"What is truth?" Pontius Pilot asked Jesus of Nazareth. For many educators today this question seems quaintly passe. Rejection of "truth" goes hand-in-hand with the rejection of epistemological realism. Educational thought over the last decade has instead been dominated by empiricist, anti-realist, instrumentalist epistemologies of two types:…

This study took place during a First Year Seminar course where 20 incoming college freshmen studied the central topic of the nature of science within the context of biological evolution. The instructor researched students' understandings in the nature of science as they progressed through the course by examining a variety of qualitative and…

The structure of David's Bloor argument for the Strong Programme (SP) in Science Studies is criticized from the philosophical perspective of anti-skeptical, scientific realism. The paper transforms the common criticism of SP--that the symmetry principle of SP implies an untenable form of cognitive relativism--into the clear philosophical issue of…

This paper presents the early investigations about the nature of sound of the Pythagoreans, and how they started a tradition that remains valid up to present times--the use of numbers in representing natural reality. It will touch on the Pythagorean notion of musical harmony, which was extended to the notion of universal harmony. How the…

Phrenologists believed that specific brain regions corresponded to certain character traits. In addition, the size of each brain region was believed to determine the strength of the respective trait. Phrenology originated in Austria with Franz Josef Gall and was popularized and commercialized in America at the end of the 19th century by Orson…

We report an attempted replication of G. T. W. Patrick and J. A. Gilbert's pioneering sleep deprivation experiment "Studies from the psychological laboratory of the University of Iowa. On the effects of loss of sleep", conducted in 1895/96. Patrick and Gilbert's study was the first sleep deprivation experiment of its kind, performed by some of the…

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) believed that consciousness was represented by the interconnection of psychical processes comprised of temporal elements and compounds. To explore these processes, Wundt used a metronome to measure the amount of information that passed into consciousness across time. The current project replicated some of his procedures,…

This paper is about the relationship between Marxism, Science and Worldviews. In Section I, the paper gives a descriptive definition of the scientific viewpoint based on a materialist ontology, a realist epistemology, and the recognition that science is a social activity. The paper shows in Section II that there are currents in contemporary…

Egon Brunswik (1903-1955) first made an interesting distinction between perception and explicit reasoning, arguing that perception included quick estimates of an object's size, nearly always resulting in good approximations in uncertain environments, whereas explicit reasoning, while better at achieving exact estimates, could often fail by wide…

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is well known as an early twentieth century writer, but less well known is her involvement in automatic writing research. Critics of Stein's literary works suggest that her research had a significant influence on her poetry and fiction, though Stein denied any influence. A partial replication of Stein's 1896 study was…

This article discusses, from various vantages, Ryan Tweney's (this issue) pedagogical technique of employing historical replications of psychological experiments with graduate students in psychology. A "prima facie" perspective suggests great promise for this sort of academic "ancestor analysis," particularly given the enthusiasm and skill…

In this paper I examine the particular question of the meaning of the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values in the natural sciences and, if this would make sense, the possibility to transcend this distinction. I claim that the distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic values maintains its necessity as long as a certain sort…

In this paper, we present a multi-dimensional study concerning Heisenberg's "gamma ray microscope", a thought experiment, which is intimately connected with the historical development of quantum mechanics (QM), and also with the most disputed interpretations of quantum theory. In this study: (a) we investigate how philosophers of science read and…

The knowledge of historical facts can help teachers and students to correctly appreciate a variety of scientific theories. It is important to be aware of the evolution of the basic concepts, particularly the ones our students find very abstract and therefore difficult to understand. Historical knowledge of chemical concepts will allow us to…

If issues in the history and philosophy of science and those related to science, technology and society are generally accepted in policy, how ought these be handled in practice? Mandate in policy does not guarantee implementation in practice. Indeed, HPS and STS have for decades been marginalized in the curriculum. Subject areas designated to…