Proceedings of the First Conference of the International Society for Hermeneutics and Science.

In this paper I intend to discuss some of the views put forward by Stephen Kemp in his recent critique of the Strong Program. In particular I will try to defend David Bloor’s SSK against the charge of weak idealism brought up by Stephen Kemp in his paper. The widely held accusation, namely, according to which the social constructionist approach to scientific knowledge is strongly idealist, is already rejected by Kemp himself. He argues, however that Bloor’s attempts to divert the (...) charge of idealism from the Strong Programme were not successful with respect to the kind of idealism that Kemp calls ‘weak idealism’, that is, treating scientific discourse as free-floating and unrelated to the world of things. I intend to argue that Kemp’s charges are unfounded when levelled at Bloor’s views on meaning and reference. Kemp deals with two issues of the Bloorian program: with the social constructionist approach to concepts as self-referential social institutions, and with the actor/analyst distinction introduced by the Strong Programmers. I will focus only on the first issue in my paper.Keywords: Strong Programme; David Bloor; Social constructionism; Self-reference; Idealism; Reference to external reality. (shrink)

Abstract This paper deals with Larry Laudan's attack on the symmetry thesis of Bloor's ?strong programme?. It will be shown that Laudan's argumentation is fallacious and, therefore, his attempt at refuting the symmetry thesis has failed.

In this contribution I intend to reconstruct and evaluate one of Galileo's famous arguments given in the Discorsi against a well‐entrenched thesis of Aristotelian physics. It will be shown that Galileo's reduction‐to‐the‐absurd type of counterargument is, although seemingly cogent, after all fallacious. I ascribe Galileo's committing of this fallacy to his looking at the Aristotelian physics through the (Kuhnian type) paradigmatic “spectacles” of his own new physics.

(1986). The method of analysis‐synthesis and the structure of causal explanation in Newton. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 60-84.

In this article I respond to the defences of the Strong Programme put forward by David Bloor and Márta Fehér in this issue. I dispute the claim that it is attention to only limited parts of the Strong Programme framework that allows me to argue that this approach: leads to weak idealism, undermines the idea that theories have varying levels of instrumental success, and challenges the theoretical claims of scientific actors. Rather, I argue that these problematic positions are entailed by (...) the constructionist tenets at the core of the Strong Programme.Keywords: Strong Programme; David Bloor; Social constructionism; Idealism; Self-Reference; Anomalies. (shrink)

In a series of three behavioral experiments, we found a systematic distortion of probability judgments concerning elementary visual stimuli. Participants were briefly shown a set of figures that had two features (e.g., a geometric shape and a color) with two possible values each (e.g., triangle or circle and black or white). A figure was then drawn, and participants were informed about the value of one of its features (e.g., that the figure was a “circle”) and had to predict the value (...) of the other feature (e.g., whether the figure was “black” or “white”). We repeated this procedure for various sets of figures and, by varying the statistical association between features in the sets, we manipulated the probability of a feature given the evidence of another (e.g., the posterior probability of hypothesis “black” given the evidence “circle”) as well as the support provided by a feature to another (e.g., the impact, or confirmation, of evidence “circle” on the hypothesis “black”). Results indicated that participants’ judgments were deeply affected by impact, although they only should have depended on the probability distributions over the features, and that the dissociation between evidential impact and posterior probability increased the number of errors. The implications of these findings for lower and higher level cognitive models are discussed. (shrink)

There is widespread interest in the possibility that music training enhances nonmusical abilities. This possibility has been examined primarily for speech perception and domain-general abilities su...

The current disclosure model of informed consent ignores the linguistic complexity of any act of communication, and the increased risk of difficulties in the special circumstances of informed consent. This article explores, through linguistic analysis, the specificity of informed consent as a speech act, a communication act, and a form of dialogue, following on the theories of J.L. Austin, Roman Jakobson, and Mikhail Bakhtin, respectively. In the proposed model, informed consent is a performative speech act resulting from a series of (...) communication acts which together constitute a dialogic, polyphonic, heteroglossial discourse. It is an act of speech that results in action being taken after a conversation has happened where distinct individuals, multiple voices, and multiple perspectives have been respected, and convention observed and recognized. It is more meaningful and more ethical for both patient and physician, in all their human facets including their interconnectedness. Keywords: communication, dialogism, informed consent, linguistics, performative, physician-patient relationship CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This is a study of the effects of a number of background variables on ethical perceptions of Mexican and U.S. marketers. This research investigates how a marketer’s personal religiousness, relativism, and the ethical values influence in perceptions of the degree of ethical problems in hypothetical marketing scenarios. It also examines differences between Mexican and U.S. marketers on these variables. The results show significant differences in perception between the countries, and we discuss the implications of these differences for cross-cultural business activities.

