fiveferfive / the week that was (II, 1)

Nothing diagram-worthy (diaphragm-worthy? HEYO!) from last night's softball game, but I did make all my plays in the OF and go five for five with 2 straight-up legit inside-the-park (sigh) HRs. The second one came late in a 7-7 game with 2 outs and nobody on, and we ended up winning that game 9-7, so groovy groovy jazzy funky on that. I took the week off from Ultimate in an effort to recover from the nasty job the Lei Out sand did on my adductors, and it seems to have served me well - no discomfort last night, so I'll be getting back on the field tomorrow for some pickup (and to get ready for next weekend's New Year's Fest). Hot times ahead! In the more immediate future, it's 1, lotsa Phil reading today; 2, Chinese New Year party with some of Beck's Cooking Light friends; and 3, birthday dinner with Danimal and Xtina. AND we have a veterinarian dinner tomorrow night! Butterflies be we.

The first official week back at school went well - I'm taking four classes, auditing one, doing some research / helping out with a class with Jason, and I suppose I should get on some of my own research interests. The four classes:

History and Philosophy of Scinece Weekly Lab Seminar (aka Weekly Departmental Discussion of Our Work Session)
Philosophy of Science Graduate Seminar
Cultural Psychology
Advanced Bioethics (Feminist Perspectives)
Neuroimmunophilosophy (Auditing)

The last class is a one-monther toward the end of the term, so nothing particular on that yet. We had our first HPS Seminar on Tuesday - last semester our class was combined with the Human & Social Dimensions of Science & Technology (HSDST, or HSD) lab of similar purpose, and the experiment crashed and burned. So we've divorced the two and put things back in an HPS-only seminar, which is FANTASTIC - Drs. Laubichler and Armendt are running it, and we had a great session on foundational problems of HPS and "Specific Theory," the question of how do you reconcile the particularity of case studies with notions of universality / the general. Cool stuff, and it seems as though having a smaller group to work with is going to help mightily.

Phil of Science (also Tuesday) was great Drs. Hamilton (my prof from last semester's semi-disastrous HSD class) and Creath, both of whom are actual in-the-flesh philosophers, run this course and do so in a fast-paced, know-yer-stuff atmosphere. We discussed a classic paper on scientific explanation which brought up, among other things, what the hey are you doing when you "explain" something. I tried to share this with Beck, but she responded with "isn't it obvious" and "this is just a semantic argument," both of which are fair assessments. If you permit yourself to play the philosophy game, though - admittedly semantic, but we are concerned with meaning, after all - it does get very hard to understand what explanation and hey, understanding are really getting at. This paper made the grand distinction between "Scientific explanation" and "mere description," and oddly, mere description seems to be a lot of what science does. This may be worthy of its own post entirely (post-worthy? Huh?), but think about Newtonian physics - when you have a body at location l₀ time t₀ with x mass, y velocity, z acceleration, etc., and then you have the same body at location l₁ at time t₁, you can "explain" how it got there by referring to Newton's laws. But what do those laws do, other than enable you to describe a bunch of intermediate positions between the two - how are these laws anything more than a method for compiling laundry lists of locations? Where is the understanding, really? The gist of the paper was that leaving that question aside, explanations tend to look like (conditions, laws) -> (outcomes), and there are some problems with that model. Sorry to wax on about this, but here's a funny example:

Condition: Joe is a man taking birth control pills
Law: Men who take birth control pills don't get pregnant
Outcome: Joe does not get pregnant

Does that strike you as an accurate explanation? Because it fits the requirements of the general scientific explanatory model (at least as proffered by this paper).

Anyways, that was Tuesday; Wednesday, I read a ton, worked on some stuff for Jason and eventually went to my Cultural Psychology course. The professor was wildly disorganized, and kept putting in under the guise of "I want to make sure you guys get out of this what you want," but really it just seems like he came in with a list of one hundred articles he thought were applicable to the topic and didn't do much work to structure the course. We'll see, but this could end up being a hodgepodge experience. The prof is also a HUGE evolutionary psychology fan, and Jason and I spent part of last semester reviewing a book that skewers the discipline*. So this should be fun.

* (Real quick - evo psych uses "natural selection" as a mechanism to explain certain psychological trends; classic example would be "men are unfaithful because it is to their reproductive advantage to sleep around." Overt Problem - Evo Psych stops at this level of analysis without offering an explanation of the underlying genetics or any mechanisms which would result in the observed outcomes. So you've got a lot of theoretical explanations of contemporary phenomena that don't ground themselves in evolutionary history or detail, which (obviously?) pisses biologists off; worse, evo psych often posit theories that fly in the face of known genetic mechanisms and therefore couldn't possibly be accurate. Evo Psych also aggravate general decent people on the street by hypothesizing things like "rape gives you a selective advantage," which would be interesting if demonstrable, but since its based on such armchair-guessing just strikes a lot of people as distasteful and controversial-to-sell-books. So, this semester could be fun; I'll tread lightly).

Neuroimmunophilosophy on Thursday was a bit of a bust; he was covering "basic immunology" which 1, I've already had several times over, and 2, is sort of categorically incomprehensible. Immunology is vastly complex, so to try to cover the entire shebang in an hour amounts to a long list of cell types and functions, all of which are vague and questionably useful as working definitions. Worse: they were presented in powerpoint with goofy animations and sounds and NO HISTOLOGY, so we saw nothing resembling "real" cells - not that histology cells are actually "real" - just a slew of jagged edged cartoon bubbles. Frustrating, but I can understand why the prof wanted to give everyone a grounding before diving into articles full of "cytokines" and "CD4+" cells and the like. Hopefully this will get better as we get into the philo; it is a combo grad / undergrad class, so I'm not going to hold my breath.

The main note from Friday was that I met with Andrew to discuss my HSD paper from last term and its implications for future research directions. Great meeting; he liked my paper, had several suggestions both for how to improve it and "next steps" for research. Word on the street is that he normally skewers papers, so pin a gold star on me. I am sure that ego-boost carried over into my HR walloping ways...