In their recent paper “Telling Gender: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions” , the philosophers Quill Kukla and Mark Lance (well known in the philosophy of language as authors of the 2009 essential book Yo! And Lo! The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons ) embark on a journey into the heart of […]
One possible and relatively trivial explanation of the absence of the category of “social problem” in the list of topics that have deserved some interest in the social ontology literature, is that perhaps social problems are intuitively seen as being too far from the ‘ground’ or the ‘bottom’ of social reality. According to this hypothesis […]
The absence of ‘social problems’ as a distinct ontological category in the extensive literature on social ontology is a notable oversight. This one and the following entry aim to shed light on this absence and explore the interconnectedness of social problems with both the positive and normative aspects of social reality and thought. In doing […]
democracy There is a growing movement to democratize science, involving the public, often lacking traditional scientific credentials, in the research process. This inclusivity manifests in various forms, particularly involving the public in making value judgments that play a vital role in the scientific decision-making process. As demonstrated by philosophers and scholars of science, scientific inquiry […]
Public events In our series about theory and observation (as well as in the philosophical literature dealing with this question), the truth is that most of what we have said is more about theory than about observation (perhaps with the only exception of our third entry). Philosophers of science have devoted a lot of effort […]
nets One of the most interesting aspects of Joseph Sneed’s structuralist view of science is the one I mentioned in passing in my last entry: the fact that a scientific theory must not be understood as a mere combination or conjunction of different propositions (its “axioms”, plus the indefinite number of assertions they make about […]
As we mentioned in the second entry of this series, the distinction between ‘the observable’ and ‘the theoretical’ focused on the first of these two concepts, so that the notion of ‘theoretical’ was implicitly understood as meaning simply ‘non-observable’. This distinction was submitted to powerful criticisms since the end of the fifties, when it was […]
Though the persistent reference to “Athens and Jerusalem” captures the cliché that the modern Western way of thinking and of being comes basically from two main roots (Greek philosophy and Hebrew monotheism), the fact is that probably we owe much more to the Romans, the true creators of the civilization from which our kind of […]
In our trip through the philosophical discussion about the nature of observation in science, I propose to take a different route from the most classical ones, and probably a surprising one for most of you. Akerlof’s classic paper ‘The Market for Lemons’, one of the founding works of the Economics of Information, presented an idealised […]
In recent years, supporters of the theory of degrowth have found an ally in an imaginary “new economic theory” that has become very popular: the so-called Doughnut Economics , for the title of a book by the British economist Kate Raworth, who proposed the model in a 2012 article. Raworth is not really a degrowther […]