Recent challenges to non-traditional theories of natural kinds demand clarifications and revisions to those theories. Highlights: The semantics of natural kind terms is a special case of a general naturalistic conception of signaling in organisms that explains the epistemic reliability of signaling. Natural kinds and reference are two aspects of the same natural phenomenon. Natural kind definitions are phenomena in nature not linguistic or representational entities; their relation to conceptualized definitions is complex. Reference and truth are special cases of a (...) broader phenomenon of accommodation between aspects of signaling and epistemically relevant causal structures. (shrink)

3.0. Well-being as a Challenge to Naturalism. In Chapter Three Adams discusses and criticizes those accounts of a person’s well being which characterize it in terms of counterfactuals regarding her actual desires and preferences. These criticisms are important for the question of ethical naturalism because any plausible naturalist position will have to portray a person’s well-being as somehow or other supervening on features of her psychology and her environment. The sorts of analyses Adams criticizes are the most prominent analyses consistent (...) with this constraint, so it is important to see whether or not Adams’ criticisms of them undermine the prospects for ethical naturalism generally. (shrink)

3.0. Well-being as a Challenge to Naturalism. In Chapter Three Adams discusses and criticizes those accounts of a person’s well being which characterize it in terms of counterfactuals regarding her actual desires and preferences. These criticisms are important for the question of ethical naturalism because any plausible naturalist position will have to portray a person’s well-being as somehow or other supervening on features of her psychology and her environment. The sorts of analyses Adams criticizes are the most prominent analyses consistent (...) with this constraint, so it is important to see whether or not Adams’ criticisms of them undermine the prospects for ethical naturalism generally. (shrink)

This second research paper on science education in Māori‐medium school contexts complements an earlier article published in this journal (Stewart, 2005). Science and science education are related domains in society and in state schooling in which there have always been particularly large discrepancies in participation and achievement by Māori. In 1995 a Kaupapa Māori analysis of this situation challenged New Zealand science education academics to deal with ‘the Māori crisis’ within science education. Recent NCEA results suggest Pūtaiao (Māori‐medium Science) education, (...) for which a national curriculum statement was published in 1996, has so far increased, rather than decreased, the level of inequity for Māori students in science education. What specific issues impact on this lack of success, which contrasts with the overall success of Kura Kaupapa Māori, and how might policy frameworks and operational systems of Pūtaiao need to change, if better achievement in science education for Māori‐medium students is the goal? A pathway towards further research and development in this area is suggested. (shrink)

Many people argue that history makes a special difference to the subjects of biology and psychology, and that history does not make this special difference to other parts of the world. This paper will show that historical properties make no more or less of a difference to biology or psychology than to chemistry, physics, or other sciences. Although historical properties indeed make a certain kind of difference to biology and psychology, this paper will show that historical properties make the same (...) kind of difference to geology, sociology, astronomy, and other sciences. Similarly, many people argue that nonhistorical properties make a special difference to the nonbiological and the nonpsychological world. This paper will show that nonhistorical properties make the same difference to all things in the world when it comes to their causal behavior and that historical properties make the same difference to all things in the world when it comes to their distributions. Although history is special, it is special in the same way to all parts of the world. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychologists often try to “bring together” biology and psychology by making predictions about what specific psychological mechanisms exist from theories about what patterns of behaviour would have been adaptive in the EEA for humans. This paper shows that one of the deepest methodological generalities in evolutionary biology—that proximate explanations and ultimate explanations stand in a many-to-many relation—entails that this inferential strategy is unsound. Ultimate explanations almost never entail the truth of any particular proximate hypothesis. But of course it does (...) not follow that there are no other ways of “bringing together” biology and psychology. Accordingly, this paper explores one other strategy for doing just that, the pursuit of a very specific kind of consilience. However, I argue that inferences reflecting the pursuit of this kind of consilience with the best available theories in contemporary evolutionary biology indicate that psychologists should have a preference for explanations of adaptive behavior in humans that refer to learning and other similarly malleable psychological mechanisms—and not modules or instincts or any other kind of relatively innate and relatively non-malleable psychological mechanism. (shrink)