Faculty - History/Philosophy of Science

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    Indiana University in the Light of History
    (IU Alumni Association, 1995) Capshew, James H.
    Indiana University celebrates its 175tb anniversary in 1995. When it was founded in 1820, there were fewer than 65 institutions of higher education in America; now there are more than 2,000. As one of this country's oldest state universities, IU has grown from a tiny wilderness outpost to a major academic center. This growth echoes familiar themes in the history of American edu­cation.
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    Monism and Morphology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
    (2012) Gliboff, Sander
    Ernst Haeckel’s monistic worldview and his interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution worked together to help him rule out any role for divine providence or any non-material mind, spirit, will, or purpose in the organic world. In his account of 1866, the impersonal, unpredictable, and purposeless external environment was what drove evolutionary change. By around the turn of the twentieth century, however, new theories of evolution, heredity, and embryology were challenging Haeckel’s, but Haeckel no longer responded with his earlier vigor. Younger monistically oriented evolutionary biologists had to take the lead in modernizing and defending the monistic interpretation and the external causes of evolution. Three of these younger biologists are discussed here: Haeckel’s student, the morphologist-turned-theoretician Richard Semon (1859–1918); Ludwig Plate (1862–1937), who took over Haeckel’s chair at the University of Jena and became an influential journal editor and commentator on new research on heredity and evolution; and Paul Kammerer (1880–1926), whose experimental evidence for the modifying power of the environment was hotly debated.
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    Breeding Better Peas, Pumpkins, and Peasants: The Practical Mendelism of Erich Tschermak
    (2015) Gliboff, Sander
    This paper follows the career of Erich Tschermak (1871–1962, aka Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg), one of the three “co-rediscoverers” of Mendel’s laws. It considers the practical ramifications, in agriculture, eugenics, and politics, of Tschermak’s reading of Mendel’s theory, and examines how Tschermak promoted his theories and practices—and himself—in the shifting contexts of the Austro-Hungaian Empire, Austrian First Republic, and Nazi period. Special attention is given to the hybridization work on peas that led him to Mendel’s paper, to the development of the “Tschermak Pumpkin” in the 1930s as an illustration of the practical side of his Mendelism, and to his wartime consultations with the German Minister of Agriculture on selecting and crossing strains of crops, animals, and even the peasants to go with them to planned settlements in occupied Poland and Ukraine.
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    The Spoiler: Paul Kammerer’s Fight for the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics
    (2002) Gliboff, Sander
    In scientific controversy, as in sports, there are winners and losers, but sometimes also spoilers—unheralded outsiders, who defy convention and change the terms, the style, and the outcome of the competition, even if they cannot win it themselves. In the fight over the inheritance of acquired characteristics in the 1910s and 1920s, Paul Kammerer was the spoiler. His dramatic experimental results and provocative arguments surprised the established stars of genetics and evolution and exposed their weaknesses, particularly their inability to agree on the nature and causes of variation or on a better explanation of Kammerer’s results than Kammerer’s own “Lamarckian” one.
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    The Mendelian and Non-Mendelian Origins of Genetics
    (2015) Gliboff, Sander
    Mendel's paper as part of a large body of nineteenth-century literature on practical plant- and animal breeding and experimental hybridization, which contained a confusing and contradictory assortment of observations on heredity, some in line with Mendel’s, but most not. After 1900, this literature was, in a sense, rediscovered along with Mendel, and it then played a dual role. For critics like W. F. R. Weldon, the non-Mendelian cases falsified Mendel’s laws. But for Mendel’s three co-rediscoverers, William Bateson, and others, they represented challenges to be met within a research program that would modify and extend Mendel’s system and establish a new scientific discipline.
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    The Many Sides of Gregor Mendel
    (2013) Gliboff, Sander
    Far from being designed only for the ages, Mendel’s celebrated experiments on hybridization in peas addressed the interests of contemporary breeders, plant hybridizers, Mendel’s teachers in Vienna, brothers at the monastery, and colleagues at the Brünn Society. It was the work of a man with many sides, who belonged to many communities.
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    Ascent, Descent, and Divergence
    (2014) Gliboff, Sander
    In their pathbreaking discussions of the human family tree in the 1860s and 1870s, Ernst Haeckel and Charles Darwin had to account for both the ascent of the species and its diversification into races. But what were the cause and the pattern of diversification, and when did it begin? Did we attain a common humanity first, which all the races still share? Or did we split up as apes and have to find our own separate and perhaps not equivalent ways to become human? Using texts and images from their principal works, this paper recovers Haeckel’s and Darwin’s views on these points, relates them to the monogenist-polygenist debate, and compares them to Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1864 attempt at a compromise.
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    Encounters with Genius Loci Herman Wells at/and/of lndiana University
    (Transaction Publishers, 2011) Capshew, James H.
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    A Conceptual and Computational Model of Moral Decision Making in Human and Artificial Agents
    (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010-05-13) Allen, Colin; Franklin, Stan; Wallach, Wendell
    Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in general, comprehensive models of human cognition. Such models aim to explain higher order cognitive faculties, such as deliberation and planning. Given a computational representation, the validity of these models can be tested in computer simulations such as software agents or embodied robots. The push to implement computational models of this kind has created the field of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. Moral decision making is arguably one of the most challenging tasks for computational approaches to higher order cognition. The need for increasingly autonomous artificial agents to factor moral considerations into their choices and actions has given rise to another new field of inquiry variously known as Machine Morality, Machine Ethics, Roboethics or Friendly AI. In this paper we discuss how LIDA, an AGI model of human cognition, can be adapted to model both affective and rational features of moral decision making. Using the LIDA model we will demonstrate how moral decisions can be made in many domains using the same mechanisms that enable general decision making. Comprehensive models of human cognition typically aim for compatibility with recent research in the cognitive and neural sciences. Global Workspace Theory (GWT), proposed by the neuropsychologist Bernard Baars (1988), is a highly regarded model of human cognition that is currently being computationally instantiated in several software implementations. LIDA (Franklin et al. 2005) is one such computational implementation. LIDA is both a set of computational tools and an underlying model of human cognition, which provides mechanisms that are capable of explaining how an agent’s selection of its next action arises from bottom-up collection of sensory data and top-down processes for making sense of its current situation. We will describe how the LIDA model helps integrate emotions into the human decision making process, and elucidate a process whereby an agent can work through an ethical problem to reach a solution that takes account of ethically relevant factors.
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    Mirror, Mirror in the Brain, What’s the Monkey Stand to Gain?
    (Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 2010-05-25) Allen, Colin
    Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called “mirror neurons” in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionality, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical work and perhaps a rejection of the standard philosophical view.
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    Animal Pain
    (Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 2004-11-04) Allen, Colin
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    How "weak" mindreaders inherited the earth
    (Cambridge University Press, 2009-04-23) Buckner, Cameron; Shriver, Adam; Crowley, Stephen; Allen, Colin
    Carruthers argues that an integrated faculty of metarepresentation evolved for mindreading and was later exapted for metacognition. A more consistent application of his approach would regard metarepresentation in mindreading with the same skeptical rigor, concluding that the “faculty” may have been entirely exapted. Given this result, the usefulness of Carruthers' line-drawing exercise is called into question.
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    Working the Crowd: Design principles and early lessons from the social-semantic web.
    (CEUR Workshop, 2009) Allen, Colin; Niepert, Mathias; Buckner, Cameron
    The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO)project is presented as one of the first social-semantic web endeavors which aims to bootstrap feedback from users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. Our approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming approaches to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. We describe the basic principles and initial experimental results of our system.