Bayesian epistemology provides a promising framework for a theory of epistemic rationality. But the way in which this framework has been built upon thus far yields an unfortunately mechanical picture of rationality, on which rational agents are mere data crunchers who receive evidential input and spit out numeric credal output. This picture is rightly criticized, most prominently by Bas van Fraassen, for being too narrow and restrictive and thus failing to account for certain features which rationality plausibly has, such as a degree of permissiveness, and for certain unconventional rational phenomena, such as conversions. Unfortunately, van Fraassen’s apt criticism of mechanistic rationality overshoots its mark in seeking to topple the entire Bayesian framework. Bayesian epistemology suffers a guilt by association with the robotic picture. This dissertation aims to restore Bayesianism from the mechanistic but often implicit assumptions which corrode it, and to rebuild, from the Bayesian foundation, an alternative picture of rationality as a property of sentient agents who are capable of understanding and mentally engaging with the objects of their credences. Along the way I account for some basic Bayesian objects such as credence and evidential input. I also accord a central role to the ability of representational experiences, largely sidelined in many Bayesian discussions, to give rise to surprising evidence. On these building blocks I develop theory of rationality, Expansive Bayesianism, which evades the criticisms launched at the robotic picture and shows that Bayesianism itself is a fruitful and powerful framework for a theory of rationality.

Orientador: Sandra Regina Teodoro Gatti / Banca: Sandra Regina Teodoro Gatti / Banca: Roberto Nardi / Banca: Júlio Cesar Castilho Razera / Resumo: A aproximação de aspectos de História e a Filosofia da Ciência (HFC) ao ensino vêm sendo discutida como uma abordagem importante para a alfabetização científica, com potencial para proporcionar uma visão mais fundamentada sobre a Natureza da Ciência (NdC), desconstruindo a compreensão de um somatório de verdades absolutas, descobertas por grandes gênios isolados e livres de quaisquer influências. Dessa forma, tais reflexões poderiam possibilitar a humanização da Ciência, o desenvolvimento do pensamento crítico, além de melhorar a compreensão dos conteúdos e a formação do professor. Isto nos remete aos cursos de Licenciatura e às possibilidades formativas que estes vêm proporcionando em relação a esta temática. Assim, esta pesquisa buscou compreender qual o perfil formativo dos quatro cursos de Licenciatura em Química de uma universidade pública do Estado de São Paulo, no que tange a articulação da HFC com ensino. Partimos da análise dos Projetos Pedagógicos dos Cursos (PPCs) e dos planos de ensino das disciplinas específicas sobre HFC. Buscamos ainda investigar os docentes que ministram tal disciplina, a fim de entender como sua formação poderia influenciar em sua prática. Para tanto, realizamos primeiramente uma busca nos currículos Lattes, e posteriormente, uma entrevista semiestruturada, com o intuito de aprofundar as informações e entender como conduzem e organizam a disciplina. Utilizamos como metodologia de análise a Análise de Conteúdo (AC). Com base nas análises reali... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The oncoming of aspects of History and the Philosophy of Science (HPS) to teaching has been discussed as an important approach to scientific literacy, with potential to develop a more substantiated view on the Nature of Science (NoS) by deconstructing its comprehension as a sum of absolute truths, discovered by great isolated geniuses and free from all influences. In this way, such reflections could enable a humanization of science, a development of critical thinking, and an improvement in the understanding of contents and in the teacher formation. This brings us to the teacher education programs courses and the formation possibilities that these have been providing in relation to this theme. Therefore, this research sought to understand the formative profile of four teacher education programs courses in Chemistry of a public university in the State of São Paulo, regarding the articulation of HPS with teaching. We start from the analysis of the Courses' Pedagogical Projects (PPCs) and the teaching plans of the specific HPS disciplines. We also seek to investigate the professors who teach this subject in order to understand how their formation could influence their practice. Thereunto, we first realized a search in the Lattes curriculum, and then a semi-structured interview with them, in order to deepen the information and understand how they conducts and organizes the discipline. We used the Content Analysis (AC) as the methodology approach. Based on these performed analyzes,... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

Chor-yung Cheung. / Bibliography: leaves 97-101 / Thesis (M.Ph.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1986

