"As part of its spring open submission cycle, the John Templeton Foundation welcomes online funding inquiries in the areas of philosophy and theology. The submission window is February 1 to April 16, 2012. Proposed philosophical projects need not have religion or theology as a focus. To submit an online funding inquiry, please visit http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/our-grantmaking- process.
Please note that the Templeton Foundation does not normally provide dissertation fellowships through this open submission process. For more information on the kinds of projects that the Foundation can support, visit http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/core-funding-areas/ science-and-the-big-questions.
A list of Foundation grants in the areas of philosophy and theology can be found here: http://www.templeton.org/what-we-fund/grant-search/results/ taxonomy%3A5."
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Templeton Foundation Funding Opportunities
I've been asked to post the following announcement on behalf of the Templeton Foundation:
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Radical reform for peer review?
A recent piece by Scott Jaschik in “Inside Higher Education” pointed out what a number of us have been thinking for a while now: the peer review system for scholarly journals doesn’t work very well, needs to be reformed, and really ought to take radical advantage of new technologies. There is, of course, going to be quite a bit of resistance to any change coming from the usual quarters, beginning with older academics who still think of social networking in terms of meeting colleagues after work for a martini (well, okay, nothing wrong with that), administrators who are used to the simple (and simplistic) bean counting operations for tenure and promotion made possible by the current system, and journal publishers who make a ton of money while adding next to nothing in value to people’s publications (after all, they don’t pay for the research, don’t pay the writers, and don’t pay the editors and reviewers — which of course doesn’t stop them from charging an arm and a leg to university libraries).
Of course, since the new technologies are making an overhaul of the system possible, and since there is widespread frustration with the current modus operandi especially among younger faculty, change will happen one way or another — witness the rise of open access and online journals that bypass traditional publishers. It’s only a question of which paths to take, and that’s where the conversation gets interesting.
The most radical suggestion mentioned in the Inside article is the one by Aaron J. Barlow, associate professor of English at the City University of New York, where I work. Barlow is quoted in the article as saying that “peer review — in the sense that people work and a consensus may emerge that a given paper is important or not — doesn’t need to take place prior to publication.” He is, of course, right and as a matter of fact most peer review has always taken place after publication. A lot of bad or simply irrelevant stuff gets published and ends up augmenting someone’s c.v. by a line or two (good for promotion and tenure!), but then dies the common death of much academic scholarship: complete lack of citations by anyone other than the author.
The question that Barlow is raising is whether it wouldn’t be better to skip the preliminary step — the pre-publication filter — and simply leave everything to the community at large. I am sympathetic to that position, particularly because as author, editor and reviewer I have seen my share of unseemly behavior, gender and racial biases, personal vendettas, and so on that certainly don’t belong anywhere within a scholarly environment. But I think pretty much everyone agrees that we already have far too much pyrite to sift through in order to find the gold nuggets, and I shudder as to what would happen if anyone were suddenly able to claim “scholarship” by simply posting their papers on the web and ask people — anyone, not just the relevant expert community? — to comment, “+1” or “like.”
This is the same problem that has been faced by the publishing and journalism industries. These days anyone can self-publish a book at the click of a button, and anyone can set up an online newspaper with free or cheap software and access to a server. But I doubt these new technological possibilities will spell the demise of editors, publishing houses and newspapers like the New York Times, for the simple reason that these “classic” outlets do exercise a very valuable (if flawed, incomplete, sometimes biased) function of filtering a lot of distracting or poor quality nonsense (as the NYT’s famous tagline says, “all the news that’s fit to print,” or to pixellate, as the case may be).
