Zvi Hasnes Beninson

Steven Rose obituary Neuroscientist, author, political activist and advocate for social responsibility in science

Steven Rose was a neuroscientist and critic of genetic determinist views of human behaviour; he was also a founder member of the now defunct British Society for Social Responsbility in Science (which perhaps needs to be resurrected…) www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Model-formulation

Congratulations! These are wonderful news. Well done. 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Account in the social network formerly known as “twitter”: deactivated. Better late than never.

Remember, it is much harder to have solidarity with the poor and non-privileged in your own society than to have solidarity with the wretched of the earth far away. A lot more is at stake in the former, but much greater impact as well.

The timing of their publication is entirely fortuitous.

The paper on FECs was (on my part) a first stab at the issue. I think that there is a lot more to unpack there.

If you have a related idea that you would like to develop, please feel free to dm me. I’ll be happy to collaborate.

Finally, I will add that my advisor @duhe.bsky.social and I are thinking about the distinction between good and bad science, and I am under the impression that such differentiation involves some normative dimension. I cannot speak for Ehud, but for me normativity is not a naughty word.

Fin

Third, while your suggestion is plausible, I still think that it is shifts the circularity to the normative domain. That does not mean that this sort of defusing is worthless, but it does mean that not all justifications are necessarily done on epistemic grounds.

5/?

That there is a way for thick concepts to play central role within the regular practices in science, and that such regular practices (model formulation for one) could be mechanisms to make such introductions. In this sense, psychological unacceptability becomes a valid consideration.

4/?

Second, regarding agents seeking to make their thick concepts coherent, this is not far removed from my idea that they seek to introduce their commitment to their communities such that the community adopts these commitments as standards. My point was that this introduction means …

3/?

For me, the circularity of FEPs is one of the features that gives them their compelling power over their adherents. While it may be a problem, I don’t know that there is a solution, and whether such solution is indeed epistemic. So non-epistemic justification seems like a reasonable approach.

2/?

Thank you for that, Angela. There is a lot to unpack in your replies, and I will address them as best I can.

First, Michael Lynch is probably more bothered than I am from the circularity problem. For him, it is important that this issue is solved, and solved on epistemological grounds.

1/?

Epistemic commitments have no “Off” button: on the embodiment of commitments by way of model formulation - Biology & Philosophy The current paper examines how a commitment to a principle, adhered to by an individual agent, becomes an accepted standard of an epistemic community. Addressing this question requires three steps: fi...

2/2 Since you brought up these questions, I allow myself a degree of self promotion; my previous paper (published three weeks ago) deals specifically with loop analysis and the way it embodies a dialectical approach. Available here:

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

1/2 The grain of some of these questions does go back to the Strategy paper, and Levins was also concerned about making this complexity tractable. The approach he developed after 1966 to dealing with this problem was loop analysis.

Thank you very much Daniel. Very happy to make your digital acquaintance 😎