Professor Ronald Giere

About the Speaker: Ronald N. Giere is Professor of Philosophy and a former Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota. In addition to many papers in the philosophy of science, he is the author of Understanding Scientific Reasoning (4th ed 1997); Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach (1988); and Science Without Laws (1999). He has also edited several volumes of papers in the philosophy of science, including, most recently, Cognitive Models of Science (1992) and Origins of Logical Empiricism (1996). Prof. Giere is a Fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science, a long-time member of the editorial board of the journal Philosophy of Science, and a Past President of the Philosophy of Science Association. His current research focuses on scientific cognition as a form of distributed cognition and on the perspectival nature of scientific knowledge

"Scientific Perspectives"
Brief Abstract: What is the status of scientific claims? I begin by describing two opposing views which I label objectivism and constructivism. My project is to develop a third alternative, which I call perspectivism. I first illustrate this alternative with the familiar example of human color vision. I then argue that all scientific observing is perspectival in roughly the way that color vision is perspectival. Finally, I argue that scientific theorizing is also perspectival. The conclusion is that all scientific claims, including this conclusion itself, are perspectival

Friday, April 29, 2005 at 5:10 p.m. in the Business Auditorium, Business College