December 15, 2010
by peter.taylor
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Moral philosophy has traditionally positioned itself at some distance from the problem of counteracting actually experienced injustice. (At least so it seemed to me in the mid-1990s when I wrote the unpublished essay from which these posts is drawn). “Compliance” … Continue reading
December 14, 2010
by peter.taylor
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Through her basic and applied research, sociologist Denise Lach illuminates a wide range of environment and resource issues (including water, forest, fish, and bioremediation), from an unusually rich combination of angles, with dissemination to a range of outlets and audiences … Continue reading
December 13, 2010
by peter.taylor
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Hull’s Science as a Process (U. Chicago, 1988) invited us to borrow a biological theory, natural selection, after philosophical streamlining, to analyze scientific activity and conceptual change. This ambitious synthetic work of the late David Hull, a philosopher of evolution … Continue reading
December 12, 2010
by peter.taylor
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Cultural anthropologists Schwarz and Thompson (1990, 4-6) use diagrams to illustrate four worldviews concerning nature and the effect society can have on it (Fig. 1). This classification and the cultural (“grid-group”) theory that underlies it have been widely invoked in … Continue reading
December 8, 2010
by peter.taylor
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Problem-Based Learning (PBL) begins from a Scenario in which the problems are not well defined*, Students brainstorm so as to identify a range of problems related to the scenario and choose which of these they want to investigate and report … Continue reading
December 1, 2010
by peter.taylor
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This post begins by categorizing into three levels the gender dimensions of social structuredness in relation to science and technology. (Equivalent levels can be articulated for differences that refer to race, ethnicity, or Euopean descent vs. other othernesses.) 1) Under-representation … Continue reading
November 30, 2010
by peter.taylor
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During the 1960s Bookchin (1962), Carson (1962), and Commoner (1963; 1971) linked ecology-as-social-action to criticisms of the dominant directions of scientific research. Social responsibility in science was promoted by the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, the Union of … Continue reading
November 28, 2010
by peter.taylor
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David Hounshell characterizes Akera’s book Calculating a Natural World well when he says, as quoted on the book’s cover, that it “takes many of the familiar developments in the early history of digital electronic computing and recasts them so as … Continue reading
November 27, 2010
by peter.taylor
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There has been a long history in social theory of discussion of how to relate social structure and human agency (Dawe 1976; Giddens 1981; Sewell 1992; Vogt 1960; see Taylor 1996 for bibliography in context of interpretation of science). Concepts … Continue reading
November 25, 2010
by peter.taylor
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In the late 1980s Roberto Mangabeira Unger laid out a “constructive social theory,” which centered on “institutional and imaginative frameworks of social life [that] supply the basis on which people define and reconcile interests, identify, and solve problems.” He went … Continue reading