Cliff Hooker

University of Newcastle Australia · School of Humanities and Social Science

In an Isis 2008 review of research in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), Galison opened discussion on ten on-going HPS problems. It is however unclear to what extent these problems, and constraints on their solutions, are of HPS’s own making. Recent research provides a basic resolution of these issues. In a recent paper Hooker (Perspect Sci 2...

This paper describes a general methodology for “integrated sustainability assessment”, showing how it has been applied within Australia to several large-scale regional resource management issues, and indicates how it might be applicable to the energy sector. However the methodology can be applied at all scales down to individual energy company and...

Complex systems are used, studied and instantiated in science, with what consequences? To be clear and systematic in response it is necessary to distinguish the consequences, (i) for science, of science using and studying complex systems, (ii) for philosophy of science, of science using and studying complex systems, (iii) for philosophy of science,...

Deliberative judgment formation is a core human skill largely irreplaceable by rational formalisms. Judgment is rationally learnable and improvable like other skills, and well-designed deliberation is the foundation of non-formal rationality. It includes self-improvement by learning about our own norms and deliberative processes, exemplified in inc...

Real examples illustrate how the resources of non-formal reason are used practically. The first example is taken from an ethnographic study of children with leukemia. These children desperately wanted to know what was wrong with them, but their parents and the health care staff remained silent. The children used the four resources of non-formal rea...

Deliberation occurs when deliberate judgment has to be made. The best way to understand deliberation is by examining the operation of non-formal reason in examples of deliberation. Deliberation has been portrayed as an imaginative dramatic rehearsal. That is what the women in Chapter 1 did when deciding whether they would try to get pregnant. They...

The problematic features of moral issues revealed in Chapters 1 and 2 have exact counterparts in scientific research, where their appearance makes it clear that the problem is located in the common conception of formal reason, especially because logic currently underlies both ethics and science. To prepare for re-examining appropriate rational proc...

A second kind of formal rationality, complementary to the maximizing expected utility in Chapter 1, is logical inference. In much of moral philosophy and in standard bioethics decision making is applied ethics. Moral theories are taken to be comprised of principles that are applied to the facts of cases to deduce conclusions about what ought to be...

Designing ethical policies is illustrated with two real examples. The first, allocating cadaver kidneys for transplantation, needs to develop a policy that satisfies the two conflicting fundamental values of equality and efficiency. Equality would require a lottery or a first-come, first-served policy. Efficiency would allocate kidneys to the candi...

Ethics is embedded in the practices and institutions of society. Three examples illustrate the communal importance of ethical design. First is the distinction between Fights, Games, and Debates as successively more ethical and more intelligent institutional designs for handling conflict. The second is the Prisoner’s Dilemma in game theory, whose be...

The new conception of rationality as non-formal reason is completed by an explanation of how design in engineering can be brought to the design of practical problems in ethics, from which the notion of ethics as design for flourishing is developed. The conventional notions of balancing and specification in applied ethics are rejected and replaced b...

A paradigm instructs in how to do research successfully. Analytic philosophy of science, currently dominant, models paradigmatic rational science as a system of logical inferences. It is, however, an abundantly inadequate paradigm. This paper presents an alternative paradigm: science as an organized collection of problem solving processes. This pos...

A modestly generic, innovative, problem solving process with roots in the study of design and scientific research problem solving is presented and motivated. It is argued to be the shared core process of all problem solving. At its heart is a recognition of five foci or nodes of change vital to the process (changes in problem and solution formulati...

The preceding three decades have seen the emergence, rise, and proliferation of machine learning (ML). From half-recognised beginnings in perceptrons, neural nets, and decision trees, algorithms that extract correlations (that is, patterns) from a set of data points have broken free from their origin in computational cognition to embrace all forms...

Complete CV of principle publications and associated rolles

Galle and Kroes (this journal 2014) have critiqued a recent paper by Farrell and Hooker (this journal 2012) that argued that design and science shared a common core problem-solving (cognitive) process. Contrarily, Galle and Kroes argued for distinct purposive identities to design and science and on that and further grounds argued for their having d...

