Saturday, May 2, 2009

Dinner with Giere, Waters

As part of the University of Cincinnati Darwiniana speaker series (sponsored by Taft), I had dinner last night with Ron Giere and Ken Waters. Although much of the time was talking about non-philosophy topics or the history of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, it was a very enjoyable dinner. There was an interesting discussion about the use of visuals in science. Philosophers of science have not tackled that issue yet. Scientists use visuals (images of fluorescent proteins in tissues, graphs of data, functional MRI brain scans) to make their argument. Ken seems to think that the visuals are interpretations of data and not the data themselves. Certainly in fMRI, PIs (principal investigators) put up either summary images combining the effect of all subjects or hand-select an ideal image to serve as an exemplar of the activation pattern s/he is talking about, which supports the interpretation claim. Graphs are interpretations as well. But, photographs of gel electrophoresis seem to be the data that needs to be interpreted. I'm sure it will turn out that different fields have different evidentiary and interpretive standards. But it's an interesting question.

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