Letitia Meynell

From Lucretius throwing a spear beyond the boundary of the universe to Einstein racing against a beam of light, thought experiments stand as a fascinating challenge to the necessity of data in the empirical sciences. Are these experiments, conducted uniquely in our imagination, simply rhetorical devices or communication tools or are they an essential part of scientific practice? This volume surveys the current state of the debate and explores new avenues of research into the epistemology of thought experiments

In this chapter, Meynell offers an overview of a specific scientific research program known as evolutionary psychology. She begins by defining two senses of this moniker in order to clearly circumscribe that which has been the target of most critique—feminist and otherwise. She reviews the key commitments of this problematic research program and rehearses common criticisms before illustrating them with a case study. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the rhetorical positioning of this research program and a few remarks about a new supposedly feminist version of evolutionary psychology.

In this paper I tackle the question of what basic form an analytical method for articulating and ultimately assessing visual representations should take. I start from the assumption that scientific images, being less prone to interpretive complication than artworks, are ideal objects from which to engage this question. I then assess a recent application of Nelson Goodman's aesthetics to the project of parsing scientific images, Laura Perini's ‘The truth in pictures’. I argue that, although her project is an important one, her Goodmanian conventionalism produces a method of analysis that is incapable of adequately parsing a certain class of pictures and her focus on truth is unnecessary. This speaks against the promise of Goodman's analytical strategy for elucidating visual content and reasoning in the sciences and elsewhere. As an alternative, I develop John Willats’ analytical method and compare it to Perini's through engaging three of her examples—a chemical diagram, a graph and an electron micrograph. Ultimately, a space remains open for a mixed system where Willats’ account provides pictorial analysis and the Goodman–Perini approach parses visual languages