This thesis examines various reductive case studies in thermal physics. In particular, I argue that according to my account of reduction-as-construction, there are two suc- cessful examples of reduction. Thermodynamics reduces to statistical mechanics, and statistical mechanics reduces to the underlying microdynamics - be they quantum or classical. The reduction of a given theory alters that theory's scope, that is: its domain of applicability. The scope of thermodynamics will be central to this thesis - and I will argue for a narrower scope than some authors. This thesis consists of four Chapters, together with an introduction and a conclusion. In Chapter 1, I discuss how different levels of description relate to one another. I argue that a higher-level of description is reduced to the lower level, if the higher-level quantities and their behaviour can be constructed or captured by the lower-level theory. I claim that 'functionalism' can be helpful in securing reductions. In this Chapter I also argue that the aim of reduction is to vindicate, not eliminate, the higher-level theory. In Chapter 2, I tackle the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics. I articulate the functional, or nomological, role of various thermodynamic quantities that are implicitly defined by the zeroth, first and second laws of thermodynamics: temperature, energy and entropy respectively. I then argue that there are quantities in statistical mechanics that realise these roles: though finding them sometimes requires us to focus on quantum, rather than classical, statistical mechanics. In Chapter 3, I consider the reductive relationship between statistical mechanics and the underlying microdynamics. I demonstrate how the irreversible equations of statistical mechanics can be constructed from the underlying microdynamics using what I label the 'Zwanzig-Zeh-Wallace' framework. Yet this framework uses a procedure called 'coarse-graining' which has been heavily criticised in the literature; so in this Chapter I offer a justification of coarse-graining. One upshot is that the time-asymmetry in statistical mechanics is weakly emergent. In Chapter 4, I consider a question about the domain of applicability of thermal physics. Namely: does it apply to self-gravitating systems, such as elliptical galaxies? Much controversy surrounds this question: some argue yes, others argue no. I deflate the dispute by claiming that thermodynamics does not apply, but statistical mechanics does. Thus, my delineation of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics earlier in this thesis not only makes headway with the question of reduction, but also sheds light on this dispute. I argue that this situation - statistical mechanics, but without thermodynamics - can be understood in terms of a central notion in thermal physics: the thermodynamic limit. But as I also discuss: justifying this idealisation has been philosophically controversial.

Social scientific measurement is much desired and much criticized. In this dissertation I evaluate one of the main approaches to social scientific measurement that has nevertheless been virtually ignored by philosophers - the psychometric approach. Psychometric measures are typically used to measure unobservable attributes such as intelligence and personality. They typically take the form of questionnaires or tests and are validated by statistical tests of properties such as reliability and model-fit. My thesis is two-fold. In the first, more critical part, I argue that psychometric instruments normally fail to fulfil plausible criteria for adequate measurement. To make this argument, I define and defend a conception of quantitative representation necessary for measurement. My definition is grounded in the Representational Theory of Measurement but avoids the main critiques this theory has faced. I then show that the typical psychometric process of measure validation fails to produce evidence of such quantitative representation. The upshot is that although a quantitative interpretation of psychometric data is common, it is largely unwarranted. In the second part, I argue that psychometric instruments are nonetheless apt for various other purposes. This argument hinges on a new outlook on how concepts should be formed for psychometric purposes. Philosophers have traditionally thought that concepts should cohere with intuitions and/or pick out so-called natural kinds, while many psychometricians argue that concepts should pick out real as opposed to constructed attributes. I argue that, when it comes to social scientific measurement, it is much more important to focus on the usefulness of the concept, where usefulness can take on different meanings in different contexts. Building on the defended outlook on concept formation, I show what useful functions psychometric instruments can serve even when they fail at quantitative representation.

