Let me leave aside for a moment our talk about scientists and papers, and bring up a topic that, at first sight, might seem totally unconnected: Ronald Coase’s economic theory about the firm and the allocation of property rights. As in the case of the problem we mentioned in our last entry (why scientists share […]
The allocation of merit to individual scientists is one of the crucial aspects of how scientific systems work. Publication of ‘papers’ in important journals, and, still most significantly, citation of those papers in the works of colleagues, is perhaps (with all its shortcomings ) the most determinant mechanism for recognising the value and capacity of […]
In 1951, the physicist Paul A.M. Dirac called for the re-introduction of the æther in an oft-quoted letter to Nature. His was an attempt to resuscitate an epistemic object that most scientists at the time, as much as today, judged to be dead and buried. By using the old-fashioned spelling, Dirac was making a statement […]
The problem of what is the relation between matter and mind, and more particularly, between the physical stuff of our brain, on the one hand, and our consciousness and their conscious, qualitative states (also known as ‘qualia’), certainly is one of the deepest and hardest questions in all philosophy. I have already written in Mapping […]
This article is not about supporting the use of animals for research or to justify the need of such models for the advance of our society (many others have addressed that already). This post is neither about the constant pressure that researchers feel from peers, funding bodies or institutions to do more and more. The […]
One of the most popular ideas within the new and fashionable transhumanism craze is that, in the future humans, will be able of reaching a kind of ‘immortality’ by decoding the information contained in your brain, ‘uploading’ it to some kind of memory device, and making it live on a computer (see, e.g., Seung 2012) […]
In science, for a phenomenon to be reliable, it needs to be validated by a certain statistical value, the p-value, which by giving an estimate of the probability that the result would be the product of chance, serves as a measure of the probability that a certain event happening is true. So far, the convention […]
DAVID HUME: You’re not going to believe me, Otto, but I have a new girlfriend. OTTO NEURATH: Com’on, Dave, at your age, and within this crappy retirement home in which we’re confined. HUME: Incredible or not, it’s a fact. She is a German existentialist philosopher, who was Heidegger’s affair a few months ago. NEURATH: Well […]
After centuries of debate, there is no agreement about whether ‘knowledge’ must be essentially conceived as a cognitive state of individual minds, or must be attributed to some collective entity, i.e., whether it’s me , or we , who ‘really’ knows. A promising analytical approach to this problem has emerged in recent years, which is […]
What does reason consist really in? What it is for? And why are humans, of all the millions of species having populated the earth, the only one that enjoys such a wonderful capacity? The French psychologist Hugo Mercier and anthropologist Dan Sperber (though in both cases the labels are poorly informative of the multifarious work […]