BackgroundIn about one in 10,000 cases, a published article is retracted. This very often means that the results it reports are flawed. Several authors have voiced concerns about the presence of retracted research in the memory of science. In particular, a retracted result is propagated by citing it. In the published literature, many instances are given of retracted articles that are cited both before and after their retraction. Even worse is the possibility that these articles in turn are cited in (...) such a way that the retracted result is propagated further.MethodsWe have conducted a case study to find out how a retracted article is cited and whether retracted results are propagated through indirect citations. We have constructed the entire citation network for this case.ResultsWe show that directly citing articles is an important source of propagation of retracted research results. In contrast, in our case study, indirect citations do not contribute to the propagation of the retracted result.ConclusionsWhile admitting the limitations of a study involving a single case, we think there are reasons for the non-contribution of indirect citations that hold beyond our case study. (shrink)

What does a naturalistic epistemologist do? Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9531-7 Authors William F. Harms, Humanities and Social Sciences, Seattle Central Community College, 1701 Broadway, Seattle, WA 98122-9905, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Part II: Modeling Chapter 3: Single Populations Chapter 4: Multiple Populations Chapter 5: Information [ “The Use of Information Theory in Epistemology”, Philosophy of Science ...] Chapter 6: A two level model for Bacterial Epistemology Chapter 7: A three level model for Bumblebee Epistemology [ “Reliability and Novelty”.

Documento: La epiqueya de Aristóteles en tiempos de crisis económica.

Positieve uitlokking van ethisch hacken. Een onderzoek naar responsible-disclosurebeleid In this contribution, the Dutch government’s acceptance of ethical hacking, by implementing a policy of responsible disclosure, is considered to be a beneficent development. Ethical hacking contributes to cybersecurity and is intrinsically desirable. The term positive incitement is proposed to describe the relatively new phenomenon of encouraging ethical hacking. Positive incitement will be analysed by making a comparison to the Dutch toleration policy regarding soft drugs, and to incitement by law enforcement. (...) Positive incitement should not change into negative incitement, which would result in a serious breach of the rights of ethical hackers. Furthermore, it is argued that the intrinsic value of ethical hacking can justify searching for vulnerabilities in systems of organisations who do not approve of this in advance. (shrink)

Rudolf Harms entwickelt seine reich differenzierte Ästhetik des Films in Anlehnung an die Ästhetik seines Lehrers Johannes Volkelt und sucht deren auf Kant zurückgehende Polarität des Schönen und Erhabenen für das Verständnis des neuen Mediums fruchtbar zu machen. Doch sein systematisches Interesse richtet sich auf die Suggestionskraft, durch die sich der Film vor den traditionellen Künsten auszeichnet. Für Harms, der den Film mit Blick auf die photographische Wiedergabe als realistische Kunst einschätzt, ist der Film das Reich des Sichtbaren. Es gibt (...) für ihn keine Kunst, die so berufen wäre, das 'Gesicht der Dinge' darzustellen, wie der Film. Da dieser zu allererst eine Handlung in Bildern gibt, ist er zugleich das Märchenbuch des modernen Erwachsenen. Obwohl noch ausschließlich auf den Schwarzweißfilm und den Stummfilm beschränkt, bietet das Buch in seiner Konzentration auf die wahrnehmungsästhetische und die narrative Dimension des Mediums - auf die Wirkung von Handlung als Bewegung in sinnlicher Anschauung - Einsichten in seine konstitutiven Möglichkeiten, die sich bis heute als Anschlussfähig erweisen. (shrink)

Pour éclaircir problème de la science fondamentale, on doit s’assurer qu’il n’y a pas, dans le champ actuel de la science, de science spéciale qui puisse faire fonction, pour toutes les autres, de science fondamentale. Une vraie science fondamentale générale pourrait se développer à partir de la théorie actuelle des sciences, si cette théorie était méthodiquement construite. А côté, il у a une science fondamentale partielle qui consiste dans la pénétration réciproque des diverses sciences spéciales et de leur méthode. II (...) у a encore un aspect ontologique et un aspect pédagogique du problème. La valeur n’est pas une base pour la science fondamentale. (shrink)

Philosophers spend a lot of time worrying about rules. We worry about how one ought to live, about the rules of justification for beliefs and actions, about what it would be like if the rules of reason were rigorously followed, about what the rules are for scientific enquiry, about which rules govern the meaning of signs and the intentions of agents, and so on. Sometimes, we argue that there are no such rules as most of us want to believe there (...) are, rules which apply to all of us collectively and to each of us individually, which are beyond our ability to change, and whose violation is in some simple sense wrong. To this we often respond that without such rules we are all made somehow less, that our normative deliberations are a sham, or even that the whole business of living becomes somehow pointless. (shrink)

According to his own account, Russell was “led to” the Theory of Descriptions by “the desire to avoid Meinong’s unduly populous realm of being”. This “official view” has been subjected to severe criticism. However stimulating this criticism may be, it is too extreme and therefore not critical enough. It fails to fully acknowledge both the way it is itself opposed to Russell and the way Russell and Meinong were opposed to _their_ opponents. In order to avoid these failures, a more (...) “dialectical” kind of analysis will be applied. It leads to unravelling two confusions shared by the official and the unofficial views: the confusion between _conception_ and _adoption_ of the theory of descriptions and the confusion between _three varieties of Meinongianism_. By means of these distinctions both a significant kernel of truth contained in Russell’s account and the underlying motive for his distortion of the historical facts can be laid bare. (shrink)

Telenomic Agency: Towards a proper functions theory of normativity (pdf) is a recent paper on the biological basis of normativity. This paper attempts to show that the notion of biological function/malfunction has more to offer our understanding of genuine agency than is usually acknowledged. It is suggested that moral and rational normativity attach to signals in very specific biological regulatory systems, and that the complexity of these systems accounts for much of the phenomenological richness of agency, as well as showing (...) the error in standard counterexamples. If this is correct, it turns out that the incommensurability between "is" and "ought" may be due to the requirements of the systems within which descriptive and overtly normative language have their biologically normative roles, rather than to any incompleteness in naturalistic accounts. One consequence is that moral language can have objective (and naturalistically specifiable) truth conditions, without special moral facts and without reducibility to naturalistic description. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory offers the possibility of building an epistemology that requires neither a theory of truth nor a definition of knowledge, thus bypassing some of the more notable difficulties with standard approaches to epistemology. Following a critique of one of the most popular approaches to thinking about cultural evolution I argue for a frequentist approach to evolutionary epistemology, and that cultural transmission should be understood as coordinated phenotypic variability within groups of closely related organisms. I construct a formal system which (...) allows the analysis of the evolution of networks of multiple interacting populations. Of particular epistemological interest is the relationship between genetic evolution and the evolution of cultural entities. The information-theoretic notion of "mutual information" is employed to quantify the transfer of information from the environment as it determines genetic fitnesses into the distribution of acquired traits Two simple models are constructed and analyzed. A two-level model of the navigation of a colony of bacteria demonstrates how selection on inherited traits affects the acquisition of information on the level of transient behavioral traits. A three-level model of bumblebee foraging shows how information about the environment is caught up in distributions of acquired foraging preferences--a bee-analog of human cognitive states. The Appendix contains an analytic proof of information gain under selection. (shrink)