School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe role of feet in early and classical Greek literature(University of Melbourne, 1998)
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ItemT(racing) gender, en(gendering) race : Aboriginal women and the politics of representation(University of Melbourne, 1997)
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ItemLaws of nature( 1994)
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ItemLack of confidence : a study of the suppression of certain counter-examples to the Neyman-Pearson theory of statistical inference with particular reference to the theory of confidence intervals( 1998)This thesis describes the way in which a series of counter-examples to the Neyman-Pearson theory of Statistical Inference has consistently been ignored by Orthodox Statisticians. This particular theory is the dominant one, and is taught in preference to all alternative statistical theories in the majority of Mathematical Statistics departments in Australian Universities, and also in a wide 'range of disciplines making a major use of statistics, notably, the Social Sciences and the Life Sciences and Business. Therefore the failure to seriously explore or even document its weaknesses is particularly serious. These counter-examples (anomalies) all involve the existence of certain recognisable types of data for which the standard procedures, despite being optimal for data in general (globally optimal), are locally (ie. for these particular types of data) sub-optimal. Should our insight into these local features lead us to re-evaluate the accuracy of the standard methods in cases where our data set is of this form? This question does not appear in undergraduate courses and books. We consider first an example raised in 1939 for which the standard Neyman-Pearson procedure, which is globally optimal, produced results which, at a local level, were intuitively very unsatisfactory. Despite the fact that an alternative method already existed which gave "more sensible results", this issue was ignored for largely ideological reasons. The justification for preferring the standard procedure failed entirely to come to grips with the force of the opposing argument. We consider also a number of contributions made to the discussion about closely related (but not identical) phenomena in the 1960s and 1970s. The alternative procedure available for use in the 1939 case had, in the mean time, become incorporated into the general theory, despite being based on a fundamentally different approach from that prescribed by the core of the theory. This had been done without addressing the wider issues, which meant that there was no obvious way to deal with the later counter-examples either. The later debate contains some startling responses to the counter-examples, including: A general acceptance of the notion that a particular type of case does not constitute an anomaly, despite the lack the of any reasoned arguments to this effect and the existence of cogent arguments to the contrary. Arbitrary manoeuvres designed to "solve" the problem of the anomaly but again failing to investigate the real nature of the problem. . Finally, we note that these problems with the standard theory have been concealed from students and from many practitioners of these methods. These issues are regarded as a specialist interest and do not appear in general texts or courses. Moreover, leaving aside the detail of these cases, the fundamental questions which they naturally raise about the ultimate alms of such statistical procedures, and the beliefs on which they are based, are notably absent (or actually misrepresented) in most works on these topics.
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ItemA defence of formalism( 1998)
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ItemThe sexual brain : representing scientific knowledge( 1998)This is a study of the textual production and presentation of knowledge in a selected field of scientific research. It takes as its focus a current research program in the neurosciences, the sexual brain research program; research into sex differences in brain functioning and organisation, or more precisely, research into differences in hemispheric asymmetry between men's and women's brains. In common with most scientific research in progress, the sexual brain research program is marked by complexity, diversity and uncertainty. It is conducted within a number of specialised scientific disciplines, in numerous locations, on a variety of subjects, using differing experimental techniques. It generates a mass of diverse and often inconsistent findings, partial models and fluid theories. The puzzle posed by this diversity and partiality is how robust theories, that is, theories that have historical continuity and significant allies, are created in a system where knowledge production is decentralised and heterogeneous. To investigate the apparent success of a sometimes anomalous and often amorphous research program, scientific writings are examined from a rhetorical perspective. Drawing on the techniques of literary criticism and analysis, identifying tropes and other figures of speech, and using concepts such as narrative time, the implied author and the reader in the text, a close reading is undertaken of a selection of articles published by a group of Canadian neuropsychologists over the past 25 years. Exemplars of three genres of scientific writing have been selected for detailed analysis - three experimental reports, a review and a popular science article. The three genres, having different rhetorical tasks, employ differing literary techniques and devices. The experimental report operates as an oxymoron `writ large'. It is a text that is simultaneously open and closed, created by an author who is absent and present, who speaks both confidently and doubtingly. It represents a constant tension between the conflicting desires of the scientific enterprise; between the search for certified knowledge and the ethos of scientific scepticism The review is an understated text. It addresses the anomalies of the sexual brain obliquely, working to aggregate and simplify data. Its rhetorical imperative is to create a promissory note, a warrant of the ultimate validity and productivity of the research program. Popular scientific writing effects another kind of transformation. The reader is taken on an illustrated journey of detection and serendipitous discovery. It is in this least scientific of texts that the sexual brain is finally made visible. In conclusion, while textual analysis cannot be said to resolve or fully explain the puzzle of the sexual brain research program, it provides another perspective from which to investigate the creation of scientific knowledge. From this perspective, of most interest and impact are the transformations within and between the texts, the silences and instabilities where rhetoric works most powerfully to achieve its effects.
