I discuss the predicament that engineering-ethics education in Japan now faces and propose a solu... more I discuss the predicament that engineering-ethics education in Japan now faces and propose a solution to this. The predicament is professional motivation, i.e., the problem of how to motivate engineering students to maintain their professional integrity. The special professional responsibilities of engineers are often explained either as an implicit social contract between the profession and society (the ‘‘social-contract’ ’ view), or as requirements for membership in the profession (the ‘‘membership-requirement’ ’ view). However, there are empirical data that suggest that such views will not do in Japan, and this is the predicament that confronts us. In this country, the profession of engineering did not exist 10 years ago and is still quite underdeveloped. Engineers in this country do not have privileges, high income, or high social status. Under such conditions, neither the social-contract view nor the membership-requirement view is convincing. As an alternative approach that mig...
This paper aims at giving a general outlook of Bayesianism as a set of meta-criteria for scientif... more This paper aims at giving a general outlook of Bayesianism as a set of meta-criteria for scientific methodology. In particular, it discusses Social Bayesianism, that is, the application of Bayesian meta-criteria to scientific institutions. From a Bayesian point of view, methodologies and institutions that simulate Bayesian belief updating are good ones, and those with more discriminatory power (measurable by likelihood ratio) are better ones than those with less discriminatory power, other things being equal. This paper applies these ideas to a particular issue: diversity in science. Bayesian considerations reveal some conditions for epistemically desirable diversity in science.
What are the factors that influence our moral behaviors on the Internet and our consciouness on s... more What are the factors that influence our moral behaviors on the Internet and our consciouness on such behaviors? This presentation discusses influences of sex and personal relationships, and their interaction. We use the result of an international online survey conducted in 2002, and we focus on the U.S. data.
In philosophy of science, historical science used to be an unfashionable topic, but studies on th... more In philosophy of science, historical science used to be an unfashionable topic, but studies on this subject started to appear lately. Aviezer Tucker, a representative of this new trend, summarizes the methodology of historical science in Bayesian terms in his book Our Knowledge of the Past (2004). In this presentation, we introduce and examine the methodology Tucker proposes, and investigate the problem of whether important distinctions become less visible by categorizing several fields as ’historical science’ as Tucker does. Tucker regards historical science as a category that originates with biblical criticism and comparative linguistics, and that includes scientific historiography and evolutionary biology. According to him, the essence of historical science lies in the research method in which various pieces of evidence remaining today are used to study their common causes, and the method is supposed to have two steps: the first step is one of theoretically demonstrating that sim...
There seems to be a lack of mutual understanding between naturalistically oriented philosophers a... more There seems to be a lack of mutual understanding between naturalistically oriented philosophers and more traditional philosophers in the philosophy of science. This paper attempts to bridge the gap between these two orientations by introducing a conceptual framework: a distinction between action-guiding rules and evaluative principles. To make the argument concrete, I examine exchanges between Frederick Suppe and Bayesians over Suppe's interpretation of W.J. Morgan's plate tectonics paper. Through a reanalysis of the Morgan paper, I conclude that Suppe's account through the special reasons requirement can be made compatible with a Bayesian account, though not quite in the way Bayesians themselves argue.
I discuss the predicament that engineering-ethics education in Japan now faces and propose a solu... more I discuss the predicament that engineering-ethics education in Japan now faces and propose a solution to this. The predicament is professional motivation, i.e., the problem of how to motivate engineering students to maintain their professional integrity. The special professional responsibilities of engineers are often explained either as an implicit social contract between the profession and society (the ‘‘social-contract’ ’ view), or as requirements for membership in the profession (the ‘‘membership-requirement’ ’ view). However, there are empirical data that suggest that such views will not do in Japan, and this is the predicament that confronts us. In this country, the profession of engineering did not exist 10 years ago and is still quite underdeveloped. Engineers in this country do not have privileges, high income, or high social status. Under such conditions, neither the social-contract view nor the membership-requirement view is convincing. As an alternative approach that mig...
This paper aims at giving a general outlook of Bayesianism as a set of meta-criteria for scientif... more This paper aims at giving a general outlook of Bayesianism as a set of meta-criteria for scientific methodology. In particular, it discusses Social Bayesianism, that is, the application of Bayesian meta-criteria to scientific institutions. From a Bayesian point of view, methodologies and institutions that simulate Bayesian belief updating are good ones, and those with more discriminatory power (measurable by likelihood ratio) are better ones than those with less discriminatory power, other things being equal. This paper applies these ideas to a particular issue: diversity in science. Bayesian considerations reveal some conditions for epistemically desirable diversity in science.
What are the factors that influence our moral behaviors on the Internet and our consciouness on s... more What are the factors that influence our moral behaviors on the Internet and our consciouness on such behaviors? This presentation discusses influences of sex and personal relationships, and their interaction. We use the result of an international online survey conducted in 2002, and we focus on the U.S. data.
In philosophy of science, historical science used to be an unfashionable topic, but studies on th... more In philosophy of science, historical science used to be an unfashionable topic, but studies on this subject started to appear lately. Aviezer Tucker, a representative of this new trend, summarizes the methodology of historical science in Bayesian terms in his book Our Knowledge of the Past (2004). In this presentation, we introduce and examine the methodology Tucker proposes, and investigate the problem of whether important distinctions become less visible by categorizing several fields as ’historical science’ as Tucker does. Tucker regards historical science as a category that originates with biblical criticism and comparative linguistics, and that includes scientific historiography and evolutionary biology. According to him, the essence of historical science lies in the research method in which various pieces of evidence remaining today are used to study their common causes, and the method is supposed to have two steps: the first step is one of theoretically demonstrating that sim...
There seems to be a lack of mutual understanding between naturalistically oriented philosophers a... more There seems to be a lack of mutual understanding between naturalistically oriented philosophers and more traditional philosophers in the philosophy of science. This paper attempts to bridge the gap between these two orientations by introducing a conceptual framework: a distinction between action-guiding rules and evaluative principles. To make the argument concrete, I examine exchanges between Frederick Suppe and Bayesians over Suppe's interpretation of W.J. Morgan's plate tectonics paper. Through a reanalysis of the Morgan paper, I conclude that Suppe's account through the special reasons requirement can be made compatible with a Bayesian account, though not quite in the way Bayesians themselves argue.
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Papers by Tetsuji Iseda