Browsing by Subject "Philosophy of science"
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Item Embargo A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference: The Quantum Gravity Matrix and Embryogenesis of Our Universe(2021) Murtagh, Mitchell DamianThis dissertation makes a case that sexual difference, to date, has been a deeply misconceptualized philosophical concept. Too often reduced to only one expression of itself—the difference between the sexes—critiques of sexual difference as essentialist, heterosexist, transphobic, and race-blind are based on this limited definition of it as an identity category. Its scope, however, expands far beyond its anthropomorphic or human-centric expression and, I argue, it is only by opening up the concept as an ontology that we can begin to conceive new, nuanced, philosophically-grounded ways out of sexist, racist, transphobic, capitalistic and colonialist metaphysics whose roots run so deep that their foundational frameworks are often left unchallenged. This requires stretching sexual difference from an epistemological project that centers “the knower,” often “Woman,” to an ontological framework that constitutes the condition of possibility for epistemology itself. In other words, sexual difference is not reducible to the sex of the knowing subject but founds the logic that there are always at least two ways of knowing, thinking, and being that are irreducible to, or non-collapsible into each other. An ontology of sexual difference requires moving beyond the concept’s historical basis in feminist critiques of psychoanalysis, and even beyond feminist theory itself, where—in its current form—it remains trapped in a tired and boring binary debate between social constructivists and new materialists.
A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference aims for a way out of this dualism within feminist theory by proposing sexual difference as the organizing, incorporeal principle of reality itself. Open-ended throughout—neo-finalist rather than teleological—this takes sexual difference further than it has ever been taken before—beyond its role as the engine of evolution proliferating life, even beyond inciting the emergence of life itself from non-living matter. Sexual difference, if it is to be a truly revolutionary metaphysics or first philosophy, must begin from the very beginning, with the origins of space-time For this reason, this project engages deeply and seriously with contemporary physics, and in the spirit of Irigaray, has both critical and creative components.
The first half critiques contemporary Western physics for its unconscious but undergirding phallocentrism—an unacknowledged commitment to a logic of replicating self-sameness, containment, and unification. This is most palpable in the practically unanimous desire to unify all the “self-contained” structures of physical reality—from the smallest subatomic particles to the large-scale cosmological universe itself—into a totalizing “theory of everything.” Doing this, however, would require solving for “quantum gravity,” the biggest challenge the field faces today. It implies overcoming the logical contradiction at the heart of physics—the incompatibility between two theories of nature—general relativity, which governs large and very massive structures, and quantum mechanics, which governs small and light structures. Our best current theory for gravity—Einstein’s general relativity—refers to the curvature of space-time on which quantum fields emerge, but it cannot, and has never been quantized itself. Ever-elusive and enigmatic, quantum gravity is a feminine symptom that seems to situate itself at the boundaries between the physical and the meta-physical, i.e., what is before the Big Bang, above the speed of light, below the Plank scale, and inside black holes. Posed at these thresholds, we may begin to think of quantum gravity as the interval itself.
It is precisely here, in the second half of the dissertation, that sexual difference stages its constructive intervention. As a logic of co-constitutive “twoness,” it emphasizes the relation from which two things emerge rather than trying to enclose two things into one container. Applying this to the “incompatibility” between general relativity and quantum mechanics, I propose embryogenesis, a philosophical concept borrowed from Raymond Ruyer, as a new “model” for physical reality that emerges only by beginning from this different logic or meta-physics for physics: sexual difference rather than phallocentrism. As the condition of possibility for physics, meta-physics itself is the maternal-feminine par excellence, opening physics and feminist theory to an ontological alliance via sexual difference. “Embryogenesis” could be conceived of as an alternative framework to the “theory of everything” for physicists to take up in the future, which may even change the way the problem of quantum gravity is conceptualized. In embryogenesis, quantum reality is not stuffed inside our gravitational universe as it is framed by the epistemological Copenhagen formulation that centers the observer. Inversely, this proposal relies on the only ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics that exists—Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds. Many-worlds theory makes the case that fundamental quantum reality is a Hilbert space in which our universe is represented by a quantum mechanical wave-function that decoheres—splits or branches or sexuates—each time the self-entanglement of the system as a whole evolves. Hilbert space is therefore the “quantum womb” within which our embryonic universe makes itself by evolving and expanding the local geometry of space-time. Quantum gravity, in this context, may be the interval between realms that nourishes this process of embryogenesis, perpetually self-differentiating the realms from each other, but also supplying their mutual growth and development, by crossing the threshold from the non-local, virtual, “in-formational,” or trans-spatial maternal matrix into our gravitational universe and converting itself into the mysterious “dark energy” that supplies the ongoing growth and development of its structuration.
