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http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10202-011-0103-0 | DOI Listing |
Hist Philos Life Sci
January 2025
University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The goal of this paper is to explore a set of epistemological and ontological issues regarding the historical and philosophical role of placebos in the contested history of antidepressants. Starting from an account of the dual nature of the placebo as both an epistemic and a therapeutic tool, and against the background of the heated debates on the efficacy of second-generation antidepressants, I propose two related arguments. First, I argue that placebos as controls played a crucial but paradoxical role in the rise of so-called evidence-based approaches to depression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPoiesis Prax
December 2011
Unit of Social, Culture and Technology Studies, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Haardtring 100, 64295 Darmstadt, Germany.
This paper aims to contribute to the attempts to clarify and classify the vague notion of "technosciences" from a historical perspective. A key question that is raised is as follows: Does Francis Bacon, one of the founding fathers of the modern age, provide a hitherto largely undiscovered programmatic position, which might facilitate a more profound understanding of technosciences? The paper argues that nearly everything we need today for an ontologically well-informed epistemology of technoscience can be found in the works of Bacon-this position will be called epistemological real-constructivism. Rather than realist or constructivist, empiricist or rationalist, Bacon's position can best be understood as real-constructivist since it challenges modern dichotomies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Context
June 1996
Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This paper focuses on the opening of a discursive space: the emergence of informational and scriptural representations of life and hereditiy and their self-negating consequences for the construction of biological meaning. It probes the notion of writing and the book of life and shows how molecular biology's claims to a status of language and texuality undermines its own objective of control. These textual significations were historically contingent.
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