Table of Contents: - From the Desk of the President
Short Reads by Grads -
PSA Office Hour
- PSA24 Calls Open
- PSA24 Early Bird Sponsors
- PhilSci Archive - Top 5 Downloads
- PhilSci Archive Open Access Initiative
- Calendar of Events & Calls for Papers - Upcoming Dates
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From the Desk of the President |
Dear Friends and Colleagues As I approach the end of my first year as PSA President, I wanted to give you an update about a number of new and ongoing initiatives that the PSA has organized over the past twelve months.
The inaugural PSA Around the World 2023 took place via ZOOM on the 5 th, 11 th and 17 th November, with plenary sessions focussed on philosophy of science in East Asia and South East Asia and parallel sessions with many contributed papers open to all PSA members and on a great array of topics. It was heartening to see so many early career scholars taking part in this new initiative and the wide geographical spread they represented. Despite the challenge of the time zone differences in the online delivery, the engagement and the discussions both in the plenary panels and in the parallel sessions were excellent.
During the recent COVID pandemic, we all discovered the importance of online meetings as a way of staying together as a community. The PSA Around the World was an experiment prompted by conversations within the PSA Governing Board, the PSA Climate Task Group, and the PSA International Relations Committee. The experiment was successful in enabling a geographically and institutionally very diverse community to come together. It reminded us that international travel not only has a climate impact but poses also a significant financial barrier for many early career colleagues around the world and for their ability to join ongoing debates in the field.
Once again I am very grateful to our Executive Director, Max Cormendy and Assistant Director Rami Amin, the PSA International Relations Committee with Hasok Chang (Chair), Chuang Liu, Teru Miyake and all the colleagues in the PSA AW2023 Program Committee (Hasok Chang, Natalja Deng, Zhu Jing, Chuang Liu, Qiaoyin Lu, Teru Miyake, Yuko Murakami, Jun Otsuka, Karen Yan, Sang Wook Yi, Wang Wei, Billy Wheeler, Jiji Zhang) for the fantastic collective effort in the delivery of PSA Around the World 2023.
In other news, the Call for Symposia for the next Biennial Meeting of the PSA in New Orleans (14-17 November 2024) is now out (https://pheedloop.com/psa24/proposal/start/?call=CAL9HLTB3USLGLH), and will close on 15 January. The Call for Contributed Papers, Call for Posters, and Call for Cognate Societies session will follow in the early 2024 with announcements via the PSA newsletter and on the PSA website. As announced in my previous newsletter, many thanks to David Danks for acting as Chair of the PSA2024 Program Committee, Charbel El-Hani for acting as Chair of the Poster Committee and Mary Morgan as Chair of the Cognate Societies session.
Please do consider submitting to these calls. Preparations are well under way for various PSA events in New Orleans including the Public Forum (organised by President-Elect Craig Callender and chaired by Dan Burston) and the Presidential Plenary Symposium (organised by myself and chaired by Catherine Kendig). We very much hope to see you all in New Orleans next November.
Next, I wanted to pre-announce an upcoming webinar on the topic of How can philosophers of science contribute to science policy?. This will run on ZOOM as an in-conversation event with Professor Michael Weisberg (University of Pennsylvania) who has extensive experience of working with policy-makers in his role as senior negotiator at the United Nations Climate Conferences and as a contributing author to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, among others. We look forward to seeing many of you taking part to this webinar (details including time/date registration for ZOOM will follow in early January on the PSA website). We especially hope this webinar might be of interest to graduate students and early career scholars who might be considering career options in the world of science policy.
The PSA Office Hour initiative continues with a series of upcoming events on January 23 rd and 26 th 2023, which you can find here: https://philsci.org/psa_office_hour.php We invite all PSA members especially graduate students but also postdocs to join these office hours by registering through the link above. We are grateful to the Carla Fehr, Alison Wylie, Sabina Leonelli and Anya Plutynski for their generous time to run these office hours. And as always many thanks to Kerry McKenzie for organising the PSA office hour initiative.
As we approach the end of the year, I wish you, your families and friends a restful holiday break and my heartfelt wishes of a peaceful and happy New Year ahead for everyone, wherever you are. Michela Massimi (PSA President 2023-24) |
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The PSA is pleased to share its third installment of Short Reads by Grads. Matilde Carrera is a second year PhD student at Boston University, working under the supervision of Alisa Bokulich. Matilde is interested in epistemological and methodological questions about scientific practice and scientific knowledge production. She adopts an integrated History and Philosophy of Science approach to investigate classical topics, such as explanatory frameworks and modeling techniques, in the contexts of historical and biological sciences, especially human evolution and paleoanthropology. Her other projects involve research on pain measurements in medicine and the definitional issues concerning the concept of culture in cultural evolution. Matilde is also an active member of Alisa Bokulich's research group on the Philosophy of Geosciences.
