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  1. Defectiveness of formal concepts.Carolin Antos - manuscript
    It is often assumed that concepts from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, have to be treated differently from concepts from non-formal sciences. This is especially relevant in cases of concept defectiveness, as in the empirical sciences defectiveness is an essential component of lager disruptive or transformative processes such as concept change or concept fragmentation. However, it is still unclear what role defectiveness plays for concepts in the formal sciences. On the one hand, a common view sees formal (...)
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  2. Translation, history of science, and items not on the menu: a response to Susan Carey.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    In “Conceptual Differences Between Children and Adults,” Susan Carey discusses phlogiston theory in order to defend the view that there can be non-translatability between scientific languages. I present an objection to her defence.
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  3. Science and the Elephant.Dyutiman Mukhopadhyay - manuscript
    This is a brief conceptual analysis of the limitations of 'scientific' empiricism which I tried to convey without any possible scientific or philosophical jargon which are commonly used by scientists or philosophers and which are difficult for others to understand. The terms which appear as jargon here do not need to be understood literally as they are supposed to convey mere examples rather than meaning.
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  4. Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Extension in Science.Sandy C. Boucher - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue that the Conceptual Ethics and Conceptual Engineering framework, in its pragmatist version as recently defended by Thomasson, provides a means of articulating and defending the conventionalist interpretation of projects of conceptual extension (e.g. the extended mind, the extended phenotype) in biology and psychology. This promises to be illuminating in both directions: it helps to make sense of, and provides an explicit methodology for, pragmatic conceptual extension in science, while offering further evidence for the value and fruitfulness of the (...)
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  5. Classification, Kinds, Taxonomic Stability, and Conceptual Change.Jaipreet Mattu & Jacqueline Anne Sullivan - forthcoming - Aggression and Violent Behavior.
    Scientists represent their world, grouping and organizing phenomena into classes by means of concepts. Philosophers of science have historically been interested in the nature of these concepts, the criteria that inform their application and the nature of the kinds that the concepts individuate. They also have sought to understand whether and how different systems of classification are related and more recently, how investigative practices shape conceptual development and change. Our aim in this paper is to provide a critical overview of (...)
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  6. Feyerabend’s Realism and Expansion of Pluralism in the 1970s.Jonathan Y. Tsou - forthcoming - In Jonathan Y. Tsou, Shaw Jamie & Carla Fehr (eds.), Values, Pluralism, and Pragmatism: Themes from the Work of Matthew J. Brown. Cham: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science. Springer.
    My aim in this chapter is to clarify the nature of the shift in Feyerabend’s philosophical thinking in the 1970s, focusing on issues of realism, relativism, and pluralism. Contra-Preston, I argue that realism-relativism is a misleading variable for characterizing Feyerabend’s shift in the 1970s. Rather, I characterize this shift as Feyerabend’s expansion of pluralism and suggest that this shift appears in Feyerabend’s publications starting in the late-1960s (e.g., Feyerabend 1968b, 1969b, 1970a, 1970c). Adopting the terminology of Brown and Kidd (2016), (...)
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  7. Climate concepts for supporting political goals of mitigation and adaptation: The case for “climate crisis”.Philipp Haueis - 2024 - WIREs Climate Change:1-20.
    Climate concepts are crucial to understand the effects of human activity on the climate system scientifically, and to formulate and pursue policies to mitigate and adapt to these effects. Yet, scientists, policymakers, and activists often use different terms such as “global warming,” “climate change,” “climate crisis,” or “climate emergency.” This advanced review investigates which climate concept is most suitable when we pursue mitigation and adaptation goals in a scientifically informed manner. It first discusses how survey experiments and social science reviews (...)
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  8. Sellars, Analyticity, and a Dynamic Picture of Language.Takaaki Matsui - 2024 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 14 (1):78-102.
    Even after Willard Quine’s critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Wilfrid Sellars maintained some forms of analyticity or truth in virtue of meaning. In this article, I aim to reconstruct (a) his neglected account of the analytic-synthetic distinction and the revisability of analytic sentences, (b) its connection to his inferentialist account of meaning, and (c) his response to Quine. While Sellars’s account of the revisability of analytic sentences bears certain similarities to Carnap’s and Grice and Strawson’s (...)
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  9. Exploratory concept formation and tool development in neuroscience.Philipp Haueis - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (2):354 - 375.
