Philosophers of neuroscience have traditionally described interfield integration using reduction models. Such models describe formal inferential relations between theories at different levels. I argue against reduction and for a mechanistic model of interfield integration. According to the mechanistic model, different fields integrate their research by adding constraints on a multilevel description of a mechanism. Mechanistic integration may occur at a given level or in the effort to build a theory that oscillates among several levels. I develop this alternative model using (...) a putative exemplar of reduction in contemporary neuroscience: the relationship between the psychological phenomena of learning and memory and the electrophysiological phenomenon known as Long-Term Potentiation. A new look at this historical episode reveals the relative virtues of the mechanistic model over reduction as an account of interfield integration. (shrink)

The so-called "non-commutativity" of probability kinematics has caused much unjustified concern. When identical learning is properly represented, namely, by identical Bayes factors rather than identical posterior probabilities, then sequential probability-kinematical revisions behave just as they should. Our analysis is based on a variant of Field's reformulation of probability kinematics, divested of its (inessential) physicalist gloss.

To enlarge the discussion of scientific responsibility for research integrity, this paper offers two historico-philosophical observations. First, in the broad history of ideas, modern ethics replaces social role responsibility with appeals to abstract principles; by contrast, discussions within the scientific community of responsibility for research integrity constitute a rediscovery of the continuing vitality of role responsibility. This is a rediscovery from which philosophy itself may benefit. Second, within the context of scientists’ concerns, the idea of role responsibility has undergone significant (...) evolution from “collective responsibility” to the notion of responsibility resting with a “trans-scientific community.” Further challenges nevertheless remain in order to relate scientific role responsibility for scientific integrity to the relationship between science and society. To promote a notion of integrity not just in science but in the science-society relationship, it may be useful to think in terms of a “co-responsibility” for scientific integrity. (shrink)

This article examines and critiques the use of the term “vulnerability” in U.S. and international regulations and guidelines on research ethics. After concluding that the term is currently used in multiple, often inconsistent, senses, it calls on regulators to differentiate between three distinct types of vulnerability: “consent-based vulnerability,”“risk-based vulnerability,” and “justice-based vulnerability.”.

Jonathan Weisberg claims that certain probability assessments constructed by Jeffrey conditioning resist subsequent revision by a certain type of after-the-fact defeater of the reasons supporting those assessments, and that such conditioning is thus “inherently anti-holistic.” His analysis founders, however, in applying Jeffrey conditioning to a partition for which an essential rigidity condition clearly fails. Applied to an appropriate partition, Jeffrey conditioning is amenable to revision by the sort of after-the-fact defeaters considered by Weisberg in precisely the way that he demands.

It is a common assumption in contemporary cognitive neuroscience that discovering a putative realized kind to be dissociably realized (i.e., to be realized in each instance by two or more distinct realizers) mandates splitting that kind. Here I explore some limits on this inference using two deceptively similar examples: the dissociation of declarative and procedural memory and Ramachandran's argument that the self is an illusion.

Suppose that several individuals who have separately assessed prior probability distributions over a set of possible states of the world wish to pool their individual distributions into a single group distribution, while taking into account jointly perceived new evidence. They have the option of first updating their individual priors and then pooling the resulting posteriors or first pooling their priors and then updating the resulting group prior. If the pooling method that they employ is such that they arrive at the (...) same final distribution in both cases, the method is said to be externally Bayesian, a property first studied by Madansky . We show that a pooling method for discrete distributions is externally Bayesian if and only if it commutes with Jeffrey conditioning, parameterized in terms of certain ratios of new to old odds, as in Wagner , rather than in terms of the posterior probabilities of members of the disjoint family of events on which such conditioning originates. (shrink)

Several authors have made the argument that because blind evolutionary processes produced human intelligence on Earth, it should be feasible for clever human engineers to create human-level artificial intelligence in the not-too-distant future. This evolutionary argument, however, has ignored the observation selection effect that guarantees that observers will see intelligent life having arisen on their planet no matter how hard it is for intelligent life to evolve on any given Earth-like planet. We explore how the evolutionary argument might be salvaged (...) from this objection, using a variety of considerations from observation selection theory and analysis of specific timing features and instances of convergent evolution in the terrestrial evolutionary record. We find that, depending on the resolution of disputed questions in observation selection theory, the objection can either be wholly or moderately defused, although other challenges for the evolutionary argument remain. (shrink)

Building on research in anthropology and philosophy, one can make a distinction between type I and type II energy ethics as a framework for advancing public debate about energy. Type I holds energy production and use as a fundamental good and is grounded in the assumption that increases in energy production and consumption result in increases in human wellbeing. Conversely, type II questions the linear relationship between energy production and progress by examining questions of equity and human happiness. The type (...) I versus type II framework helps to advance public debates about energy that address broad questions of profitability, regulation, and the environment, and in the process poses fundamental questions about the reverence for energy growth in advanced technological societies. (shrink)

