HPS 1702 Junior/Senior Seminar for HPS Majors
HPS 1703 Writing Workshop for HPS Majors
Spring term 2018
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.
Good history of science depends on the use of the best sources and identifying the appropriate context. Select some episode in history of science that interest you and identify:
a. A good source
b. A poor source
c. An appropriate context
d. An inappropriate context
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.
In some area of philosophy of science that interests you, identify:
a. a thesis of central importance
b. an argument that supports it.
Optional bonus question: 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. Can you identify this point in the area of philosophy of science that interests you?
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.
There are many ways that history of science and philosophy of science can be combined in HPS. Select some piece of HPS scholarship and identify how the "H" and the "P" are connected in it.
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.
Bad philosophy of science presents us with confused thinking. Sometimes the confusions are blamed on the supposed difficulty of the problem posed. Other times the confusions themselves are presented as deep truths that only someone of higher intellect could understand.
Good philosophy of science cuts through confusions and presents analyses that seem so clear and simple that you wonder how anyone could think anything else.
Drawing on your experience in philosophy of science, identify such an episode.
If you are finding it hard to locate an example, track down some "paradoxes." Sometimes they are just the result of muddled thinking that good philosophical analysis can clarify.
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.
What makes science distinctive is that we have strong evidence for its core statements, such as illustrated here. Describe some statement in science and the evidence that favors it.
Optional bonus question: Which relation of inductive support among those sketched here is illustrated by your example.
Alternative for skeptics: Describe some widely accepted statement in science and explain why you believe the evidence for it is poor.
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.
The inductive argument form "inference to the best explanation" is one of the most popular among the non-formal (e.g. non-probabilistic) accounts of inductive inference. Drawing on your knowledge of a science, describe an example of its use in 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.
John D. Norton, Spring 2018