Both group agents (for group agency theorists) and individual agents (for enactivists) are themselves constituted by agents. This raises a similar challenge for both group agency and enactivism, namely to explain the constitutive relationship between sub-agential agents and the agents themselves. In this paper, I propose an enactivist account of what constitutes collective action. I conclude that non-human processes—both natural and artificial—may be constitutive of group agents typically recognized as human. In particular, I argue that machine learning recommendation algorithms should (...) be recognized as constitutive of certain group agents on an enactivist account of what constitutes collective action. (shrink)

Although it has been shown that immersive virtual reality can be used to induce illusions of ownership over a virtual body , information on whether this changes implicit interpersonal attitudes is meager. Here we demonstrate that embodiment of light-skinned participants in a dark-skinned VB significantly reduced implicit racial bias against dark-skinned people, in contrast to embodiment in light-skinned, purple-skinned or with no VB. 60 females participated in this between-groups experiment, with a VB substituting their own, with full-body visuomotor synchrony, reflected (...) also in a virtual mirror. A racial Implicit Association Test was administered at least three days prior to the experiment, and immediately after the IVR exposure. The change from pre- to post-experience IAT scores suggests that the dark-skinned embodied condition decreased implicit racial bias more than the other conditions. Thus, embodiment may change negative interpersonal attitudes and thus represent a powerful tool for exploring such fundamental psychological and societal phenomena. (shrink)

Although scientists dating back to Darwin have noted the importance of the body in communicating emotion, current research on emotion communication tends to emphasize the face. In this article we review the evidence for bodily expressions of emotions—that is, the handful of emotions that are displayed and recognized from certain bodily behaviors (i.e., pride, joy, sadness, shame, embarrassment, anger, fear, and disgust). We also review the previously developed coding systems available for identifying emotions from bodily behaviors. Although no extant coding (...) system provides an exhaustive list of bodily behaviors known to communicate a panoply of emotions, our review provides the foundation for developing such a system. (shrink)

Paul Griffiths and John Matthewson argue that selected effects play the key role in determining whether a state is pathological. In response, it is argued that a selected effects account faces a number of difficulties in light of modern genomic research. Firstly, a modern history approach to selection is problematic as a basis for assigning function to human traits in light of the small population sizes in the hominin lineage, which imply that selection has played a limited role in shaping (...) these genomes in the evolutionarily recent past. Secondly, determining both the genetic basis of disease and selective histories of the various alleles involved may be experimentally intractable. Thirdly, the existence of “selected disorders” is well supported, and yet on the other hand many other common diseases may not reduce evolutionary fitness. In summary, the biological ends promoted by natural selection, as best modeled in recent research, do not adequately ground a concept of dysfunction that aligns well with the interests of human health. (shrink)

Much work in the philosophy of religion has been devoted to exploring the virtue of faith. Very little of it, however, has done so from the perspective of Christian worship and liturgical practice. In this essay, I explore the virtue of faith, articulated in a traditionally Catholic manner, as it is practiced, engaged, and deepened through participation in the Eucharist. I begin by emphasizing both the cognitive and the volitional dimensions of a robust conception of the virtue of faith and (...) then show how devout Eucharistic practice confirms and strengthens them, affording believers a unique opportunity to deepen their belief and concretely strengthen their trust in God. I conclude by noting how a Eucharistic approach to faith can avoid a common criticism—that faith is exceedingly passive—and also help us to understand why faith and religious practice can so easily become stagnant. (shrink)

La démarchandisation, ou la capacité à maintenir un niveau de vie raisonnable pour une personne incapable de participer au marché du travail, est l’objectif principal des prestations liées au handicap. Toutefois, peu de recherches ont été menées jusqu’à présent pour savoir si les dispositifs mis en œuvre atteignent cet objectif dans le monde réel. Cet article propose un retour socio-historique sur les dispositifs de prestations handicap et décrit les réformes entreprises, qui sont largement transnationales à l’ère post-industrielle. L’article évalue ensuite (...) la manière dont ces dispositifs démarchandisent en s’appuyant sur des données qui englobent neuf pays et deux systèmes de politiques en faveur des personnes handicapées, à partir de données tirées de l’enquête sur la santé, le vieillissement et les retraites en Europe. Il présente et analyse enfin des mesures visant à améliorer la démarchandisation induite par les dispositifs liés au handicap, tout en proposant un programme de recherche pour l’avenir. (shrink)