Item Open Access Advances in Choquet theories(2022) Caprio, MicheleChoquet theory and the theory of capacities, both initiated by French mathematician Gustave Choquet, share the heuristic notion of studying the extrema of a convex set in order to give interesting results regarding its elements. In this work, we put to use Choquet theory in the study of finite mixture models and the theory of capacities in studying severe uncertainty.
In chapter 2, we show how by combining a classical non-parametric density estimator based on a Pólya tree with techniques from Choquet theory, it is possible to retrieve the weights of a finite mixture model. We also give the rate of convergence of the Pólya tree posterior to the Dirac measure on the weights.
In chapter 3, we introduce dynamic probability kinematics (DPK), a method for an agent to mechanically update subjective beliefs in the presence of partial information. We then generalize it to dynamic imprecise probability kinematics (DIPK), which allows the agent to express their initial beliefs via a set of probabilities. We provide bounds for the lower probability associated with the updated probability sets, and we study the behavior of the latter, in particular contraction, dilation, and sure loss. Examples are provided to illustrate how the methods work. We also formulate in chapter 4 an ergodic theory for the limit of the sequence of successive DIPK updates. As a consequence, we formulate a strong law of large numbers.
Finally, in chapter 5 we propose a new, more general definition of extended probability measures ("probabilities" whose codomain is the interval [-1,1]). We study their properties and provide a behavioral interpretation. We use them in an inference procedure, whose environment is canonically represented by a probability space, when both the probability measure and the composition of the state space are unknown. We develop an ex ante analysis - taking place before the statistical analysis requiring knowledge of the state space - in which we progressively learn its true composition. We describe how to update extended probabilities in this setting, and introduce the concept of lower extended probabilities. We provide two examples in the fields of ecology and opinion dynamics.
Item Open Access Chance Begets Order: Hierarchical Probabilistic Processes in the Natural Sciences(2012) Crawford, David RobertAt the end of the nineteenth century Charles Sanders Peirce wrote that "chance begets order" - indeterministic or `chancy' processes can underlie orderly and seemingly deterministic processes. Indeed, Peirce argues that indeterminism is the seed of all order in the natural world. The dissertation explores this theme in three parts. The first chapter reconstructs and elaborates Peirce's objections against necessitarianism, the position that all natural laws are perfectly orderly, deterministic. The second chapter examines and elaborates Ronald Aylmer Fisher's sophisticated analogy between gas models from statistical mechanics and his own population genetics models. The final chapter treats a contemporary indeterministic account of biological fitness and examines several points on which intuitions from deterministic theories misinterpret this quintessentially indeterministic position. The dissertation motivates an indeterministic theory of natural law and reinvigorates its implications for hierarchical models of the natural world.
Item Open Access Deliberative Bayesianism: Abduction, Reflection, and the Weight of Evidence(2018) Chan, Lok CIn this dissertation, I defend the thesis that an epistemic judgment of probability must be interpreted against the background of the context of inquiry in which it is made: in the abductive context, judgments of probability are matters of decision, made strategically in service to the investigative goal of the inquirer; in deduction, probabilities are derived based on the premises chosen in abduction, in order to explicate the implied commitments the agent may incur from those decisions; during the inductive stage, the inquirer is expected to conduct her empirical investigation in a deliberate manner, in accordance with the assertions and decisions she made during abduction and deduction, collectively referred to as the deliberative context.
I set the stage by proposing a pragmatist reading of Bas van Fraassen's Reflection Principle and his voluntarist interpretation of assertions of degrees of beliefs as performative locutions to express the intention to undertake a proportional epistemic commitment. I argue for a refinement of this view that I call deliberativism, which introduces an abductive dimension to understand the normative force that regulates these epistemic judgments. I then argue that decisions made in the context of abduction have inferential repercussions on the validity of inductive inference. In particular, I situate deliberativism in the context of statistical inference by critically examining a problem in the literature called optional stopping, which occurs when the experimenter's intention to stop can manipulate the statistical significance of the data. The last chapter explores the Pericean idea of deductive reasoning as the strategic interrogation of a provisionally chosen hypothesis by focusing on J. M. Keynes' notion of the weight of evidence.