There is a widespread view that design and scientific research are very different processes. One important argument for that view is based on the claim that design is prescriptive, value-laden and normative, whilst science is descriptive, value-free and non-normative. We argue that this position is quite mistaken, fundamentally because the view of...

Complexity arises from interaction dynamics, but its forms are co-determined by the operative constraints within which the dynamics are expressed. The basic interaction dynamics underlying complex systems is mostly well understood. The formation and operation of constraints is often not, and oftener under appreciated. The attempt to reduce constrai...

We examine the claim that design is demarcated from science by having wicked problems while science does not and argue that it is wrong. We examine each of the ten features Rittel and Weber hold to be characteristic of wicked problems and show that they derive from three general sources common to science and design: agent finitude, system complexit...

Context: For almost a decade, the Kidney Transplantation Committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing has been striving to revise its approach to allocating kidneys from deceased donors for transplantation. Two fundamental values, equality and efficiency, are central to distributing this scarce resource. The prevailing approach gives primacy...

In 1895 sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel published a paper: ‘On a connection of selection theory to epistemology’. It was focussed on the question of how behavioural success and the evolution of the cognitive capacities that underlie it are to be related to knowing and truth. Subsequently, Simmel’s ideas were largely lost, but recently (200...

Although recent clinical trials have demonstrated the increasing promise of gene therapy, they have also illustrated the difficulties of assessing risks, given the inherent uncertainty of trial outcomes. An international survey was conducted to investigate gene therapy researchers' perceptions and assessments of risks in clinical trials. Data from...

There is a long tradition of arguing that design and science are importantly different. One such argument is that the separation of science and design is an implication that can be drawn from the Simon-Kroes model of the nature of technical artifacts. This paper argues that the Simon-Kroes model does not imply a radical separation between science a...

This introductory chapter provides a first presentation of an intellectual framework for understanding the foundational and philosophical issues raised by the complex systems revolution. The present essay is designed to introduce and broadly review the domain of complex systems, with an eye to identifying the historical setting, the key systems pro...

This chapter describes the application of reduction concepts in emergence and self organization of complex dynamical system. Condition-dependent laws compress and dynamical equation sets provide implicit compressed representations even when most of that information is not explicitly available without decompression. And, paradoxically, there is stil...

This chapter explores the implications of a complex dynamic systems perspective for the adequate conception of sustainability and satisfactory sustainability policy. The essence of sustainability policy is the appropriate management of human interaction with the natural world, with a particular emphasis on interactions that involve risks to valuabl...

Not for transmission or reproduction in any form or by any means except by written permission of the authors. Executive Summary The World Commission on Environment and Development introduced the idea of sustainable development as that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need...

Professor Polikarov has spent considerable time surveying various dimensions of the science-technology process, and scientific method in particular (Polikarov 1973; 1983). Therein he has expressed a view which has radical implications vis-a-vis traditional philosophy, namely that philosophy of science should itself be considered an extension of the...

The point of this paper is to provide a principled framework for a naturalistic, interactivist-constructivist model of rational capacity and a sketch of the model itself, indicating its merits. Being naturalistic, it takes its orientation from scientific understanding. In particular, it adopts the developing interactivist-constructivist understandi...

A microwave beam (8-mm wavelength) was propagated parallel to the confining magnetic field in a plasma. To identify the transmission bands, the electron density and the magnetic field were slowly varied (in time) to separate the transmission bands of the left-hand circularly polarized wave from the right hand wave, above and below the electron cycl...

The domain of nonlinear dynamical systems and its mathematical underpinnings has been developing exponentially for a century, the last 35 years seeing an outpouring of new ideas and applications and a concomitant confluence with ideas of complex systems and their applications from irreversible thermodynamics. A few examples are in meteorology, ecol...

Error is protean, ubiquitous and crucial in scientific process. In this paper it is argued that understanding scientific process requires what is currently absent: an adaptable, context-sensitive functional role for error in science that naturally harnesses error identification and avoidance to positive, success-driven, science. This paper develops...

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Analytic moral philosophy's strong divide between empirical and normative restricts facts to providing information for the application of norms and does not allow them to confront or challenge norms. So any genuine attempt to incorporate experience and empirical research into bioethics--to give the empirical more than the status of mere 'descriptiv...