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Review of Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break by Alfred Nordmann, Hans Radder and Gregor Schiemann (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011) By Matilde Carrera
Has the relationship between scientific research, society, and technology radically changed in the last decades? This is the core question that the essays collected in the edited volume by Alfred Nordmann, Hans Radder, and Gregor Schiemann explore. Those who endorse the epochal break thesis maintain that a new age of technoscience has come, in which the alliance between science and the values promoted by the Enlightenment has been severed. Scientific research is no longer informed by intellectual qualities, such as curiosity and desire for knowledge, but rather by the need to solve problems arising from our reliance on technology. Such radical reorientation of scientific practice has led to substituting a piecemeal approach driven by the need to manage socio-technological issues for a deeper, comprehensive understanding of the world - the hallmark of modern science (p. 2). Contrary to this view, many argue that science and technology have been entangled since the Modern Age. This robust, historically documentable relationship prevents from making any general claim about radical changes in scientific practice, undermining especially any argument that rests on an alleged dichotomy between pure and applied science, respectively understood as aiming at either representing nature or intervening in it.
The fourteen essays collected in this volume offer a stimulating variety of perspectives on the relationship between scientific practice, society, and technology. Their main achievement is to provide the reader with several, distinct methodological reflections on how to philosophically investigate such a complex topic, including whether there is a "vantage point of view" from which adjudicating the epochal break thesis (pp. 19-29, 54-65), what are the ontological and epistemological consequences of such claim (pp. 51-53), and how can they be established (pp. 201-205). As the editors highlight in the introduction, this is a debate about "facts and values" (p. 2), encouraging a reflective understanding of our normative idea of what science should be and whether the current scientific practice mirrors and promotes such understanding.
The volume, therefore, fits into a broader tradition of studies investigating scientific knowledge production in its social contexts, alongside works in the sociology of science, such as Nowotny, Scott, Gibbons (2001), who explore the relationships between academia and industry in recent times, and Latour (1993), who emphasizes the longstanding intertwinement among scientific research, technological advancement, and societal needs. Overall, by discussing the epochal break thesis, the volume encourages philosophers to broaden their understanding of science to those research areas - such as biomedical, engineering, and environmental sciences - in which different modes of inquiry besides theoretical explanations are at work, ranging from experimental intervention to data visualization, modeling, and computer simulation. This collection of essays thus manages to present a broad spectrum of approaches, leaving however the readers with the rather challenging task of making up their minds about how contemporary scientific research should be conceptualized.
Bibliography Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action; Hot to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge University Press.
Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. 2001. Rethinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, Mass.: Polity. |
The PSA would like to offer its graduate student membership the opportunity to interact with prominent members of our profession in a more controlled and accessible setting. To this end, the PSA is introducing the PSA Office Hour as a pilot project. Each month, for some months of the year, a philosophical theme will be chosen and two influential philosophers working within that theme will be made available, individually, to graduate students via Zoom through online sign-up sheet posted on the PSA member website. For more information, please visit https://www.philsci.org/psa_office_hour.php
Upcoming Office Hours - January 2024 Tuesday, January 23 - 12pm EST: Feminist Philosophy of Science
Carla Fehr (University of Waterloo) Alison Wylie (University of British Columbia) Friday, January 26 - 11am EST: Philosophy of Biology and Medicine Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter)
Anya Plutynski (Washington University in St. Louis) |
PSA24 Early Bird Sponsors |
The PSA is pleased to announce its first round of PSA24 sponsors for the upcoming biennial meeting in New Orleans: Emerald Sponsors: University of California Irvine, Logic & Philosophy of Science - Platinum Sponsors: Ann Johnson Institute
Gold Sponsors: Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Philosophy Arizona State University, Centre for Biology and Society Our sponsors help make the PSA biennial meeting possible. Thanks to them, not only are we able to have a high quality meeting but we are also able to keep conference registration more accessible for students. If you are interested in becoming a PSA24 sponsor, please reach out to director@philsci.org. |
PhilSci Archive - Top 5 Downloads |
PhilSci-Archive is the official preprint repository for the PSA and the best place to host your philosophy of science preprints. It offers a free, stable, and openly accessible archive for scholarly articles and monographs. With PhilSci-Archive, researchers can search the open-access repository and get curated alerts about new work delivered to their inboxes. Many journals encourage authors to post preprints on archives like the PhilSci-Archive in order to increase readership, and historical data suggests that posting to the archive increases a published paper's citation rates (see https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/20778/). Visit philsci-archive.pitt.edu today to create a free account and post your preprints.
The most downloaded preprints for the last 6 months of articless deposited in the previous 2 years are:
Avigad, Jeremy (2022) - What we talk about when we talk about mathematics
Villavicencio, Marcos (2020) - Four Examples of Pseudoscience
Zinkernagel, Henrik (2008) - Did time have a beginning?
Vickers, Peter John (2008) - Bohr's Theory of the Atom: Content, Closure and Consistency
van Dam, Suzanne (2012) - Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the Higgs mechanism |
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PhilSci Archive Open Access Initiative |
There is a growing number of open access monographs published in philosophy of science. To facilitate their preservation and contribute to publicize them, the Phil-Sci Archive has a section for depositing books that have been published by an academic imprint (subject to peer review). http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/books.html Authors can deposit the published version of their PDFs, provided that their Creative Commons publication license permits it - most CC licenses do. The submission procedure mirrors the procedure for depositing article preprints but requires the author to choose "Open Access book" as the item type. If you are negotiating a publishing contract for a monograph, you may consider asking the press for permission to post the accepted version on this repository. This would not need to amount to a full CC license but could be included as a subclause of your publishing contract. Here is a list of OA books already deposited at the Phi-Sci Archive. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/view/type/book.html In case you need further details, please contact us at: philsci-archive@mail.pitt.edu |
Calendar of Events & Calls for Papers - Upcoming Dates |
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