A number of thinkers have been wondering about the moral obligations humans have, or will have, to intelligent technologies. An underlying assumption is that “moral machines” are decades in the offing, and thus we have no pressing obligations now. But, in the context of technology, we are yet to consider that we might owe moral consideration to something that is not a member of the moral community but eventually will be as an outcome of human action. Do we have current (...) actual obligations to technologies that do not currently exist? If there are obligations to currently non-existing technologies, we must confront what might be called the Non-Identical Machines Problem. Can we harm or benefit an entity by making it one way rather than another? This paper presents the problem and argues that it is more challenging than the standard Non-Identity Problem. (shrink)

The former part of this paper attempted to show— 1. That in Anaxagoras' scheme of physics the following substances were elements: The animal substances ; The vegetable substances ; The so-called Opposites ; and 2. That there is no evidence that Anaxagoras asserted any substances to be homoeomerous, and that, even if he had done so, the word ‘homoeomerous’ does not bear the meanings often attached to it by those theories which assume he made the assertion. The meaning of is, (...) μοιομερς is, not ‘simple in substance,’ i.e. ‘elementary,’ but ‘simple in formation.’. (shrink)

A significant feature of the love–based immortality in Marcel‘s philosophy is its ontological and anthropological dimension, or the way that the structure itself of the human being suggests the real possibility of immortality. The task of this article is to explicate these conditions for the possibility of immortality. The first section begins with a reading of an Augustinian lack–based approach to the afterlife where the restlessness of the person orients her outside of herself in love. The second section develops this (...) movement of love through Marcel‘s characterization of love as gift, culminating in the act of self–sacrifice for the sake of the other in which the person exists not in herself but in the thou. This implies, as discussed in the third and final section, that through being for the other, there might be a shared eternity between self and thou, which together transgress the boundaries of death. (shrink)

Brought to you by: Crop X editors: Jonathan Alexander Perez, Harmony Smith, Corinne Tendorf, David Turturo, and Derek Rahn Williams. Faculty Advisor: David Turturo; Crop X team included: Chaimae Alehyane, Zachary S. Casey, Suzanna Brinez, Jacob Brown, Elizabeth George, Francisco Javier Muniz Ituarte, Brodey Myers. -/- Credits: Huckabee College of Architecture; Graphic Designers: Studio BLDG (Blossom Liu + Danny Gray); English Editor: Luke Studebaker; Spanish Translator: Jessie Forbes; Printer: Die Keure. Cover Photo: Derek Williams. -/- Generously supported by the (...) Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University. (shrink)

Although we are fairly well informed about the general organization and important events of the dramatic competitions in Athens, there remain significant gaps in our knowledge on many points of detail. In no place is this more true than with regard to the epinikian celebration honouring members of the victorious performance, about which scarcely any unambiguous testimony has come down to us. This study aims to provide new insights into the problem by demonstrating a connection between the iconography preserved in (...) several sculpted reliefs of the Roman period commonly referred to as Dionysos¿ visit to Ikarios and the representation of a celebration for poetic victory in Plato¿s Symposium. Central to the combined testimony of these sources is the ideal of Dionysos¿ epiphany to the poet in order to acknowledge and honour his victory in person. So identified as an element of victory celebration, related articulations of this imagined moment can then be detected in several additional representations on vases and in Aristophanic comedy, in both of which other independent elements likewise suggest the activation of an epinikian syntax. Practical matters about the celebration still elude us; what we gain, however, is a clearer sense of the religious ideals that were conveyed through these celebrations in connection with the worship of Dionysos, which formed a nucleus for the dramatic festivals. (shrink)