Another approach commented on in the Inside piece is the one currently pursued by Cheryl Ball, the editor of an online journal on rhetoric and technology called Kairos, and an associate professor of English at Illinois State University. Her journal engages the entire editorial board in a lengthy discussion of every submitted paper, at the end of which an editor is assigned to coach the author on how to revise the manuscript to reflect the consensus of the board. This makes the system much more transparent (the author knows that all editors participated in the discussion, no anonymity on either side) and obviously immensely constructive from the point of view of the author and the community at large. But I seriously doubt this sort of model can be expanded to the whole industry. I edit a smallonline open access journal in philosophy of science, and even with our low number of yearly submissions it would be impossible to get my editorial board to do what Ball has been able to accomplish with hers. Again, the problem being that there are too many authors out there, and that far too high a proportion of submitted papers is simply not up to even minimum standards, or would require a huge amount of work to get there (not to mention, of course, that — again — editors and reviewers are not paid for this, nor do they get much concrete credit from university administrations for engaging in what they do).
I do not know what the solution is, and I suspect that we will see over the next few years increased experimentation on the part of younger editors to either ameliorate the problems with the current system or to overhaul the thing altogether. Some journals already make the author, not just the reviewers, anonymous, to minimize biases (it is well known, for instance, that women and minorities get fewer papers accepted if the reviewers know their names, and that the effect disappears if authorship is kept anonymous). Others publish all submitted papers that are technically correct — meaning that are written in an intelligible manner and include all the necessary documentation — while leaving to readers to judge the intrinsic value of the authors’ findings and opinions. We certainly are on the cusp of a technologically driven revolution in academic publishing, but just as in the already mentioned cases of book publishing and journalism, it remains to be seen exactly what will be left standing and what will have arisen anew once the storm has passed.
Of course, since the new technologies are making an overhaul of the system possible, and since there is widespread frustration with the current modus operandi especially among younger faculty, change will happen one way or another — witness the rise of open access and online journals that bypass traditional publishers. It’s only a question of which paths to take, and that’s where the conversation gets interesting.
The most radical suggestion mentioned in the Inside article is the one by Aaron J. Barlow, associate professor of English at the City University of New York, where I work. Barlow is quoted in the article as saying that “peer review — in the sense that people work and a consensus may emerge that a given paper is important or not — doesn’t need to take place prior to publication.” He is, of course, right and as a matter of fact most peer review has always taken place after publication. A lot of bad or simply irrelevant stuff gets published and ends up augmenting someone’s c.v. by a line or two (good for promotion and tenure!), but then dies the common death of much academic scholarship: complete lack of citations by anyone other than the author.
The question that Barlow is raising is whether it wouldn’t be better to skip the preliminary step — the pre-publication filter — and simply leave everything to the community at large. I am sympathetic to that position, particularly because as author, editor and reviewer I have seen my share of unseemly behavior, gender and racial biases, personal vendettas, and so on that certainly don’t belong anywhere within a scholarly environment. But I think pretty much everyone agrees that we already have far too much pyrite to sift through in order to find the gold nuggets, and I shudder as to what would happen if anyone were suddenly able to claim “scholarship” by simply posting their papers on the web and ask people — anyone, not just the relevant expert community? — to comment, “+1” or “like.”
This is the same problem that has been faced by the publishing and journalism industries. These days anyone can self-publish a book at the click of a button, and anyone can set up an online newspaper with free or cheap software and access to a server. But I doubt these new technological possibilities will spell the demise of editors, publishing houses and newspapers like the New York Times, for the simple reason that these “classic” outlets do exercise a very valuable (if flawed, incomplete, sometimes biased) function of filtering a lot of distracting or poor quality nonsense (as the NYT’s famous tagline says, “all the news that’s fit to print,” or to pixellate, as the case may be).
Another approach commented on in the Inside piece is the one currently pursued by Cheryl Ball, the editor of an online journal on rhetoric and technology called Kairos, and an associate professor of English at Illinois State University. Her journal engages the entire editorial board in a lengthy discussion of every submitted paper, at the end of which an editor is assigned to coach the author on how to revise the manuscript to reflect the consensus of the board. This makes the system much more transparent (the author knows that all editors participated in the discussion, no anonymity on either side) and obviously immensely constructive from the point of view of the author and the community at large. But I seriously doubt this sort of model can be expanded to the whole industry. I edit a smallonline open access journal in philosophy of science, and even with our low number of yearly submissions it would be impossible to get my editorial board to do what Ball has been able to accomplish with hers. Again, the problem being that there are too many authors out there, and that far too high a proportion of submitted papers is simply not up to even minimum standards, or would require a huge amount of work to get there (not to mention, of course, that — again — editors and reviewers are not paid for this, nor do they get much concrete credit from university administrations for engaging in what they do).
