Are plants sentient? Like other aspects of the cognitive potential plants, this is a controversial issue, often driven by analogies and seldom supported on solid theoretical grounds. Sentience understood in sciences as capacity to feel. I suggest that because plants’ evolved adaptations morphological plasticity, sessile nature ecological constraints, they are unlikely have requisite complexity ...

Controversies have been a topic in science studies for some time now. The interest in controversies has fluctuated over time, and the death of controversy studies was announced already in 1988 by Arie Rip; like so many other fields in the social sciences, science studies sometimes appears to hover restlessly from one fashion to the next. In this article I would like to explore why and how Rip's...

Abstract The social sciences often explain behavioral differences by appealing to membership in distinct cultural groups. This work uses the concepts of “cultures” and “cultural groups” like any other demographic category (e.g. “gender”, “socioeconomic status”). I call these joint conceptualizations cultures . Such have long been subject scrutiny. Here isolate respond a set arguments skepticism...