Item Embargo Epistemologies of the Unknown: Cybernetic Cultures after the Cold War(2024) Uliasz, RebeccaThe term “unknown” no longer merely refers to a subjective judgment indicating a stable and conceivable fact or object “in the world.” Nor does it only describe a mathematical or scientific variable that can be calculated and predicted in relation to the consistent properties or timeless truths about reality. This dissertation investigates the multiple and contested meanings of the term in ecology, security, and computational design which taken together, are suggestive of an ontological and epistemological transformation in conceiving of the relation between the environment and technology already initiated with mid-20th century cybernetic and information theories. At the heart of this reconfiguration: “life itself” is mobilized as a post-human form of computational knowledge that can be stretched to embrace indeterminacy and the unknown, fueled by a planetary nomos. As with 21st century media like accelerated computing and artificial intelligence, the environment is no longer merely modified with technologies, but is increasingly constituted by future-oriented forms of algorithmic mediation that are explored here in the larger scope of the material and environmental impacts of technology.
Instead of following the work of a specific thinker, the project undertakes an interdisciplinary reevaluation of Cold War cybernetic ontologies in the literary post-humanities, new media art and design, affect theory, and media ecology, tracing how the passage of cybernetic metaphors into the global cultural imaginary is symptomatic of an ecological reconfiguration in the way technology is accumulated as power, knowledge, and capital. Specifically, it describes how the becoming environmental of computation also entails the remediation of a history of colonial extraction and subjugation in more reticular and algorithmic forms like neural networks and intelligent design, proffering mutations as technics that redeploy the Enlightenment political and metaphysical project of the Anthropos as relational ontologies and vitalist ecological politics. The project reevaluates the rejection of the anthropos in totalizing theoretical ecologism, given the resonances of the discourse with both neoliberal political ecology and the American and European far Right where the production of life is used legitimate techno-cybernetic extraction and violence.
Against the dominant themes of new materialist media theory and affect theory, the project develops a critique of media ecology. It draws on feminist materialist and postcolonial understandings of subjectivity and sovereignty to argue that the “unknown” is no longer a technological problem to be overcome, but rather, is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon that operates at the level of material affect and environmental sense-making. Using both theoretical inquiry and case studies drawn from new media art practices and digital culture, I draw two implications of this shift for political thought: first, it is necessary to address how changes in sociality and politics in the era of accelerated and planetary computing technologies relate to transformations to the subjective characteristics of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity beyond the individual body, population, or nation-state; second, such reconsiderations of subjectivity may help to politicize the role of contingency and unknowability in digital environments and in the speculation of technological futures.
Item Embargo From Error to Event: Decision in the Age of Generative Aesthetics(2023) Karriem, Quran MikalThis dissertation disputes the notion of a decline in human agency, which is taken as a theoretical article of faith in many threads of post- and anti-human literatures concerned with the effects of technical networking and computation on society. Its central contention is that the notion of “the death of authorship” is based on a false construction of political authority and individual subjecthood, and that the concept of decision developed during the Western Enlightenment continues to exert an outsized discursive influence on our conceptions of human being (via liberal subjectivity) and state power (sovereignty). Because such discourses share an understanding of decision as something concentrated in an individual, issues that transcend the scope of localized human perception are often considered outside the purview of human agency, ultimately resulting in an abdication of collective human responsibility. Despite never having truly articulated interpersonal and political relations, the figure of the sovereign subject is reified by twenty-first century discourses that claim to have transcended it. The work accomplishes this critique through a combination of arts-based research and theoretical argumentation, developing notions of ‘collectivity’ and ‘improvisation’ as central to human decision and agency, while casting the sovereign subject as the lingering particularity of a specific time in the history of Western political thought. It concludes, first, that understandings of human subjectivity as always already interrelated—intersubjectivity—allows theory to better model and understand political phenomena in the age of networked, generative aesthetics and, secondly, that such understandings may provide avenues toward a notion of collective responsibility for novel approaches to problems considered outside the limited purview of individual subjecthood.
Item Open Access Making Models Work(2022) Finestone, KobiScientific models are used to investigate reality. Here “model” refers to a representation which is created by an agent for a particular inferential purpose. These purposes include but are not limited to explanation, prediction, exploration, classification, and measurement. Through modeling, scientists become capable of understanding the composition and structure of natural systems and social systems in a systematic manner constitutive of scientific research. This process of understanding is underwritten by a logical structure distinctive to scientific modeling.