The critical discourse analysis is the tool used in this article, to study how audiovisual media have constructed mental representation about the historical facts occurred in Spain between the final stage of the Spanish Civil War and the late 1980s: the theft of newborn babies. The State has failed in an attempt to establish policies that support truth, justice and reparation as it has been recalled by United Nations experts to the Government of Spain, and the reports and documentaries have (...) become vehicles to capture and recover memories. Our objective is to analyze how this collective awareness has been realized and the contribution of reports and documentaries. Our results show that the Spanish television channels silence the Francoist context to depict the thefts as the product of economical mobs focused on child trafficking. The international channels, however, put the origin of the dictatorship at the center of the discourse. (shrink)

The claim that there are significant parallels and connections between hermeneutics and humanism may be plausible from the mere fact that the magnum opus of contemporary hermeneutics, Gadamer's Truth and Method, opens with a chapter on “The significance of the humanist tradition for the human sciences”, which is discussed in this chapter. A brief interpretation of the Gadamer's chapter and its philosophical background will be followed by a short interpretive reconstruction of the origin and history of the concept of humanism (...) and its interconnections with hermeneutics. Possible or plausible consequences of what has been said include the following two theses: hermeneutics is humanism; and the contemporary form of humanism is hermeneutics. From this perspective, hermeneutics may be said to be the heir of the legacy of the humanist tradition and may be entitled to be called its form in the twentieth and twentieth‐first centuries more than any other philosophical stance. (shrink)

The present study examined the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire Short Form (TEIQue-SF). Analyses were performed using a sample of undergraduates (N = 585) recruited from four universities across China. Confirmatory factor analysis of the Chinese TEIQue-SF supported the one-factor structure of trait emotional intelligence. Measurement invariance analyses were conducted across the Chinese sample and a sample of Canadian undergraduate students (N = 638). Although the two samples demonstrated configural and partial metric invariance, (...) scalar invariance was not found. Cross-cultural implications and explanations of the present findings, as well as suggestions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The most important systematic analysis of social movements to date has been Touraine's The Voice and the Eye. Here, one can almost paraphrase Marx's famous dictum: for the French sociologist, the history of all societies is a history of movements. In identifying movements with social classes, Touraine negotiates a radical turn from system theories to a strong version of action theory and breaks with the Procrustean framework of an Althusserian-Poulantzasian structuralism in which everything is accounted for once the economically based (...) class equivalent has been found. For Touraine, movements emerge and diversify in the process of their challenging “historicity” — a key concept derived from Castoriadis’ central category, the imaginary institution. (shrink)

The connections between hermeneutics and ontology cannot be restricted to the ontological (re)conception of understanding and interpretation. The ontological thematization of understanding and interpretation provided by Heidegger in Being and Time, is preceded by another, more original, and more comprehensive interrelation between hermeneutics and ontology. The former, the ontological thematization of understanding and interpretation may be seen to be, as it were, but a “derivative” case of this more primordial interdependence or fusion of ontology and hermeneutics which has always already (...) been operative or set into motion from the very first pages of the work in terms of a reciprocal dependence of the Being‐question (ontology) and a (vague and average) “understanding of Being” (hermeneutics). This chapter attempts to reconstruct and elaborate on the emergence of this twofold relation on Heidegger's path of thinking up to and inclusive of Being and Time. (shrink)

Report on the international conference Ethical Thinking: Past and Present entitled Ethics in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Le présent volume rassemble les conférences prononcées dans le IIe Séminaire International de l’AEIHM (Asociación Española de Investigación de Historia de las Mujeres). Tenu en 2005, le séminaire précédent avait été centré sur l’œuvre de la théoricienne américaine Joan Scott. Celui-ci – qui a eu lieu en 2007 – a suivi le même questionnement sur l’inscription internationale des courants épistémologiques féministes en Espagne mais il a abordé l’influence particulière des théoriciennes française...