Douglas and Chang on the Value of Cognitive Values

While most of it is not directly relevant to the issues in this class, Hasok Chang’s 2004 book, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress, is one of the better works of history and philosophy of science in the last several years. In it, Chang traces several different aspects of the attempt to create, standardize, expand, [...]

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Heather Douglas, part II

In this week’s readings (chapters 4-6 of the book), Heather Douglas makes good on a lot of the titillating suggestions from last week. Before switching to discuss that, let me bring out some nagging questions from last week’s post and class discussion. Then I’ll bring up some important points for this week’s readings.

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Science, Money & Policy

Knowledge is the number one commodity in a post-industrial society. Thus, it is only natural that the way knowledge is obtained and how it is applied would become big business under this circumstance. Almost every major university traverses the tricky arena of intellectual property and supports the entrepreneurial endeavors of their faculty, students and staff [...]

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Paper Topic: The Dover Decision in Philosophical Perspective

Abstract In 1989 a contentious textbook entitled Of Pandas and People was published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, a Christian non-profit organization based in Richardson, Texas.  The authors of the book, Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, have some training in scientific fields (Davis – zoology; Kenyon – biophysics) and are the Professor [...]

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Research Proposal: Jennifer Culver

Advances in technology raise concerns about power and the ability to distinguish what is “real.”

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Heather Douglas on Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal

Heather Douglas‘s new book, Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, adds significantly to the historical story we’ve been exploring for the past couple of weeks. As with Reisch, Howard, and Richardson, Douglas shows us that the “traditional” approach to philosophy of science in which issues of value are rejected or simply left out is of [...]

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William Moulton Marston: Educational and Professional Background

Here’s some background information for my project on the psychology of William Moulton Marston. Who Was William Moulton Marston? Little remembered today in the halls of psychology departments, William Moulton Marston (b. 1893 – d. 1947) was in his time very widely known to the American public. Marston was by turns an academic psychologist and [...]

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On the Sokal Hoax

[Editor's note: The following is a guest post from Sabrina Starnaman, Ph.D. candidate in Literature at UC-San Diego and currently a visiting scholar at UT-Dallas. I asked Sabrina to write this post because she comes out of that part of the humanities that Sokal was most attacking: literature and cultural studies. Sabrina kindly agreed, and [...]

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