What are the relative epistemic merits of building prosthetic models versus building nonprosthetic models and simulations? I argue that prosthetic models provide a sufficient test of affordance validity, that is, of whether the target system affords mechanisms that can be commandeered by a prosthesis. In other respects, prosthetic models are epistemically on par with nonprosthetic models. I focus on prosthetics in neuroscience, but the results are general. The goal of understanding how brain mechanisms work under ecologically and physiologically relevant conditions (...) is narrow compared to the search for maker's knowledge about how the brain can be made to work for us. (shrink)

Despite all the attention to Big Data and the claims that it represents a “paradigm shift” in science, we lack understanding about what are the qualities of Big Data that may contribute to this revolutionary impact. In this paper, we look beyond the quantitative aspects of Big Data and examine it from a sociotechnical perspective. We argue that a key factor that distinguishes “Big Data” from “lots of data” lies in changes to the traditional, well-established “control zones” that facilitated clear (...) provenance of scientific data, thereby ensuring data integrity and providing the foundation for credible science. The breakdown of these control zones is a consequence of the manner in which our network technology and culture enable and encourage open, anonymous sharing of information, participation regardless of expertise, and collaboration across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional barriers. We are left with the conundrum—how to reap the benefits of Big Data while re-creating a trust fabric and an accountable chain of responsibility that make credible science possible. (shrink)

The dissolution of the U.S.S.R. marked also the end of the communist system. However, its replacement by a working democracy is not assured. First a 'civil society', built upon a pluralistic infrastructure, has to be established. This requires the achievement of a 'law-based state', pluralism in the political media, an unshackled media, and freedom of religion. The distinguished experts in these fields brought together in this book question whether such an infrastructure is firm enough as yet to preclude reversion to (...) an authoritarian system. Current events in Russia form an experiment of incalculable importance to the future of the international system - Russian Pluralism-Now Irreversible? offers a lucid, stimulating assessment of the experiment's chances for success. (shrink)

This paper gives a formalization of general topology in second-order arithmetic using countably based MF spaces. This formalization is used to study the reverse mathematics of general topology. For each poset P we let MF denote the set of maximal filters on P endowed with the topology generated by {Np | p ∈ P}, where Np = {F ∈ MF | p ∈ F}. We define a countably based MF space to be a space of the form MF for some (...) countable poset P. The class of countably based MF spaces includes all complete separable metric spaces as well as many nonmetrizable spaces. The following reverse mathematics results are obtained. The proposition that every nonempty Gδ subset of a countably based MF space is homeomorphic to a countably based MF space is equivalent to [Formula: see text] over ACA0. The proposition that every uncountable closed subset of a countably based MF space contains a perfect set is equivalent over [Formula: see text] to the proposition that [Formula: see text] is countable for all A ⊆ ℕ. The proposition that every regular countably based MF space is homeomorphic to a complete separable metric space is equivalent to [Formula: see text] over [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

Environmentalists have advocated the Precautionary Principle (PP) to help guide public and private decisions about the environment. By contrast, industry and its spokesmen have opposed this. There is not one principle, but many that have been recommended for this purpose. Despite the attractiveness of a core idea in all versions of the principle—that decision-makers should take some precautionary steps to ensure that threats of serious and irreversible damage to the environment and public health do not materialize into harm—even one of (...) the most widely endorsed principles needs considerable specification and refinement before it can be used. Moreover, the PP is an approach or guide to utilizing scientific evidence in social or legal decision-making contexts. In this it does not differ in kind from other approaches to using factual information such as in the law. The law provides some models for different strategies to guide decision-making under uncertainty when factual issues cannot be resolved with certainty. These in turn can help guide the formulation of different versions of PP and help clarify some presuppositions of the principle. Once some plausible versions of PP are articulated, I suggest some applications to existing environmental problems. (shrink)

It has often been recommended that the differing probability distributions of a group of experts should be reconciled in such a way as to preserve each instance of independence common to all of their distributions. When probability pooling is subject to a universal domain condition, along with state-wise aggregation, there are severe limitations on implementing this recommendation. In particular, when the individuals are epistemic peers whose probability assessments are to be accorded equal weight, universal preservation of independence is, with a (...) few exceptions, impossible. Under more reasonable restrictions on pooling, however, there is a natural method of preserving the independence of any fixed finite family of countable partitions, and hence of any fixed finite family of discrete random variables. (shrink)

