人类基因组图谱研究能给我们带来什么

人类基础组研究在过去１０年中取得了重要成果,推动了生命科学的迅猛发展。人类基因组研究给我们带来了什么？首先是带来了新的观念,促使人们从整体综合的认识论高度去认识生命现象的发生原理,其次,在方法论上,开创了以高通量、大规模为特点的研究方式。人类基因组研究将成为２１世纪科技发展的优先领域。     

Recognizing Racit Knowledge in Medical Epistemology

The evidence-based medicine movement advocates basing all medical decisions on certain types of quantitative research data and has stimulated protracted controversy and debate since its inception. Evidence-based medicine presupposes an inaccurate and deficient view of medical knowledge. Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge both explains this deficiency and suggests remedies for it. Polanyi shows how all explicit human knowledge depends on a wealth of tacit knowledge which accrues from experience and is essential for problem solving. Edmund Pellegrino’s classic treatment of clinical judgment is examined, and a Polanyian critique of this position demonstrates that tacit knowledge is necessary for understanding how clinical judgment and medical decisions involve persons. An adequate medical epistemology requires much more qualitative research relevant to the clinical encounter and medical decision making than is currently being done. This research is necessary for preventing an uncritical application of evidence-based medicine by health care managers that erodes good clinical practice. Polanyi’s epistemology shows the need for this work and provides the structural core for building an adequate and robust medical epistemology that moves beyond evidence-based medicine.An erratum to this article can be found at     

Intellectual Safety, Moral Atmosphere, and Epistemology in College Classrooms

Students report feeling safe to express and challenge their beliefs and assumptions in some classrooms and interactions but not in others. This paper proposes a definition of intellectual safety derived from student responses to their experience of safety or threat in college classrooms, and explores students' experience of intellectual safety in relation to epistemological development. Intellectual safety defined here has two components: epistemic fit or lack of fit between student and professor's epistemology, and moral climate. Students can be challenged in their world-views and feel either threatened, unsafe, and uncomfortable, or supported and safe despite possible discomfort. Experiencing an intellectually safe moral climate may create conditions and opportunities for epistemological reflection and change. Using concepts from moral theory, including moral type and moral perspectives of justice and care, I describe features of an intellectually safe moral climate during the cognitively and emotionally difficult time of epistemological development.     

从佛教量论看翻译的实质及类型划分--兼论翻译理论中的不可译性问题

本文首先从佛教量论的角度对翻译的实质做出界定,指出翻译的实质是一种为他(社会性)的比量活动。根据翻译为他比量的实质,可以引导出翻译的两种类型：比知翻译和喻知翻译。比知翻译是具有事先直接约定性的语言传递活动;喻知翻译是没有事先直接约定的语言传递活动。根据从佛教量论对翻译实质和类型的规定,本文分析了不可译性问题,揭示出不可译性在认识论上的误区,指出不可译性是不可知论或怀疑论在翻译领域的显现。     

Nancey Murphy's Work

Nancey Murphy has been influential in the religion-and-science field through her espousal of the work of Imre Lakatos, more recently developed into a three-tier approach to the joint epistemology of scientific and religious thought incorporating also the ideas of Hempel and MacIntyre. She has proposed a substantial influence of the radical reformed tradition on science and has demonstrated the nature of social influences on the form of Darwinism. She has developed important links between ethics and the science-theology debate and has examined in depth ideas associated with hierarchical structuring, supervenience, and the nature of the soul. Together these form a unique and sharply focused contribution to the understanding of the relation between science and religion.     