The role of interaction in learning is essential and profound: it must provide the means to solve open problems (those only vaguely specified in advance), but cannot be captured using our familiar formal cognitive tools. This presents an impasse to those confined to present formalisms; but interaction is fundamentally dynamical, not formal, and wit...

The Aristotle-Kant tradition requires that autonomous activity must originate within the self and points toward a new type of causation (different from natural efficient causation) associated with teleology. Notoriously, it has so far proven impossible to uncover a workable model of causation satisfying these requirements without an increasingly un...

Overall energy flow in a societal energy system has three stages: primary source to secondary fuel media to tertiary services production. The secondary stage is comprised of fuel media: electrical, chemical, mechanical and thermal. These have a systematic (‘diamond’) inter-conversion structure with conversion inefficiencies attached to each connect...

An energy scenario is a coherent narrative of the successive states of an energy system from the present to some future end-state configuration. There are two significant first order parameters characterising an energy technology configuration : i) which energy medium and tertiary technology serves transport demands, and ii) which resource, primary...

The purpose of this paper and its sister paper I (Farrell and Hooker, a) is to present, evaluate and elaborate a proposed new model for the process of scientific development: self-directed anticipative learning. The vehicle for its evaluation is a new analysis of a well-known historical episode: the development of ape language research. Paper I exa...

The purpose of this paper and its sister paper (Farrell and Hooker, b) is to present, evaluate and elaborate a proposed new model for the process of scientific development: self-directed anticipative learning (SDAL). The vehicle for its evaluation is a new analysis of a well-known historical episode: the development of ape-language research. In thi...

For over three decades, Paul Churchland has been a provocative and controversial philosopher of mind and of science. He is most famous as an advocate of 'eliminative materialism', whereby he suggests that our commonsense understanding of our own minds is radically defective and that the science of brain demonstrates this (just as an understanding o...

‘Forty-two! ’ yelled Loonquawl. ‘Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years work?’ ‘I checked it very thoroughly, ’ said the computer, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.’ ‘But it was the Great Question! The Ultima...

All the major inter-theoretic relations of fundamental science are asymptotic ones, e.g. quantum theory as Planck's constant h → 0, yielding (roughly) Newtonian mechanics. Thus asymptotics ultimately grounds claims about inter-theoretic explanation, reduction and emergence. This paper examines four recent, central claims by Batterman concerning asy...

Tim van Gelder, following Brandom, Collins and others, uses the so-called wide content of capacities which support social, norm governed activities, such as language, to argue for their anti-natural, abstract, but socially instituted nature and thence for the failure of the entire traditional mind-body discussion as ill-posed. We argue that his for...

This chapter explores the dynamics of cultural change by presenting a dynamical analysis of biological organisation. In order to understand cultural change, it argues that the focus should be on highly interactive and plastic, highly organised processes and concomitant states that constitute culture. It also suggests that the interactive complex of...

Donald Campbell has long advocated a naturalist epistemology based on a general selection theory, with the scope of knowledge restricted to vicarious adaptive processes. But being a vicariant is problematic because it involves an unexplained epistemic relation. We argue that this relation is to be explicated organisationally in terms of the regulat...

In this paper, we outline a theory of the nature of self-directed agents. What is distinctive about self-directed agents is their ability to anticipate interaction processes and to evaluate their performance, and thus their sensitivity to context. They can improve performance relative to goals, and can, in certain instances, construct new goals. We...

This paper outlines a positive naturalistic account of the emergence of norms, intentionality and intelligence from the evolutionary elaboration of organisational capacities which are fundamental to biological life forms. Correlatively, it provides a critique of the currently dominant selectionist teleosemantic account of these features. According...

This paper outlines an interactivist-constructivist theory of autonomy as the basic organisational form of life, and the role we see it playing in a theory of embodied cognition. We distinguish our concept of autonomy from autopoiesis, which does not emphasise interaction and openness. We then present the basic conceptual framework of the I-C appro...