In numerous studies, experimental economists have documented the fact that people tend to propose that divisible goods be divided equally. It has often been proposed, most notably by the sociobiologists, that this tendency may have a biological basis, and might be the product of evolution and natural selection. ;My dissertation addresses methodological and philosophical problems that arise in the course of establishing this naturalistic claim. Specifically, the focus of this dissertation is on the project of using evolutionary game theory to (...) model the emergence of behavioral norms in a population. ;Chapter 1 briefly surveys the experimental economics literature that supports the existence of such behavioral propensities, and gives an overview of the dissertation. Chapter 2 introduces the fundamental concepts of game theory and evolutionary game theory. Chapter 3 argues that certain robustness failures may be overcome if group selection mechanisms are incorporated into the evolutionary models. Chapter 5 defends Peter Railton's causal theory of explanation, and argues that it best accommodates the dynamical models of evolutionary game theory. Chapter 6 addresses the question of whether a descriptive account of the origins of our moral intuitions is relevant to the normative project of identifying our moral obligations, and critiques arguments by Peter Singer and Peter Unger that our moral intuitions lack justification. (shrink)

This paper reports on a study of crowd-sourcing ‘study aid’ web platforms. Students are sharing completed academic coursework through a growing network of ‘study aid’ web platforms like CourseHero.com. These websites facilitate the crowd-sourced exchange of coursework, and effectively support plagiarism. However, virtually no data exists concerning the scope or extent of coursework being shared through these platforms. This paper reports on two experiments to monitor the frequency of coursework from a sample university uploaded onto CourseHero.com. Ultimately, both experiments failed (...) to produce a clear or meaningful measurement of coursework upload frequency. The apparently widespread use of these crowd-sourcing ‘study aid’ websites and the failure of these experiments demonstrates the need for further investigation into how much coursework is being shared through such platforms, how frequently it is shared, and what kind of coursework is being shared. Addressing these issues is an important step into measuring the impact of these wellsprings of academically dishonest behavior. (shrink)

A large body of research has indicated international students in the United States and abroad experience difficulties understanding what academic integrity is and how to avoid academic misconduct, 159–172 2011; Brown & Howell, 2001; Gullifer and Tyson Studies in Higher Education, 39, 1202-1218 2014). While most studies focus on academic misconduct and academic corruption in research ethics, 339-358 2014), this study analyzes the length, English-language readability, and translation of academic integrity policies of 453 four-year U.S. institutions of higher education. Findings (...) indicate average academic integrity policies are over 2000 words long, are written above the 16th-grade reading level, and are very rarely translated into a language other than English. In addition, no institutions published their academic integrity policies in full on their institutional international student website, possibly rendering the policy difficult to locate on the institution’s website for international students. Implications for research, policy, and practice are addressed. (shrink)

The famous EPR article of 1935 challenged the completeness of quantum mechanics and spurred decades of theoretical and experimental research into the foundations of quantum theory. A crowning achievement of this research is the demonstration that nature cannot in general consist in noncontextual pre-measurement properties that uniquely determine possible measurement outcomes, through experimental violations of Bell inequalities and Kochen-Specker theorems. In this article, I reconstruct an argument from Niels Bohr’s writings that the reality of the Einstein-Planck-de Broglie relations alone implies (...) that no such properties can exist for momentum and position measurements, show how this argument responds to the challenge of EPR on general physical grounds, and advance that this reconstruction shows that and how Bohr’s “complementarity” is a view of the objective content and logic of quantum theory. (shrink)

I want to begin by sharing an experience working alongside a team of scientists dedicated to studying coastal fog. Two years ago, experts in coastal ecology, meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, and geography recognized the need to initiate conversation between the diverse disciplines that investigate fog. Although fog had long received attention from myriad sciences, coastal fog was yet to receive the sustained investigation that these scientists believed it warranted. Coastal fog is a strong candidate for such investigation; not only is fog (...) implicated in a number of socially relevant processes, such as agriculture.. (shrink)

Perhaps the central question in action theory is this: what ingredient of bodily action is missing in mere behavior? But what is an analogous question for mental action? I ask this: what ingredient of active, goal-directed thought is missing in mind-wandering? My answer: attentional guidance. Attention is guided when you would feel pulled back from distractions. In contrast, mind-wandering drifts between topics unchecked. My unique starting point motivates new accounts of four central topics about mental action. First, its causal basis. (...) Mind-wandering is a case study that allows us to tease apart two causes of mental action––guidance and motivation. Second, its experiential character. Goals are rarely the objects of awareness; rather, goals are “phenomenological frames” that carve experience into felt distractions and relevant information. Third, its scope. Intentional mind-wandering is a limit case of action where one actively cultivates passivity. Fourth, my theory offers a novel response to mental action skeptics like Strawson. (shrink)

