In his mature writings, Kuhn describes the process of specialisation as driven by a form of incommensurability, defined as a conceptual/linguistic barrier which promotes and guarantees the insularity of specialties. In this paper, we reject the idea that the incommensurability among scientific specialties is a linguistic barrier. We argue that the problem with Kuhn’s characterisation of the incommensurability among specialties is that he presupposes a rather abstract theory of semantic incommensurability, which he then tries to apply to his description of (...) the process of specialisation. By contrast, this paper follows a different strategy: after criticising Kuhn’s view, it takes a further look at how new scientific specialties emerge. As a result, a different way of understanding incommensurability among specialties will be proposed. (shrink)

Natural Categories and Human Kinds is a recent and timely contribution to current debate on natural kinds. Because of the growing sophistication of this debate, it is necessary to make careful distinctions in order to appreciate the originality of Khalidi’s position. Khalidi’s view on natural kinds is naturalistic: if we want to know what Nature’s joints really are, we should look at the actual carving job carried out by our best scientific practices. Like LaPorte, Khalidi is a fallibilist: our best (...) scientific theories may be revised or abandoned and so can our current classifications of natural kinds. Unlike LaPorte, however, Khalidi is an anti-essentialist: he argues against the idea that membership in a natural kind is a matter of possessing an essential set of necessary and sufficient properties. Like Dupré, Khalidi is a pluralist and anti-reductionist: he does not believe that there is only one true classification system and that there are natural kinds only at the so-called "fundamental level" of microphysics. Khalidi develops his pluralistic and anti-reductionistic position on the basis of a deep appreciation for the special sciences but, unlike Dupré, he thinks that only the scientific inquiry, which is driven by epistemic purposes, discover natural kinds and that, therefore, there are important differences between scientific and folk classifications. Khalidi’s conception of natural kinds has both an epistemic and a metaphysical component. (shrink)

Incommensurability may be regarded as driving specialisation, on the one hand, and as posing some problems to interdisciplinarity, on the other hand. It may be argued, however, that incommensurability plays no role in either specialisation or interdisciplinarity. Scientific specialties could be defined as simply 'different' (that is, about different things), rather than 'incommensurable' (that is, competing for the explanation of the same phenomena). Interdisciplinarity could be viewed as the co- ordinated effort of scientists possessing complemetary and interlocking skills, and not (...) as the overcoming of some sort of incommensurable divide. This article provides a comprehensive evaluative examination of the relations between specialisation, interdisciplinarity, and incommensurability. Its aim is to defend the relevance of incommensurability to both specialisation and interdisciplinarity. At the same time, it aims at correcting the tendency, common among many philosophers, to regard incommensurability in a restrictive manner - such as, for example, as an almost purely semantic issue. (shrink)

To believe that every single scientist ought to be individually engaged in ethical thinking in order for science to be responsible at a collective level may be too demanding, if not plainly unrealistic. In fact, ethical labor is typically distributed across different kinds of scientists within the scientific community. Based on the empirical data collected within the Horizon 2020 ‘RRI-Practice’ project, we propose a classification of the members of the scientific community depending on their engagement in this collective activity. Our (...) classification offers, on the one hand, a model of how the ethical aspects of science are taken into consideration by scientists and, on the other, some indications on how to institutionalize ethics in science. (shrink)

In his mature works, Kuhn abandons the concept of a paradigm and becomes more interested in the analysis of the conceptual structure of scientific theories. These changes are interpreted as resulting from a ‘linguistic turn’ that Kuhn underwent sometimes around the 1980s. Much of the philosophical discussions about Kuhn’s post-‘linguistic turn’ philosophy revolves around his views on taxonomic concepts. Apart from taxonomy, however, the mature Kuhn introduces other concepts, such as conceptual networks and lexicons. This article distinguishes these three concepts (...) and shows that adopting each one of them has different impacts on Kuhn’s model of science. After distinguishing and assessing the concepts of taxonomy, network, and lexicon, it will be argued that the latter not only fits the Kuhnian model of science better, but it also helps capture the wide sense of Kuhn’s early concept of a paradigm. (shrink)

