Be a hero: Employ refugees like a pragmatist

To escape blame, don't be a hero—Be a victim

A pragmatist theory of learning

This paper suggests that Peirce’s pragmatism might be a more suitable underpinning of educational research than the currently prevailing constructivism, in particular with respect to science and mathematics education. Using examples from the educational literature, a case is made for a notion of “truth”, a pragmatist scientific method, Peirce’s doubt-belief cycle and his semiotics and logic in ...

A necessary hero

How will we know when it’s done? Today’s computational methods can generate reasonable homology models with a minimum of 30% sequence identity within a family. Once a genome is completed and subdivided into families that are 30% identical, it is easy to calculate how many structure determinations are necessary to yield models for that genome. Our accountants, the bioinformaticists, estimate we ...

Is Really Achilles a Hero?

The Iliad is not a work that gives a mere account of historic facts and events but one where persons are the protagonists by virtue of their behaviors, values, motives and decisions which affect the flow of the story. Achilles is one of these persons that play a primary role in the plot of Iliad; as Homer puts it in the first lines of this work, the anger (mênin) of Achilles, his withdrawal fro...

Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of Science

This three-part essay begins with a diagnosis of the career of general philosophy of science in the tradition begun by Hempel’s reform of logical positivism. Since 1950, Anglophone philosophy of science has largely sought general accounts of confirmation, theory and explanation. It has not found them. Instead it has assembled some valuable tools for exploring problems in the natural and social ...