I do not know what the solution is, and I suspect that we will see over the next few years increased experimentation on the part of younger editors to either ameliorate the problems with the current system or to overhaul the thing altogether. Some journals already make the author, not just the reviewers, anonymous, to minimize biases (it is well known, for instance, that women and minorities get fewer papers accepted if the reviewers know their names, and that the effect disappears if authorship is kept anonymous). Others publish all submitted papers that are technically correct — meaning that are written in an intelligible manner and include all the necessary documentation — while leaving to readers to judge the intrinsic value of the authors’ findings and opinions. We certainly are on the cusp of a technologically driven revolution in academic publishing, but just as in the already mentioned cases of book publishing and journalism, it remains to be seen exactly what will be left standing and what will have arisen anew once the storm has passed.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
CFP: Special Issue of the *Journal for General Philosophy of Science* on Climate Science.
CFP: Special Issue of the *Journal for General Philosophy of Science* on Climate Science.
Guest Editor: Eric Winsberg (University of South Florida)
Submission Deadline: August 1st, 2012
Climate science is at the center of many of the world’s greatest environmental challenges, yet philosophy of science has only recently begun to pay attention to it. In this special issue of the Journal for General Philosophy of Science, we are looking for papers that explore climate science from a variety of philosophical points of view: epistemology, methodology, ethics, science and democracy, etc. We expect contributions on the foundations of climate science, the confirmation and testing of climate models and predictions, the role of ethics and values in climate science, the nature of explanation in climate science, the role of simulations and experiments, the relative importance of data and models, and any other topic related to climate science and philosophy.
Submission Details: Please send a pdf version of your paper (maximum 8000 words) prepared for blind review. The first page of the manuscript should contain the paper’s title, and a short abstract of 100-150 words. The pdf should be attached along with contact details for the corresponding author and all other authors (if any) in an email addressed to Eric Winsberg eric.winsberg@gmail.com
Friday, December 16, 2011
Title bout, round two
My manuscript on natural kinds is in the hands of the publisher. It will, in due time, be one of the first books in Palgrave's series New Directions in Philosophy of Science.
It was to have been titled Carving up the world: Scientific enquiry and natural kinds, but yesterday I learned about a just-published collection of essays titled Carving nature at its joints: Natural kinds in metaphysics and science. The collection from MIT Press includes a wide range of essays from the 11th Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, so it really isn't direct competition for a focused monograph on natural kinds. Yet the title, as my publisher says, is "a little close for comfort."
In short, I need a new title.
Brainstorming this morning led to the following list, plus others too terrible to record. Do any of these sound like books you would want to read?
1. Planets, mallards, and other natural kinds
2. Natural kinds and the structure of the world
3. Pragmatism, realism, and natural kinds
4. What about natural kinds?
5. Science, philosophy, and natural kinds
[Cross posted. Feel free to respond wherever.]
It was to have been titled Carving up the world: Scientific enquiry and natural kinds, but yesterday I learned about a just-published collection of essays titled Carving nature at its joints: Natural kinds in metaphysics and science. The collection from MIT Press includes a wide range of essays from the 11th Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, so it really isn't direct competition for a focused monograph on natural kinds. Yet the title, as my publisher says, is "a little close for comfort."
In short, I need a new title.
Brainstorming this morning led to the following list, plus others too terrible to record. Do any of these sound like books you would want to read?
1. Planets, mallards, and other natural kinds
2. Natural kinds and the structure of the world
3. Pragmatism, realism, and natural kinds
4. What about natural kinds?
5. Science, philosophy, and natural kinds
[Cross posted. Feel free to respond wherever.]