In the past few years, social epistemologists have developed several formal models of the social organisation of science. While their robustness and representational adequacy has been analysed at length, the function of these models has begun to be discussed in more general terms only recently. In this article, I will interpret many of the current formal models of the scientific community as representing the latest development of what I will call the ‘Kuhnian project’. These models share with Kuhn a number (...) of questions about the relation between individuals and communities. At the same time, they also inherit some of Kuhn’s problematic characterisations of the scientific community. In particular, current models of the social organisation of science represent the scientific community as essentially value-free. This may put into question both their representational adequacy and their normative ambitions. In the end, it will be shown that the discussion on the formal models of the scientific community may contribute in fruitful ways to the ongoing debates on value judgements in science. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is widely considered as one of the most important philosophers of science of the 20th century, while his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) is regarded as one of the most influential works in the philosophy ofscience. At the same time, however, his place within philosophy of science remains ambiguous. On the one hand, despite the popularity of SSR, there is no proper ‘Kuhnian school of thought’ in HPS. On the other hand, the interest towards Kuhn does (...) not seem to fade away and the number of publications about his work does not seem to decrease. We suggest that there are at least three different ways to go ‘beyond SSR’: (i) by scrutinising the development of Kuhn’s thought, from his pre- to his post-SSR writings; (ii) by contextualising Kuhn in the philosophical milieu of his time, thus interpreting his view as emerging from the intellectual exchanges he had with contemporary philosophers; (iii) by reinterpreting and developing some of his most known ideas, in ways that perhaps Kuhn himself was not able to contemplate. (shrink)

Contemporary interdisciplinary research is often described as bringing some important changes in the structure and aims of the scientific enterprise. Sometimes, it is even characterized as a sort of Kuhnian scientific revolution. In this paper, the analogy between interdisciplinarity and scientific revolutions will be analysed. It will be suggested that the way in which interdisciplinarity is promoted looks similar to how new paradigms were described and defended in some episodes of revolutionary scientific change. However, contrary to what happens during some (...) scientific revolutions, the rhetoric with which interdisciplinarity is promoted does not seem to be accompanied by a strong agreement about what interdisciplinarity actually is. In the end, contemporary interdisciplinarity could be defined as being in a ‘pre-paradigmatic’ phase, with the very talk promoting interdisciplinarity being a possible obstacle to its maturity. (shrink)

Both in the bibliography and in the citation in the text, Michelle Gibbons’ article below has been mistakenly attributed to “Gibson.” The proper reference to the article should be: Gibbons, M.. Reassessing discovery: Rosalind Franklin, scientific visualization, and the structure of DNA. _Philosophy of Science, 79_, 63–80.

Kuhn’s analysis of the structure and function of the scientific community has been recently re-interpreted as a seminal contribution to the so-called social epistemology of science. Kuhn’s social epistemology should be considered as part of a normative-descriptive philosophical framework in which epistemological, historical, sociological, and psychological elements are interconnected. In this chapter, I will compare Kuhn’s seminal insights with two contemporary approaches to the social epistemology of science, namely: the development of idealised formal models of the scientific community and the (...) use of qualitative studies for philosophical purposes. On the one hand, these contemporary approaches to social epistemology may be regarded as developing some of Kuhn’s views in new and exciting ways. On the other hand, however, it is still not entirely clear which kind of general philosophical ‘image of science’ they are contributing to. This chapter, therefore, aims at illuminating how analysing some of the contemporary debates in social epistemology through the lenses of Kuhn’s philosophy may recast under a new light the issue of the value of the study of the social dimension of scientific research for general philosophy of science. (shrink)

There is a growing concern for the proper role of science within democratic societies, which has led to the development of new science policies for the implementation of social responsibility in research. Although the very expression ‘social responsibility of science’ may be interpreted in different ways, many of these emerging policy frameworks define it, at least in part, as a form of anticipative reflection about the potential impacts of research in society. What remains a rather under-discussed issue is the definition (...) of the bearer of the social responsibility of science. In other words, it is not clear who is supposed to engage in such an anticipative reflection, whether individual researchers or research groups. In the past few years, philosophers of science have begun to use qualitative research methods to fill the gaps between normative models of the organisation of ideal scientific communities and the reality of actual scientific practices. In this article, I follow this approach to discuss the issue of the collective dimension of the social responsibility of science. I rely on a qualitative study conducted on an interdisciplinary research group and I describe how group dynamics position individuals and distribute duties and roles, including social responsibility. Qualitative descriptions of the distribution of duties within actual research groups should inform the formulation of general prescriptive theories on the collective responsibility of science. (shrink)

