New Course for Fall!

After much success, in her summer course on metaphysics, Dr. Sara Vollmer is back with an all-new course about the ethics of image manipulation and pictoral scientific representation. The course was just recently added to the schedule for fall, so if you're interested, sign up soon!

Here is a course description from Dr. Vollmer:
Ethics of Image Manipulation and How Scientific Knowledge is Represented in Pictures
Images play an important role in representing evidence for scientific belief and knowledge. In many fields of science, the images created are analogous to images of ordinary objects and as such, they are pictures of individuals as seen from certain perspectives at certain times.
However, science is supposed to be about kinds, not just individuals, and perspective-free. This creates a problem: how is the categorically different, perspectival, knowledge of pictures related to the objective knowledge of science? Moreover how, from the perspective-bound knowledge of images, is perspective-free scientific knowledge supposed to be generated?
In this course, we will study pictures in science and how they bear on these two kinds of knowledge. Pictures have a strong analogy to perception, and we will study how the knowledge represented in pictures is related to perceptual knowledge. A striking aspect of both perception and pictures is that the knowledge or information they carry can not just represent knowledge, but also suggests, in an integral way, how the knowledge was obtained. For example, a snapshot of a wristwatch, or a man looking at a wristwatch might not only convey, for example, “It is five o’clock” when the picture was taken, but also that this knowledge is gained through looking at a wristwatch. This aspect of pictures is related to their perspective-bound nature, and we will study the issue of how it is translated into perspective-free terms.
We will also examine the ethics of image choice and manipulation in science, including the ways in which images produce and justify knowledge, the ways they can be misused, and the legal consequences of misusing them. The course will teach some specifics surrounding how manipulations, such as cropping or cloning, can degrade or destroy the evidential basis for scientific hypotheses, and how this is related to the problem of producing objective conclusions from perspective-bound data.