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
CFP: Science-Policy Interactions and Social Values
Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology conference on
Science-Policy Interactions and Social Values
at the University of Texas at Dallas
April 13-14th, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Kevin Elliott, University of South Carolina
The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology seeks proposals for papers and symposia for a conference to wrap up our 2011-2012 public lecture series on "Funded and Forbidden Knowledge: Science, Politics, and Cultural Values." The conference will be interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of science and technology studies, history and philosophy of science, science and technology policy studies, ethics and political philosophy, and science policy in exploring the interactions between science and policy-making, with special attention to the role of values in those interactions.
In these areas of scholarship, several categories of discussion concerning science and policy have emerged. Some focus on the role of science in the policy process, while others look at the inverse relationship of how politics influence scientific research. Some approach the topic in a very empirically grounded and particularistic fashion, while others take a normative approach and aim for general accounts. While there have been important interdisciplinary conferences in this area, the scholarship remains somewhat disjointed and piecemeal, whereas tackling the major issues in this area requires thinking across such boundaries. This conference will emphasize that the relationship between science and politics is mutually influential rather than unidirectional; it will emphasize the importance of normative or critical approaches that are also empirically grounded in the practice of science and realities of political institutions. We seek submissions that bring to the forefront issues of values in science-policy interactions.
Suggested topics (not an exhaustive list):
* Democratization of science
* Evidence-based policy
* Policy and the value-free ideal of science
* Forms of scientific and political representation
* Theories of scientific expertise
* Models of science advising
* History of science policy
* Lessons from environmental policy-making
* Scientific expertise and political advocacy
* Commercialization of science and the public good
* The aims of science and choice of research priorities
* Science and justice in political institutions
* Science, non-scientific views, and public reason
* Expertise and elitism in democratic deliberation
* Science and democracy in comparative and international contexts
* The influence of science on ethical values, and political ideals
* Obstacles to socially or politically responsible science
We're especially interested in proposals that cross the boundaries between already-established research programs.
Submissions
You should submit your proposal to
http://tinyurl.com/
We welcome submissions of both individual paper proposals and proposals for symposia and other multi-participant panel formats. For contributed papers, please submit a 250-500 word abstract. For symposia and other multi-participant panels, submit an abstract up to 250 words describing the panel and descriptions of up to 100 words describing each participant's contribution.
Submissions are due January 5, and decisions will be announced by early February.
Send any questions to centerforvaluesutdallas@gmail.
Organizing Committee
Matthew J. Brown, UT Dallas - Philosophy of Science
Richard Scotch, UT Dallas - Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences
Magdalena Grohman, UT-Dallas - Psychology
Sabrina Starnaman, UT-Dallas - Literary Studies
Program Committee
Heather Douglas, University of Waterloo - Philosophy of Science, Science Policy
Kevin Elliott, University of South Carolina - Philosophy of Science, Applied Ethics
Mark B. Brown, CSU Sacremento - Political Science
Jeremy Farris, Harvard Law School - Political Philosophy
Science-Policy Interactions and Social Values
at the University of Texas at Dallas
April 13-14th, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Kevin Elliott, University of South Carolina
The Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology seeks proposals for papers and symposia for a conference to wrap up our 2011-2012 public lecture series on "Funded and Forbidden Knowledge: Science, Politics, and Cultural Values." The conference will be interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of science and technology studies, history and philosophy of science, science and technology policy studies, ethics and political philosophy, and science policy in exploring the interactions between science and policy-making, with special attention to the role of values in those interactions.
In these areas of scholarship, several categories of discussion concerning science and policy have emerged. Some focus on the role of science in the policy process, while others look at the inverse relationship of how politics influence scientific research. Some approach the topic in a very empirically grounded and particularistic fashion, while others take a normative approach and aim for general accounts. While there have been important interdisciplinary conferences in this area, the scholarship remains somewhat disjointed and piecemeal, whereas tackling the major issues in this area requires thinking across such boundaries. This conference will emphasize that the relationship between science and politics is mutually influential rather than unidirectional; it will emphasize the importance of normative or critical approaches that are also empirically grounded in the practice of science and realities of political institutions. We seek submissions that bring to the forefront issues of values in science-policy interactions.