Susan Wolf maintains that the meaningfulness of a life arises when someone acts upon the subjective desire of doing something objectively valuable. This amounts to a hybrid view, which contains both subjectivist and objectivist elements. Wolf’s tentative definition of what is objectively valuable amounts to what, in this article, we define as ‘intersubjectivism’. As it will be argued, however, intersubjectivism poses a number of problems, which are exacerbated in contemporary society and which shed a new light on the problem of (...) meaning in life. (shrink)

Some debates about the role of non-epistemic values in science discuss the so-called Value-Free Ideal together with the autonomy thesis, to the point that they may be assumed to be intertwined. As I will argue in this article, the two are independent from one another, are supported by different arguments, and ought to be disentangled. I will also show that the arguments against value-freedom and supporting a value-laden conception of science, are different from the arguments against autonomy, which support democratized (...) science. Moreover, while some of the arguments against autonomy and for democratized science may actually be consistent with value-freedom, they conflict with some philosophical views about the internal diversity of well-designed epistemic communities. This article distinguishes the Value-Free Ideal and the autonomy thesis, as well as their antitheses, and investigates their relations to some of the socio-epistemological models of the social organization of scientific research. Its aim is to make explicit some incompatibilities between different normative frameworks developed in philosophy of science. (shrink)

Scientists have the epistemic responsibility of producing knowledge. They also have the social responsibility of aligning their research with the needs and values of various societal stakeholders. Individual scientists may be left with no guidance on how to prioritise and carry these different responsibilities. As I will argue, however, the responsibilities of science can be harmonised at the collective level. Drawing from debates in moral philosophy, I will propose a theory of the collective responsibilities of science that accounts for the (...) internal diversity of research groups and for their different responsibilities. (shrink)

Book Review of Current Controversies in Values and Science, Kevin C. Elliott and Daniel Steel (Editors), Routledge, 2017.

In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved in such a (...) transition. I will clarify the role of the scientific community in revolutionary changes and characterize the incommensurability across specialties as possessing both semantic and methodological aspects. The discussion of the discovery of the structure of DNA will serve both as an illustration of my main argument and as reply to one criticism raised against Kuhn—namely, that his model cannot capture cases of revolutionary yet non-disruptive episodes of scientific progress. Revisiting Kuhn’s ideas on specialization will shed new light on some often overlooked features of scientific change. (shrink)

Many of the commentators—let’s ignore their sex for the moment—suggested including women in the Feyerabend conference. Then the question was raised, “but are they of the right quality, status, rank?” That is, do they bring down the average quality of the conference in virtue of their being of inferior status, or, in Vincenzo Politi’s words, not “someone whose work is both relevant to the topic of the conference and also as widely recognized as the work of the invited (...) speakers” (HOPOS-L archive, “CFP: Feyerabend Conference,” Tuesday, July 17, 2012, 14:57:20)? It is extremely important that such a discussion of quality, status, and rank recognize the scourge of evaluation bias and its long-term and pervasive consequences. One well-designed study this past year, published by the National Academy of Sciences, established prominent evaluation bias among both male and female science faculty in their evaluations of a student applying for a managerial job, who was randomly assigned either a male or a female name (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012). These professors examined the qualifications of the students and decided whether to hire them, what salary to give them, and whether to mentor themand howmuch to do so.The resultswere that both male and female scientists hired more men, gave them higher salaries, and offered more mentoring to them, even though themale applications were identical to the female applications. When probed about their reasons for not hiring or mentoring the female applicants, the professors explained that they based their decisions on the inferior competence of the applicant: the female applicants were perceived as less competent by all professors (with identical applications between males and females). This is what “evaluation bias” looks like, and it has been established in many, many contexts since the 1970s—this is only the most recent. (shrink)

Interaction mining is about discovering and extracting insightful information from digital conversations, namely those human–human information exchanges mediated by digital network technology. We present in this article a computational model of natural arguments and its implementation for the automatic argumentative analysis of digital conversations, which allows us to produce relevant information to build interaction business analytics applications overcoming the limitations of standard text mining and information retrieval technology. Applications include advanced visualisations and abstractive summaries.

The paper lists several editions of Euclid’s Elements in the Early Modern Age, giving for each of them the axioms and postulates employed to ground elementary mathematics.