In this dissertation I argue that artworks that mimic scientific experiments can transform our philosophical understanding of scientific experiment itself. The collection of artworks that form the basis of my case studies includes imaginary scientific instruments, responsive sound environments, genetic portraits and live scientific demonstrations. Despite their heterogeneity, each of these artworks embodies a certain idea of experiment through its physical form. I read these artworks as material representations of the logics and practices described by philosophers and historians of scientific experimentation. Much as scientific models mediate between theories and the real world, artworks, in my analysis, mediate between the philosophical descriptions of science and its material instantiations. Like models, artworks are not merely illustrations of preconceived ideas but also have lives of their own. The very idea of using artworks to explore the nature of experiment has its roots in Kant's theory of exemplarity, developed in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Artworks are considered exemplary when they give sensuous embodiment to an idea that has not yet been fully formed in thought. To regard artworks as exemplary for the philosophy of science and technology is to regard them as generative of new ways of thinking about experimentation as a mode of material and conceptual practice that art and science share. My dissertation opens up a new archive for the philosophy of scientific experimentation in the form of what I call performative experiments--a term that I reserve for artworks that at once enact and query the logic of scientific experimentation. The dissertation is comprised of four chapters, each of which places one or more artworks into conversation with a set of philosophical questions that arise at the intersection of aesthetic theory, philosophy of science and philosophy of technology. Philosophers of technology have observed that tools, by their very nature, tend to recede into their context of use and in doing so become transparent and invisible to their users. My first chapter aims to recover the role of instruments in the epistemology of scientific experimentation through a close reading of Eve André Laramée's Apparatus for the Distillation of Vague Intuitions (1994-98), a glass sculpture installation that embeds within itself a virtual archeological record of continuity in instrumentation from alchemy to modern chemistry. The second chapter examines the methodology of so-called "natural experiments," in which investigators treat occurrent situations as if they were intentionally created for the purposes of controlled experimentation. Through my analyses of Natalie Jeremijenko's work Tree Logic (1999-present) and Stacey Levy's Seeing the Path of the Wind (1991), I argue that performative experiments dramatize how we export habits of seeing and patterns of inference from the carefully shielded conditions of the laboratory to the unruly world outside its walls. My third chapter investigates the use of molecular genetics as a new medium of portraiture and shows how the specific aesthetic possibilities and constraints of this medium transform the genre of portraiture so as to capture changing conceptions of personal identity, kinship and subjective temporality in the genetic age. Finally, the fourth chapter explores the ethical, political and institutional limits governing the transformation of experiences into the basis of experimental knowledge as these limits become sites of contest in IRB# G10-02-066-01 (2010), an artwork qua social psychology experiment for the artist Jennifer Gradecki failed to win approval from her university's ethics review board. Drawing, in part, on the primary data of my own repeated trials as a subject in this illicit experiment, titled "Social Interaction as a Function of Voluntary Engagement With a Shock Machine," I reflect on how the epistemic and social value of experiences are mediated by the institutional context in which research is regulated and legitimated. Throughout the dissertation, I demonstrate that artworks transform material and epistemological practices derived from the sciences into formal devices for directing perceptual attention and imaginative reflection. When practices of experiment are used to organize aesthetic responses in the context of the art museum or gallery, they draw attention to aesthetic and phenomenological dimensions of scientific practice that tend to escape notice in the context of science itself, and therefore to remain under-theorized within the history and philosophy of science. The emerging genre of performative experiments opens up a site of critical self-reflexivity within the methods and material of scientific practice itself, a site in which it is possible both to explore the cultural significance of scientific knowledge and to critique the empirical methods that are used to produce the scientific image of the world. Performative experiments are exemplary, in this respect, of a new form of critical literacy that arises at once within the sciences and the arts.