Throughout this dissertation, I articulate, justify, and defend a specific account of the logical structure of scientific modeling. In order to do so, I detail economic models, which I contend are representative of general scientific modeling. Broadly, my account of scientific modeling can be decomposed into three distinct claims. First, I argue for understanding scientific modeling in terms representation. Following others, I then conceptualize representation in terms of purpose and relevant similarity. However, against this conceptualization are numerous counterarguments, which I proceed to detail and then disarm.
Second, I argue that the ideal scientific model is a useful model. Connectedly, I contend that in order for a scientific model to be useful, it must first be idealized. In order to demonstrate the necessity of idealizations for scientific modeling, I begin by detailing a number of idealization strategies and demonstrate how they are integral to the use of scientific models across the natural and social sciences. But in order to demonstrate that idealized models are not only useful but are ideal, I dismantle the putative ideal of completeness which holds that the ideal model completely represents reality in all its detail and complexity. However, as I demonstrate, completeness is neither achievable nor a legitimate aspiration for working scientist.
Third, I argue that in order to use scientific models, it is often necessary for scientists to alter them in order to better fit particular target systems. In order to explain the alteration process, I detail the representational continuum found across the sciences which stretches from highly concrete data models to highly abstract principles. Between these extremes are theoretical models and empirical models. In order to construct such models, scientists must engage in an exploratory process by which possibilities are mapped and relative likelihoods estimated. In this way, scientists can construct highly specialized models which can allow them to better pursue specific inferential purposes. All of this results in a division of inferential labor and associated efficiency gains which, I argue, are constitutive of scientific progress.
Item Open Access Making Sense of Normative Functions and Information in Neurobiological Systems(2012) Kraemer, Daniel MarkIn this thesis, I take up two important issues for understanding neurobiological systems: normative functions and information. After introducing the topic and my methodology in chapters 1 and 2, chapter 3 contains an extended critique of the most prominent theory of biological functions, the selected-effects theory of functions. My arguments center on the influential recent selected-effects theory arguing that it has trouble accounting for certain cases and does not seem to capture the sense of malfunction employed in the neurosciences. Chapter 4 defends an alternative theory of normative biological functions that I label the statistical fitness theory. Roughly, this theory holds that tokens of a trait type have the normative function to do something y if it is typical for tokens of that type of trait to y and their doing y contributes to the inclusive fitness of the organism that possesses the trait. In turn, this theory defines malfunctioning trait tokens as those whose effects that typically make positive contributions to fitness fall below the "normal" range in the population. Chapter 5 argues that several other recently popular theories of normative functions have significant flaws.
Chapter 6 takes up the issue of a certain kind of information, namely natural, propositional information. I provide a general framework that explains when signals carry this kind of information about their signifieds based upon stable, perfect correlations holding between the two. Hence, I label this the "stable correlation theory". I also argue that there are good reasons to think that neurons in our brains carry natural, propositional information and that their ability to do so is also grounded in stable correlations.
Item Open Access Martin Heidegger's Mathematical Dialectic: Uncovering the Structure of Modernity(2016) Beattie, Darren JeffreyMartin Heidegger is generally regarded as one of the most significant—if also the most controversial—philosophers of the 20th century. Most scholarly engagement with Heidegger’s thought on Modernity approaches his work with a special focus on either his critique of technology, or on his more general critique of subjectivity. This dissertation project attempts to elucidate Martin Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity, and, by extension, his thought as a whole, from the neglected standpoint of his understanding of mathematics, which he explicitly identifies as the essence of modernity.
Accordingly, our project attempts to work through the development of Modernity, as Heidegger understands it, on the basis of what we call a “mathematical dialectic.“ The basis of our analysis is that Heidegger’s understanding of Modernity, both on its own terms and in the context of his theory of history [Seinsgeschichte], is best understood in terms of the interaction between two essential, “mathematical” characteristics, namely, self-grounding and homogeneity. This project first investigates the mathematical qualities of these components of Modernity individually, and then attempts to trace the historical and philosophical development of Modernity on the basis of the interaction between these two components—an interaction that is, we argue, itself regulated by the structure of the mathematical, according to Heidegger’s understanding of the term.
The project undertaken here intends not only to serve as an interpretive, scholarly function of elucidating Heidegger’s understanding of Modernity, but also to advance the larger aim of defending the prescience, structural coherence, and relevance of Heidegger’s diagnosis of Modernity as such.
