How does science work? _Making Truth: Metaphor in Science_ argues that most laypeople, and many scientists, do not have a clear understanding of how metaphor relates to scientific thinking. With stunning clarity, and bridging the worlds of scientists and nonscientists, Theodore L. Brown demonstrates the presence and the power of metaphorical thought. He presents a series of studies of scientific systems, ranging from the atom to current topics in chemistry and biology such as protein folding, chaperone proteins, and (...) global warming. These case studies provide the basis for far-reaching conclusions about science as an intellectual and social practice and about the nature of scientific truth. (shrink)

"Explores the relationships between science and other societal sectors, notably law, religion, government and public culture, in terms of the concepts of expert and moral authority"--Provided by publisher.

Book Reviews in This Article:Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.Eric Stovcr and Elena O. Nightingak, eds., The Breaking of Bodies and Minds: Torture, Psychiatric Abuse and the Health Professions.Elliot S. Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Related Treatments for Mental Illness.

Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many‐to‐many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side‐stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real‐world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use them to (...) provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two‐layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short‐term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human‐like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR. (shrink)

In most general terms, my paper is about the mixture of agendas in the recording industry, where documentation, with its apparently educational implications, becomes difficult to distinguish from a range of distinct, even opposed, goals—which I group under the heading "fabrication." After a few historical remarks, I develop the concept of what I call works of phonography —that is, sound-constructs created by the use of recording machinery. I detail their ontological characteristics, as contrasted the features of ordinary musical works. WPs (...) are—I claim—replete. They are autographic. And they are phono-accessible—that is, accessible only through playbacks of authentic instances of their record artifacts, e.g., cassette tapes, CDs, etc. I then turn to Theodore Gracyk's recent study of rock music, arguing that his account is formally similar to my account of WPs. This raises the question of whether there be counter-examples to Gracyk's account—particularly of the sort that show his view to be too broad. I bring this to a focus finally by a comparison of rock recordings with jazz recordings—two classes that Gracyk tries to keep ontologically distinct. I argue that many classic jazz recordings are artifacts of the recording studio, no less than those Gracyk identifies as pure cases of rock music. In the same vein, I argue that, once recorded, the improvisational music of jazz is deformed—indeed, that it acquires features of WPs. This has the further implication that Gracyk cannot preserve his sharp distinction between rock and jazz records that he want's to maintain. (shrink)

ABSTRACT During a visit to Europe in the autumn of 1882, Henry Augustus Rowland, Professor of Physics at Johns Hopkins University, displayed diffraction gratings produced on a ruling engine he had designed and built, which were bigger and much higher quality than any previously made. Some were of a novel type, ruled on concave surfaces, which he used in a simple but equally novel spectroscope that he had devised, to reveal spectral lines in great detail, and by means of photography (...) to record spectral data much more rapidly than previously possible. Over about twenty years Rowland built three ruling engines, published photographic maps of the solar spectrum, compiled a catalogue of the wavelengths of lines in the solar spectrum correlated with laboratory-produced spectra of almost all the chemical elements, and produced and sold the diffraction gratings used by spectroscopists everywhere. For decades after his death Rowland’s ruling engines remained practically the only source of good-quality diffraction gratings. This paper describes and analyses this work of Rowland and of the other men, Theodore Schneider, John Brashear, and Lewis Jewell, who played major roles in it. (shrink)

An American teacher of literature and poetry living in Montréal, Curtis Brown, recovers Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) as a ‘virus novel’, venturing an integrated response to two literary questions occasioned by the recent pandemic: What might the contemporary ‘Covid novel’ look like? And how did the Spanish flu of 1918–1919—which infected a third of the world's population and killed 50 million—leave literary traces so few and faint? Brown tracks the genesis of An American Tragedy in (...) Dreiser's personal life, his research in microbiology and his general interest in plagues to show how a form traditionally associated with the ‘individual moral adventure’ was repurposed for an institutional epic of viral contagion and systemic malaise. Charting the vicissitudes of Dreiser's reputation over a century, and presenting his formal innovations as widely assimilated, largely unrecognized, and more relevant than ever, Brown concludes that a writer's influence, like a virus, can disappear into ubiquity. (shrink)