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ItemThe project of indeterminacy : Freud, Castoriadis and the politics of the imagination( 1997)The thesis attempts a critical exegesis of Cornelius Castoriadis's psychoanalytically informed writings, concentrating on the vicissitudes of his developmental notion of the psychical monad and its transition from solipsism to society. In particular, the thesis attends to the way that such a notion informs ideas of the relation of subjectivity to the body, the self to society, and the ego to the unconscious. The argument is that Castoriadis's discourse is of great importance in pointing to the potential for psychoanalysis to question radically all the received schemas of determination which purport to explain the human condition. The first chapter elucidates the peculiarity of the psychoanalytic explanation of the subject's sui generis relation to its body, particularly as this is illustrated in the Freudian account of infantile development. This picture of the loose relation of the psyche to the body is contrasted with the discourses of biological determinism which are in the ascendancy in the contemporary West. Castoriadis, and, according to the thesis's interpretation of it, psychoanalysis in general, gain their importance in combating biologistic thinking by ushering in the challenge of indeterminacy. The first chapter concludes by examining the psyche/soma relation in terms of Castoriadis's notion of 'leaning-on'. The second chapter examines Castoriadis's argument that the individual is entirely 'fabricated' by its society from the raw material of the psyche. For Castoriadis, it is not the individual which stands in fundamental opposition to society, but the psyche. Yet it is questionable whether this opposition is as extreme as Castoriadis maintains. The social and psychical realms in fact show significant areas of similarity. Furthermore, there is a logical difficulty in explaining how Castoriadis's psychical monad, as an entirely closed system, could register otherness, in the form of society, at all. The second chapter finishes with an assessment of these questions. It turns to Whitebook for a possible solution. For Whitebook the psyche is neither fundamentally opposed to society nor open to it, but, rather, neutral before it. The third chapter assesses Castoriadis's primary political concern which is to argue for the possibility of the individual's and society's freedom and autonomy in terms of his model of the psyche. Such liberation is to be achieved by bringing about a freer relation between the psychical agencies. The thesis contrasts this psychological model with that of Lacan, which locates humanity's truth in the darkness of the unconscious. The chapter concludes, after examining Castoriadis's and Lacan's contrary positions on the status of the subject, that the former successfully retains the characteristic dualism of Freud's thought, and is ultimately the more convincing of the two. In summary, the thesis is motivated by a desire to explore the concept of the indeterminacy of the self and social world as it is presented by psychoanalysis.