Item Open Access Materia Mentis: How the Brain Sculpts the Mind(2019) Gessell, BryceThe principal problem of cognitive neuroscience is to draw relations between mental processes, constructs, and concepts, on the one hand, and neural processes, structures, and concepts, on the other. The philosophical issues animating this problem are deep, and transcend such things as the nature of explanation or mechanism.
In a series of essays, this dissertation cuts straight to these deeper issues. I defend a group of positions characterized by an appreciation for the many different perspectives we can take on human action and psychology. I first argue that, though indeterministic models are essential in neurobiology, we cannot infer that the brain therefore behaves indeterministically. In a second essay, I analyze the concept of a "functional unit" in neuroscience. I show that this concept hides an important ambiguity of meaning, which causes disagreements over the most basic entities we use to explain brain-based physiological and psychological behavior.
A third essay argues that the stages of memory formation, such as encoding and consolidation, cannot be cleanly separated from each other. Since this is true at both the psychological and neurobiological levels, I advocate for an instrumentalist interpretation of this aspect of memory research. Finally, in a fourth essay, I turn to the historical development of neuroscience in Emanuel Swedenborg, an early modern natural philosopher. Swedenborg's work showed remarkable foresight in creating conceptual resources for explaining the brain, but many non-scientific factors prevented his view from becoming widely known. I use the case of Swedenborg to draw morals about the proper approach to the history and philosophy of neuroscience.
Taken together, these essays lay the groundwork for an empirically-sensitive history and philosophy of neuroscience. Both are necessary to work through the maze of mind-brain relations.
Item Open Access Metamaterials and Topology Enabled Light-Matter Interactions and Photonic Devices(2020) Shalaev, MikhailEngineered materials currently play a central role in the fields of nanophotonics and nanoelectronics. Recent advances in nanofabrication enabled exciting opportunities for light manipulation that were never possible before. Wherein this dissertation, I investigate different kinds of engineered optical materials, including metamaterials, metasurfaces and topological photonic crystals. First, I discuss my theoretical studies of the process of second harmonic generation in negative index metamaterials with optical vortex beams. The negative index of refraction enables a a novel regime of backward phase-matching, where the interacting waves energies propagate in opposite directions. I have demonstrated that the vortex beam launched from the positive linear material changes its helicity in the negative index metamaterial, while the generated second harmonic wave propagates backward with simultaneously doubled frequency, doubled optical angular momentum, and reversed rotation direction of the wavefront. The second part of my dissertation is devoted to investigation of all-dielectric metasurfaces for beam steering and beam shaping. Metasurfaces are two-dimensional versions of metamaterials that are easier to fabricate than their three-dimensional counterparts and that also enable low-loss operation due to their small optical thickness. Despite their subwavelength thicknesses, they enable full control on amplitude phase and polarization of light. In particular, I have experimentally demonstrated highly-efficient all- dielectric metasurface with full 0-to-2π phase control at near-infrared wavelengths that enable vortex beam converter and beam deflector with efficiencies of 45% and 36%, respectively. In the third part, I study topological photonic crystals. Topological photonics is posed to improve the efficiency of photonic devices by eliminating parasitic scattering losses due to so-called topological protection. Thus, these materials offers unprecedented opportunity to avoid the loss on structural imperfections and disorders, facilitating robust light propagation. Specifically, I demonstrate lossless (scattering-free) light propagation around sharp turns in photonic crystal slab with non-trivial topology. In addition, two tunability mechanisms of the photonic topological insulators enabled by electrically tunable liquid crystal properties and optically tunable free-carries excitation in semiconductor material. The dynamic control on topological edge states is demonstrated theoretically and experimentally for liquid crystal and free carrier excitation approaches, respectively. Finally, I investigate optical properties of topological photonic crystal ring resonators. I characterize the limitation of topological protection for the case of in-plane light scattering and demonstrate a sup- pression of out-of-plane scattering as compared to conventional hollow W1 photonic crystal ring resonator.