Causal models of agents have been used to analyse the safety aspects of machine learning systems. But identifying agents is non-trivial -- often the causal model is just assumed by the modeler without much justification -- and modelling failures can lead to mistakes in the safety analysis. This paper proposes the first formal causal definition of agents -- roughly that agents are systems that would adapt their policy if their actions influenced the world in a different way. From this we (...) derive the first causal discovery algorithm for discovering agents from empirical data, and give algorithms for translating between causal models and game-theoretic influence diagrams. We demonstrate our approach by resolving some previous confusions caused by incorrect causal modelling of agents. (shrink)

Many of us have encountered a version of what Zachary Horton calls the "cosmic zoom"--a visual journey through the many scales of the universe, from the microscopic to the cosmic. Most of our daily perception operates at a level of scale somewhere between that of quarks and galaxies, and it is this comfort with the immediately visible everyday world that the cosmic zoom unsettles. In Mediating Scale, Horton uses the history of the cosmic zoom to explore how that scale (...) itself has been constructed over the past seventy years. How has cosmic zoom media influenced scientific and popular understanding of the unseen world and how it may be known, accessed, and exploited? Horton insists that scale is the key to understanding and addressing major contemporary issues including climate change and big data, but people working on issues of scale in various disciplines often talk past each other. Horton starts by sketching four common ways of thinking about scale derived from cartography, physics, engineering/biology, and mathematics. He then shows how these concepts operate in various disciplines, explains why they don't fit together, and puts forth a new, transdisciplinary theory and vocabulary of scale, one that links the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences. In this ambitious work, scale becomes a foundation for rethinking the relationships between knowledge, mediation, and environment. (shrink)

In this Special Issue of Journal of Critical Realism on Normativity, Elder-Vass has provided a paper that in part responds to one that Chris Winship and I wrote together, which was presented at the...

Brian Skyrms has argued that the evolution of the social contract may be explained using the tools of evolutionary game theory. I show in the first half of this paper that the evolutionary game-theoretic models are often highly sensitive to the specific processes that they are intended to simulate. This sensitivity represents an important robustness failure that complicates Skyrms's project. But I go on to make the positive proposal that we may none the less obtain robust results by simulating the (...) population structures that existed among our evolutionary ancestors. It is by extending the evolutionary models in this way that we should pursue the project of explaining the evolution of the social contract. (shrink)

Doxastic normativism is the thesis that norms are constitutive of or essential to belief, such that no mental state not subject to those norms counts as a belief. A common normativist view is that belief is essentially governed by a norm of truth. According to Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi, truth norms for belief cannot be formulated without unpalatable consequences: they are either false or they impose unsatisfiable requirements on believers. I propose that we construe the fundamental norm of belief (...) as a knowledge norm, rather than a truth norm. I argue that a specific kind of knowledge norm—one that has a subject's obligation to believe that p depend on her being in a position to know that p—might avoid the well-known formulation problems with truth norms. (shrink)

Researchers developed and tested an online training module with both experienced public relations professionals and newcomers to the field with the hopes of helping them sharpen and refine their ethical decision-making skills. The study found that although most testers reported the Web site was difficult to navigate and/or found the ethical content to be complex, the majority believed their ethical decision-making abilities were improved.

