This volume argues for a new image of science that understands both natural and social phenomena to be the product of mechanisms, casting the work of science as an effort to understand those mechanisms. Glennan offers an account of the nature of mechanisms and of the models used to represent them in physical, life, and social sciences.

Scientific antirealists run the argument from underconsideration against scientific realism. I argue that the argument from underconsideration backfires on antirealists’ positive philosophical theories, such as the contextual theory of explanation (van Fraassen, 1980), the English model of rationality (van Fraassen, 1989), the evolutionary explanation of the success of science (Wray, 2008; 2012), and explanatory idealism (Khalifa, 2013). Antirealists strengthen the argument from underconsideration with the pessimistic induction against current scientific theories. In response, I construct a pessimistic induction against antirealists that (...) since antirealists generated problematic philosophical theories in the past, they must be generating problematic philosophical theories now. (shrink)

I review and challenge the views on simplicity and its role in linguistics put forward by Ludlow. In particular, I criticize the claim that simplicity—in the sense pertinent to science—is nothing more than ease of use or “user-friendliness”, motivated by economy of labor. I argue that Ludlow’s discussion fails to do justice to the diversity of factors that are relevant to simplicity considerations. This, in turn, leads to the neglect of crucial cases in which the rationale for simplification is unmistakably (...) epistemic, as well as instances where simplicity is part of the content of substantive, empirical hypotheses. I illustrate these points with examples from the history of generative linguistics, such as: the shaping influence exerted by simplicity, via its involvement in the notion of “linguistically significant generalization”, its methodological and substantive contribution to the goal of explanatory adequacy, and its central role in the Minimalist Program’s search “beyond explanatory adequacy”. (shrink)

The thesis of underdetermination presents a major obstacle to the epistemological claims of scientific realism. That thesis is regularly assumed in the philosophy of science, but is puzzlingly at odds with the actual history of science, in which empirically adequate theories are thin on the ground. We propose to advance a case for scientific realism which concentrates on the process of scientific reasoning rather than its theoretical products. Developing an account of causal–explanatory inference will make it easier to resist the (...) thesis of underdetermination. For, if we are not restricted to inference to the best explanation only at the level of major theories, we will be able to acknowledge that there is a structure in data sets which imposes serious constraints on possible theoretical alternatives. We describe how Differential Inference, a form of inference based on contrastive explanation, can be used in order to generate causal hypotheses. We then go on to consider how experimental manipulation of differences can be used to achieve Difference Closure, thereby confirming claims of causal efficacy and also eliminating possible confounds. The model of Differential Inference outlined here shows at least one way in which it is possible to ‘reason from the phenomena’. (shrink)

I have two main aims. The first is general, and more philosophical. The second is specific, and more closely related to physics. The first aim is to state my general views about laws and causation at different ”levels’. The main task is to understand how the higher levels sustain notions of law and causation that ”ride free’ of reductions to the lower level or levels. I endeavour to relate my views to those of other symposiasts. The second aim is to (...) give a framework for describing dynamics at different levels, emphasizing how the various levels’ dynamics can mesh or fail to mesh. This framework is essentially that of elementary dynamical systems theory. The main idea will be, for simplicity, to work with just two levels, dubbed ”micro’ and ”macro’, which are related by coarse-graining. I use this framework to describe, in part, the first four of Ellis’ five types of top-down causation. (shrink)

Dawes (2013) claims that we ought not to believe but to accept our best scientific theories. To accept them means to employ them as premises in our reasoning with the goal of attaining knowledge about unobservables. I reply that if we do not believe our best scientific theories, we cannot gain knowledge about unobservables, our opponents might dismiss the predictions derived from them, and we cannot use them to explain phenomena. We commit an unethical speech act when we explain a (...) phenomenon in terms of a theory we do not believe. (shrink)

In his seminal Inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton adopted a causal view of explanation and a broadly Millian view of how causal knowledge is obtained. This made his account vulnerable to critics who charged that Inference to the Best Explanation is merely a dressed-up version of Mill’s methods, which in the critics’ view do the real inductive work. Lipton advanced two arguments to protect Inference to the Best Explanation against this line of criticism: the problem of multiple differences (...) and the problem of inferred differences. Lipton claimed that these two problems show Mill’s method of difference to be largely unworkable unless it is embedded in an explanationist framework. Here I consider both arguments as well as the best Millian defense against them. Since the existing Millian defense is only partially successful, I will develop a new and improved account. As an integral part of the argument, I show that my solutions to the problems of multiple and inferred differences offer new insight into Lipton’s main case study: Ignaz Semmelweis’s discovery of the cause of childbed fever. I conclude that the method of difference can overcome Lipton’s challenges outside an explanationist framework. (shrink)