Both natural and engineered systems are fundamentally dynamical in nature: their defining properties are causal, and their organisational and functional capacities are causally grounded. Among dynamical systems, an interesting and important sub-class are those that are autonomous, anticipative and adaptive (AAA). Living systems, intelligent systems...

Donald Campbell has long advocated a naturalist epistemology based on a general selection theory, with the scope of knowledge restricted to vicarious adaptive processes. But being a vicariant is problematic because it involves an unexplained epistemic relation. We argue that this relation is to be explicated organizationally in terms of the regulat...

We are naturalists aiming to ground philosophical notions in real dynamical processes. From our perspective science is better modeled as a dynamical system than as the formal logical (inductive and deductive) machine found in the work of both the rationalists and empiricists (Hooker 1991,1995). We seek a model of science whereby accepted theory, pr...

Siegel argues that no naturalist account of the normative is possible because only means, not ends, can be naturalised - but ends are essential. I want to agree that ends are essential to understanding normativity, yet remain naturalist. In response I argue that a fully naturalised and fallibilist, constructivist theory of objective ends is both po...

This book focuses on showing how the ideas central to the new wave oj dynamic systems studies may also form the basis for a new and distinctive theory of human development where both global order and local variability in behaviour emerge together from the same organising dynamical interactions. This also sharpens our understanding of the weaknesses...

In his bookMinimal Rationality (1986), Christopher Cherniak draws deep and widespread conclusions from our finitude, and not only for philosophy but also for a wide range of science as well. Cherniak's basic idea is that traditional philosophical theories of rationality represent idealisations that are inaccessible to finite rational agents. It is...

It is argued that fundamental to Piaget''s life works is a biologically based naturalism in which the living world is a nested complex of self-regulating, self-organising (constructing) adaptive systems. A structuralist-rationalist overlay on this core position is distinguished and it is shown how it may be excised without significant loss of conte...

Reason in science has proven a more subtle and complex business than even its subtle masters supposed.

Newton’s methodology in his Principia provides the historical focus for the present methodological study. The background required to fully appreciate the methodology of Newton’s approach to universal gravitation, focused in Book 3 of the Principia, is deliciously complex and delightfully illuminated in the papers by Stein 1990a,b and Wilson 1970.1...

It is shown how the development of physics has involved making explicit what were homocentric projections which had heretofore been implicit, indeed inexpressible in theory. This is shown to support a particular notion of the invariant as the real. On this basis the divergence in ideals of physical intelligibility between Bohr and Einstein is set o...

Locate Feyerabend within a theory of Western traditions. [What follows is my current conjectural formulation of the core western philosophical project, not a pronouncement ex cathedra].

Public policy formation in the energy sector is dominated by liberalism and the assumption that the primary aim of p o l i q is the correction of market failure. Such a policy framework does not sufficiently account for the inter- connectedness of the energy system and the role it has in determining characteristics of society and the environment. T...

Bell’s work is placed in historical context; it represents one tradition within a much wider set of diverging traditions stemming from the debates between Bohr and Einstein. Bell’s theorem and responses are presented and critically reviewed. It is argued that none of the latter succeed in advancing physical understanding beyond the original debates...

Over the past two centuries the character of science has changed markedly and crucially. When humans had relatively small amounts of information and energy available they perforce had no option but to attempt to describe objectively a world which behaved independently of them. The basic practical problem was to discover what the pattern of the worl...

The relativist holds that in some crucial respect or other our cognitive abilities are simply too restricted or weak to determine our cognitive development. The essence of cognitive relativism is to deny that humans have access to methods for objectively criticising their own cognitive commitments; in particular, relativists argue the absence of cr...

Scenario research is often perceived as being of limited use to government energy planners because of a mismatch between the process and results of energy planning and those of scenario research, specifically: energy planning is strategic or operational, whereas scenario research is normative; energy planning relates to the short term, whereas scen...

"Churchland and Hooker have collected ten papers by prominent philosophers of science which challenge van Fraassen's thesis from a variety of realist perspectives. Together with van Fraassen's extensive reply . . . these articles provide a comprehensive picture of the current debate in philosophy of science between realists and anti-realists."—Je...