science and Pseudoscience” [C&C]
    • PGS 4, 7.2
    • For the Perplexed: Sven Ove Hansson, “Science and Pseudo-Science” [online]
    • Going Further: Paul Thagard, “Why Astrology Is a Pseudoscience” [C&C]; Thomas Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? [C&C]; Paul Churchland, “How Parapsychology Could Become a Science” [online]

M 9/17

II. The Aims of Science

Part of understanding what science is involves understanding what it aims at, what its distinctive goals are. In this unit, we consider a variety of proposals for the what science aims at.

W 9/19

  • The Aim of Science is Explanation
    • Carl G. Hempel, “Two Basic Types of Scientific Explanation” [C&C]
    • PGS 13.1-13-2
    • For the Perplexed: Rudolf Carnap, “The Value of Laws: Explanation and Prediction” [C&C]
    • Going Further: Carl G. Hempel, “The Thesis of Structural Identity”; Carl G. Hempel, “Inductive-Statistical Explanation”; Peter Railton, “A Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation”; David-Hillel Ruben, “Arguments, Laws, and Explanation” [All in C&C]

M 9/24

W 9/26

  • Library Day
    • Hit the books, work on paper proposals

M 10/1

  • The Aim of Science is to Discover the Laws of Nature
    • A. J. Ayer, “What Is a Law of Nature?” [C&C]
    • PGS 13.4
    • For the perplexed: “Laws of Nature: Introduction” [C&C], “Commentary” pp. 879-885 [C&C]
    • Going Further: John Carroll “Laws of Nature,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fred Dretske, “Laws of Nature” [C&C], D.H. Mellor, “Necessities and Universals in Natural Laws” [C&C], “Commentary” pp. 885-896 [C&C]

W 10/3

M 10/8

III. Challenging Science

In this unit, we will discuss a variety of historical, philosophical, and sociological challenges to science. Some are legitimate challenges to the authority of science itself, but most attempt to leave that unchanged while challenging our understanding of why science is successful or authoritative. We will examine the following provocative challenges to science or our theories of science.

W 10/10

M 10/15

  • Theory is Underdetermined by Evidence
    • Pierre Duhem, “Physical Theory and Experiment” [C&C]
    • For the Perplexed: Underdetermination of Scientific Theory [online]; “The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination: Introduction” [C&C]; “Commentary” pp. 354-365 [C&C]
    • Going Further: Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” [C&C]; Gillies, “The Duhem Thesis and the Quine Thesis” [C&C]; Laudan, “Demystifying Underdetermination” [C&C]; Commentary pp. 365-411 [C&C]

W 10/17

M 10/22

W 10/24

  • Scientific Revolutions are Revisionary
    • Kuhn [SSR] Ch VI-IX
    • PGS 6.1-6.2
    • For the Perplexed:Ian Hacking, Introductory Essay [SSR]
    • Going Further: Larry Laudan, “Dissecting the Holist Picture of Scientific Change” [C&C]

M 10/29

  • Science Does Not Progress Towards the Best Theory
    • Kuhn [SSR] Ch X-XIII & Postscript
    • PGS 6.3-6.5
    • For the Perplexed:Ian Hacking, Introductory Essay [SSR]
    • Going Further: Ernan McMullin, “Rationality and Paradigm Change in Science” [C&C]

W 10/31

  • Science Has No Method
    • Paul Feyerabend, from Against Method [Part I; Part II] (Make sure you get through Part II – It’s where a lot of the pay-off is at.)
    • PGS 7.4-7.5
    • For the Perplexed: Ian Hacking, “Introduction to the Fourth Edition”
    • Halloween! Come dressed up, in honor of epistemological anarchism!

M 11/5

W 11/7

M 11/12

W 11/14

  • Science is Sexist
    • Kathleen Okruhlik, “Gender and the Biological Sciences” [C&C]
    • PGS 9

M 11/19-11/21

  • Fall Break! 

IV. Values in Science

M 11/26

W 11/28

M 12/3

  • Science is Insulated from Non-Epistemic Value-Judgments
    • Thomas S. Kuhn, “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice” [C&C]
    • Ernan McMullin, “Values in Science” [online]

W 12/5

M 12/10

W 12/12

Grading

Assignments

  1. Class Participation (9 pts) – Class attendance, quality of contributions to the life of the class. 5pts + Participation (4.0 scale) – Absences – (1/2) * Tardies
  2. Homework and In-class Assignments (5)
  3. Midterm Exam (8)
  4. Peer-Mark Assignments (5) – Several times during the semester, students will provide feedback on early stages of their research papers.
  5. Research Paper (18) – Grade includes not only final paper but work throughout the semester. Details here.

Final Grades

Final grade will be calculated on a 4.0 scale by taking your points divided by ten. So, for example, a student with a 33 would have a 3.3 or a B+. 41+ points is an A+, 38+ points is an A, 35+ points is an A-, 32+ is a B+, 28+ is a B, 25+ is a B-, etc.