Tim Crane's ‘Cosmic Hermeneutics vs. Emergence: The Challenge of the Explanatory Gap’ claims that non‐reductive physicalism must either close the explanatory gap, addressing the challenge famously posed by Levine's argument, or become identical to emergentism. Since no way to close the gap is available, the result is that there can be no interesting philosophical position intermediate between physicalism and emergentism. This chapter argues that if we look at the relation between physicalism and emergentism from the vantage point of reduction, Crane's (...) analysis is rather persuasive. However, if we switch from reduction to causality, its conclusions appear more disputable. In particular, if we shift from ‘novelty and explanation’ to ‘novelty and causality’ as key features of emergent properties, we may introduce a distinction between two kinds of emergentism (moderate and radical) based on their attitude towards the causal inheritance principle. If the causal inheritance principle is accepted (some versions of) moderate emergentism may be considered as non‐trivial forms of non‐reductive physicalism. (shrink)

The case of John Snow has long been important to epidemiologists and public health officials. However, despite the fact that there have been many discussions about the various aspects of Snow’s case, there has been virtually no discussion about what guided Snow’s reasoning in his coming to believe his various conclusions about cholera. Here, I want to take up this question in some detail and show that there are a number of specific principles of reasoning that played a crucial role (...) for Snow. Moreover, these principles were episte- mologically important to Snow, a fact about which Snow is explicit in many places. An analysis of Snow’s case suggests that, because of the epistemic role such principles of reasoning can play, health care practitioners ought to understand their practices to be theoretically informed in these ways, and not just data driven. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I offer an anti-Humean interpretation of the causal interactions in somatic medicine. I focus on life-threatening pathological states and show how Nancy Cartwright’s capacities can offer a plausible epistemology for medical processes and the singular causal claims advanced in medical diagnoses. I argue that the capacities manifested in the emergence of symptoms and signs could be tracked down if healthy organisms are construed as nomological machines and suggest that the causal reasoning from current medical practice bears (...) a tacit adherence to anti-Humean assumptions. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-28 DOI 10.1007/s12136-011-0141-1 Authors Stefan Dragulinescu, Drumul Taberei 20, Bucharest, Romania Journal Acta Analytica Online ISSN 1874-6349 Print ISSN 0353-5150. (shrink)

If dispositions are conceived as properties of systems that refer to possible causal relations, dispositions can be used in singular causal explanations. By means of these dispositional explanations, we can explain behavior B of a system x by (i) referring to a situation of type S that triggered B, given that x has a disposition D to do B in S, or (ii) by referring to a disposition D of x to do B in S, given that x is in (...) a situation of type S. Dispositional explanations are adequate and indispensable explanations: they can explain behavior B without explicitly referring to the underlying causal basis in x that constitutes a disposition to do B. Radical Behaviorist explanations are a sort of dispositional explanations, but the dispositional model is not restricted to these explanations. The dispositional model is compatible with, or can be applied to, several research programs. (shrink)

1. What is the Problem of Personal Identity?Locke posed the problem of personal identity in one brief question, “What makes the same person?” This formulation is deceptively simple. My aim is to offer a new interpretation of the problem and to suggest a method for finding a solution.Investigations of personal identity are usually cast in terms of finding the criterion for personal identity. Yet talk of criteria is ambiguous. In one sense of the term, the criterion of personal identity would (...) be special evidence for personal identity. According to the second usage, the criterion of personal identity would be that state of affairs for which evidence for personal identity is evidence. We will not be concerned with the first construal. On that reading, the problem of personal identity would be an epistemological issue. But the basic question concerning personal identity, “What is one person?” does not appear to be an epistemological question. (shrink)

This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between physical theories. I shall take emergence as behaviour that is novel and robust relative to some comparison class. I shall take reduction as deduction using appropriate auxiliary definitions. And I shall take supervenience as a weakening of reduction, viz. to allow infinitely long definitions. The overall claim (...) of this paper will be that emergence is logically independent both of reduction and of supervenience. In particular, one can have emergence with reduction, as well as without it; and emergence without supervenience, as well as with it. Of the subsidiary claims, the four main ones are: : I defend the traditional Nagelian conception of reduction ; : I deny that the multiple realizability argument causes trouble for reductions, or ``reductionism'' ; : I stress the collapse of supervenience into deduction via Beth's theorem ; : I adapt some examples already in the literature to show supervenience without emergence and vice versa. (shrink)

Batterman has recently argued that fundamental theories are typically explanatorily inadequate, in that there exist physical phenomena whose explanation requires that the conceptual apparatus of a fundamental theory be supplemented by that of a less fundamental theory. This paper is an extended critical commentary on that argument: situating its importance, describing its structure, and developing a line of objection to it. The objection is that in the examples Batterman considers, the mathematics of the less fundamental theory is definable in terms (...) of the mathematics of the fundamental theory and that only the latter need be given a physical interpretation---so we can view the desired explanation as drawing only upon resources internal to the more fundamental physical theory. (The paper also includes an appendix surveying some recent results on quantum chaos.). (shrink)

Opponents of ceteris paribus laws are apt to complain that the laws are vague and untestable. Indeed, claims to this effect are made by Earman, Roberts and Smith in this volume. I argue that these kinds of claims rely on too narrow a view about what kinds of concepts we can and do regularly use in successful sciences and on too optimistic a view about the extent of application of even our most successful non-ceteris paribus laws. When it comes to (...) testing, we test ceteris paribus laws in exactly the same way that we test laws without the ceteris paribus antecedent. But at least when the ceteris paribus antecedent is there we have an explicit acknowledgment of important procedures we must take in the design of the experiments — i.e., procedures to control for “all interferences” even those we cannot identify under the concepts of any known theory. (shrink)

In concluding section 2, chapter VI of part II of [6], Duhem claimed:... the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses...... when the experiment is in disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not designate which one should be changed'.

