Nancy Cartwright began the second installment of her Rotman Lecture (‘Wiser use of Social Science’) with a discussion of the tragic death of 17 month old Peter Connelly, a case of child neglect and abuse that led to a widespread media controversy and to a public inquiry into Britain’s child services and social services programmes. [...]
An interview with Rotman Institute Visiting Fellow John Bolender John Bolender has been a Visiting Fellow in the Rotman Institute during the 2011-2012 academic year. He is a philosopher of mind whose primary interest is cognition. Specifically, he has inquired into how the computational core of language may crucially enter into uniquely human cognitive capacities, [...]
A while back in the article “Science, Values and Democracy” I argued that science alone cannot determine policy and that values and politics play an integral part of the decision making process. If you don’t want to take my word for it, here is an article by psychiatry profess or Keith Humphreys talking about values in [...]
Steve Sherwood, of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, provides a thoughtful, if schematic, discussion of historical scientific controversy, linking past polemics to present strife on climate change. Both Copernican heliocentrism and Einstein's theory of relativity met with opposition from critics that was as much moral-political [...]
Dr. Nancy Cartwright will be the third annual Lecturer in Philosophy & Science, giving two talks: one on Thursday, March 8th beginning at 5pm EST ("Evidence, Argument and Mixed Methods"), and another on Friday, March 9th at 3:30 pm EST ( "Wiser Use of Social Science, Wiser Wishes, Wiser Policies"). Both talks will be streNintendo [...]
The CBC reports on Nature's extraordinary editorial on the Harper government's control over scientific dissemination, policy which is starting to make headlines internationally as well. The full text of the editorial in Nature can be found here. The criticism is severe. As the articles notes, Researchers who once would have felt comfortable responding freely and [...]
I’ve been thinking more about the intersection of science and politics, somewhat unsure how to broach such a broad topic. The question I’m pondering is: why conflict? Why not smooth integration of scientific consensus into the decision-making process? Large, unwieldy question. Now the advice typically given in such a situation is to choose a specific [...]
Jesse Prinz (CUNY) asks "Why Are Men So Violent?" in Psychology Today, suggesting the answer is to be found in historical, and not biological, factors. (As a follow-up, I recommend Corey Robin's piece on arch-libertarian Ludwig von Mises' views of gender.) The journal Nature has a fascinating series of articles on the ethical and scientific [...]
Science, Values, and Democracy In the next few posts I would like to examine the role of science in determining public policy. Though I will be using current events as examples, the purpose is not to evaluate policies but to highlight the issues at play when thinking about the use of scientific evidence in democratic [...]