Item Open Access Mindcraft: a Dynamical Systems Theory of Cognition(2014) Barack, DavidThis dissertation develops a theory of cognition, driven by recent developments in the electrophysiological investigation of the neuronal mechanisms that support adaptive behavior. In the first chapter, I situate the theory in the conceptual landscape of the philosophy of mind, distinguishing componential from systemic dynamical theories of cognition. In the second chapter, I analyze two case studies from electrophysiological cognitive neuroscience, arguing that cognitive neuroscientists are beginning to uncover the dynamical components of cognition. Drawing on the recent literature on mechanisms and scientific explanation, I propose a revised definition of a mechanism that accommodates these dynamical mechanisms, as well as making room for their implementation by physical mechanisms. In the third chapter, I argue that the investigation of a particular class of intelligent behavior begins with the construction of a formal model of the processing problem for that behavior, where this model is distinct from the physical device and the functions performed by the device's components. In the third chapter, I argue that the component dynamical mechanisms of cognitive systems are distinct from though implemented by physical mechanisms. These dynamical mechanisms are described by sets of differential equations, possess a set of organized components and activities that execute the formal models of processing, and are implemented by the physical machinery of the cognitive system, such as the brain. After I argue that these multiple interacting dynamical mechanisms are the components of cognition, defending this componentiality claim against several objections, I define the implementation relation that holds between dynamical and physical mechanisms. I next discuss the grounds for inferring the existence of dynamical mechanisms that are type distinct from physical mechanisms, their implementing substrate. In the fourth chapter, I argue that these dynamical mechanisms are reused: they can execute different formal models and be implemented by different physical substrates. I define this concept of reuse, situating it in the debate on theories of reuse, and illustrate how dynamical mechanisms are reused in cognitive systems.
Item Open Access Peircean Naturalism(2013) Williams, Robert ANaturalism faces problems caused by a lack of agreement about whether there is or can be a meaningful and useful conception of naturalism as a general research position. Without a widely agreed upon account of what naturalism in general amounts to there is no clear and definitive way to adjudicate disputes as to what is consistent with naturalism; the absence of such an account also makes it impossible for specific projects in naturalistic inquiry to take guidance from naturalism in general. In the following, I develop a determinate account of naturalism in general, which I think could find acceptance among naturalists because it accounts for many of the features commonly associated with naturalism. To do this, I first lay out the problem to be solved, express its importance, and explain what a solution to the problem would involve. I then make appeal to an account of naturalism developed by Penelope Maddy and use this account to show that the published and unpublished work of Charles Sanders Peirce offers, prima facie, a more determinate account of naturalism than is commonly recognized and that goes beyond the account given by Maddy. With this Peircean account developed, I then measure it against the criteria I develop and conclude that a Pericean account of naturalism does promise to adjudicate various disputes in the naturalism literature and to offer guidance to the development and application of specific projects in naturalistic inquiry.
Item Open Access Social Thought and Social Change: Methodological Dilemmas at the Intersection of Science and Ethics(2010) English, William EdwardI argue that ethical convictions are crucial to the maintenance and transformation of social institutions. Moreover, since ethical convictions are sometimes corrigible and open to persuasive transformation, ethical persuasion can be a powerful source of social change. However, I observe that the dominant analytic techniques of the social sciences are ill equipped to understand the nature and import of ethical convictions, and even less well equipped to inform ethical persuasion. I argue this, in part, explains why social science research has often proved of little value in trying to address prominent social concerns.
This diagnosis raises a puzzle and a challenge. The puzzle is why some social scientists would wholly commit themselves to methods that cannot adequately deal with important dimensions of social structure. I show this is due to a misguided conception of science, one which seeks an "absolute perspective" that requires reducing or explaining away ethical convictions.
The challenge, once this vision of science is rejected in favor of a more pragmatic one, is 1) to understand the systematic limits of different methodological approaches and 2) to see how an account of ethics, rightly understood, can complement social scientific knowledge in service of better social outcomes.
I evaluate three dominant methodological approaches in the social sciences, namely, statistical modeling, formal modeling, and biological-behavioral research. Although all are useful within certain domains, I show that each has systematic limits relating to the dynamism of ethical convictions. I demonstrate how these methods can fail on their own terms and can blind researchers to important resources for social change, such as possibilities for persuasion.
Finally, I develop an account of the relationship between ethics, rationality, and persuasion drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. This account rejects prominent "scientific" attempts to explain ethical allegiances as biologically hardwired or structurally determined, and it further challenges accounts of ethical naturalism and pluralistic neutrality.
I conclude by illustrating the constructive role that ethical persuasion has played in a number of development projects, which help demonstrate my thesis that debates about visions of "the good" matter profoundly for human flourishing.
Item Open Access Speculative Physics: the Ontology of Theory and Experiment in High Energy Particle Physics and Science Fiction(2014) Lee, Clarissa Ai LingThe dissertation brings together approaches across the fields of physics, critical theory, literary studies, philosophy of physics, sociology of science, and history of science to synthesize a hybrid approach for instigating more rigorous and intense cross-disciplinary interrogations between the sciences and the humanities. I explore the concept of speculation in particle physics and science fiction to examine emergent critical approaches for working in the two areas of literature and physics (the latter through critical science studies), but with the expectation of contributing new insights to media theory, critical code studies, and also the science studies of science fiction.
