Browsing by Author "Jutta Schickore"

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Conceptions of experimental control in 19th-century life sciences
(2018) Jutta Schickore; jschicko@indiana.edu.
This article presents a new framework for the analysis of experimental control. The framework highlights different functions for experimental controls in the realization of an experiment: experimental controls that serve as tests and experimental controls that serve as probes. The approach to experimental control proposed here can illuminate the constitutive role of controls in knowledge production, and it sheds new light on the notion of exploratory experimentation. It also clarifies what can and what cannot be expected from reviewers of scientific journal articles giving feedback on experimental controls.
“Control(led) experiments” in historical and philosophical perspective
(2014) Jutta Schickore; jschicko@indiana.edu; Martin Kusch
Facing Giere’s challenges to the History and Philosophy of Science
(2012) Samuel Schindler; samuel.schindler@css.au.dk; Jutta Schickore
Genres of Justification
(2007) Jutta Schickore; jschicko@indiana.edu
This article identifies a fundamental distinction in scientific practice: the mismatch between what scientists do and what they state they did when they communicate their findings in their publications. The insight that such a mismatch exists is not new. It was already implied in Hans Reichenbach’s distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification, and it is taken for granted across the board in philosophy of science and science studies. But while there is general agreement that the mismatch exists, the epistemological implications of that mismatch are not at all clear. Philosophers, historians, and sociologists of different stripes have expressed widely different views about how one should understand and interpret the relation between what scientists do and what they state they did. This article surveys a number of approaches to the mismatch. Based on this survey, I offer an assessment of the epistemological significance of the mismatch and identify the major meta?epistemological challenges that it poses for the analysis of scientific practice
Stimulus Error and the Red Herring of Introspection
(2014) Uljana Feest; feestphilos.uni-hannover.de; Jutta Schickore
The Early History of Chance in Evolution: Causal and Statistical in the 1890s
(2012) Charles H. Pence; charles@charlespence.net; Jutta Schickore
Work throughout the history and philosophy of biology frequently employs ‘chance’, ‘unpredictability’, ‘probability’, and many similar terms. One common way of understanding how these concepts were introduced in evolution focuses on two central issues: the first use of statistical methods in evolution (Galton), and the first use of the concept of “objective chance” in evolution (Wright). I argue that while this approach has merit, it fails to fully capture interesting philosophical reflections on the role of chance expounded by two of Galton's students, Karl Pearson and W.F.R. Weldon. Considering a question more familiar from contemporary philosophy of biology—the relationship between our statistical theories of evolution and the processes in the world those theories describe—is, I claim, a more fruitful way to approach both these two historical actors and the broader development of chance in evolution.
The nature and roles of methods accounts in experimental reports
(2012) Jutta Schickore; jschicko@indiana.edu; Friedrich Steinle
The Stimulus Error and Experimental Design: The Manipulation of Perceptual “Set”
(2014) Gary Hatfield; hatfield@sas.upenn.edu; Jutta Schickore
The Stimulus-Error, “Equivocal Correlation” and Perceptual Constancy
(2014) Mazviita Chirimuuta; mac289@pitt.edu; Jutta Schickore
Psychologists in the early years of the discipline were much concerned with the stimulus-error. Roughly, this is the problem encountered in introspective experiments when subjects are liable to frame their perceptual reports in terms of what they know of the stimulus, instead of just drawing on their perceptual experiences as they are supposedly felt. “Introspectionist” psychologist E. B. Titchener and his student E. G. Boring both argued in the early 20th century that the stimulus-error is a serious methodological pit-fall. While many of the theoretical suppositions motivating Titchener and Boring have been unfashionable since the rise of behaviourism, the stimulus-error brings our attention to one matter of perennial importance to psychophysics and the psychology of perception. This is the fact that subjects are liable to give different kinds of perceptual reports in response to the same stimulus. I discuss attempts to control for variable reports in recent experimental work on colour and lightness constancy, and the disputes that have arisen over which kinds of reports are legitimate. Some contemporary psychologists do warn us against a stimulus-error, even though they do not use this terminology. I argue that concern over the stimulus-error is diagnostic of psychologists' deep theoretical commitments, such as their conception of sensation, or their demarcation of perception from cognition. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this debate to current philosophy of perception.
Ways of Integrating History and Philosophy of Science
Theodore Arabatzis; Jutta Schickore; tarabatz@phs.uoa.gr
This special issue presents selected contributions to the conference “Integrated History and Philosophy of Science” (&HPS3) held at Indiana University in September 2010. The introduction revisits a previous special issue on History and Philosophy of Science, published in Perspectives on Science (2002), and reflects on the recent development of HPS as a field. Ten years ago, scholars expressed concern about the growing distance between mainstream history of science and mainstream philosophy of science. Today, we have good reason to be optimistic. The papers assembled in this special issue demonstrate that we now have a whole spectrum of combinations of historical, philosophical, and other perspectives to study science, ranging from augmenting historical studies by philosophical perspectives and vice versa to historicist reflection on methodological, epistemological, or scientific concepts and practices. This plurality of approaches to combining the historical and the philosophical perspectives on science is a hopeful sign that integrated HPS is here to stay.