The Scientometric Bubble Considered Harmful

This article deals with a modern disease of academic science that consists of an enormous increase in the number of scientific publications without a corresponding advance of knowledge. Findings are sliced as thin as salami and submitted to different journals to produce more papers. If we consider academic papers as a kind of scientific ‘currency’ that is backed by gold bullion in the central bank of ‘true’ science, then we are witnessing an article-inflation phenomenon, a scientometric bubble that is most harmful for science and promotes an unethical and antiscientific culture among researchers. The main problem behind the scenes is that the impact factor is used as a proxy for quality. Therefore, not only for convenience, but also based on ethical principles of scientific research, we adhere to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment when it emphasizes “the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in funding, appointment and promotion considerations; and the need to assess research on its own merits rather on the journal in which the research is published”. Our message is mainly addressed to the funding agencies and universities that award tenures or grants and manage research programmes, especially in developing countries. The message is also addressed to well-established scientists who have the power to change things when they participate in committees for grants and jobs.     

Perception

Book Information Perception. Perception Barry Maund, Chesham : Acumen Publishing, 2003, 240, £12.95 (paper) By Barry Maund. Acumen Publishing. Chesham. Pp. 240. £12.95 (paper:),     

On Ignorance and Contradiction Considered as Truth-Values

A critical view of the alleged significance of Belnap four-valuedlogic for reasoning under inconsistent and incomplete informationis provided. The difficulty lies in the confusion between truth-valuesand information states, when reasoning about Boolean propositions.So our critique is along the lines of previous debates on therelevance of many-valued logics and especially of the extensionof the Boolean truth-tables to more than two values as a toolfor reasoning about uncertainty. The critique also questionsthe significance of partial logic. Received for publication 8 November 2007.     

Medicine and Music: Three Relations Considered

Two well-recognised, but inherently reductionist, relations between medicine and music are the attempted neuro-scientific understanding of responses to music and interest in music's contributions to clinical therapy. This paper proposes a third relation whereby music is seen as an organising metaphor for clinical medicine as a practice. Both music and clinical medicine affirm human well-being, and both do this inter alia through varieties of skilful, crafted yet spontaneous mutual engagement between a 'performer' and an 'audience'. I argue that this organising metaphor offers a corrective to the reductionist influences of the first two relations, illuminates a number of medicine's important features, and reaffirms the existential as being at the core of medicine's telos.     

Distance Perception

ABSTRACT— Distance perception seems to be an incredible achievement if it is construed as being based solely on static retinal images. Information provided by such images is sparse at best. On the other hand, when the perceptual context is taken to be one in which people are acting in natural environments, the informational bases for distance perception become abundant. There are, however, surprising consequences of studying people in action. Nonvisual factors, such as people's goals and physiological states, also influence their distance perceptions. Although the informational specification of distance becomes redundant when people are active, paradoxically, many distance-related actions sidestep the need to perceive distance at all.     

Perception and Belief

An attempt is made to pinpoint the way in which perception is related to belief. Although, for familiar reasons, it is not true to say that we necessarily believe in the existence of the objects we perceive, nor that they actually have their ostensible characteristics, it is argued that the relation between perception and belief is more than merely contingent
There are two main issues to address. the first is that 'collateral' beliefs may impede perceptual belief. It is argued that this still assigns an essential role to belief in perception, though the belief may be of an attenuated form. the second is Fred Dretske's claim that even attenuated belief may be entirely absent from perception. It is argued that (a) 'non-epistemic'perception can be understood only by employing the concept of 'epistemic'perception; (b) that the former can occur only partially—i.e., within perceptions that are otherwise epistemic; and (c) that by switching attention from the perception of objects to the Phenomenological tradition's concern with the perception of world, we can see that perception must be entirely permeated with 'doxastic'force.     

Perception in chess

This paper develops a technique for isolating and studying the perceptual structures that chess players perceive. Three chess players of varying strength — from master to novice — were confronted with two tasks: (1) A perception task, where the player reproduces a chess position in plain view, and (2) de Groot's (1965) short-term recall task, where the player reproduces a chess position after viewing it for 5 sec. The successive glances at the position in the perceptual task and long pauses in the memory task were used to segment the structures in the reconstruction protocol. The size and nature of these structures were then analyzed as a function of chess skill.     

Perception of illumination

Abstract.— Previous research on the perception of illumination has primarily been occupied with the apparent paradox that "we must know the object colour in order to utilize the reflected light as an index of illumination, while we must know the illumination in order to use the reflected light as an index of object colour". The present study shows this paradox to exist only as a long as the traditional one-dimensional conception of achromatic colours is maintained. Two experiments are reported. In Exp. 1 it is shown that by mere variation of the luminance difference of two adjacent areas, a consistent shift in colourlshadow discrimination is obtained; i.e. within a certain range of luminance differences the observer may find it difficult to decide whether the difference is one of colour (two fields of different greyness in common illumination) or one of illumination (two fields of equal greyness under different illumination), above this range the observer perceives the differences as one of illumination. Taking the bidimensionality of achromatic colours into account in Exp. 2, results are obtained which show the brightness (alternatively termed luminosity) relations of adjacent areas to be the critical factor for the perceptual shift.     

Perception and Representation

I oppose the popular view that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience consists in the subject's representing the (putative) perceived object as being so-and-so. The account of perceptual experience I favor instead is a version of the "Theory of Appearing" that takes it to be a matter of the perceived object's appearing to one as so-and-so, where this does not mean that the subject takes or believes it to be so-and-so. This plays no part in my criticisms of Representationalism. I mention it only to be up front as to where I stand. My criticism of the Representationalist position is in sections. (1) There is no sufficient reason for positing a representative function for perceptual experience. It doesn't seem on the face of it to be that, and nothing serves in place of such seeming. (2) Even if it did have such a function, it doesn't have the conceptual resources to represent a state of affairs. (3) Even if it did, it is not suited to represent, e.g., a physical property of color. (4) Finally, even if I am wrong about the first three points, it is still impossible for the phenomenal character of the perceptual experience to consist in it's representing what it does. My central argument for this central claim of the paper is that it is metaphysically, de re possible that one have a certain perceptual experience without it's presenting any state of affairs. And since all identities hold necessarily, this identity claim fails.     

Perception of gait

Our ability of perceive the identity and naturalness of a human gait is examined in a series of four experiments involving computer-animated stick figures. The results indicate that the perceived naturalness of a walking or running gait can be influenced by the motion of any limb segment, but the perceived identity of these gaits is primarily determined by the movements of the lower leg (i.e., the tibia). The results also demonstrate that a perceptually salient walking gait can be transformed into running (or vice versa) by adding or subtracting a constant value to the angle of the lower leg over the entire step cycle. The size of this constant value is affected by the shape of the lower leg angle function and the motion of other limb segments.     

Perception and tonus

Abstract.— A review is given of the achievements of more than one hundred years of research concerning the influence of muscular tonus on the perceptual phenomena related to human spatial orientation. The tonal conditions of both the extrinsic eye muscles and the complex system of skeletal muscles have been shown to have decisive influence on egocentric localization. The factual median is perceived as being displaced in the direction of the side of the body with greater tonus. This is the case whether the tonic asymmetry is experimentally induced or natural. Corresponding to this fact, a spot of light in the dark situated at the factual eye level will be perceived as being situated above the experienced eye level. The influence on egocentric localization exercised by prolonged fixation of greater or smaller parts of the muscular system (especially of the eye muscles) is pointed out. This fixation effect seems to be in accordance with conceiving the postural system of the body by analogy with a servo-mechanical system, the feed-back part of which is restrained.