This study tested four theoretical models of leadership with data from the ethnographic record. The first was a game-theoretical model of leadership in collective actions, in which followers prefer and reward a leader who monitors and sanctions free-riders as group size increases. The second was the dominance model, in which dominant leaders threaten followers with physical or social harm. The third, the prestige model, suggests leaders with valued skills and expertise are chosen by followers who strive to emulate them. The (...) fourth proposes that in small-scale, kin-based societies, men with high neural capital are best able to achieve and maintain positions of social influence (e.g., as headmen) and thereby often become polygynous and have more offspring than other men, which positively selects for greater neural capital. Using multiple search strategies we identified more than 1000 texts relevant to leadership in the Probability Sample of 60 cultures from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF). We operationalized the model with variables and then coded all retrieved text records on the presence or absence of evidence for each of these 24 variables. We found mixed support for the collective action model, broad support for components of the prestige leadership style and the importance of neural capital and polygyny among leaders, but more limited support for the dominance leadership style. We found little evidence, however, of emulation of, or prestige-biased learning toward, leaders. We found that improving collective actions, having expertise, providing counsel, and being respected, having high neural capital, and being polygynous are common properties of leaders, which warrants a synthesis of the collective action, prestige, and neural capital and reproductive skew models. We sketch one such synthesis involving high-quality decision-making and other computational services. (shrink)

In an anonymous referee report written in 1945, Church suggested a sweeping argument against verificiationism, the thesis that every truth is knowable. The argument, which was published with due acknowledgement by Fitch almost two decades later, has generated significant attention as well as some interesting successor arguments. In this paper, we present the most important episodes in this intellectual history using the logic that Church himself favoured, and we give reasons for thinking that the arguments are less than decisive. However, (...) we present some new arguments against verificationism that we believe to be dialectically effective. (shrink)

Theology and the University in Nineteenth-Century Germany examines the dual transformation of institutions and ideas that led to the emergence of theology as science, the paradigmatic project of modern theology associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher. Beginning with earlier educational reforms across central Europe and especially following the upheavals of the Napoleonic period, an impressive list of provocateurs, iconoclasts, and guardians of the old faith all confronted the nature of the university, the organization of knowledge, and the unity of theology's various parts, (...) quandaries which together bore the collective name of 'theological encyclopedia'. Schleiermacher's remarkably influential programme pioneered the structure and content of the theological curriculum and laid the groundwork for theology's historicization. Zachary Purvis offers a comprehensive investigation of Schleiermacher's programme through the era's two predominant schools: speculative theology and mediating theology. Purvis highlights that the endeavour ultimately collapsed in the context of Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic, beset by the rise of religious studies, radical disciplinary specialization, a crisis of historicism, and the attacks of dialectical theology. In short, the project represented university theology par excellence. Engaging in detail with these developments, Purvis weaves the story of modern university theology into the broader tapestry of German and European intellectual culture, with periodic comparisons to other national contexts. In doing so, he Purvis presents a substantially new way to understand the relationship between theology and the university, both in nineteenth-century Germany and, indeed, beyond. (shrink)

A semantic theory aims to make predictions that are accurate and comprehensive. Sometimes, though, a semantic theory falls short of this aim, and there is a mismatch between prediction and data. In such cases, defenders of the semantic theory often attempt to rescue it by appealing to Gricean pragmatics. The hope is that we can rescue the theory as long as we can use pragmatics to explain away its predictive failures. This pragmatic rescue strategy is one of the most popular (...) moves in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and formal semantics. In this paper I argue that this strategy fails whenever the predictive failures at issue can be recast in epistemological or metaphysical terms. This general “reformulation argument” undermines a wide variety of pragmatic rescue attempts. (shrink)

"Peck's approach is less to document the land than to experience herself as part of its living systems. Her exquisite photographs are the artist's attempt to share that process." --Tim McNulty.

It is tempting to think that a process of choosing a point at random from the surface of a sphere can be probabilistically symmetric, in the sense that any two regions of the sphere which differ by a rotation are equally likely to include the chosen point. Isaacs, Hájek, and Hawthorne (2022) argue from such symmetry principles and the mathematical paradoxes of measure to the existence of imprecise chances and the rationality of imprecise credences. Williamson (2007) has argued from a (...) related symmetry principle to the failure of probabilistic regularity. We contend that these arguments fail, because they rely on auxiliary assumptions about probability which are inconsistent with symmetry to begin with. We argue, moreover, that symmetry should be rejected in light of this inconsistency, and because it has implausible decision- theoretic implications. -/- The weaker principle of probabilistic invariance says that the probabilistic comparison of any two regions is unchanged by rotations of the sphere. This principle supports a more compelling argument for imprecise probability. We show, however, that invariance is incompatible with mundane judgments about what is probable. Ultimately, we find reason to be suspicious of the application of principles like symmetry and invariance to nonmeasurable regions. (shrink)