We initiate the reverse mathematics of general topology. We show that a certain metrization theorem is equivalent to Π2 1 comprehension. An MF space is defined to be a topological space of the form MF(P) with the topology generated by $\lbrace N_p \mid p \in P \rbrace$ . Here P is a poset, MF(P) is the set of maximal filters on P, and $N_p = \lbrace F \in MF(P) \mid p \in F \rbrace$ . If the poset P is countable, (...) the space MF(P) is said to be countably based. The class of countably based MF spaces can be defined and discussed within the subsystem ACA0 of second order arithmetic. One can prove within ACA0 that every complete separable metric space is homeomorphic to a countably based MF space which is regular. We show that the converse statement, "every countably based MF space which is regular is homeomorphic to a complete separable metric space," is equivalent to Π2 1-CA0. The equivalence is proved in the weaker system Π1 1-CA0. This is the first example of a theorem of core mathematics which is provable in second order arithmetic and implies Π2 1 comprehension. (shrink)

In a recent issue of The Lancet, the historian Roger Cooter predicted that the field of bioethics will soon die of self-inflicted wounds. “Conspiring against it,” he wrote, “is exposure of the funding of some of its US centres by pharmaceutical companies; exclusion of alternative perspectives from the social sciences; retention of narrow analytical notions of ethics in the face of popular expression and academic respect for the place of emotions; divisions within the discipline ; and collusion with, and appropriation (...) by, clinical medicine.” Cooter's prognosis? “Hardly wet behind the ears, bioethics seems destined for a short lifespan.”. (shrink)

Infinite time register machines (ITRMs) are register machines which act on natural numbers and which are allowed to run for arbitrarily many ordinal steps. Successor steps are determined by standard register machine commands. At limit times register contents are defined by appropriate limit operations. In this paper, we examine the ITRMs introduced by the third and fourth author (Koepke and Miller in Logic and Theory of Algorithms LNCS, pp. 306–315, 2008), where a register content at a limit time is set (...) to the lim inf of previous register contents if that limit is finite; otherwise the register is reset to 0. The theory of these machines has several similarities to the infinite time Turing machines (ITTMs) of Hamkins and Lewis. The machines can decide all ${\Pi^1_1}$ sets, yet are strictly weaker than ITTMs. As in the ITTM situation, we introduce a notion of ITRM-clockable ordinals corresponding to the running times of computations. These form a transitive initial segment of the ordinals. Furthermore we prove a Lost Melody theorem: there is a real r such that there is a program P that halts on the empty input for all oracle contents and outputs 1 iff the oracle number is r, but no program can decide for every natural number n whether or not ${n \in r}$ with the empty oracle. In an earlier paper, the third author considered another type of machines where registers were not reset at infinite lim inf’s and he called them infinite time register machines. Because the resetting machines correspond much better to ITTMs we hold that in future the resetting register machines should be called ITRMs. (shrink)

The emergence of the field of health care at a distance, or “telehealth,” has been embedded within discourses of high ambition about health improvement, seamless services, empowerment, and independence for patients. In this article, the authors examine how telehealthcare technologies assume certain forms of patients—or “telepatients”—who can be mobilized and combined with images and artifacts that speak for them in the clinical encounter. Second, a tentative intervention is made in these emerging identities in the form of facilitating some alternative discourses (...) about telehealthcare. The aim is to stimulate debate by presenting and contrasting these different approaches to technology development. Such differences take material and discursive shape in the making and unmaking of telepatients, showing important interferences in the shaping of identity and possibilities for governance and participation. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the justification of scientific change and argue that it rests on different sorts of invariance. Against this background I consider notions of observation, meaning, and regulative standards. I sketch an account of the rationale of scientific change which preserves the merits and avoids the shortcomings of the approach of Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn, Toulmin, and others. Each of these writers would hold that transitions from one scientific tradition to another force radical changes in what is observed, (...) in the meanings of the terms employed, and in the metastandards involved. They would claim that "incommensurable" replacement is what does, and should, occur during scientific "revolutions." Such writers, however, have trouble in comparing different scientific theories. My account permits different theories to be compared in various ways. These comparisons, I argue, are possible through appeal to "first-level" and "second-level" invariance. In this connection I argue that observation, meaning, and regulative standards should be, and in fact usually are, nontrivially invariant with respect to scientific change. (shrink)

Philosophy has not paid sufficient attention to engineering. Nevertheless, engineers should not use this as an excuse to ignore philosophy. The argument here is that philosophy is important to engineering for at least three reasons. First, philosophy is necessary so that engineers may understand and defend themselves against philosophical criticisms. In fact, there is a tradition of engineering philosophy that is largely overlooked, even by engineers. Second, philosophy, especially ethics, is necessary to help engineers deal with professional ethical problems. A (...) case study of ethics requirements for U.S. engineering curricula substantiates this point. Third, because of the inherently philosophical character of engineering, philosophy may actually function as a means to greater engineering self-understanding. (shrink)

This is the introduction to a special, guest-edited issue of Philosophy Today. It lays out the extent to which the philosophy of science has ignored science policy and argues that policy issues deserve attention in parallel with epistemological ones. It further reviews the historical development of science policy in the United States since World War II, identifies some recent contributions to critical reflection on basic science policy assumptions, and outlines a set of issues to be addressed by any comprehensive philosophy (...) of science policy. (shrink)