2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

PSA Abstracts
histories yielded by different reference frames are the Lorentz transforms of
each other, and furthermore can be regarded as nothing more than different
descriptions of the same processes and events.
Jay Odenbaugh University of Calgary
Ecological Stability, Model Building, and Environmental Policy: A Reply to
Some of the Pessimism
Recently, there has been a rise in pessimism concerning what theoretical
ecology can offer conservation biologists in the formation of reasonable
environmental policies. In this paper, I look at one of the pessimistic arguments
offered by Kristin Shrader-Frechette and E. D. McCoy (1993, 1994)—the
argument from conceptual imprecision. I suggest that their argument rests on
an inadequate account of the concepts of ecological stability and that there
has been conceptual progress with respect to complexity-stability hypotheses.
Such progress, I maintain, can supply important resources for conservation
biologists in determining environmental policies.
Osvaldo Pessoa Jr. CLE, Unicamp
Counterfactual Histories: The Beginning of Quantum Physics
This paper presents a method for investigating counterfactual histories of
science. A central notion to our theory of science are “advances” (ideas, data,
etc.), which are units passed among scientists and which would be conserved
in passing from one possible history to another. Advances are connected to
each other by nets of causal influence, and we distinguish strong and weak
influences. Around sixty types of advances are grouped into ten classes. As
our case study, we examine the beginning of the Old Quantum Theory, using
a computer to store and process historical information. We describe four
plausible possible histories, besides six other implausible ones.
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Jean-Pierre Marquis Universite de Montreal
Category Theory: From Fundamentals to the Foundations
Our main goal in this paper is to clarify the status, from a philosophical
standpoint, of category theory in the foundations of mathematics. We will
proceed in three steps. First, we will briefly examine various philosophical
motivations underlying foundational research and extract basic but disputable
presuppositions underlying these researches. Second, we will propose