Entries by Elizabeth Hannon

The Burden of Proofs | Beth Hannon

2 June 2016 in , , /by

One of the always-frustrating aspects of being a copy editor is that it requires an obsessive nature as well as a willingness to accept that perfection isn’t possible; no matter how many times your check the proofs, there’ll always be something that makes it into the final version. Obviously enough, such obsessiveness and knowing when to let go aren’t traits often found to co-exist in one mere human. And in correcting others’ mistakes—and in writing posts such as this—Muphry’s law looms large. All in all, you’re asking for trouble. But despite opening the door to public ridicule, we thought we’d add to our ‘how to’ series with something on copy-editing.

Oi! Ref!

17 December 2015 in , , /by

Another year, another plethora of referees to thank! The BJPS continues to go from strength to strength, and while our authors can bask in the limelight, as editors we get to see behind the scenes, to all the hard work done by the referees in taking strong drafts and turning them into shiny, publishable gems. As the list of names below makes clear, the number of people it takes to make a journal work is not small, and that’s before we include all the editors and the team at OUP. What’s more, this list isn’t nearly complete—not everyone consented to be named—and there are more than a few (heroic!) people listed who have written a number of reports for us throughout the year. We are incredibly grateful for all of he considered, thoughtful reports we received throughout the year from these referees—they certainly make our job as editors easier!

Contemporary Scientific Realism and the 1811 Gill Slit Prediction | Peter Vickers

8 June 2015 /1 Comment/in , , , , /by

How exactly are the history and philosophy of science supposed to come together? In the case of the scientific realism debate there is a relatively straight forward answer to this. In short, scientific realists are keen to make some sort of success-to-truth inference. Typically they state that when scientific success is sufficiently impressive, we ought to infer that the hypotheses (or parts or aspects of the theory) that generated this success are at least approximately true. This allows for the possibility that, in the history of science, one might find just that sort of success, born of a theory/set of hypotheses that are definitely not approximately true (whatever your take on ‘approximate truth’). Even allowing for one or two exceptions, the possibility arises that there might be many such cases in the history of science. This makes many scientific realist positions falsifiable—loosely speaking, at least. But as things stand, nobody knows which contemporary realist positions (if any) are indeed falsified because we just don’t have at hand the relevant historical ‘facts’ (again, speaking loosely). What we need to make progress is careful and detailed history of science, dealing with relevant historical episodes…

It’s Hard Being Popular…

8 May 2015 in , , , , /by

Due to the very welcome fact of the BJPS’s ever increasing popularity, we’ve been forced to make some tough decisions. All print journals work with tight page budgets, which in our case has been fixed by joint agreement between the BSPS and our publishers, OUP. The upshot of this is that it’s often impossible to publish everything we would like to. Competition for space has always been fierce in the BJPS and, as the last few years have seen a 50% increase in submissions to the Journal, things have become that much tougher.

So Now You’re a Referee… | Beth Hannon

30 March 2015 in , , , , /by

It hardly needs saying that referees are essential to the functioning of journals, and the discipline as a whole. Refereeing a paper is a service to the academic community. Those that take this duty seriously don’t just help the editors and the authors; we all benefit from having published papers be as polished as they can be. I’ve written before about the fact that the production of excellent papers is by no means an individualistic endeavour. It takes an academic village to raise a paper! And we all know how busy everyone is, and how refereeing has to be managed alongside all the other teaching, research, and administrative duties that demand attention. All this is to say that we in no way underestimate the hard work done by our referees; on the contrary, we are very grateful indeed.