    Developing tools is a crucial aspect of experimental practice, yet most discussions of scientific change traditionally emphasize theoretical over technological change. To elaborate on the role of tools in scientific change, I offer an account that shows how scientists use tools in exploratory experiments to form novel concepts. I apply this account to two cases in neuroscience and show how tool development and concept formation are often intertwined in episodes of tool-driven change. I support this view by proposing common normative (...)
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  10. Robert Nola as I remember him.Howard Sankey - 2023 - Metascience 32 (1):3-5.
    The New Zealand philosopher, Robert Nola (1940-2022), has died. He was a kind man, a good friend, and a fine philosopher. Here is how I remember him.
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  11. Muscles or Movements? Representation in the Nascent Brain Sciences.Zina B. Ward - 2023 - Journal of the History of Biology 56 (1):5-34.
    The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the “muscles versus movements” debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, neurophysiologist (...)
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  12. We are Nearly Ready to Begin the Species Problem.Matthew J. Barker - 2022 - In John S. Wilkins, Igor Pavlinov & Frank Zachos (eds.), Species Problems and Beyond: Contemporary Issues in Philosophy and Practice. Boca Raton: CRC Press. pp. 3-38.
    This paper isolates a hard, long-standing species problem: developing a comprehensive and exacting theory about the constitutive conditions of the species category, one that is accurate for most of the living world, and which vindicates the widespread view that the species category is of more theoretical import than categories such as genus, sub-species, paradivision, and stirp. The paper then uncovers flaws in several views that imply we have either already solved that hard species problem or dissolved it altogether – so-called (...)
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  13. Degeneration and Entropy.Eugene Y. S. Chua - 2022 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 36 (2):123-155.
    [Accepted for publication in Lakatos's Undone Work: The Practical Turn and the Division of Philosophy of Mathematics and Philosophy of Science, special issue of Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy. Edited by S. Nagler, H. Pilin, and D. Sarikaya.] Lakatos’s analysis of progress and degeneration in the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes is well-known. Less known, however, are his thoughts on degeneration in Proofs and Refutations. I propose and motivate two new criteria for degeneration based on the discussion in Proofs and Refutations (...)
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  14. T Falls Apart: On the Status of Classical Temperature in Relativity.Eugene Yew Siang Chua - 2022 - Philosophy of Science:1-27.
    Taking the formal analogies between black holes and classical thermodynamics seriously seems to first require that classical thermodynamics applies in relativistic regimes. Yet, by scrutinizing how classical temperature is extended into special relativity, I argue that the concept falls apart. I examine four consilient procedures for establishing the classical temperature: the Carnot process, the thermometer, kinetic theory, and black-body radiation. I argue that their relativistic counterparts demonstrate no such consilience in defining the relativistic temperature. As such, classical temperature doesn’t appear (...)
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  15. Symmetry and Reformulation: On Intellectual Progress in Science and Mathematics.Josh Hunt - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Michigan
    Science and mathematics continually change in their tools, methods, and concepts. Many of these changes are not just modifications but progress---steps to be admired. But what constitutes progress? This dissertation addresses one central source of intellectual advancement in both disciplines: reformulating a problem-solving plan into a new, logically compatible one. For short, I call these cases of compatible problem-solving plans "reformulations." Two aspects of reformulations are puzzling. First, reformulating is often unnecessary. Given that we could already solve a problem using (...)
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  16. Reductionist methodology and the ambiguity of the categories of race and ethnicity in biomedical research: an exploratory study of recent evidence.Joanna Karolina Malinowska & Tomasz Żuradzki - 2022 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy (1):1-14.
    In this article, we analyse how researchers use the categories of race and ethnicity with reference to genetics and genomics. We show that there is still considerable conceptual “messiness” (despite the wide-ranging and popular debate on the subject) when it comes to the use of ethnoracial categories in genetics and genomics that among other things makes it difficult to properly compare and interpret research using ethnoracial categories, as well as draw conclusions from them. Finally, we briefly reconstruct some of the (...)
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  17. What Makes the Identity of a Scientific Method? A History of the “Structural and Analytical Typology” in the Growth of Evolutionary and Digital Archaeology in Southwestern Europe (1950s–2000s).Sébastien Plutniak - 2022 - Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology 5 (1).
