Jeopardy Review Game!

1. Jeopardy Review Game! Final Thoughts on STS D. Gruber

2. Prehistory of STS (100) • True or False: STS, as a field, developed in part as a response to Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism is the view that only testable and quantifiable claims are scientific ones; and only scientific statements should be adopted.

3. Answer (100) • [True!] Logical Positivism = An STS Boo

4. Prehistory to STS (BET pts!) • In the “Introduction to STS” PowerPoint, the standard definition of Science read as follows: “Science is a formal activity that creates and accumulates knowledge by directly confronting the natural world.” The STS definition is quite a bit different. It reads as follows: “Science is a collection of _____________ and ____________ activities (not a single “formal activity”) that __________________ knowledge (not “creates”) by manipulating the material world (not “confronting the natural world”). Fill in the blanks.

5. Answer (bet) • [Answer: social and symbolic…. constructs]

6. Prehistory to STS (300) • STS finds at least four problems with Logical Positivism. Those are: 1) The Construction of Language: Language describes observations,soobservations are not free and objective of language’s structure and associations; 2) The Experience of Meaning: The meaning of many claims cannot be understood as data alone, such as “depression is terrible”; 3)The Dependence on Verification: Non-verified claims may be worth believing, and some objects of analysis may never be verifiable by scientific standards; 4) The Veracity of the Already Verified: explain the STS meaning of this last one.

7. Answer (300) • [Answer: Since science is social, it proceeds through negotiation, rhetoric and agreement, making the already verified not as trustworthy or as objective as logical positivists want to accept.]

8. Important Concepts in STS (100) • What is the Duhem-Quine Thesis as developed by Pierre Duhem and Willard Van OrmanQuine?

9. Answer (100) • [Answer: “A theory can never be exclusively tested in isolation. What is tested is an entire framework or network of beliefs.” In other words, verifying a theory requires acceptance of a background set of beliefs about the world that also get brought along and re-verified in the process of confirming a theory.

10. Important Concepts in STS (200) • What does it mean to say a theory is always underdetermined? Remember these dots?

11. Answer (200) • [Answer: underdetermination of a scientific theory by evidence is the simple idea that the evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it. There are always other possibilities. Remember the dots?]

12. Important Concepts in STS (300) • In a Rhetoric of Science, Lawrence Prelli offers us four Superior Stases of Scientific Practice, by which he means four aspects that can always be called into question. Those are: The Evidence provided, the Methods used to obtain the finding, the Meaning or Interpretation of the finding, and the ___________. Fill in the blank.

13. Answer (300) • [Answer: the value the work has for the field or for humanity. Is it worth doing? Or, maybe it is too risky to attempt to do!]

14. Rhetoric (100) • What was the point of discussing this image?

15. Answer (100) • The perception (of what we’ll call data) requires inference. That is, the perception of anything, much less dots and lines, is no more than perception of, say, dots and lines until it is a perception of something other than dots and lines. When it becomes an inference, it requires words. Lines of reasoning. Arguments. This is where rhetoric comes in.

16. Rhetoric (200) • For the contemporary rhetorical tradition, is rhetoric a type of language use? America, the land of freedom and democracy, of power and justice, is our great nation. We are all Americans.

17. Answer (200) • No. Rhetoric, as persuasion, happens all the time. The idea is that we make particular choices in the construction of any sentence, which are designed to get you to see it my way and in a particular way. Furthermore, as we’ve seen in our STS discussions, “rhetoric” is not confined to language use. Building an impressive experimental apparatus can be persuasive in and of itself.

18. Rhetoric (300) • Who saw no value in rhetoric and thought it stood opposed to “Truth;” he believed it was dangerous to teach people how to persuade others? • A) Aristotle • B) Robert Merton • C) Plato • D) Thomas Kuhn

19. Rhetoric (300) • PLATO! Plato: Rhetoric is a pseudo-art, an ignoble practice. Plato gave rhetoric its negative sense of “mere rhetoric” or “that’s not real/truth, that’s just rhetoric!”

20. Mertonian Norms (100) • Robert Merton offers us four central values of Science or “Norms of Science.” They are: Universalism, Communism, Disinterestedness, and ____________. Fill in the blank.

21. Answer (100) • [Answer: Skepticism or Organized Skepticism]

22. Mertonian Norms (200) • Explain how this cartoon suggests that one Mertonian Norm backfires to hinder scientific development. In other words, which Norm is pictured here as gone awry?

23. Answer (200) • [Answer: Skepticism can make publishing & knowledge-building impossible]

24. Mertonian Norms (300) • In 1950, Emmanuel Velikovsky published Worlds in Collision. The problem was that the claims in the book violated universal laws of mechanics. What Mertonian Norm could his critics claim they were upholding, and which could Velikovsky claim he was upholding?

25. Answer (300) • [Answer: Critics could claim Skepticism and Velikovsky could claim true Disinterestedness.]

26. Heidegger (100) • For Heidegger, what does Modern mean? That is, why is the world “Modern” or in what way is the world “Modern” for Heidegger?

27. Answer (100) • [Answer: The Modern is making everything into objective numerical data that obscures other views of the world by allowing numerical and “scientific” claims to be the most valid and privileged in forming our view of things as things. Ontology is understood by measuring and comparing measurements.]

28. Heidegger (200) • Heidegger gets really fussy about the way we always understand a new concept in terms of what?

29. Answer (200) • [Answer: he disdains how we organize the search for new facts in terms of an old, already established fact, such that the “new” is really already pre-confirmed and paved by the old. In this way, “progress” becomes a type of reificationandtrajectory.]

30. Heidegger (BET pts!) • Heidegger’s solution to increasing datafication and mechanization is what?

31. Answer (BET!) • [Answer: The arts. We should embrace a way of seeing the world where the world is not viewed as data to be calculated and used up in industry and industrial assemblage.] A tree painting by Rosemary Hultman, RLH Design

32. TIE BREAKER • Explain the meaning of the Janus Head in terms of the prime STS critique of the two sides of Scientific practice.

33. Answer (tiebreaker) • Science can look one way and say, “if the experiment fails, then there must be a problem with the design or the experimenters!”; and Science can look the other way and say, “if the experiment succeeds, then it is Nature!”