Despite the fact that reputation is a feature of Plato’s work and context, scholars have scarcely addressed the place of reputation in Plato’s thought. Herein I ask: ‘what is reputation (doxa) for Plato?’ and provide an answer by turning to the political orders (politeiai) described in the Republic, Laws, and Menexenus. In Chapter 1 I demonstrate the horizontal relationships of mutual dependence between rulers and ruled in the politeia of the Republic. It is in the epistemic configuration of the ruled where the economy of reputation is sourced and distributed. I argue that, first, the text explicitly engages with and seeks to correct the common opinions about justice and its relationship to political power and, second, that the philosopher must care about how philosophy appears to the city at large. I end with a consideration of how the Republic attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of philosophy. The images of the cave, the ship, and the bride show how and why philosophy’s bad reputation is contingent rather than necessary. In Chapter 2 I establish the role of reputation in the circumstances described and enacted in the founding of Magnesia, the politeia of the Laws. Through its exhortation to the incoming Dorian colonists to pursue a reputation for virtue, the law code exercises normative force over the disposition of human nature to excessive self-love and also transforms the colonists into Magnesian citizens. The legislator, voiced by the Athenian Stranger who is the principal interlocutor in the dialogue, urges each individual to appear as they are, and reinvents the undesirable features of Dorian constitutions. If this politeia is to come about, its founder and interlocutor in the dialogue, Cleinias the Cnossian, must become a Magnesian; the Athenian must succeed in exhorting the ambivalent Cleinias to seek a good reputation among the future Magnesians. In Chapter 3 I turn to how Magnesia is maintained. This politeia suffers from, and has to cope with, the pathologies of agonism. It does so via the operation of the social mechanisms of praise and blame that the law code sets forth and the citizens act out. The institutional practices such as the daily athletic contests encourage Magnesians to become similar in judgment and, therefore, to correctly distribute political honors and offices. I go on to argue that the city’s foreign policy aims at peace and at deterring aggressors. Such a policy is conducive to a more stable interpolis environment, which, in turn, maintains Magnesia. In Chapter 4 I argue that the vision of the politeia found in the Menexenus is best understood as an intergenerational multitude. Reputation is key to reconstituting order in these intergenerational relationships. In a dialogue that contains a funeral oration written by Aspasia and delivered by Socrates to the young Menexenus, reputation is a defining characteristic of the politeia with the multitude being the source of reputational judgments. Reputation also operates remedially at a critical juncture in the life of the city. I show the explanatory power of these claims by considering Aspasia’s role in the dialogue. I propose the Socrates-Aspasia fusion, a device that is symbolic of the correct understanding of what constitutes a good reputation in a politeia: men and women, citizens and non-citizens, locals and foreigners. As a device, the fusion functions to block a reputation from accruing to the orator. This brings into focus the dialogue’s explicit argumentative target: the Athenian orator-general Pericles. According to Plato, reputation is a permanent source of instability for politeiai; yet, not only can this disruption be mitigated, but reputation also acts as a boon to political affairs. Reputation is a liminal space between the subjective and objective and as such is under the sway of the multitude. Therefore, reputation is both an explanatory and political concept. With an eye to future research, I conclude with a critical discussion of the findings of the dissertation.

Within and across all societies, some people live longer and healthier lives than others. Although many of us intuitively think of health as a very important good, general theories of justice have hitherto paid little attention to its distribution. This is a thesis about what we owe to one another, as a matter of justice, in view of our unequal levels of health. The first part of the thesis addresses the problem of social justice in health. I argue that the basic institutional framework of society must be arranged so as to ensure an egalitarian distribution of the 'social bases of health,' that is, the socioeconomic conditions that shape our opportunities for a healthy life. Inequalities in health, including those caused by differences in individual lifestyles, are only fair when people have been given fair opportunities. This egalitarian approach to the social bases of health must be complemented by a sufficientarian concern for meeting all basic health needs, regardless of whether these originate in unfair social arrangements. The second part of the thesis takes up the problem of global justice in health. Although I argue against the idea that domestic principles of justice can be simply replicated on a global scale, I emphasise the fact that there are a number of international institutions and practices that shape people's opportunities for health. One of these is the state system - the division of the world into sovereign states - which I argue grounds the idea of the human right to health. I also examine two more specific examples of global practices that contribute to global inequalities in health, namely global trade in tobacco and the global labour market for healthcare workers. Both of these, I suggest, must be restricted in light of their impact on health levels worldwide.

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This thesis calls into question a currently orthodox view of Ludwig Wittgenstein's post-Tractarian philosophy. This view is that the social and political implications of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations are conservative and relativist. That is, Wittgenstein's concepts such as 'forms of life', 'language-games' and 'rule-following' defend and promote: a rule-determined and context-determined rationality; or an incomparable community-determined human understanding; or a neutralist, nonrevisionary, private or uncritical social and political philosophy. / In order to challenge and correct this conventional understanding the thesis sets up as 'objects of comparison' a variety of very different examples of the use of Wittgenstein in social and political philosophy. These uses are neither relativist nor conservative and they situate understanding and critical reflection in the practices of comparison and dialogue. The examples of this 'comparative-dialogical' Wittgensteinian approach are found in the works of three contemporary philosophers: Thomas L. Kuhn, Quentin Skinner and Charles Taylor. / This study employs the technique of a survey rather than undertaking a uniquely textual analysis because it is less convincing to suggest that Wittgenstein's concepts might be used in these unfamiliar ways than to show that they have been put to these unfamiliar uses. Therefore I turn not to a Wittgensteinian ideal but to examples of the 'comparative-dialogical' uses of Wittgenstein. In so doing I am following Wittgenstein's insight in section 208 of the Philosophical Investigations: "I shall teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice. And when I do this, I do not communicate less to him than I know myself." Thus it will be in a survey of various uses and applications of Wittgenstein's concepts and techniques that I will show that I and others understand them.