    Usual narratives among prehistoric archaeologists consider typological approaches as part of a past and outdated episode in the history of research, subsequently replaced by technological, functional, chemical, and cognitive approaches. From a historical and conceptual perspective, this paper addresses several limits of these narratives, which (1) assume a linear, exclusive, and additive conception of scientific change, neglecting the persistence of typological problems; (2) reduce collective developments to personal work (e.g. the “Bordes’” and “Laplace’s” methods in France); and (3) presuppose the (...)
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  18. (1 other version)K. Brad Wray: Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays[REVIEW]Howard Sankey - 2022 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 12 (1):311-314.
    This is a book review of Brad Wray (ed.) Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays.
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  19. Inferentialism and Semantic Externalism: A Neglected Debate between Sellars and Putnam.Takaaki Matsui - 2021 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (1):126-145.
    In his 1975 paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Hilary Putnam famously argued for semantic externalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that already in 1973, Putnam had presented the idea of the linguistic division of labor and the Twin Earth thought experiment in his comment on Wilfrid Sellars’s “Meaning as Functional Classification” at a conference, and Sellars had replied to Putnam from a broadly inferentialist perspective. The first half of this paper aims to trace the development of (...)
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  20. Kuhn's Kantian Dimensions.Lydia Patton - 2021 - In K. Brad Wray (ed.), Interpreting Kuhn: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 27-44.
    Two questions should be considered when assessing the Kantian dimensions of Kuhn’s thought. First, was Kuhn himself a Kantian? Second, did Kuhn have an influence on later Kantians and neo-Kantians? Kuhn mentioned Kant as an inspiration, and his focus on explanatory frameworks and on the conditions of knowledge appear Kantian. But Kuhn’s emphasis on learning; on activities of symbolization; on paradigms as practical, not just theoretical; and on the social and community aspects of scientific research as constitutive of scientific reasoning, (...)
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  21. Conceptual Change and Future Paths for Pragmatism.Matthew Shields - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (3):405-434.
    The pragmatist faces the challenge of accounting for the possibility of rational conceptual change. Some pragmatists have tried to meet this challenge by appealing to Neurathian imagery—imagery that risks being too figurative to be helpful. I argue that we can develop a clearer view of what rationally constrained conceptual revision looks like for the pragmatist. I do so by examining the work of the pragmatist who in recent years has addressed this issue most directly, Richard Rorty. His attempts to solve (...)
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  22. Evolving Concepts of 'Hierarchy' in Systems Neuroscience.Philipp Haueis & Daniel Burnston - 2020 - In Fabrizio Calzavarini & Marco Viola (eds.), Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in the Philosophy of Neuroscience. Springer.
    The notion of “hierarchy” is one of the most commonly posited organizational principles in systems neuroscience. To this date, however, it has received little philosophical analysis. This is unfortunate, because the general concept of hierarchy ranges over two approaches with distinct empirical commitments, and whose conceptual relations remain unclear. We call the first approach the “representational hierarchy” view, which posits that an anatomical hierarchy of feed-forward, feed-back, and lateral connections underlies a signal processing hierarchy of input-output relations. Because the representational (...)
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  23. Theories as recipes: third-order virtue and vice.Michaela Markham McSweeney - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (2):391-411.
    A basic way of evaluating metaphysical theories is to ask whether they give satisfying answers to the questions they set out to resolve. I propose an account of “third-order” virtue that tells us what it takes for certain kinds of metaphysical theories to do so. We should think of these theories as recipes. I identify three good-making features of recipes and show that they translate to third-order theoretical virtues. I apply the view to two theories—mereological universalism and plenitudinous platonism—and draw (...)
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  24. Conceptual Change in Perspective.Matthew Shields - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):930-958.
    I argue that Sarah Sawyer's and Herman Cappelen's recent accounts of how speakers talk and think about the same concept or topic even when their understandings of that concept or topic substantially diverge risk multiplying our metasemantic categories unnecessarily and fail to prove explanatory. When we look more closely at our actual practices of samesaying, we find that speakers with seemingly incompatible formulations of a subject matter take one another to samesay when they are attempting to arrive at a correct (...)
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  25. Strategic Conceptual Engineering for Epistemic and Social Aims.Ingo Brigandt & Esther Rosario - 2019 - In Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. New York, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 100-124.
    Examining previous discussions on how to construe the concepts of gender and race, we advocate what we call strategic conceptual engineering. This is the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept (e.g., of race) for other purposes. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept serves (...)
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  26. ‘Data’ in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, 1665–1886.Chris Meyns - 2019 - Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science.
