The given of achievement and the reluctance to assent: Argument and inquiry in the post-postmodern world

Changes in the social, political, and intellectual climate worldwide portend radical changes in how humans view themselves and their world. This essay argues that the twenty-first century will usher in apost-postmodern age. The new epoch will be one in which argument practices more closely resemble their modernist forbears. The given of achievement will overcome the postmodern reluctance to assent. Argument will be practiced against the backdrop of realist philosophical frameworks and will be viewed as contributing to the accretion of knowledge.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Speech Communication Association Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, November 1991.To assert that moral, aesthetic, and factual arguments are statistically derived, is not to argue that there is no such thing as absolute goodness, beauty, or truth. It is to declare that these ultimate values have little relevance in practical argument.- Daniel McDonald     

Theoretical Conundrum: The Politics and Science of Theorizing Authoritarian Cognition

The historical development of the four main theories which have attempted to explain the relationship between cognitive style and ideological content—i.e., authoritarianism, extremism theory, context theory, and value pluralism theory—is analyzed from a rhetorical perspective. The discussion focuses on the manner in which the tensions between theoretical universalism and political critique have been "resolved" by theorists working in different historico-political contexts. While both these scientific and political values have been of central concern in theorizing the link between cognitive style and content, they are deeply incompatible because it is not possible to establish a fixed relationship between a personality dimension and the changing beliefs associated with different ideologies across time and place. This has prompted theorists aiming for universalistic accounts to define ideological orientation in terms of psychological processes rather than content, which, in turn, has compromised the critical potential of their theory. The paper concludes that the historical development of the literature may be understood in terms of dilemmatic counter-themes which, under different political circumstances, have been resolved in novel ways.     

Scientific Discovery on Positive Data via Belief Revision

A model of inductive inquiry is defined within a first-order context. Intuitively, the model pictures inquiry as a game between Nature and a scientist. To begin the game, a nonlogical vocabulary is agreed upon by the two players along with a partition of a class of structures for that vocabulary. Next, Nature secretly chooses one structure (the real world) from some cell of the partition. She then presents the scientist with a sequence of atomic facts about the chosen structure. With each new datum the scientist announces a guess about the cell to which the chosen structure belongs. To succeed in his inquiry, the scientist's successive conjectures must be correct all but finitely often, that is, the conjectures must converge in the limit to the correct cell. A special kind of scientist selects his hypotheses on the basis of a belief revision operator. We show that reliance on belief revision allows scientists to solve a wide class of problems.     

The legal basis for the Danish committee on scientific dishonesty

The author, a High Court Judge, has chaired the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) since its establishment in 1992. The Committee has worked in the health sector, but from 1999 the scope has been broadened to cover all fields of science. The article describes how the work is organised and the experiences gained. It is stressed, that the difficulty in connection with scientific dishonesty is, first and foremost, to organise a system suitable for investigating cases effectively, professionally, and with proper respect to the fundamental legal rights of the parties involved. The Committee has also spent much effort in determining what can be termed scientific dishonesty and what falls outside this category but which may, nevertheless, be characterised as breaching of good scientific practice. It is emphasised that these rules are not arbitrarily established by the Committee, but formulated in accordance with norms general accepted by opinion leaders in the scientific community. An carlier version of this paper was presented at a symposium, Scientific Misconduct. An International Perspective, organised by The Medical University of Warsaw, 16 November, 1998. The article is based on more comprehensive articles by the same author in DCSD’s Annual Reports for 1993 and 1995.     

Philosophy for Children and the Reconstruction of Philosophy

In this paper I trace the dialogical and narrative dimensions of the philosophical tradition and explore how they are reconfigured in the notion of community of philosophical inquiry (CPI), the mainstay of the collection of novels and discussion plans known as Philosophy for Children. After considering the ontology and epistemology of dialogue, I argue that narrative has replaced exposition in our understanding of philosophical discourse and that CPI represents a narrative context in which truth comes to represent the best story, in a discursive location in which there are always multiple stories. Finally, I raise the issue of children's philosophical voice. Can children philosophize, and if they can, do they do so in a voice different from adults'? If so, what are the distinctive features of that voice? I assert that it is children's historical marginalization in the Western construction of rationality that now – as that rationality undergoes its crisis – makes of them, like women and other “natives,” privileged strangers to the tradition, who are, through CPI, enabled to enter it through dialogue and narrative.     

Religion and Science in America: Struggling for Coherence

James Gilbert has provided fascinating and valuable historical sketches of the interactions of science and religion in American culture in this century, especially those taking place between 1945 and 1962. Yet, taken together, it is unclear what conclusion is to be drawn from these interactions. Ambiguity about the variety of forms of the science-and-religion relationship and about the referent of the term religion make the task of apprehending a coherent pattern among these sketches very difficult.     

Empathy and evaluation: Understanding the private meanings of behavior

This paper makes three points. First, empathy cannot be considered an epistemic basis for qualitative research and evaluation. Second, it is, however, a valuable method for understanding the private meanings of words and deeds. Third, this method is not completely reliable for purposes of what Popper called refutation, but is useful in what he dubbed scientific conjecture or the generation of theory. Basic researchers will need to take the necessary steps to subject empathetic hunches to critical examination. However, owing to the exigencies of action settings and decision-making, disciplined conjectures are sometimes the most that evaluators can hope to record.An earlier version of this paper was printed in the Proceedings of the Far Western Philosophy of Education Society, 1989. This version is published with permission of the Far Western Philosophy of Education society. The author is grateful for helpful comments and critisism made by members of the California Association for Philosophy Education. Remaining errors, of course, are the authors responsibility alone.     

Valorisation de la recherche en santé humaine et protection des données à l’ère du numérique

Medical research collects a huge number of medical data sheltered in Data Centers. An European regulation rule (GDRP) or General Data Protection Regulation aims to give an ethic frame to protect personal data and delegate responsability to citizens.