Archive: 2011

November 17, 2011 -

November 10, 2011 - It is not because I think that the public is stupid or dishonest in general. It is not because I don’t think that some bad scientists have done things to diminish the public trust in the scientific process. It is not because I participated in the biological sciences before changing the direction of my graduate […]

November 10, 2011 - It should be quite obvious to most properly functioning, and somewhat sophisticated human beings (whatever that means) that we agree on our most basic values and/or moral ideas.  It becomes very easy to speak within value-laden and ethical cliches: we can all agree that exploitation of children is wrong, kicking puppy dogs is heinous, and […]

November 4, 2011 - On page 153 of Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, Heather Douglas claims that “with the values used by scientists to assess the sufficiency of the evidence made explicit, both policy-makers and the public could assess those judgments, helping to ensure that values acceptable to the public are utilized in the judgments.” My question is […]

November 4, 2011 - Reading Mark Brown’s chapter on John Dewey in Science in Democracy helped me to understand some of my own problems with the idea that scientists are objective observers taking notes and discovering immutable truths about the world. Of course this paints a picture that is not quite accurate.  The immutable truths are immutable for awhile, […]

November 2, 2011 - Towards the end of the class discussion on September 28 someone had touched on the idea that scientists do not tend to ask those suffering from an illness or disease to participate in the scientific discourse.  I believe the comment was, we don’t ask a diabetic about diabetes. What I would like to ask is: […]

November 2, 2011 - http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/08/26/lawrence-solomon-science-now-settled/ Above is a link to an opinion piece on a financial website. What would this have to do with science? The piece claims that the global warming debate is settled; the new consensus is that global warming is caused by nature, not by humans. There is some rationality at work here–there has indeed been […]

November 2, 2011 - Forget Kant, forget church, forget what your parents and Sesame Street taught you; do you know what’s right and what’s wrong?  Is there an objective good and evil?  Do we live in a moral universe?  Is morality anything more than another human construct?  If so, is it based on inherent biological principles, like the concepts […]

November 1, 2011 - One of the main problems I have had with the material from the very beginning of this course is wrestling with the idea of a truly “objective” science—as an extension of there existing a truly “objective” anything. I am not well versed in philosophy so I am coming at this from what is essentially a […]

November 1, 2011 - Much of what we read this week focuses on the body.  The works emphasize the ideas of Bacon, who considered Nature to be “matter”– tied to form but also in need of domination.  Nature and matter are all associated with the body, and the body is associated with females.  Evelyn Fox Keller examines the need […]