    Was there a concept of data before the so-called ‘data revolution’? This paper contributes to the history of the concept of data by investigating uses of the term ‘data’ in texts of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions for the period 1665–1886. It surveys how the notion enters the journal as a technical term in mathematics, and charts how over time it expands into various other scientific fields, including Earth sciences, physics and chemistry. The paper argues that in these texts the (...)
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  27. Realism and Explanatory Perspectivism.Juha Saatsi - 2019 - In Michela Massimi & Casey D. Mccoy (eds.), Understanding Perspectivism (Open Access): Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects. New York, NY, USA: Routledge.
    This chapter defends a (minimal) realist conception of progress in scientific understanding in the face of the ubiquitous plurality of perspectives in science. The argument turns on the counterfactual-dependence framework of explanation and understanding, which is illustrated and evidenced with reference to different explanations of the rainbow.
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  28. Big Dreams for Small Creatures: Ilana and Eugene Rosenberg’s path to the Hologenome Theory.Ehud Lamm - 2018 - In Oren Harman & Michael R. Dietrich (eds.), Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences. University of Chicago Press.
    A biographical sketch of the Hologenome Theory.
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  29. Metaphors: Midwives of conceptual change in science.Xingming Li - 2018 - Journal of Human Cognition 2 (2):17-31.
    The American philosopher of science Kuhn, in the 1980s, studied the scientific revolution in depth from a unique perspective of the philosophy of language, seeing it as a change in the language of science, especially in scientific vocabularies or dictionaries. In this process of transformation, metaphors, analogies, and models play the role of midwives in the birth of new concepts. Based on the analysis of Kuhn's relevant insights, this paper identifies the nature and use of metaphor, analogy and model as (...)
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  30. Constitutive elements in science beyond physics: the case of the Hardy–Weinberg principle.Michele Luchetti - 2018 - Synthese (Suppl 14):3437-3461.
    In this paper, I present a new framework supporting the claim that some elements in science play a constitutive function, with the aim of overcoming some limitations of Friedman's (2001) account. More precisely, I focus on what I consider to be the gradualism implicit in Friedman's interpretation of the constitutive a priori, that is, the fact that it seems to allow for degrees of 'constitutivity'. I tease out such gradualism by showing that the constitutive character Friedman aims to track can (...)
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  31. The (Lack of) Evidence for the Kuhnian Image of Science.Moti Mizrahi - 2018 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7 (7):19-24.
    In their reviews of The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation? (2018), both Markus Arnold (2018) and Amanda Bryant (2018) complain that the contributors who criticize Kuhn’s theory of scientific change have misconstrued his philosophy of science and they praise those who seek to defend the Kuhnian image of science. In what follows, then, I would like to address their claims about misconstruing Kuhn’s theory of scientific change. But my focus here, as in the book, will be (...)
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  32. The Aesthetics of Theory Selection and the Logics of Art.Ian O’Loughlin & Kate McCallum - 2018 - Philosophy of Science (2):325-343.
    Philosophers of science discuss whether theory selection depends on aesthetic judgments or criteria, and whether these putatively aesthetic features are genuinely extra-epistemic. As examples, judgments involving criteria such as simplicity and symmetry are often cited. However, other theory selection criteria, such as fecundity, coherence, internal consistency, and fertility, more closely match those criteria used in art contexts and by scholars working in aesthetics. Paying closer attention to the way these criteria are used in art contexts allows us to understand some (...)
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  33. Scientific revolutions, specialization and the discovery of the structure of DNA: toward a new picture of the development of the sciences.Politi Vincenzo - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):2267-2293.
    In his late years, Thomas Kuhn became interested in the process of scientific specialization, which does not seem to possess the destructive element that is characteristic of scientific revolutions. It therefore makes sense to investigate whether and how Kuhn’s insights about specialization are consistent with, and actually fit, his model of scientific progress through revolutions. In this paper, I argue that the transition toward a new specialty corresponds to a revolutionary change for the group of scientists involved in such a (...)
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  34. Ether and Electrons in Relativity Theory.Scott A. Walter - 2018 - In Jaume Navarro (ed.), Ether and Modernity. pp. 67-87.
    This chapter discusses the roles of ether and electrons in relativity theory. One of the most radical moves made by Albert Einstein was to dismiss the ether from electrodynamics. His fellow physicists felt challenged by Einstein’s view, and they came up with a variety of responses, ranging from enthusiastic approval, to dismissive rejection. Among the naysayers were the electron theorists, who were unanimous in their affirmation of the ether, even if they agreed with other aspects of Einstein’s theory of relativity. (...)
