Perspectives on Science articles

Recent articles from Perspectives on Science

Music and science during the scientific revolution (1).
March 22, 2001... Historically, music has been classified both as a field of natural philosophy and as a performing art. Those savants interested in music's association with natural phenomena offered elaborate schemes in order to account for its physical basis. After all, acoustics was to become a branch of...

Constructing objects and transforming experimental systems.
March 22, 2001... 1. Introduction Scientific practice has been approached from multiple theoretical perspectives. This paper will investigate the relevance of the concept of experimental system as a theoretical tool to analyse laboratory work. My aim is also to develop that concept further. I shall argue...

Kettlewell from an error statistician's point of view.(H.B.D. Kettlewell, investigator of the phenomenon of industrial melanism)
March 22, 2001... 1. Introduction Bayesian analyses dominate contemporary philosophy of scientific inference. Allan Franklin in particular has showcased how a Bayesian analysis can clarify the logic behind the variety of strategies high energy physicists have historically used to establish that the...

Error types.
March 22, 2001... Nothing's concluded until error's excluded. --Prospective Proverb 1. Introduction Error (1) is common in scientific practice (Collins and Pinch 1993; Darden 1998; Allchin 2000a). But pervasive error threatens neither the search for trustworthy knowledge nor the epistemic...

Some philosophical consequences of Wittgenstein's aeronautical research.
March 22, 2001... 4.014 A gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound waves, all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds between language and the world... 4.0141 There is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony...