Marion Clara Vorms

Linkage (or genetic) maps are graphs, which are intended to represent the linear ordering of genes on the chromosomes. They are constructed on the basis of statistical data concerning the transmission of genes. The invention of this technique in 1913 was driven by Morgan's group's adoption of a set of hypotheses concerning the physical mechanism of heredity. These hypotheses were themselves grounded in Morgan's defense of the chromosome theory of heredity, according to which chromosomes are the physical basis of genes. In this paper, I analyze the 1919 debate between William Castle and Morgan's group, about the construction of genetic maps. The official issue of the debate concerns the arrangement of genes on chromosomes. However, the disputants tend to carry out the discussions about how one should model the data in order to draw predictions concerning the transmission of genes; the debate does not bear on the data themselves, nor does it focus on the hypotheses explaining these data. The main criteria that are appealed to by the protagonists are simplicity and predictive efficacy. However, I show that both parties' assessments of the simplicity and predictive efficacy of different ways of modeling the data themselves depend on background theoretical positions. I aim at clarifying how preference for a given model and theoretical commitments articulate

Résumé — La question de l’éducation, telle qu’elle se pose dès les premiers écrits de Simone Weil, où elle est pensée comme un apprentissage de la nécessité par l’action, puis dans ses réflexions politiques sur l’éducation syndicale d’une part et celle d’un peuple tout entier de l’autre, pour enfin se retrouver dans la pensée mystique des dernières années, offre un angle intéressant pour aborder l’œuvre de la philosophe. Jamais thématisée comme telle par Simone Weil, la notion d’éducation est pourtant transversale et permet de comprendre à la fois l’unité profonde et les apparentes contradictions de sa pensée. Dans cet article, nous dégageons un certain nombre de caractéristiques importantes de la notion d’éducation qui se retrouvent aux plans individuel, politique et finalement mystique. On verra peu à peu émerger l’importance de la notion de symbole qui nous permettra de proposer, à partir de la " philosophie de l’éducation " de Simone Weil, un " mode d’emploi " pour la lecture de son œuvre même.— The issue of education provides us with an interesting perspective to approach Simone Weil’s works : though she never takes education as such as an object of study, it is a ubiquitous notion which enables us to understand both the deep unity and the apparent contradictions of her thought. In her first works, education is thought of as concrete learning of the necessity by one’s own actions on the world. In her political reflections, Simone Weil is concerned with both the education of workers by the syndicate and the education of a whole country. Finally, the issue of education is central, as I will show, to her late mystical thought. In this paper, I emphasize some important features of " the notion of " education as it appears in the individual, political and mystical works of Simone Weil. The notion of symbol will turn out to be of central importance, and I will finally show that it provides us with some " reading instructions " of the very writings of Simone Weil from the perspective of her philosophy of education

It is quite widely acknowledged, in the field of cognitive science, that the format in which a set of data is displayed (lists, graphs, arrays, etc.) matters to the agents' performances in achieving various cognitive tasks, such as problem-solving or decision-making. This paper intends to show that formats also matter in the case of theoretical representations, namely general representations expressing hypotheses, and not only in the case of data displays. Indeed, scientists have limited cognitive abilities, and representations in different formats have different inferential affordances for them. Moreover, this paper shows that, once agents and their limited cognitive abilities get into the picture, one has to take into account both the way content is formatted and the cognitive abilities and epistemic peculiarities of agents. This paves the way to a dynamic and pragmatic picture of theorizing, as a cognitive activity consisting in creating new inferential pathways between representations.

In this paper, I analyze the significance of Ernest Nagel's introduction of the notion of model in his reconstruction of scientific theories. Nagel's account is generally considered as a version of the "received view" of theories, whose main advocate is Carnap. However, I will show that Nagel's considerations on models imply a renunciation to the logical empiricists' project of the formalization of scientific theories. I will argue that Nagel implicitly acknowledges that, in order to study the content of theories, one cannot abstract away from the agents' understanding of theories, and from the reasoning processes they perform when using them

In this paper, I wish to challenge theory-biased approaches to scientific knowledge, by arguing for a study of theorizing, as a cognitive activity, rather than of theories, as abstract structures independent from the agents’ understanding of them. Such a study implies taking into account scientists’ reasoning processes, and their representational practices. Here, I analyze the representational practices of geneticists in the 1910s, as a means of shedding light on the content of classical genetics. Most philosophical accounts of classical genetics fail to distinguish between the purely genetic, or Mendelian level, and the cytological one. I distinguish between them by characterizing them in terms of their respective associated representational practices. I then present how the two levels were articulated within Morgan’s theory of crossing-over, and I describe the representational technique of linkage mapping, which embodies the “merging” of the Mendelian and cytological levels. I propose an analysis of the mapping scheme, as a means of enlightening the conceptual articulation of Mendelian and cytological hypotheses within classical genetics. Finally, I present the respective views of three opponents to Morgan in the 1910s, who had a different understanding of the articulation of cytology and Mendelism, and entertained different views concerning the role and proper interpretation of maps. I propose to consider these diverging perspectives as instantiating what I call different “versions” of classical genetics