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  35. (1 other version)Figures of light in the early history of relativity (1905-1914).Scott A. Walter - 2018 - In David Rowe (ed.), Einstein Studies. Birkhäuser. pp. 3-50.
    Albert Einstein's bold assertion of the form-invariance of the equation of a spherical light wave with respect to inertial frames of reference became, in the space of six years, the preferred foundation of his theory of relativity. Early on, however, Einstein's universal light-sphere invariance was challenged on epistemological grounds by Henri Poincaré, who promoted an alternative demonstration of the foundations of relativity theory based on the notion of a light-ellipsoid. Drawing in part on archival sources, this paper shows how an (...)
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  36. Scientific Progress: Why Getting Closer to Truth Is Not Enough.Moti Mizrahi - 2017 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 31 (4):415-419.
    ABSTRACTThis discussion note aims to contribute to the ongoing debate over the nature of scientific progress. I argue against the semantic view of scientific progress, according to which scientific progress consists in approximation to truth or increasing verisimilitude. If the semantic view of scientific progress were correct, then scientists would make scientific progress simply by arbitrarily adding true disjuncts to their hypotheses or theories. Given that it is not the case that scientists could make scientific progress simply by arbitrarily adding (...)
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  37. The Kuhnian Image of Science: Time for a Decisive Transformation?Moti Mizrahi (ed.) - 2017 - London: Rowman & Littlefield.
    More than 50 years after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this volume assesses the adequacy of the Kuhnian model in explaining certain aspects of science, particularly the social and epistemic aspects of science. One argument put forward is that there are no good reasons to accept Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis, according to which scientific revolutions involve the replacement of theories with conceptually incompatible ones. Perhaps, therefore, it is time for another “decisive transformation in the (...)
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  38. Is it possible to give scientific solutions to Grand Challenges? On the idea of grand challenges for life science research.Sophia Efstathiou - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56:46-61.
    This paper argues that challenges that are grand in scope such as "lifelong health and wellbeing", "climate action", or "food security" cannot be addressed through scientific research only. Indeed scientific research could inhibit addressing such challenges if scientific analysis constrains the multiple possible understandings of these challenges into already available scientific categories and concepts without translating between these and everyday concerns. This argument builds on work in philosophy of science and race to postulate a process through which non-scientific notions become (...)
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  39. The life of the cortical column: opening the domain of functional architecture of the cortex.Haueis Philipp - 2016 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 38 (3):1-27.
    The concept of the cortical column refers to vertical cell bands with similar response properties, which were initially observed by Vernon Mountcastle’s mapping of single cell recordings in the cat somatic cortex. It has subsequently guided over 50 years of neuroscientific research, in which fundamental questions about the modularity of the cortex and basic principles of sensory information processing were empirically investigated. Nevertheless, the status of the column remains controversial today, as skeptical commentators proclaim that the vertical cell bands are (...)
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  40. (1 other version)In Carnap’s Defense: A survey on the concept of a linguistic framework in Carnap’s philosophy.Parzhad Torfehnezhad - 2016 - Abstracta 9 (1):03-30.
    The main task in this paper is to detail and investigate Carnap’s conception of a “linguistic framework”. On this basis, we will see whether Carnap’s dichotomies, such as the analytic-synthetic distinction, are to be construed as absolute/fundamental dichotomies or merely as relative dichotomies. I argue for a novel interpretation of Carnap’s conception of a LF and, on that basis, will show that, according to Carnap, all the dichotomies to be discussed are relative dichotomies; they depend on conventional decisions concerning the (...)
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  41. Logic and the Structure of the Web of Belief.Matthew Carlson - 2015 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3 (5).
    In this paper, I examine Quine's views on the epistemology of logic. According to Quine's influential holistic account, logic is central in the “web of belief” that comprises our overall theory of the world. Because of this, revisions to logic would have devastating systematic consequences, and this explains why we are loath to make such revisions. In section1, I clarify this idea and thereby show that Quine actually takes the web of belief to have asymmetrical internal structure. This raises two (...)
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  42. Kuhn’s Incommensurability Thesis: What’s the Argument?Moti Mizrahi - 2015 - Social Epistemology 29 (4):361-378.
