RELIGION AND FRANCIS BACON'S SCIENTIFIC UTOPIANISM

Francis Bacon often is depicted as a patriarch of modernity who promotes human rational action over faith in divine Providence and as a secular humanitarian who realized that improvement of the human condition depended on human action and not on God's saving acts in history. Bacon's New Atlantis is usually described as a “scientific utopia” because its ideal order, harmony, and prosperity are the result of the investigations of nature conducted by the members of Solomon's House. I challenge these characterizations by showing that Bacon's so‐called scientific utopianism is grounded in his religious convictions that his age was one of Providential intervention and that he was God's agent for an apocalyptic transformation of the human condition. I examine the centrality of these religious themes in two of his philosophical works, The Advancement of Learning and The Great Instauration, which are well known for setting out Bacon's critique of the state of learning and for presenting the principles of his epistemology. Analysis of The Advancement of Learning demonstrates Bacon's conviction that his reform of natural philosophy was part of a Providentially guided, twofold restoration of the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of God. Examination of The Great Instauration reveals that Bacon sees his age as one of apocalyptic transformation of the human condition that restores humanity to a prelapsarian state. Analysis of the New Atlantis shows that utopian perfection can be achieved only through a combination of right religion and the proper study of nature. Moreover, when the “scientific” work of Solomon's House is recontextualized within the religious themes of salvation and deliverance that permeate the New Atlantis, the full scope of Bacon's “scientific utopianism” can be seen, and this project is not the one usually portrayed in scholarly treatments. Bacon's program for rehabilitating humanity and its relation to nature is not a secular, scientific advance through which humanity gains dominion over nature and mastery of its own destiny but rather one guided by divine Providence and achieved through pious human effort.     

From Global Expressivism to Global Pragmatism

In the twentieth century, questions of meaning and representation played a central role in the development of pragmatism and analytic philosophy. Present‐day neopragmatism, such as Huw Price's “global expressivism,” is often framed in terms of a nonrepresentationalist theory of meaning. While some neopragmatists, such as Robert Brandom, advocate a more local approach, this article argues for taking Price's global expressivism to its next logical step: global pragmatism. Global pragmatism prioritizes the behavior‐guiding function of language and redefines representation in operational terms. This operational approach (“o‐representation”) stresses the action and conduct‐guiding role of language use, highlights the connection between meaning and action, and addresses issues facing Price's global expressivism.     

Sellars's Two Images as a Philosopher's Tool

The distinction between the manifest and the scientific image of man‐in‐the‐world is widely seen as crucial to Wilfrid Sellars's philosophical work. The present essay agrees with this view. It contends, however, that precisely because the distinction is important, we should not hurry to a quick and superficial understanding of it. The essay identifies several oversimplifications that can be found in the literature on the topic and argues that they are at least partly rooted in too rigid a view of the role that the two‐image distinction plays in Sellars's philosophy. It shows that this rigid approach is quite common in the secondary literature, either explicitly or by implication. It then presents a more cautious, flexible approach to the problem of the two images and explains why this approach is fruitful on the basis of textual evidence, along with the overall advantages of interpreting Sellars's thought as a whole.     

The Solubility of Salt: A Divine Action Account

In the burgeoning literature on dispositions, solubility is a standard example. In this paper we give a rigorous theistic divine action account of the simple mechanism of the dissolving of salt, NaCl, into the ions Na⁺ and Cl^?. We explore this reaction in terms of an alternative view of divine action, Divine Compositionalism, which holds that the functioning of every physical, chemical, and biological mechanism in the universe is a manifesting complex disposition, which is nothing other than ways God acts according to plan.     

The acquisition of scientific knowledge: the influence of methods of questioning and analysis on the interpretation of children's conceptions of the earth

Studies of children's knowledge of the Earth have led to very different conclusions: some appear to show that children construct their own, non‐scientific ‘theories’ (mental models) of the flat, hollow or dual Earth. Others indicate that many young children have some understanding of the spherical (scientific) Earth, and that their knowledge lacks the coherence of mental models. The reasons for these contrasting views were tested by interviewing French children (N = 178) aged 5–11 years and varying the different methods used in previous research, namely the types of questions (open and forced‐choice), the form of representation (two‐dimensional pictures and three‐dimensional models), and the method of analysis (the mental model theorists' coding scheme and a statistical test for associations using MANOVA). Forced‐choice questions resulted in higher proportions of scientific answers than open questions, and children appeared to have naïve mental models of the Earth only when the mental model theorists' coding scheme was used. These findings support the view that children tend to have ‘fragments’ of scientific knowledge, and that naïve mental models of the Earth are methodological artifacts. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Misconduct in science and the german law

In the past, only norms and rules developed for other types of illegal activities could be applied to misconduct in science in Germany. But only particularly blatant cases of misconduct can be dealt with efficiently in this way. Nowadays, a couple of very important funding agencies and research institutions have enacted special procedures that apply in cases of suspected scientific misconduct. A strongly decentralised system of dealing with misconduct in science is being established in Germany. An earlier 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 complex challenges of ethical choices by engineers in public service

This paper proposes that engineers in public service are confronted with unavoidable complexity in their ethical considerations. The complexity begins with interactions among venues of ethical choices. Engineers must make ethical choices simultaneously at the individual, professional, organizational and societal levels. These ethical domains often conflict. The complexity also stems from situations in which physical properties may remain stable, but important social, economic, institutional and political conditions can change substantially. The paper proposes that the reflective learning approach of pragmatism can help with these challenging situations. This approach depends upon employing Dewey’s five stage process of inquiry to engage the ethical complexity inherent in the practice of engineering in the public service. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 conference, Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology, Linking Workplace Ethics and Education, co-hosted by Gonzaga University and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 9–10 June 2005.     

The poehlman case: running away from the truth

Eric T. Poehlman, Ph.D., was an internationally recognized, tenured professor at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington when, in October 2000, a junior member of Poehlman’s laboratory became convinced that he had altered data from a study on aging volunteers from the Burlington area. This suspicion developed into one of the most significant cases of scientific misconduct in the history of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Research Integrity (ORI), launching a US Department of Justice (DOJ) civil and criminal fraud investigation and, eventually, to a much publicized guilty plea and felony conviction. In the end, Dr. Poehlman admitted to 54 findings of scientific misconduct made by the UVM and ORI, agreed to retract or correct ten of his publications and to exclude himself from federal procurement and nonprocurement transactions for life. The United States Government’s handling of this case was distinguished by a highly cooperative approach that integrated the resources of the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont (USAO) and both ORI and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in HHS in the common goal of prosecuting research fraud. The content of this article represents the personal views of the authors and does not express the opinion or policy of DHHS or its components. A paper on this topic was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005.     

From stratospheric ozone to climate change: Historical perspective on precaution and scientific responsibility

The issue of the impact of human activities on the stratospheric ozone layer emerged in the early 1970s. But international regulations to mitigate the most serious effects were not adopted until the mid-1980s. This case holds lessons for addressing more complex environmental problems. Concepts that should inform discussion include “latency,’ ‘counter-factual scenario based on the Precautionary Principle,’ ‘inter-generational burden sharing,’ and ‘estimating global costs under factual and counter-factual regulatory scenarios.’ Stringent regulations were adopted when large scientific uncertainty existed, and the environmental problem would have been prevented or more rapidly mitigated, at relatively modest incremental price, but for a time delay before more rigorous Precautionary measures were implemented. Will history repeat itself in the case of climate change?