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ItemA history of occupational health in Victoria until 1980( 1998)A History of Occupational Health in Victoria until 1980 In the flurry of activity in occupational health which began in the late 1970s, the impression was often given that nothing had been done before. In fact the State Governments made a considerable contribution to occupational health prior to this time, a contribution that has not previously been documented. The main theme of the thesis is the role of science in the prevention of occupational disease, with emphasis on the scientific work of the State Occupational Health Divisions, particularly in Victoria. Subsidiary themes concern the public administration of occupational health; the history of union involvement in occupational health; and the effect on occupational health of the changing political climate in the 1970s. The history of occupational health in Victoria began around 1900 with concern about the health of miners. In the beginning most of the work - including the chemical analysis of industrial pollutants - was done by physicians rather than scientists. In 1937 the Industrial Hygiene Division was set up in the Department of Health under the direction of,-- Dr D.O. Shiels. Eventually specialist inspectors and scientists, later known as Industrial Hygienists, were employed in the Division, an arrangement that continued until 1982. In that year the election of a Labor government in Victoria marked the start of a new attitude to occupational health, which placed less emphasis on a scientific approach to_ the assessment of occupational health hazards and more on the use of industrial relations as a means of protecting workers health. The history until the 1980's divides into three eras: prior to 1937; from 1937 - 1956 when Dr D.O. Shiels was appointed Industrial Hygiene Medical Officer in the Department of Health and established the Industrial Hygiene Division; and from 1956 - 1980 when the Division was under the control of Dr A.J. Christophers. Within this chronological framework, the thesis illustrates the effect on occupational health of various labour, industrial and governmental activities by means of a series of small case studies. These are: (i) the anthrax deaths in the 1950s which illustrate the IHD's scientific approach to problem-solving; (ii) the phosphine inquests which illustrate some of the attitudes of unions, employers and expert witnesses; (iii) a case of arsenic poisoning, claimed to be due to eating contaminated mussels and said to be a government cover-up; iv) the involvement of the IHD in other environmental health issues; (v) the 1951 Benzene Regulations which resulted in the cessation of the use of benzene as a solvent, despite the initial reaction from industry that no substitute was available; (vi) the wharf on-call service and the attitude of the waterside workers; (vii) the cases of methyl chloride poisoning that resulted in the promulgation of the Methyl Chloride Regulations banning the use of methyl chloride as a refrigerant; (viii) the story of asbestos in the blue Harris trains, which illustrates the differing attitudes of scientists and workers to the question of risk assessment, standard-setting and the acceptability of occupational risk; (ix) the activities of the IHD in monitoring exposures to asbestos and silica, illustrating some of the constraints under which the Division worked. (x) the response of the IHD to radiation hazards, which illustrates the effect of current social concerns on the direction of public policy. Written by Janet Sowden April 1998
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ItemDavidson and realism( 1998)The consequence of constraints imposed on epistemology by scepticism of the Cartesian variety on the one hand, and accounts of the appropriate criteria for meaning ori the other, is that arguments in epistemological realism, about the external world, must take a specific form. Such arguments are required to argue transcendentally for realism from explanations of meaning, or interpretation, if they are to negotiate the impasse created by the constraints indicated above. Donald Davidson's arguments for realism appear to satisfy the necessary requirements to argue for epistemological realism about the external world successfully. This thesis is an evaluation of whether Davidson's claims succeed. Three related, though separate arguments for realism, are distinguished. They are related by virtue of all stemming from the same explanation of interpretation. Where they differ is in how the realist thesis is transcendentally deduced from the common theory of interpretation. The third argument is distinct from the first two by way of incorporating a naturalistic argument into the transcendental deduction. I argue that only the third argument actually qualifies as a possible successful argument in epistemological realism because it is the only version that can potentially make the realist thesis an explanation of a necessary relation between What we mean and believe and what there is, rather than the previous ploys which could only draw, as candidates for a realist thesis, a necessary relation between what we mean and believe and what must obtain for that meaning and believing to be intelligibly explainable. However, I. conclude that Davidson's third argument does not succeed for it reverts back to an old source of scepticism in appealing to a notion of the epistemic priority of sense experience. What this means is that Davidson can give us no reason for why we must take the object of our beliefs to be synonymous with the idea of an objective world. I do offer, by way of conclusion, what I think would be a likely naturalistic source for an argument in epistemological realism, and I draw on a particular interpretation of a passage in Wittgenstein to make this point.