Oxford Scholarly Classics brings together a number of great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in a uniform series design, they will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Real causal systems are complicated. Despite this, causal learning research has traditionally emphasized how causal relations can be induced on the basis of idealized events, i.e. those that have been mapped to binary variables and abstracted from time. For example, participants may be asked to assess the efficacy of a headache-relief pill on the basis of multiple patients who take the pill (or not) and find their headache relieved (or not). In contrast, the current study examines learning via interactions with (...) continuous dynamic systems, systems that include continuous variables that interact over time (and that can be continuously observed in real time by the learner). To explore such systems, we develop a new framework that represents a causal system as a network of stationary Gauss--Markov (``\OU'') processes and show how such \textit{OU networks} can express complex dynamic phenomena such as feedback loops and oscillations. To assess adult's abilities to learn such systems, we conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to identify the causal relationships of a number of OU networks, potentially carrying out multiple, temporally-extended interventions. We compared their judgments to a normative model for learning OU networks as well as a range of alternative and heuristic learning models from the literature. We found that, although participants exhibited substantial learning of such systems, they committed certain systematic errors. These successes and failures were best accounted for by a model that describes people as focusing on pairs of variables, rather than evaluating the evidence with respect to the full space of possible structural models. We argue that our approach provides both a principled framework for exploring the space of dynamic learning environments as well as new algorithmic insights into how people interact successfully with a continuous causal world. (shrink)

The contours of sustainable systems are defined according to communities’ goals and values. As researchers shift from sustainability-in-the-abstract to sustainability-as-a-concrete-research-challenge, democratic deliberation is essential for ensuring that communities determine what systems ought to be sustained. Discourse analysis of dialogue with Michigan direct marketing farmers suggests eight sustainability values – economic efficiency, community connectedness, stewardship, justice, ecologism, self-reliance, preservationism and health – which informed the practices of these farmers. Whereas common heuristics of sustainability suggest values can be pursued harmoniously, we discuss (...) how this typology reflects the more intricate project of balancing values in tension with one another. (shrink)

The great number of contradictory statements which confront us when we examine the various explanations of Anaxagoras' philosophy make it more than usually important to decide what is to be admitted as first-hand evidence and what is not. I purpose, then, to begin by accepting the barest minimum of data, and I shall try to exclude any direct comments upon Anaxagoras' work by later writers. Sufficient justification for such a course may be found in the bewildering masses of confusion which (...) have gathered around his teaching. (shrink)

Motivated reasoning occurs when we reason differently about evidence that supports our prior beliefs than when it contradicts those beliefs. Adult participants (N = 377) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) system completed written responses critically evaluating strengths and weaknesses in a vignette on the topic of anthropogenic climate change (ACC). The vignette had two fictional scientists present prototypical arguments for and against anthropogenic climate change that were constructed with equally flawed and conflicting reasoning. The current study tested and found support (...) for three main hypotheses: cognitive style, personality, and ideology would predict both motivated reasoning and endorsement of human caused climate change; those who accept human-caused climate change will be less likely to engage in biased reasoning and more likely to engage in objective reasoning about climate change than those who deny human activity as a cause of climate change. (144 words). (shrink)

