Browsing by Subject "Scientific practice"

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    Experimentation, “models” and the turn to practice
    (Springer, 2020-09-08) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
    Review of Isabelle F. Peschard and Bas C. Van Fraassen (Eds.): The experimental side of modeling. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, 336pp, $40 PB
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    Exploring in the classroom the relationship between alcohol intake and behavioral disorders through an animal model
    (Wiley, International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB), 2024-03-19) Hernández García, Samanta; Guerrero-Rubio, M. Alejandra; Henarejos Escudero, Paula; Martínez Rodríguez, Pedro; Gandía Herrero, Fernando; Bioquímica y Biología Molecular A
    Alcohol consumption has profound effects on behavior, such as impaired judg-ment, addiction or even death. It is estimated that alcohol contributes to around three million deaths worldwide, 13.5% of them in young people with ages between 20 and 39 years. Consequently, it is necessary to raise awareness among college and high school students of the risk related to alcohol drinking. The small nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is an animal widely used as amodel organism to study nearly all aspects of Biochemistry. It is a powerfultool to test the potential bioactivity and molecular mechanisms of natural com-pounds and drugs in vivo. Therefore, it is an interesting topic to include in an undergraduate course of Biotechnology, Biochemistry or Biology students among other scientific vocations. C. elegans is also used as a neurobiological model to evaluate substances´ neurotoxicity and behavioral effects. The pro-posed experiment introduces students to the handling of this preclinical modeland to the evaluation of behavioral alterations induced by chemicals in scien-tific research. The effects of different doses of ethanol on C. elegans behavior are studied using a versatile chemotaxis assay. This laboratory experiment issuitable for an undergraduate course. The practical session can be used in theglobal strategies of information and awareness of educational centres to miti-gate the impact of alcohol abuse among students, both in formal courses or inScience fairs or exhibitions
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    Scientific practice as ecological-enactive co-construction
    (Springer, 2023-06-22) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; van Es, Thomas; Hipolito, Ines; Filosofía
    Philosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophically understanding science as a natural phenomenon can be enriched by drawing from different fields and disciplines, including niche construction theory in evolutionary biology, on the one hand, and ecological and enactive views in embodied cognitive science, on the other. But these insights have so far been explored in separation from each other, without clear indication of whether they can work together. Moreover, the focus on particular practices, however insightful, has tended to lack consideration of potential further implications for a naturalized understanding of science as a whole (i.e., above and beyond those particular practices). Motivated by these developments, here we sketch a broad-ranging view of science, scientific practice and scientific knowledge in terms of ecological-enactive co-construction. The view we propose situates science in the biological, evolutionary context of human embodied cognitive activity aimed at addressing the demands of life. This motivates reframing theory as practice, and reconceptualizing scientific knowledge in ecological terms, as relational and world-involving. Our view also brings to the forefront of attention the fundamental link between ideas about the nature of mind, of science and of nature itself, which we explore by outlining how our proposal differs from more conservative, and narrower, conceptions of “cognitive niche construction.”
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    The strong program in embodied cognitive science
    (Springer, 2023) Sanches de Oliveira, Guilherme; Filosofía
    A popular trend in the sciences of the mind is to understand cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, ecological, and so on. While some of the work under the label of “embodied cognition” takes for granted key commitments of traditional cognitive science, other projects coincide in treating embodiment as the starting point for an entirely different way of investigating all of cognition. Focusing on the latter, this paper discusses how embodied cognitive science can be made more reflexive and more sensitive to the implications that our views of cognition have for how we understand scientific practice, including our own theorizing about cognition. Inspired by the “strong programme” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, I explore the prospect of an analogously “strong” program in embodied cognitive science. I first draw from Dewey’s transactional notion of “situation” to identify a broad sense in which embodied cognitive science takes cognition, as an embodied phenomenon, to be situated. I then sketch a perspective I call situated reflexivity, which extends the Deweyan analysis to understand scientific practice in the same terms, and thereby illustrates what research in line with a strong program in embodied cognitive science can look like. This move, I propose, has the potential of setting up a new inquiry situation that makes more salient the embodiment of scientific practice and that, through this, can help organize our own embodied cognitive activities as we try to make sense of scientific work, including our own.