Suggested topics (not an exhaustive list):
* Democratization of science
* Evidence-based policy
* Policy and the value-free ideal of science
* Forms of scientific and political representation
* Theories of scientific expertise
* Models of science advising
* History of science policy
* Lessons from environmental policy-making
* Scientific expertise and political advocacy
* Commercialization of science and the public good
* The aims of science and choice of research priorities
* Science and justice in political institutions
* Science, non-scientific views, and public reason
* Expertise and elitism in democratic deliberation
* Science and democracy in comparative and international contexts
* The influence of science on ethical values, and political ideals
* Obstacles to socially or politically responsible science
We're especially interested in proposals that cross the boundaries between already-established research programs.
Submissions
You should submit your proposal to
http://tinyurl.com/
We welcome submissions of both individual paper proposals and proposals for symposia and other multi-participant panel formats. For contributed papers, please submit a 250-500 word abstract. For symposia and other multi-participant panels, submit an abstract up to 250 words describing the panel and descriptions of up to 100 words describing each participant's contribution.
Submissions are due January 5, and decisions will be announced by early February.
Send any questions to centerforvaluesutdallas@gmail.
Organizing Committee
Matthew J. Brown, UT Dallas - Philosophy of Science
Richard Scotch, UT Dallas - Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences
Magdalena Grohman, UT-Dallas - Psychology
Sabrina Starnaman, UT-Dallas - Literary Studies
Program Committee
Heather Douglas, University of Waterloo - Philosophy of Science, Science Policy
Kevin Elliott, University of South Carolina - Philosophy of Science, Applied Ethics
Mark B. Brown, CSU Sacremento - Political Science
Jeremy Farris, Harvard Law School - Political Philosophy
Sunday, November 20, 2011
And the Winner of the 2011 (Unofficial) IOAT Readers' Choice Book Award is...
With 139 votes cast and 14 more preferences than its closest competitor, the inaugural (unofficial) It's Only A Theory Readers' Choice Book Award goes to (drumroll):
Tim Maudlin!
for his 2007 book 'The Metaphysics Within Physics'!
Congratulations, Tim!!! Unfortunately for Tim, the Award is just for the glory (and I'm afraid not even much of that. I bet he won't put it on his CV.)
(For those of you without any sense of humor or much common sense, please let me clarify that I do realize that this is not a serious book award and that I do not mean our little poll to replace the judgement of the Lakatos Award's committee. Also, I'd like to apologize again to the many people whose books I failed to include in the poll (and, in particular, to fellow bloggers Steven French (for his 2006 book with Decio Krause Identity in Physics) and Eric Winsberg (for his 2010 book Science in the Age of Computer Simulations [shoot!!! this is worse than teaching logic! How many parentheses do I need to close now???]))) [That should do it. Can't be bothered to check :-)]
For the record, these were the numbers (the percentages don't add up because voters could choose multiple options):
Tim Maudlin!
for his 2007 book 'The Metaphysics Within Physics'!
Congratulations, Tim!!! Unfortunately for Tim, the Award is just for the glory (and I'm afraid not even much of that. I bet he won't put it on his CV.)
