The 2022 article “The lady vanishes” by Ann-Sophie Barwich, published on the online magazine AEON, is devoted to Mary Hesse. It is an interesting peice where Barwich argues that “the overwhelming absence of women in intellectual history is constructed. And we won’t prevent the fading of women from future history simply with an occasional reminder about the existence of a few remarkable individuals throughout the ages. What really causes our collective forgetting is the stepwise removal of their names from ongoing conversation.” For Barwich, “the story of Mary Hesse shows how quickly even well-known women from our recent past can vanish from the collective memory of their peers.”
Hesse was different. Her ideas present a refreshing departure from her contemporaries’ single-minded infatuation with the logic and justification of scientific knowledge and the idea that the rationality of philosophers ruled the foundation of science.
Mary Hesse at the Ninth Symposium of the Colston Research Society in Bristol (1957)
The next session of our research seminar will be in charge of Francesco Nappo, from the Politecnico of Milan.
On October 24th, starting at 11:00, he will deliver a paper titled “Mary Hesse on Materiality and Induction“. Aim of this paper is to discuss one of the most widespread misinterpretations of Hesse’s works, which concerns the distinction between “formal” and “material” analogies in science, provide an interpretation of Hesse’s material condition that does justice to its epistemological significance, and bring out connections to some of Hesse’s other works on the topic of induction and scientific reasoning.
The session will take place at Colégio Almada Negreiros of the NOVA University of Lisbon , Room SE1.
In the occasion of the EPISTRAN preliminary meeting that will take place on July 2023, 13th and 14th (NOVA/FCSH + online), Pietro Gori will deliver an exploratory paper titled “Expanding the epistemological framework of natural science. Mary Hesse (and Thomas Kuhn) on Hermeneutics, Translation, and Interpretation“.
The paper will be focused on Mary Hesse’s hermeneutic approach towards scientific knowledge, in relationship/comparison with Thomas Kuhn’s reflections on translation and interpretation in science.
Responding to a challenge raised by Douglas Robinson in the conclusion of his book Translationality (2017: 200-202), the EPISTRAN project uses concepts, methods and theories from Translation Studies to investigate the semiotic processes (verbal and nonverbal) involved in the transfer of information between different ‘epistemic systems’. The main focus is on the relationship between technical ‘scientific’ knowledge (i.e. the kind of knowledge which purports to be objective, rational and universal) and the various embedded, embodied and subjective forms of knowledge that have served as its Others in different times and places. Starting from the assumption that these are different modes of discourse and thus susceptible to translational operations, the project seeks to investigate the mechanisms at work in three distinct areas:
Science and Humanities – how specialist science is reformulated into popular and educational science, or reworked into imaginative literature, audiovisual content or even works of art
Knowledges of the World – how forms of epistemic translation are/can be used to transmit scientific and medical knowledge to indigenous communities in the Global South, and, conversely, how indigenous knowledges from these regions are/can be translated into formats that are meaningful to the sophisticated North
The Invention of Science – the translational processes involved in the Early Modern transition to a scientific mode of inquiry
The research, which makes use of methods drawn from Descriptive Translation Studies, supplemented with considerations from recent work in the fields of multimodality, neuroscience and information technology, is conducted by a transdisciplinary team with a shared interest in translation.
Guido Tana will deliver a paper titled “Dogmatism, Knowledge, and Factivity”. The presentation will analyse and assess some proposed solutions of the dogmatist paradox and presents a possible, albeit revisionary, way out. Specifically, whether it really is irrational to be dogmatic in the way described above, and whether it is possible to utter genuine knowledge-claims while allowing for knowledge defeasibility. It will be argued that both approaches fail to solve the paradox.
Pietro Gori will develop some “Remarks on Mary Hesse’s hermeneutic account of scientific knowledge”. Aim of his paper will be to reflect on Hesse’s attempt to bridge the gap between the approach to knowledge exhibited by the natural sciences on the one hand, and the human or social sciences on the other, with an emphasis on the consequences that this comparison may have on the educational plane.