    In this paper, I argue that there is neither valid deductive support nor strong inductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis. There is no valid deductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis because, from the fact that the reference of the same kind terms changes or discontinues from one theoretical framework to another, it does not necessarily follow that these two theoretical frameworks are taxonomically incommensurable. There is no strong inductive support for Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis, since there are rebutting defeaters against it (...)
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  43. Incommensurability and the Bonfire of the Meta-Theories: Response to Mizrahi.Lydia Patton - 2015 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4 (7):51-58.
    Scientists working within a paradigm must play by the rules of the game of that paradigm in solving problems, and that is why incommensurability arises when the rules of the game change. If we deny the thesis of the priority of paradigms, then there is no good argument for the incommensurability of theories and thus for taxonomic incommensurability, because there is no invariant way to determine the set of results provable, puzzles solvable, and propositions cogently formulable under a given paradigm.
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  44. Gene Mobility and the Concept of Relatedness.Jonathan Birch - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (4):445-476.
    Cooperation is rife in the microbial world, yet our best current theories of the evolution of cooperation were developed with multicellular animals in mind. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is an important case in point: applying the theory in a microbial setting is far from straightforward, as social evolution in microbes has a number of distinctive features that the theory was never intended to capture. In this article, I focus on the conceptual challenges posed by the project of extending Hamilton’s (...)
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  45. Meeting the brain on its own terms.Philipp Haueis - 2014 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 815 (8):86890.
    In contemporary human brain mapping, it is commonly assumed that the “mind is what the brain does”. Based on that assumption, task-based imaging studies of the last three decades measured differences in brain activity that are thought to reflect the exercise of human mental capacities (e.g., perception, attention, memory). With the advancement of resting state studies, tractography and graph theory in the last decade, however, it became possible to study human brain connectivity without relying on cognitive tasks or constructs. It (...)
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  46. The normative structure of mathematization in systematic biology.Beckett Sterner & Scott Lidgard - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 46 (1):44-54.
    We argue that the mathematization of science should be understood as a normative activity of advocating for a particular methodology with its own criteria for evaluating good research. As a case study, we examine the mathematization of taxonomic classification in systematic biology. We show how mathematization is a normative activity by contrasting its distinctive features in numerical taxonomy in the 1960s with an earlier reform advocated by Ernst Mayr starting in the 1940s. Both Mayr and the numerical taxonomists sought to (...)
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  47. Reference, Truth, and Biological Kinds.Marcel Weber - 2014 - In: J. Dutant, D. Fassio and A. Meylan (Eds.) Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel.
    This paper examines causal theories of reference with respect to how plausible an account they give of non-physical natural kind terms such as ‘gene’ as well as of the truth of the associated theoretical claims. I first show that reference fixism for ‘gene’ fails. By this, I mean the claim that the reference of ‘gene’ was stable over longer historical periods, for example, since the classical period of transmission genetics. Second, I show that the theory of partial reference does not (...)
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  48. Experiments and Research Programmes. Revisiting Vitalism/Non-Vitalism Debate in Early Twentieth Century.Bijoy Mukherjee - 2012 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 2 (1):171-198.
    Debates in the philosophy of science typically take place around issues such as realism and theory change. Recently, the debate has been reformulated to bring in the role of experiments in the context of theory change. As regards realism, Ian Hacking’s contribution has been to introduce ‘intervention’ as the basis of realism. He also proposed, following Imre Lakatos, to replace the issue of truth with progress and rationality. In this context we examine the case of the vitalism — reductionism debate (...)
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  49. Analogical insight: toward unifying categorization and analogy.Eric Dietrich - 2010 - Cognitive Processing 11 (4):331-346.
    The purpose of this paper is to present two kinds of analogical representational change, both occurring early in the analogy-making process, and then, using these two kinds of change, to present a model unifying one sort of analogy-making and categorization. The proposed unification rests on three key claims: (1) a certain type of rapid representational abstraction is crucial to making the relevant analogies (this is the first kind of representational change; a computer model is presented that demonstrates this kind of (...)
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  50. Building on Sellars: Concept Formation and Scientific Realism. [REVIEW]Tanya Kelley - 2008 - Metascience 17 (2):257-259.
    Harold Brown has written an ambitious work, which traces the formation of concepts in individuals and cultures, examines case studies of concepts in calculus, mathematics, biology and related fields, summarises important philosophical works on the theory of concepts, and seeks to reconcile scientific realism with conceptual change. Brown considers himself a scientific realist but concedes that this very label is one that depends on a long history of concepts that came before, and may indeed be superseded as conceptual change continues. (...)
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