(For those of you without any sense of humor or much common sense, please let me clarify that I do realize that this is not a serious book award and that I do not mean our little poll to replace the judgement of the Lakatos Award's committee. Also, I'd like to apologize again to the many people whose books I failed to include in the poll (and, in particular, to fellow bloggers Steven French (for his 2006 book with Decio Krause Identity in Physics) and Eric Winsberg (for his 2010 book Science in the Age of Computer Simulations [shoot!!! this is worse than teaching logic! How many parentheses do I need to close now???]))) [That should do it. Can't be bothered to check :-)]
For the record, these were the numbers (the percentages don't add up because voters could choose multiple options):
1. Maudlin (2007) 38 (27%) 2. Wimsatt (2007) 24 (17%)3. Ladyman & Ross (2007) 22 (15%) 4. van Fraassen (2009) 20 (14%) 5. Wilson (2006) 17 (12%) 6. Bokulich (2008) 13 (9%) 7. Chakravartty (2007) 10 (7%), Craver (2007) 10 (7%) Douglas (2009) 10 (7%) 8. Mitchell (2009) 7 (5%) 9. Snyder (2006) 2 (1%) | |||
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Should the Lakatos Award Have Been Awarded?
UPDATE: The poll is now closed. 11% of the 139 voters agreed that the Lakatos Award should have not been awarded. (Let me note that I take the outcome of this vote for what it is and it's no ground to criticize the outcome of the LA. I was only curious as to see how many readers of this blog agreed with the decision not to award the LA this year)
(Originally posted on Nov 12, 2011)
The Lakatos Award is arguably the most prestigious book prize for monographs in the philosophy of science broadly construed. As many of you already know, no Lakatos Award has been awarded this year. This is the statement that announces the decision:
[ADDENDUM: in order to compare "the level of impact and significance" of the above books to that of past winners of the Lakatos Award here is a list of the last five winners of the Lakatos Award:
2010: Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection),
2009: Okasha, Evolution and the Levels of Selection,
2008: Healey, Gauging Wat's Real
2007: No Award Made (Interestingly Okasha's book had already been published in 2006 so either it had not been nominated in 2007 or it was judged not to have met "the level of impact and significance required to win the award" in 2007)
2006: Brown, Physical Relativity and Chang, Inventing Temperature.]
(Originally posted on Nov 12, 2011)
The Lakatos Award is arguably the most prestigious book prize for monographs in the philosophy of science broadly construed. As many of you already know, no Lakatos Award has been awarded this year. This is the statement that announces the decision:
Many, including me, found this decision somewhat surprising, for many important and interesting philosophy of science books have been published in the last five years. The following are a few examples (Aside from a few additions I made, the list draws on a post by Eric Schliesser at NewAPPS and the comments to it. Please let me know if there are any other glaring omissions, as I'm sure there are [UPDATE: Unfortunately it turns out I can no longer add titles to the poll. SO I apologize for any omissions]).
The London School of Economics and Political Science announces that the Lakatos Award, of £10,000 for an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, will not be awarded in 2011.
The Management Committee for the Lakatos Award has considered the reports from the Selectors on the books shortlisted for the 2011 prize. While there is no doubt that all of the shortlisted books have their virtues, and that some make weighty contributions to the field, the overall view taken by the Management Committee on the basis of the Selectors' reports is that none quite meets the level of impact and significance required to merit the Award; and consequently no Award will be made this year.
- Bokulich (2008) Reexamining the Quantum-Classical Relation: Beyond Reductionism and Pluralism
- Chakravartty (2007) A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Observing the Unobservable
- Craver (2007) Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience
- Douglas (2009) Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal
- Ladyman and Ross (2007) Every Thing Must Go
- Maudlin (2007) The Metaphysics Within Physics.
- Mitchell (2009) Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy
- Ruetsche (2011) Interpreting Quantum Theories
- Snyder (2006) Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society
- van Fraassen (2009) Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective
- Wilson (2006) Wandering Significance An Essay on Conceptual Behaviour
- Wimsatt (2007) Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality
[ADDENDUM: in order to compare "the level of impact and significance" of the above books to that of past winners of the Lakatos Award here is a list of the last five winners of the Lakatos Award:
2010: Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection),
2009: Okasha, Evolution and the Levels of Selection,
2008: Healey, Gauging Wat's Real
2007: No Award Made (Interestingly Okasha's book had already been published in 2006 so either it had not been nominated in 2007 or it was judged not to have met "the level of impact and significance required to win the award" in 2007)
2006: Brown, Physical Relativity and Chang, Inventing Temperature.]
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