Science writing and publishing round-up

Today at ScienceBlogs there are a few posts of interest to science writers:
The Daily Transcript’s post, History and analysis of scientific publishing, comments on a interesting book with an overly long title, In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing.
Recent posts to Adventures in Ethics and Science discuss science [...]

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Moral intuitions about breach of contract

Here’s an article, just uploaded to SSRN, that I can’t resist promoting because it’s about moral intuitions and the law.
From the introduction:
In this research, we use traditional psychological methodologies to ask when laypeople consider breach to be immoral , which moral principles and moral heuristics they employ to make that judgment, and to what [...]

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Richard Dawkins on The Current

Anna Maria Tremonti interviews the famous atheist today on The Current. A significant portion of the interview deals with Dawkins’ view that religion gets a ‘free ride’ in the sense that atheists are unwilling to be openly critical of religion. That sets the stage for a broad discussion of the theme: how should scientists respond [...]

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What do Confucians do with moral intuitions?

I’ll confess my training in analytic philosophy means I don’t ‘get’ the continental tradition. Too much of it seems like bad metaphysics. It’s also a reason I don’t ‘get’ most eastern philosophy.
Which is, I suppose, a good enough reason to wonder if there is a cultural difference in the moral psychologies found in these very [...]

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Philosopher’s Guild

What? There’s a Philosophers’ Guild? And it has rules about not using something called data? Watch out, experimental philosophers, if you want to keep your knee-caps.
I wonder what other rules it might have…

“The first rule of Philosophers’ Guild is – you do not talk about Philosophers’ Guild.”

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