In the heart of southeast Texas, an industrial powerhouse often referred to as the 'Golden Triangle', the oil refineries and petrochemical plants stand as stalwart testaments to the region's economic evolution. Interestingly, before the discovery of oil at Spindletop, the lumber and cattle industries powered this region's economy. A profound shift occurred when the Lucas Gusher, a fountain of oil spurting thousands of feet into the air, struck the lands of Spindletop Hill on January 10, 1901. This remarkable discovery of (...) the Spindletop oilfield on a slat dome formation south of Beaumont, Texas, marked the birth of the modern petroleum industry and fundamentally transformed the region's geopolitical, economic, and cultural landscapes. People from all over the country relocated to Gladys City and Beaumont in search of work and new opportunities, creating a boomtown as the town's population swelled from 10,000 to 50,000. The newfound urbanization brought by the oil industry transformed the town and the surrounding areas, creating a ripple effect across the region that would be felt for generations to come. The surge in oil-driven economic activity transmuted the region into a vibrant nexus of commerce, with the oil industry emerging as a critical architect of growth and advancement. This newfound affluence incited by the petroleum sector ushered in an era of economic diversification, laying the groundwork for industrialization’s further evolution. The Spindletop Oil Fields not only underscored the United States’ ascent as the foremost petroleum-producing nation but also signaled the nation’s initiation into the Petroleum Age. It was Spindletop that solidified its position as America’s first significant oil field, becoming an enduring symbol of its industrial might. By 1985, over 153,000,000 barrels of oil had been produced and extracted from the Spindletop oil fields, underscoring the magnitude of this extraordinary resource. (shrink)

Social studies of interdisciplinary science investigate how scientific collaborations approach complex challenges that require multiple disciplinary perspectives. In order for collaborators to meet these complex challenges, interdisciplinary collaborations must develop and maintain integrative capacity, understood as the ability to anticipate and weigh tradeoffs in the employment of different disciplinary approaches. Here we provide an account of how one group of interdisciplinary fog scientists intentionally catalyzed integrative capacity. Through conversation, collaborators negotiated their commitments regarding the ontology of fog systems and the (...) methodologies appropriate to studying fog systems, thereby enhancing capabilities which we take to constitute integrative capacity. On the ontological front, collaborators negotiated their commitments by setting boundaries to and within the system, layering different subsystems, focusing on key intersections of these subsystems, and agreeing on goals that would direct further investigation. On the methodological front, collaborators sequenced various methods, anchored methods at different scales, validated one method with another, standardized the outputs of related methods, and coordinated methods to fit a common model. By observing the process and form of collaborator conversations, this case study demonstrates that social studies of science can bring into critical focus how interdisciplinary collaborators work toward an integrated conceptualization of study systems. (shrink)

The Isis bibliography of the history of science has been published continuously since the first issue of the journal in 1913. This essay examines how information practices used to produce the bibliography have shaped, and were shaped by, the evolving discipline of the history of science. We first focus on the intellectual endeavors of George Sarton, who used the bibliography to help define and create a new academic field: the history of science. Next, we outline the administrative struggles of the (...) History of Science Society (HSS) as it tried to continue the project after Sarton’s retirement. Finally, we examine the technological aspects of producing a bibliography by focusing on the transition from analog to digital technologies over the last fifty years. In this overview, we show the central place the Isis bibliography played in the HSS community and argue that information practices surrounding the bibliography are an underutilized resource for studying the history of the discipline. (shrink)

Assyriologists who have studied Mesopotamian commentary formation have drawn upon ideas from scholars of religion in treating the creation of a static canon at the end of the second millennium bce as a necessary precondition for the emergence of cuneiform commentaries. The present contribution argues against the idea that Mesopotamian commentaries emerged in response to a closed canon by marshaling evidence from Mesopotamian divinatory compositions, including the celestial-divinatory series Enūma Anu Enlil and its associated aḫû, or “extraneous” tradition, as well (...) as the extispical treatise Bārûtu. These compositions illustrate that commentaries could be written about texts that were still fluid and malleable in ancient Mesopotamia. Moreover, a brief look at the phenomenon of inner biblical exegesis in the Hebrew Bible supports the idea that texts need not be unchanging to be the subject of interpretation, whether in ancient Mesopotamia or elsewhere. In response to these conclusions, I outline an alternate theory for Mesopotamian commentary formation that eschews the importance of a closed canon and stresses instead ideas of scholarly bilingualism, divination, authority, and textual decorum in ancient Iraq. (shrink)

This paper presents a new system of logic, LF, that is intended to be used as the foundation of the formalization of science. That is, deductive validity according to LF is to be used as the criterion for assessing what follows from the verdicts, hypotheses, or conjectures of any science. In work currently in progress, we argue for the unique suitability of LF for the formalization of logic, mathematics, syntax, and semantics. The present document specifies the language and rules of (...) LF, lays out some notational conventions, and states some basic technical facts about the system. (shrink)