Plugging the Leaks in Neurath's Ship: A Defense of Naturalistic Epistemology

This paper examines the question whether foundational epistemology (“FE”) can be replaced by naturalized epistemology (“NE”). First, it argues that Quine's defense of NE is inadequate since it is only based on arguments showing the impossibility of the logical empiricist version of FE rather than on arguments for the impossibility of FE as such. Second, it proposes that a more promising argument for the impossibility of FE can be found in the Münchhausen-trilemma which aims at showing that ultimate foundations (and, hence, FE) are unattainable. However, Karl-Otto Apel has shown that this trilemma is unconclusive since it uncritically presupposes the premise that all argumentation is deductive in nature. Apel's argument implies that FE is possible if and only if it is possible to devise a non-deductive foundation (“NDF”). It is argued, however, that the possibility of NDF cannot be demonstrated. This leads to a situation called the Multatuli-dilemma: we cannot prove the possibility of ultimate foundations nor can we prove the impossibility of ultimate foundations. This dilemma shows that the discussion about the possibility of FE is pointless. Thus, it suggests that it is legitimate to replace FE by NE. Barry Stroud and Henri Lauener, however, argue that this replacement is not feasible since NE is not capable of refuting scepticism (Stroud) or justifying methodological rules (Lauener). But these objections are shown to be mistaken: First, epistemological scepticism is practically impossible and, hence, does not pose a serious threat to NE. Second, NE is capable of justifying methodological norms if and only if it makes use of so-called internal justifications. Thus, the final conclusion of this paper is that FE can be replaced by NE. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Why we Believe

The radical probabilist counsels the prudent never to put away uncertainty, and hence always to balance judgment with probabilities of various sizes. Against this counsel I shall advise in favor of the practice of full belief — at least for some occasions. This advice rests on the fact that it is sometimes in a person's interests to accept certain propositions as a means of bringing it about that others recognize oneself as having accepted those propositions. With the pragmatists, therefore, I shall reject the view that belief formation must in every instance be a truth-directed affair. Unlike the pragmatists, however, I shall conclude that the enterprise of belief formation is not directed exclusively, or even primarily, at attaining knowledge. In other words, pursuit of that which it profits to believe, on the one hand, and pursuit of knowledge on the other, are distinct enterprises, which overlap (when they do) only accidentally. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Face of Truth

I attempt to explain Plato's choice of dialogue through an analysis of what he regarded as the conditions of knowledge acquisition. I see the main contribution of the paper in exposing the way in which time and pain are, for Plato, conditions of knowledge acquisition. Plato endorsed the "learning through suffering," or pathei mathos , convention, central to Greek drama, and did so not through theory but through the praxis some of the dialogues employ. This addition of experiential components to the more cognitively oriented definitions of knowledge that Socrates uses complicates what these works may say about human knowledge. I analyze these tensions and the bearing they may have on the question of Plato's choice of dialogue, that is, on his rhetoric in practice. The requirements for actual persuasion, as Plato specifies them in the Seventh Letter, , are only partially met by the fictional scenes of argumentation and knowledge conveying that Plato presents. However, such scenes permit transcending some of the limitations of written, systematic, nonpersonal discourse. The presentation of such interactions to a real reader through dialogue turns into a mode of writing that is closer to meeting the demands of actual communication of knowledge – at least knowledge regarding what Plato envisaged as being the highest sort of epistemic communication     

Virtue Ethics, Theory, and Warrant

Are there good grounds for thinking that the moral values of action are to be derived from those of character? This ‘virtue ethical’ claim is sometimes thought of as a kind of normative ethical theory; sometimes as form of opposition to any such theory. However, the best case to be made for it supports neither of these claims. Rather, it leads us to a distinctive view in moral epistemology: the view that my warrant for a particular moral judgement derives from my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge. This view seems to confront a regress-problem. For the belief that I am a good moral judge is itself a particular moral judgement. So it seems that, on this view, I need to derive my warrant for believing that I am a good moral judge from my warrant for believing that I am a good judge of moral judges; and so on. I show how this worry can be met, and trace the implications of the resulting view for warranted moral judgement.     

Greatness and misery in the teaching of the psychology of learning

Overshadowed by more popular disciplines, the study of learning seems to have lost its prominent place in the undergraduate psychology curriculum. In the first part of this essay, we argue that one reason for this state of affairs is the current content of psychology of learning courses, namely, its disproportionate emphasis on facts, procedures, and everyday examples at the expense of functional and conceptual investigations. In the second part of the essay, we outline an alternative approach to the teaching of learning, one that emphasizes basic contents such as the conceptualization of learning as a biological adaptation or the study of temporal regulation, critical methodological issues such as the logic of experimental designs or the difficulties of measuring behavior, and broad epistemological problems such as the role of hypothetical constructs, the advantages of quantitative reasoning, or the origins of knowledge and its integration. By using learning as a means towards more fundamental ends, the splendor of the discipline and its prominent place in the undergraduate curriculum may be restored.