Abstract In March 2024, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy rejected the proposal for an Anthropocene Series/Epoch beginning in 1952. Yet the decision did not settle the meaning of “Anthropocene.” We reconstruct how an Earth-system diagnosis became a stratigraphic proposal through the identification of a candidate geological interval, marker selection and correlation, taxonomic assignment, and institutional adjudication. These operations did not map neatly onto the questions the proposal had to answer: whether a boundary-centered framework was appropriate, where its boundary should lie, what transformation it should represent, and what rank the unit warranted. An array of mid-twentieth-century stratigraphic signals documented a rapid departure from Holocene Earth-system baselines, with many changes persisting on geological timescales. This evidential achievement did not automatically determine framework, representation, or rank: a classificatory gap remained. Rejection also exposed a jurisdictional gap, since authority over the formal time scale did not confer equivalent authority over the term’s wider scientific uses. Stoppani’s nineteenth-century Anthropozoic provides a historical partial analogue through which alternative principl es of geological periodization become visible. The case explains how evidence of planetary transformation can coexist with disagreement over its classification and semantic authority.
Abstract Norwood Russell Hanson is primarily remembered as a critic of logical empiricism, despite never having mounted explicit philosophical critiques of logical positivism or falsificationism. Hanson viewed his own thought as a via media between different forms of analysis and distinct theoretical persuasions. Rather than putting forward a distinctive model or theory of how science does, or ought to, function, Hanson performed philosophical analyses of key concepts in science. Hanson’s eclectic philosophical toolbox drew most heavily from ordinary language philosophy, logical positivism, and pragmatism. He championed concepts as indispensable, and irreducibly philosophical, elements of all science, pushing conceptual analysis into domains that his predecessors had avoided. For instance, his arguments that observation is theory-laden and that there is a logic of discovery resulted from the application of philosophical and empirical analysis to subjects previously defined as off-limits.
Abstract Wittgenstein’s influence on Kuhn’s thought can be traced from his 1951 Lowell Lectures through The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to his last unfinished manuscript. Meaning as use, vague concepts, family resemblance, aspect seeing, paradigms as models, knowledge and certainty are some of the Wittgensteinian ideas that have left their imprint on Kuhn’s work. In the present paper, I argue that although Kuhn drew on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and agreed with him on fundamentals, he misread certain aspects of Wittgenstein’s work without threatening their overall alignment. I concentrate on three issues: Kuhn’s understanding of concepts, Kuhn’ s understanding of knowledge and certainty, and Kuhn’s take on the accessibility of radically different frameworks, as discussed in The Plurality of Worlds (2022), Kuhn’s unfinished manuscript.
AbstractComplexity sciences have become famous worldwide thanks to several popular books that served as echo chambers of their promises. These consisted in departing from “classical science” defined as deterministic, reductionist, analytic and mono-disciplinary. Their founders and supporters declared that complexity sciences were going to give rise (or that they have given rise) to a post-Laplacian, antireductionist, holistic and interdisciplinary approach. By taking a closer look at their content and practices, I argue in this article that, because of their physics-oriented, computationalist, and mathematical assumptions, complexity sciences have paradoxically produced knowledge at odds with these four tenets.
Although researchers agree on the importance of validity, they have not yet reached a consensus on what validity consists of. This article traces the historic trajectories of validity theory development in three research traditions: psychometrics, experiment in social settings, and animal models of psychiatric disorders, showing that the multiplicity in the concept of validity is shaped by its multiple historic trajectories and reflects the diversity of practices and concerns in different research traditions. I argue that specifying validity of what target practice and for what purpose in discussions helps to connect validity to its rich context that gives rise to its specific meaning and relevance.