Grading Standards

  1. Indicates excellent work, going beyond the expectations of the course to display subtle and nuanced understanding, clear and effective presentation, and intellectual rigor, insight, creativity, and sophistication.
  2. Indicates good work, thoughtful and careful, clear and consistent, without major errors.
  3. Indicates adequate or average work that meets all basic course expectations, but may involve unclear writing, lack of sophisticated understanding, or unsupported or insufficiently developed ideas. Some serious errors may be present.

Work which deserves a grade less than C will display some of the following problems: it fails to show adequate understanding of the text; it fails to understand the assignment; it fails to articulate a coherent or adequate argument; it fails to reflect on the content of the course; it displays such pervasive grammatical errors as to be highly obscure in meaning.

Late Work / Make-Up Exams

No late work or make-up exams will be allowed without consent of the professor prior to the due/exam date, except in situations where University policy requires it.

Class Attendance Policy

While reading and writing are crucial parts of the course, the central philosophical activity is live discussion. While class will occasionally involve bits of lecture, this is merely an instrument to a more well-informed discussion and other structured activities. Attendance is thus considered mandatory. Missed classes will count against your participation grade, and egregious absenteeism will be grounds for an F in the course at the professor’s discretion. In-class assignments and activities likewise cannot be made up unless the professor agrees to it before the class is missed. Disruptive late arrivals or early departures are poor classroom citizenship and will also negatively impact your participation.

Classroom Expectations

You are expected to have read the assignments before class, and it would be to your benefit to also read them again after class. You are expected to bring all of the texts assigned for each day’s class, and have them available to refer to. You are expected to listen respectfully to the professor and your fellow students, and participate in class discussions and activities.

Further standard University policies can be found at http://go.utdallas.edu/syllabus-policies

The syllabus is a living document. These descriptions and timelines are subject to change at the discretion of the Professor.

Russell’s Reserve: Then and Now

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My first successful dusty hunt was almost a complete accident.  Recently, we stayed in Lawrence, Kansas for a few weeks, and up the street from the house we rented was a seemingly unassuming liquor store called Jensen Liquor. Honestly, I wouldn’t have even been there if my friend Dale (a local) hadn’t been looking for lime cordial to mix with the rum we happened to find at the house. The nearby (and much larger) Cork & Barrel somehow didn’t have it in stock, so we trucked across the street to this other place. Jensen turned out to be a goldmine of rare liqueurs (including the Allspice Dram that Dale had been seeking for his upcoming Tiki party) and a good number of semi-dusty whiskeys. I picked myself up a bottle of Wild Turkey Russell’s Reserve 101°, which has since been discontinued and replaced by Russell’s Reserve 90° (no mention of Wild Turkey anywhere on the bottle). The bottom of the glass bottle has a faint raised “04” which leads me to believe it was bottled around 2004 (a trick I learned from sku). This about matches the date it was discontinued, according to the chatter about it I’ve found on the web. (For reference, I’m guessing that the 90° Russell’s is a 2010 or 2011, given the “10”.)

With this review, I’m going to do something a little bit different and compare the older Wild Turkey Russell’s Reserve (WTRR) head to head with the new stuff, Russell’s Reserve 90° (RR90).
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Angel’s Envy Bourbon Review

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Angel’s Envy is Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey that has been finished in port pipes, which is unusual for bourbon but common for scotch.Angel's Envy Bourbon It is the brainchild of Lincoln Henderson. Angel’s Envy apparently skirts a line with respect to the arcane legalities of American whiskey labeling, as the Federal Standards of Identity for Bourbon are pretty strict as to what you can call “Bourbon.” This is why the bottle clearly indicates how it has been finished, to avoid any miscommunication that would defy those standards.

Age: At least 4 years (probably more like 5-7)
Proof: 86.6°
Price: $46.00
Volume:750mL

Color: Light golden honey. In lightness, almost closer to the color of many scotches than a normal bourbon. I would think that the port pipes would give it a darker color, but no.

Nose: Light and very sweet, with a clear whiff of vanilla, and also a bit of a light floral scent.

Palate: Nice and creamy, with vanilla and dried fruits prominent, especially dried apricot, and a little bit of fig drizzled with honey.

Finish: Glowing, with a bit of pepper and warming spices, medium length.

Overall: I love this whiskey. I’ve been holding on to this bottle for some time, taking a dram every now and again, and revising the tasting notes in my spreadsheet several times. It’s not perfect for every occasion, as it is definitely very sweet and also a bit low proof—you’re not going to want to drink this any way but neat. It is a fantastically crafted bourbon, and the peppery finish really clears the sweetness for the palate and gets you ready for the second dram. Hopefully we’ll see more innovation tempered by careful craftsmanship of this type in the future. Thank you, Mr. Henderson!

Rating: A 

Whiskey Review Post Formats

Aside

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One of the exciting things about getting my blog up and running is having a place to post some longer-form whiskey reviews. (I’ve done some micro reviews on Twitter.) My first is my review of Baker’s! (Actually, one I’ve had stored in a spreadsheet for some time.) But the real question is, what style for the reviews? I tried a pretty long, structured version like Whiskey Wonka or Bourbon Enthusiast, but should I go for a shorter, less formal review like Sku or John Hansell?  Longer, informal, more narrative reviews like Drinkhacker or Scotch & Ice Cream? What sort of reviews do you like to read?