There are two levels of conversations going on in the dissertation; at the first level, the discussion is centered on a critical historiography and philosophical implications of the discovery Higgs boson in relation to its position at the intersection of old (current) and the potential for new possibilities in quantum physics; I then position my findings on the Higgs boson in connection to the double-slit experiment that represents foundational inquiries into quantum physics, to demonstrate the bridge between fundamental physics and high energy particle physics. The conceptualization of the variants of the double-slit experiment informs the aforementioned critical comparisons. At the second level of the conversation, theories are produced from a close study of the physics objects as speculative engine for new knowledge generation that are then reconceptualized and re-articulated for extrapolation into the speculative ontology of hard science fiction, particularly the hard science fiction written with the double intent of speaking to the science while producing imaginative and socially conscious science through the literary affordances of science fiction. The works of science fiction examined here demonstrate the tension between the internal values of physics in the practice of theory and experiment and questions on ethics, culture, and morality.
Nevertheless, the dissertation hopes to show the beginnings of a possibility, through the contentious but generative space provided by speculative physics, to produce more cross-collaborative thinking between physics as represented by the hard sciences, and science fiction representing the objects of literary enterprise and creative evolution.
Item Open Access The Greater Complexity of Drosophila Mutants as Compared to the Wild Type: Part-type, Shape and Color Complexity Over Two Focal Levels(2011) Fleming, LeonoreThe Zero Force Evolutionary Law predicts an increase in complexity at all levels of biological hierarchy unless there are constraints or selective forces opposing that increase. I present the first test of this universal tendency by evaluating the complexity of Drosophila melanogaster mutants, which represent organisms that arise in a context where selective forces are greatly reduced. Complexity gains and losses were measured with respect to part types, shape and color over two independent focal levels. My results show, significantly, that D. melanogaster mutants are more complex than the wild type. I also find that among mutants, those that are weakly constrained are more complex with respect to part types, shape and color. These findings are the first step in testing whether the Zero Force Evolutionary Law is true, and provide the impetus for a larger research program devoted to understanding increases in complexity as the default expectation.
Item Open Access The Problem of Nothingness: Early Modern Literature, Science, and the Vacuum(2017) Aldousany, LaylaMy dissertation explores literature’s participation in these cross-disciplinary debates over nothingness; I argue that literary forms create the possibilities of scientific discourse later in the century. To fully understand the complex network of relationships that formed early modern science as well as, in consequence, our own experimental philosophy requires examining the challenges that literature issues to science. To demonstrate the mutually productive relationship between the literature and science of the period, my dissertation charts the seventeenth century's different literary conceptions of nothingness, and the contribution of writers such as John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish to these debates over both the nature of nothingness and, more broadly, how we come to know anything at all. Literary texts – in the form of sonnets, tragicomedies, and even proto-science fiction – produce knowledge in ways that anticipate and subtly revise scientific processes.
The first chapter, “Encompassing Nothingness in Donne’s Poetry” evaluates two of John Donne’s poems from Songs and Sonnets alongside the introduction of the symbol of zero into Western systems of calculation and the invention of the microscope. I argue for a re-reading of poems such as “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “The Flea” that accounts for their seemingly paradoxical representation of absence and presence by considering Donne’s thought in terms of mathematical developments as well as developing literary technologies. The culmination in the poem’s well-known image of the compass, drawing a circle centered on a point inscribes the Arabic symbol for zero; the poem thus participates in the broader project of transforming nothingness into an appropriate object for scientific inquiry. Donne’s poetry also anticipates scientific method by forming imagined communities of observers whom he addresses and leads through a process of witnessing nothingness, thus revealing its status as an object of scientific inquiry, and consequently, as something after all.
Chapter 2, “Playing at Nothing in The Winter’s Tale,” looks at the treatment of nothingness in this play as a model for literature’s production of experimental science in the seventeenth century. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’s solipsistic assurance of his wife’s infidelity and the infallibility of his own senses gives way to knowledge formed collectively by a performance that reforms and reconciles the community. This performance suggests that the community, rather than the solitary individual, is the basis for building knowledge. Through analyzing Leontes’s method of knowledge production versus the communal models that close the play, I argue that The Winter’s Tale preemptively figures the shift from a patronage-based court philosophy to an experimental philosophy. In doing so, The Winter’s Tale helps to revise the dominant narrative about when the idea of communal witnessing begins by emphasizing the importance of literary contributions to conceptualizing the history of science.