The complete programme of the conference is available here.
The programme of the conference “The Value of Scientific Representation. Classic Issues and Contemporary Challenges”, is out! Take a look at it at this link.
The conference takes place at the NOVA University of Lisbon on June 21st-22nd, 2023.
Organized within the activities of the research project “Mary B. Hesse’s ‘new epistemology’. Principles and Legacy” (FCT/IFILNOVA), The conference aims to explore issues from the current debate on scientific representation that may be – directly or indirectly – connected with Mary B. Hesse’s theoretical understanding of science. On a general level, the speakers will engage with open questions related with the value of the scientific world-explanation from a variety of viewpoints that shall not be limited to a philosophical or linguistic analysis of the issues explored, but may also involve contributions devoted to classic figures of the history and philosophy of science.
The next session of our research seminar will be in charge of Andreas Hüttemann, from the University of Cologne.
On April 21st, starting at 15:00, he will deliver a paper titled “A Positive Role for Negative Analogies”, a term introduced by Mary Hesse in her work on models and analogies. “Negative analogies” stands for properties of the model that the target system lacks. In his talk, Andreas Hüttemann will explore, first, why according to Hesse we need to use models in science, second, what Hesse has to say about the role of negative analogies in particular. He will then argue that the role of negative analogies is best understood in the context of a more general account of idealization. Negative analogies, conceived of as idealizations, provide us with knowledge of invariance relations, or more generally with modal knowledge.
The session will take place at Colégio Almada Negreiros of the NOVA University of Lisbon , Room 209.
The history of the encounter between pragmatism and science is long, fruitful, yet also problematic. Each of the major founding pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey) was at some time during their career directly engaged with experimental science. All three wrote about the nature of scientific inquiry and the status of scientific theories, and reflected on how the methods of the sciences can be related with other methods of fixing belief. Moreover, pragmatist attitudes can be encountered in major figures of both the history and the philosophy of science (e.g. Quine, Kuhn, Putnam, Laudan, and Kitcher), who engaged critically with the issue of the value of knowledge claims. Finally, pragmatism walks hand in hand with naturalism, given the interest of classic pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Wright (among others) in demanding natural, as opposed to supernatural, answers to our philosophical questions.
Despite – or parallel to – this general interest in the scientific theoretical framework, pragmatist thinkers almost always rejected scientism, understood as an attitude of science-worship involving an uncritical faith in the methods of the modern sciences, an uncritical acceptance of their assumptions and conclusions, and a quasi-religious faith in the overriding value of the scientific enterprise. Contrary to this view, for example, pragmatists such as James and Dewey argued that science can neither tell us what we should value, nor fully account for the value we in fact find in certain objects, activities, and experiences. And crucially, they maintained that science cannot tell us whether or why its own goal of attaining truth is valuable. Broadly speaking, it is possible to say that pragmatism challenges scientism, protecting the original nature of lived experience from rationalism and scientific materialism; taking ideas as essentially connected with voluntary action; and regarding faith as necessary for any practical achievement of truth.
In line with this, the proposed issue of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy aims to explore to what extent the encounter of pragmatism and science can offer the opportunity to reflect upon the genesis and nature, limits and potentialities of both philosophical and scientific inquiry, with a special focus on the problem as to how science and common sense, science and philosophy, science and religion – broadly, science and culture – fit together, and to what extent science can be a reference for human praxis.
Authors are encouraged to submit papers on topics such as (but not limited to) the influence of science upon philosophy; the role of the scientific method in the fixing of beliefs; science as a form of life; the place of science in individual and/or social life; pragmatist approaches to the debate on naturalism; and historical and contemporary pragmatist attitudes in the philosophy of science.
Papers in English should be sent to Rachel Cristy (rachel.cristy[at]kcl.ac.uk) and Pietro Gori (pgori[at]fcsh.unl.pt) by December 2023. Prepared for a process of blind review, they should not exceed 8 000 words and must include an abstract of 200 words and a list of references.
The selected papers will be published in April 2024.
