Publisher: Michigan Publishing, Open Access
Published since: 2009
Current Volume: 10
No. of Issues per Year: 1
Web: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?page=home;c=ptb;c=ptpbio;...
KS, Nishanth. 2018. "Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology." In STS Publications, created by Aalok Khandekar, Duygu Kaşdoğan, Alberto Morales Ramirez, Noela Invernizzi, and Martín Pérez Comisso. In STS Across Borders Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August. http://stsinfrastructures.org/content/philosophy-theory-and-practice-bio....
STS Across Borders digital collections are focused through ten shared questions that can be asked across all STS formations so as to enable comparative insight.
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STS Across Borders is a special exhibit organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to showcase how the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has developed in different times, places...Read more
Editor in Chief, Christopher Eliot on the change in style and content of the journal.
I joined PTPBio as Executive Editor at the beginning of 2016. At the time, the journal was called Philosophy & Theory in Biology. We relaunched and retitled it in 2017, in an effort to expand explicitly into discussions of scientific practices and turn around the journal's declining momentum under its older guise. Our challenge is to make economically sustainable a journal that is freely available to everyone in the world who can access the internet but also free to authors.
On the shift in focus.
The journal has expanded into discussions of scientific practice and the implications of scientists' choices, for instance. This focus moves the journal away from the strong focus on scientific theory traditional to philosophy of science and history of science, and by the same stroke creating more genuinely cross-disciplinary conversation.
In “Cross-cultural Research, Evolutionary Psychology, and Racialism: Problems and Prospects” (2016) historian John Jackson uses cultural anthropology to undermine assumptions about culture and race made by philosophers of science and evolutionary psychologists. This exemplifies how valuable cross-disciplinary work can be for effective critique with social implications.
Philosophers defending evolutionary/cognitive accounts of racialism argue that cross-cultural psychological research has discovered similar patterns of racial reasoning around the globe. Such research, they hold, simultaneously supports the existence of an underlying cognitive mechanism for essentialist thinking while undercutting social constructionist accounts of racialism. I argue that they are mistaken for two reasons. First, evolutionary/cognitive researchers are unfamiliar with constructionist accounts of global racialism which explain similarities and differences in racialism. Second, evolutionary/cognitive accounts that make cross-cultural claims shoulder probative obligations for showing the independence of the cultures being compared, and these obligations have not been met. I argue that further evolutionary/cognitive research on racialism must account for constructionist models of global racialism while meeting the argumentative obligations of cross-cultural research.
English researcher Melissa Wills shows how subtle linguistic and graphical choices can make a difference in how scientific publications are received, including on issues with serious social implications like the meaningfulness of “race.” One of the important impacts of this piece is that it has been read, acknowledged, embraced, tweeted, retweeted, and commented on by many biologists and practitioners of population genetics whom one would most want to read it.
Noah Rosenberg et al.'s 2002 article “Genetic Structure of Human Populations” reported that multivariate genomic analysis of a large cell line panel yielded reproducible groupings (clusters) suggestive of individuals' geographical origins. The paper has been repeatedly cited as evidence that traditional notions of race have a biological basis, a claim its authors do not make. Critics of this misinterpretation have often suggested that it follows from interpreters' personal biases skewing the reception of an objective piece of scientific writing. I contend, however, that the article itself to some degree facilitates this misrepresentation. I analyze in detail several verbal and visual features of the original article that may predispose aspects of its racial interpretation; and, tracing the arguments of one philosopher and one popular science writer, I show how these features are absorbed, transformed into arguments for a biological basis of race, and re-attributed to the original. The essay demonstrates how even slight ambiguities can enable the misappropriation of scientific writing, unintentionally undermining the authors' stated circumspection on the relationship between cluster and race.