On October 16, 1859, John Brown led an unsuccessful raid on the Harpers Ferry Armory. He planned to seize the cache of weapons in order to arm local slaves, to march south, and to deplete Virginia of the slaves who supported its economy. While it failed to realize this objective, the raid succeeded in driving a wedge between the Union and the Confederate States. The rift that Brown helped create grew into the gaping wound of the Civil War.Four (...) years later, Abraham Lincoln surveyed the site of the most gruesome aspect of that wound: Soldier's Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His Gettysburg Address signaled a turn in the war and a turn in the Union's favor. It is remembered as a significant step in the project .. (shrink)

A number of attempts have been made to construct a plausible ontology of rock music. Each of these ontologies identifies a single type of ontological entity as the “work” in rock music. Yet, all the suggestions advanced to date fail to capture some important considerations about how we engage with music of this tradition. This prompted Lee Brown to advocate a healthy skepticism of higher-order musical ontologies. I argue here that we should instead embrace a pluralist ontology of rock, (...) an ontology that recognizes more than one kind of entity as “the work” in rock music. I contend that this approach has a number of advantages over other ontologies of rock, including that of allowing us to make some comparisons across ontological kinds. (shrink)

Inspired by Heidegger’s concept of the clearing of being, and by Wittgenstein’s ideas on human practice, Theodore Schatzki offers a novel approach to understanding the constitution and transformation of social life. Key to the account he develops here is the context in which social life unfolds—the "site of the social"—as a contingent and constantly metamorphosing mesh of practices and material orders. Schatzki’s analysis reveals the advantages of this site ontology over the traditional individualist, holistic, and structuralist accounts that have (...) dominated social theory since the mid-nineteenth century. A special feature of the book is its development of the theoretical argument by sustained reference to two historical examples: the medicinal herb business of a Shaker village in the 1850s and contemporary day trading on the Nasdaq market. First focusing on the relative simplicity of Shaker life to illuminate basic ontological characteristics of the social site, Schatzki then uses the sharp contrast with the complex and dynamic practice of day trading to reveal what makes this approach useful as a general account of social existence. Along the way he provides new insights into many major issues in social theory, including the nature of social order, the significance of agency, the distinction between society and nature, the forms of social change, and how the social present affects its future. (shrink)

A property, F, is maximal iff, roughly, large parts of an F are not themselves Fs.' Maximality makes trouble for a recent analysis of intrinsicality by Rae Langton and David Lewis.

The existence and importance of supervenience principles for identity across times and worlds have been noted, but insufficient attention has been paid to their precise nature. Such attention is repaid with philosophical dividends. The issues in the formulation of the supervenience principles are two. The first involves the relevant variety of supervenience: that variety is global, but there are in fact two versions of global supervenience that must be distinguished. The second involves the subject matter: the names “identity over time” (...) and “identity across worlds” are misnomers, for in neither case is identity at issue. The philosophical dividends then follow. Nathan Salmon’s argument that identity over time needs no “grounds” in matters of qualitative fact can be answered, as can an argument offered by many, that coincident objects would require objectionably ungrounded differences in identities across times and worlds. (shrink)

A property, F, is maximal i?, roughly, large parts of an F are not themselves Fs. Maximal properties are typically extrinsic, for their instantiation by x depends on what larger things x is part of. This makes trouble for a recent argument against microphysical superve- nience by Trenton Merricks. The argument assumes that conscious- ness is an intrinsic property, whereas consciousness is in fact maximal and extrinsic.

In July 2020, more than 1000 companies that advertise on social media platforms withdrew their business, citing failures of the platforms (especially Facebook) to address the proliferation of harmful content. The #StopHateForProfit movement invites reflection on an understudied topic: the ethics of boycotting by corporations. Under what conditions is corporate boycotting permissible, required, supererogatory, or forbidden? Although value-driven consumerism has generated significant recent discussion in applied ethics, that discussion has focused almost exclusively on the consumption choices of individuals. As this (...) article underscores, value-driven consumerism by business corporations complicates these issues and invites further examination. We propose principles for the ethics of boycotting by corporations, indicate how these principles relate to different CSR paradigms, and show how these insights can help assess recent instances of corporate boycotting. (shrink)