RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter
Google+The Duhem-Quine thesis, when simplified, explains how a given set of facts can produce more than one apparently true conclusion: essentially, different background assumptions lead to different outcomes. A related concept is known as underdetermination: that a given set of evidence can be explained by more than one–potentially conflicting–theory. How does this impact the relationship between science and religion?
theory
David Noble on “The Religion of Technology”
In The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, David Noble investigates the Western relationship between religion and technology.
Stephen Turner describes “The Social Study of Science before Kuhn”
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions–in many ways established the modern field of science studies. Stephen Turner provides a brief, socioligist’s version of the lead-up to Kuhn’s seminal book.
Benefits of viewing the right to privacy as a property right
If a core reason that copyright has always been compatible with the First Amendment is that it is a property right, then perhaps a way out of the conflict between privacy and freedom of speech and the press is to conceive of privacy in the same way–as a property right. Certainly it is already on its way there, as the “right of publicity” in many jurisdictions already implicitly does so, since it provides control over unauthorized commercial use by others.
Privacy and the First Amendment: privacy as property?
In Copyright and the First Amendment: The Unexplored, Unbroken Historical Practice, Terry Hart does an excellent job of exploring why the First Amendment has never been held to interfere with the enforcement of copyright, including pre-publication injunctive relief.
On “The Role of Technology in Human Affairs”
In The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler discusses his vision of the role of technology in historical change. He rejects an overly deterministic vision of technology (which he connects with Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan), but also rejects a view of technology as immaterial to a society’s direction.
First remarks on G. Edward White’s The American Judicial Tradition
I’m reading G. Edward White’s The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges as part of my general background reading on American legal history. Lawrence Friedman may argue that “[t]here really isn’t a canon for legal history,” but I think White’s book at least comes close.
Legal reasoning by analogy
My VISU presentation on reasoning in analogy in Warren and Brandeis’ famous 1890 law review article on privacy.
Bayesian networks and criminal defense
I have begun to consider the utility of formal methods of evidential evidence mapping. Even without deep mathematical knowledge, the formulas are useful in any presentation of statistics in a courtroom, and can help avoid common reasoning fallacies (like the “prosecutor’s fallacy”).
Initial reflections on the nature of scientific evidence
For the last week I’ve been a part of the Vienna Institute Summer University (VISU) at the University of Vienna, at a two-week conference on “The Nature of Scientific Evidence.” The program brings together graduate students from a variety of disciplines from around the world to discuss science-related topics.
Cassirer and the Enlightenment
Cassirer’s work on the Enlightenment is quite unlike many of the other works of science studies I have worked on over the last couple of years.
Science and Sociability in Mary Terrall’s The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment
For the enlightened of the mid-eighteenth century, the most fundamental aspect of their enlightenment was “sociability,” according to Mary Terrall in The Man Who Flattened the Earth.
Thinking about theories of historiography
Recently, I’ve been struck by the sense that what seems to drive history as a profession is not specifically the investigation of new archives, new materials, new places, or new times, but rather simply the larger desire to always pursue what is new qua new.
Considering comparative approaches in legal histories
I have proposed comparative/transnational approaches between legal and societal understandings of privacy in the face of new technologies. Micol Siegel’s work suggests that I should, at the very least, consider my approach more critically.
Modern Islam and science: an article by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
In “Islam and Science,” an article written for the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Nasr attempts to give a broad overview of the relationship of Islam to modern science and technology. He makes some key points regarding to criticism of Western science from an Islamic point a view.
Popper, Kuhn, and Creationism
Since at least McLean v. Arkansas in 1981, Creationists — Christian fundamentalists who oppose evolution — have turned, intriguingly, to philosophy of science to try to justify the inclusion of Creationism alongside evolution in science classrooms.