Chapter 3, “Experience in Paradise Lost” pays particular attention to the shift from observation to experience as represented in Milton’s poetry. Engaging with critical debates over Milton’s materialism, I read Milton’s epic as it rejects the idea of creation ex nihilo and instead focuses on creation out of Chaos. Just as Boyle justified his explorations into atomistic philosophy and rejected the idea of a universe created by random atomic interactions, Milton’s universe, too, is established and ordered by a divine Creator. Unlike Boyle, however, Milton rejects the experiment, which he identifies with a fallen world, in favor of experience – described in Paradise Lost as wisely used, individually mediated reason.
Chapter 4, “‘To Make Your World of Nothing’: Nothingness in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World” examines Cavendish’s 1666 utopian proto-science fiction romance in conjunction with Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia, a text that explores the minute worlds opened to human observation with the microscope’s invention. Cavendish’s text envisions a world-building that is entirely the result of individual human invention – in her words, one made of “Nothing but Wit.” Cavendish focuses on the imaginative possibilities opened by a creation focused on seeming nothingness; her text fantasizes about a world in which this act of creation forces multiple boundaries to break down (human / animal, scientist / experiment). The Blazing World challenges the rules for scientific practice enshrined by the Royal Society by imagining experiments that create hybrids that challenge the seemingly objective stance of the scientific observer as well as the facts produced in the laboratory itself.
Item Open Access Understanding Cognition(2015) Steenbergen, Gordon J.Cognitive neuroscience is an interdisciplinary enterprise aimed at explaining cognition and behavior. It appears to be succeeding. What accounts for this apparent explanatory success? According to one prominent philosophical thesis, cognitive neuroscience explains by discovering and describing mechanisms. This "mechanist thesis" is open to at least two interpretations: a strong metaphysical thesis that Carl Craver and David Kaplan defend, and a weaker methodological thesis that William Bechtel defends. I argue that the metaphysical thesis is false and that the methodological thesis is too weak to account for the explanatory promise of cognitive neuroscience. My argument draws support from a representative example of research in this field, namely, the neuroscience of decision-making. The example shows that cognitive neuroscience explains in a variety of ways and that the discovery of mechanisms functions primarily as a way of marshaling evidence in support of the models of cognition that are its principle unit of explanatory significance.
The inadequacy of the mechanist program is symptomatic of an implausible but prominent view of scientific understanding. On this view, scientific understanding consists in an accurate and complete description of certain "objective" explanatory relations, that is, relations that hold independently of facts about human psychology. I trace this view to Carl Hempel's logical empiricist reconceptualization of scientific understanding, which then gets extended in Wesley Salmon's causal-mechanistic approach. I argue that the twin objectivist ideals of accuracy and completeness are neither ends we actually value nor ends we ought to value where scientific understanding is concerned.
The case against objectivism motivates psychologism about understanding, the view that understanding depends on human psychology. I propose and defend a normative psychologistic framework for investigating the nature of understanding in the mind sciences along three empirically-informed dimensions: 1) What are the ends of understanding? 2) What is the nature of the cognitive strategy that we deploy to achieve those ends; and 3) Under what conditions is our deployment of this strategy effective toward achieving those ends? To articulate and defend this view, I build on the work of Elliot Sober to develop a taxonomy of psychologisms about understanding. Epistemological psychologism, a species of naturalism, is the view that justifying claims about understanding requires appealing to what scientists actually do when they seek understanding. Metaphysical psychologism is the view that the truth-makers for claims about understanding include facts about human psychology. I defend both views against objections.
Item Open Access Variance, Selection and Evolutionary Explanation(2012) Fleming, LeonoreThis dissertation presents some of the first work written and published on the Zero Force Evolutionary Law (McShea and Brandon 2010). It is a collection of four philosophy of biology papers, which together, illustrate the importance of the Zero Force Evolutionary Law (ZFEL) spanning evolutionary studies. In particular, this dissertation includes issues in the history of philosophy of science (chapter 1), group formation and network theory (chapter 2), biological hierarchy and the major transitions in evolution (chapter 3), and the Price equation and quantifying evolutionary change (chapter 4). While these four chapters may differ in focus, they make the same general claim: evolutionary methods and explanations are improved when the underlying tendency of biological systems is characterized correctly as exhibiting increasing variance.