We offer a proof of the duality theorem for finitely presented MV-algebras and rational polyhedra, a folklore and yet fundamental result. Our approach develops first a general dual adjunction between MV-algebras and subspaces of Tychonoff cubes, endowed with the transformations that are definable in the language of MV-algebras. We then show that this dual adjunction restricts to a duality between semisimple MV-algebras and closed subspaces of Tychonoff cubes. The duality theorem for finitely presented objects is obtained by a further specialisation. (...) Our treatment is aimed at showing exactly which parts of the basic theory of MV-algebras are needed in order to establish these results, with an eye towards future generalisations. (shrink)

This article links the human concern for relative social standing with technological developments, and the future of work. We argue that to the extent that the desire for social status retains its importance in human behaviour, technological advancements affecting the production of goods and services will not necessarily lead to a diminishment of the demand for human labour. This essay makes two principal contributions. First, it links two different literatures: that regarding status-driven consumption, and that regarding the effects of technological (...) change on labour markets. Second, it offers an alternative justification for the conclusion that radical technological shocks will not eliminate the importance of work. (shrink)

This book proposes and defends a radically new account of Plato's method of argument and enquiry in his early dialogues. Vasilis Politis challenges the traditional account according to which these dialogues are basically about the demand for definitions, and questions the equally traditional view that what lies behind Plato's method of argument is a peculiar theory of knowledge. He argues that these dialogues are enquiries set in motion by dilemmas and aporiai, incorporating both a sceptical and an anti-sceptical dimension, and (...) he contends that Plato introduces the demand for definitions, and the search for essences, precisely in order to avoid a sceptical conclusion and hold out the prospect that knowledge can be achieved. His argument will be of great value to all readers interested in Plato's dialogues and in methods of philosophical argument more generally. (shrink)

Abstract: It seems that from an epistemological point of view comparative probability has many advantages with respect to a probability measure. It is more reasonable as an evaluation of degrees of rational beliefs. It allows the formulation of a comparative indifference principle free from well known paradoxes. Moreover it makes it possible to weaken the principal principle, so that it becomes more reasonable. But the logical systems of comparative probability do not admit an adequate probability updating, which on the contrary (...) is possible for a probability measure. Therefore we are faced with a true epistemological dilemma between comparative and quantitative probability. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

There have been many interpretations of Catullus’ poem 2 and especially of verses 5-8. The first part of this study presents the status quaestionis, listing the main interpretations and conjectures. In the second part two new interpretations of vv. 5-8 are advanced, without modifying the text of manuscripts OGR. According to the first, the words cum desiderio meo … lubet iocari are understood as a substantive clause dependent on the verb credo, which also governs et solaciolum as a predicative. Alternatively, (...) solaciolum may be taken as predicative of an understood object te referring to passer in the first verse. In either case, ut cum with the transmitted future acquiescet can have temporal force, as recently argued by Paul Claes 56. (shrink)

Parlare del fallimento delle primavere arabe come di una sconfitta, che ha favorito, da un lato, la restaurazione di regimi autoritari e, dall’altro, il rafforzamento dei movimenti fondamentalisti, è riduttivo. L’articolo si propone di mostrare come i movimenti collettivi, che hanno animato le proteste nelle maggiori piazze delle capitali di molti Paesi arabi, hanno interpretato il bisogno di cambiamento politico ed economico che da troppi anni è stato ignorato o represso dai regimi al potere. Tali movimenti sono l’espressione di un (...) contro-movimento politico alternativo a quanti, in questi anni, inneggiando all’islam, hanno teorizzato e messo in pratica la lotta armata rivoluzionaria. La differenza fra questi due tipi di movimenti collettivi sta nella diversa posta in gioco che essi pongono al centro della loro azione. Per i movimenti di rivolta, la battaglia politica è per l’avvento della democrazia, per i movimenti fondamentalisti è, invece, in buona sostanza, la costituzione di un ferreo regime della verità religiosa, ancor più autoritario dei regimi politico-militari che si sono ripresi il potere dopo il 2012. (shrink)

Non si prenda questo lavoro come un saggio specializzato di orientalistica. Anche se vi abbiamo messo in opera tutto quanto abbiamo appreso faticosamente di quel dominio. Il primo lavoro e stato tradurre integralmente il testo arabo Mungid basandoci su due edizioni. Siamo convinti che una religione non vada studiata soltanto nei suoi testi sacri, ma va osservata negli individui che la professano tant'e che l'Islam rimane un'astrazione se non si passa a studiare direttamente i Musulmani. Questo libro non e una (...) difesa del Cristianesimo nei riguardi dell'Islam, ma abbiamo voluto conoscere da vicino un'opera breve ma importante del piu famoso teologo musulmano. (shrink)