From creationism to economics : how far should analyses of pseudoscience extend?

Both the scientific and philosophical problems with classic pseudosciences such as astrology and creationism are well known, leading to institutions that are not structured to promote cognitive advancement. A focus on institutions, however, also encourages recognition of gray areas, such as parapsychology, which combines scientifically dubious claims with institutions that are comparable to most social sciences in their structure. Furthermore, institutional approaches to pseudoscience also raise questions about some academically mainstream fields such as economics. In such cases, pseudoscientific aspects of practice are harder to identify, highlighting the need to place analyses of pseudoscience in a wider context of institutional pathologies

Is There A Political Argument For Teaching Evolution?

This essay develops my keynote address on the topic of creationism and science education, delivered at the conference Religions, Science and Technology in Cultural Contexts: Dynamics of Change, NTNU, Trondheim (2012). Debates over evolution in science education take place in a political context where liberal and conservative visions about the purpose of education come into conflict. Comparing the history of creationist pressures on science education in the United States and Turkey highlights the broad contours of these competing visions. The current conservative ascendancy in both countries, however, makes it difficult to reach any consensus on the practical benefits of including evolution in mass science education. This paper is one of a collection that originated in the IAHR Special Conference “Religions, Science and Technology in Cultural Contexts:  Dynamics of Change”, held at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology on March 1–2, 2012. For an overall introduction see the article by Ulrika Mårtensson, also published here. &nbsp

Biology and ‘Created Nature’: Gender and the Body in Popular Islamic Literature from Modern Turkey and the West

A common theme in today\u27s popular Islamic literature is defending traditional gender roles against forces of change. When addressing audiences who are strongly influenced by Western modernity, such as in Turkey and some immigrant populations in the industrialized West, this literature often justifies its pronouncements by invoking the apparent authority of science, especially biology. Authors paint a sharp dichotomy between men and women in body, mind, behavior, and character, asserting that such differences are inherent and immutable. In assuming masculine biological superiority, such writings sometimes end up offering a quasi-Aristotelian notion of the body, echoing theories of anatomy and physiology dating back to the medical and biological treatises of ancient Greece. Casting women as universally predisposed, physically and psychologically, toward emotionality, weakness, domesticity, and motherhood, these authors define the nature of the body in such ways as to counter more liberal notions

Why "Intelligent Design" Is More Interesting Than Old-Fashioned Creationism

Taner Edis argumentuje, że choć teoria inteligentnego projektu w dużej mierze po prostu powtarza błędy dawno zdyskredytowanego tradycyjnego kreacjonizmu, część jej twierdzeń może mieć znaczenie dla rozwoju nauki. Edisowi chodzi o twierdzenia, dotyczące natury inteligencji i wykrywania projektu. Mimo iż jego zdaniem nie są one słuszne, zdanie sobie sprawy, dlaczego tak jest, może pomóc naukowcom w dostrzeżeniu, w jak wielkim stopniu współczesna nauka ma charakter interdyscyplinarny, a to mogłoby przyśpieszyć rozwiązanie jednego z najbardziej fundamentalnych problemów naukowych, jakim jest kwestia pochodzenia informacji.Author argues that even though intelligent design theory for the most part repeats common mistakes of long ago discredited traditional creationism, some of its claims can be significant for the advancement of science. He means claims concerning the nature of intelligence and detection of design. In spite of the fact that in his opinion these claims are incorrect, he points out that when scientists will realize why is that, it will help them to recognize the strongly interdisciplinary character of modern science. In consequence, it could bring the solution for one of the most fundamental scientific issues – the origin of information – more quickly

Resolving Goodman’s Paradox: How to Defuse Inductive Skepticism

Subjective Bayesian inference is unsuitable as an ideal for learning strategies to approximate, as the arbitrariness in prior probabilities makes claims to Bayesian learning too easily vulnerable to inductive skepticism. An objective Bayesian approach, which determines priors by maximizing information entropy, runs into insurmountable difficulties in conditions where no definite background theory is available. However, this lack of background knowledge makes the maximum entropy argument directly applicable to the process of drawing samples from a population. As a result, evidence can be seen not just as eliminating a number of incompatible hypotheses out of an infinity of possibilities, but as being representative of the true state of affairs. Hence inductive skepticism can be avoided, as demonstrated by a resolution of Goodman’s ‘grue ’ paradox. This leads to a clearer understanding of the vital role abductive processes and tools like simple generalization play in learning

Truth and consequences : when is it rational to accept falsehoods?

Judgments of the rationality of beliefs must take the costs of acquiring and possessing beliefs into consideration. In that case, certain false beliefs, especially those that are associated with the benefits of a cohesive community, can be seen to be useful for an agent and perhaps instrumentally rational to hold. A distinction should be made between excusable misbeliefs, which a rational agent should tolerate, and misbeliefs that are defensible in their own right because they confer benefits on the agent. Likely candidates for such misbeliefs are to be found in the realm of nationalism and religion, where the possession costs of true beliefs are high, and where collective beliefs in falsehoods may allow for a cohesive community. We discuss the paradoxes of reflective awareness involved in the idea of deliberately embracing falsehoods. More rigorous, fully reflective concepts of rationality would still disallow false beliefs, but such demanding versions of rationality would commit agents to pay large costs, thereby weakening the motivation for acquiring true beliefs

The end of science? : On human cognitive limitations and how to overcome them

What, if any, are the limits of human understanding? Epistemic pessimists, sobered by our humble evolutionary origins, have argued that some parts of the universe will forever remain beyond our ken. But what exactly does it mean to say that humans are 'cognitively closed' to some parts of the world, or that some problems will forever remain 'mysteries'? In this paper we develop a richer conceptual toolbox for thinking about different forms and varieties of cognitive limitation, which are often conflated by the so-called 'new mysterians'. We distinguish between representational access (the ability to develop accurate scientific representations of reality) and imaginative understanding (immediate, intuitive comprehension of those representations), as well as between different modalities (hard vs. soft) of cognitive limitation. Next, we look at tried-and-tested strategies for overcoming our innate cognitive limitations, drawing from the literature on distributed cognition and cognitive scaffolding'. This allows us to distinguish between the limits of bare brains vs. scaffolded brains. Most importantly, we argue that this panoply of mind-extension devices is combinatorial and open-ended. In the end, this allows us to turn the table on the mysterians: for every alleged 'mystery', they should demonstrate that no possible combination of mind extension devices will bring us any closer to a solution