The Pervasiveness of Motivated Reasoning By Dan Hicks This is part I of a three-part series. This series will be posted simultaneously on Je Fais, Donc Je Suis, my personal blog, as well as the Rotman Institute Blog. Social and political values predict your views on climate change: if you're an egalitarian-communitarian (think: liberal, on the political [...]
By Melissa JacquartThis post concludes our recent string on science and the public interest. The idea for this series was sparked by the Rotman Institute’s Science, Policy, and Philosophy Working Group reading Grischa Metlay’s 2006 paper, "Reconsidering Renormalization: Stability and Change in 20th-Century Views on University Patents”. The previous four blog posts in the series [...]
by Reuven Brandt Science is neither cheap nor easy. One tool used to incentivise investment of both money and effort into scientific research is patent law, which offers temporary monopolies as a reward for new marketable scientific developments. In theory, the profits to be made from patent protection drive innovation by rewarding individuals for turning [...]
By Jessey Wright The notion of public interest, while murky and hard to define, can be a useful tool for isolating the core issues at play in a policy debate. Appreciating what is meant by ‘the public interest’ requires identifying which ‘public’ is being served. The clearest approach is to identify what they mean by [...]
By Amy Wuest Grischa Metlay, in her 2006 paper "Reconsidering Renormalization: Stability and Change in 20th-Century Views on University Patents," traces conceptual shifts in the debates surrounding public policy from the 1940’s through the 1980’s. As the title implies, some things changed while others didn’t. She argues that the concept of “intellectual property” underwent [...]
By Dan Hicks [This is the first of a series of posts on science and the public interest, written by members of the Rotman Institute’s Science, Policy, and Philosophy Working Group.] In the wake of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, contemporary philosophers of science generally recognize that values play a role in [...]
Join us this January 24th, for the first talk of the new year at a Rotman special event. Stathis Psillos will revisit this controversy, analyse the wider context in which it took place, examine the role of history of science in the defence of a realist approach to science and draw some significant lessons for the [...]
By Wayne Myrvold In the lead-up to the release of the contribution of Working Group I (the Physical Science Basis) to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report (AR5), stories alleging that the state of climate science is in disarray are proliferating. If you read between the lines, there’s an air of desperation in these stories. If [...]
“In a modern world where we can travel the globe in hours, connect with one another from wherever we are, achieve remarkable advances in healthcare and physically explore our universe, it is easy to take science for granted,” said Carl Hoefer, the new Director of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy. “But it is essential that [...]
By Martin Vezér Since 2001, the Institute Vienna Circle (IVC), the University of Vienna, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research have held a summer university program focusing on topics in the philosophy of natural and social sciences. This past July, I attended the Vienna International Summer University (VISU)—a program that brought together an international group of professors [...]
