HPS 1702 Junior/Senior Seminar for HPS Majors
HPS 1703 Writing Workshop for HPS Majors
Spring term 2014
Discussion and Reading Assignments
"Short Assignments"
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Policy on Late Submission of Research Assignments. Late submission of these assignments is strongly discouraged. The short assignments prepare you for discussion each week. Late submission defeats their purpose and also may give you the advantage of drawing on class discussion. As a result, a short assignment, if submitted late, can score at most 50% of the regular grade.
These are shorter assignments that are intended to prepare you for the material to be covered in discussed each. They require some reading and little research on your part.
See Schedule for deadlines.
Mature debates in philosophy of science are driven to points of intractability. Two or more considerations drive the discussion in opposite directions, so that further advances face significant obstacles. Identifying such a point is essential to someone wishing to advance the literature.
Drawing on your experience in philosophy of science, identify a point of intractability in philosophy of science. You may use examples already discussed in class, but, if you do, you must add something to the prior classroom discussion.
200 words. Submitted on paper at the start of class.
Popular ideas and even text books in science may be quite mistaken about what actually happened in some major episode in the history of science. Drawing on your experience in history of science, identify such an episode.
200 words. Submitted on paper at the start of class.
I have assigned my Einstein Companion chapter as background reading. John D. Norton, "Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and the Problems in the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies that Led him to it." Look at it for an extended example of how Einstein's work on special relativity is best located within then current work on electrodynamics. That is its most appropriate context. Trying to understand how it came about by locating it within philosophical analyses of time mislocates it and obscures its origins.
Drawing on your experience in history of science, describe an enumerative inductive inference that played a significant role in a science.
200 words. Submitted on paper at the start of class.
To firm up your notion of enumerative induction and why it is routinely regarded as problematic, read as much as you need of Sections 1 and 2 only of John D. Norton, A Survey of Inductive Generalization.
Drawing on your experience in history of science, describe a case in which reproducibility or replication of experiment (or its failure) played a significant role in a science.
200 words. Submitted on paper at the start of class.
Drawing on your experience in history of science, describe a case in which an analogy played a significant role in a science.
200 words. Submitted on paper at the start of class.
Drawing on your experience in history of science, describe a case in which considerations of simplicity played a significant role in a science.
200 words. Submitted on paper at the start of class.
Find someone who has sought to publish a paper in a peer reviewed journal in any scholarly area of the sciences or the humanities. Ask them to recount the experience and report it to the class. (NB First tier journals have 90% rejection rates, so you expect a tale of woe.) You may maintain the anonymity of your interview subject.
200 words. Submitted on paper at the start of class.
John D. Norton, Spring 2014