Reichenbach's well-known distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification has recently come under attack from several quarters. In this paper I attempt to reconsider the distinction and evaluate various recent criticisms of it. These criticisms fall into two main groups: those which directly challenge Reichenbach's distinction; and those which (I argue) indirectly but no less seriously challenge that distinction by rejecting the related distinction between psychology and epistemology, and defending the "naturalizing" of epistemology. I argue that (...) these recent criticisms fail, and that the distinction remains an important conceptual tool necessary for an adequate understanding of the way in which scientific claims purport to appropriately portray our natural environment. (shrink)

1. Introduction. Professor Nagel's account of the “cognitive status” of scientific theories has been attacked by P. K. Feyerabend [5] and M. B. Hesse [8] in terms of his alledgedly misguided distinction between experimental laws and theories. The difficulty lies, these critics agree, in Nagel's attempt to find a stable basis for scientific theories in an observational basis of experimental laws. Both Feyerabend and Hesse note the vacillation in Nagel's account of the stability of the meaning of experimental terms and (...) in his discussion of the status of observational as opposed to theoretical terms. They find Nagel too “positivistic” and see as a first step toward a more adequate account of scientific theories the abandonment of the theoretical-observational dichotomy as having more than a pragmatic significance. Nagel's discussion of the theoretical-observational dichotomy is, I agree, inadequate in certain respects. I shall, however, suggest a quite different remedy from those of Feyerabend and Hesse, one that depends neither on a phenomenalistic reduction of theoretical entities nor on a blurring of the theoretical-observational dichotomy. (shrink)

Arguments in favor of anti-representationalism in cognitive science often suffer from a lack of attention to detail. The purpose of this paper is to fill in the gaps in these arguments, and in so doing show that at least one form of anti- representationalism is potentially viable. After giving a teleological definition of representation and applying it to a few models that have inspired anti- representationalist claims, I argue that anti-representationalism must be divided into two distinct theses, one ontological, one (...) epistemological. Given the assumptions that define the debate, I give reason to think that the ontological thesis is false. I then argue that the epistemological thesis might, in the end, turn out to be true, despite a potentially serious difficulty. Along the way, there will be a brief detour to discuss a controversy from early twentieth century physics. (shrink)

In trying to characterize the relationship between psychology and neuroscience, the trend has been to argue that reductionism does not work without suggesting a suitable substitute. I offer explanatory extension as a good model for elucidating the complex relationship among disciplines which are obviously connected but which do not share pragmatic explanatory features. Explanatory extension rests on the idea that one field can "illuminate" issues that were incompletely treated in another. In this paper, I explain how this "illumination" would work (...) between psychology and neuroscience. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor has argued that the multiple realizability argument, as discussed in his original “Special Sciences” article, “refutes psychophysical reductionism once and for all.” I argue that his argument in “Special Sciences” does no such thing. Furthermore, if one endorses the physicalism that most supporters of the “Special Sciences” view endorse, special science laws must be reducible, in principle. The compatibility of MR with reduction, however, need not threaten the autonomy of the special sciences.

Observational and experimental discoveries of new factual entities such as objects, systems, or processes, are major contributors to some advances in the life sciences. Yet, whereas discovery of theories was extensively deliberated by philosophers of science, very little philosophical attention was paid to the discovery of factual entities. This paper examines historical and philosophical aspects of the experimental discovery by Carl Woese of archaea, prokaryotes that comprise one of the three principal domains of the phylogenetic tree. Borrowing Kuhn’s terminology, this (...) discovery of a major biological entity was made during a ‘normal science’ project of building molecular taxonomy for prokaryotes. Unexpectedly, however, an observed anomaly instigated the discovery of archaea. Substantiation of the existence of the new archaeal entity and consequent reconstruction of the phylogenetic tree prompted replacement of a long-held model of a prokarya and eukarya bipartite tree of life by a new model of a tripartite tree comprising of bacteria, archaea, and eukarya. This paper explores the history and philosophical implications of the progression of Woese’s project from normal science to anomaly-instigated model-changing discovery. It is also shown that the consequential discoveries of RNA splicing and of ribozymes were similarly prompted by unexpected irregularities during normal science activities. It is thus submitted that some discoveries of factual biological entities are triggered by unforeseen observational or experimental anomalies. (shrink)

AbstractBohmian mechanics grounds the predictions of quantum mechanics in precise dynamical laws for a primitive ontology of point particles. In an appraisal of the de-Broglie–Bohm theory, the paper discusses the crucial epistemological and conceptual role that a primitive ontology plays within a physical theory. It argues that quantum theories without primitive ontology fail to make contact with observable reality in a clear and consistent manner. Finally, it discusses Einstein’s epistemological model and why it supports the primitive ontology approach.

This thesis focuses on models of conceptual change in science and philosophy. In particular, I developed a new bootstrapping methodology for studying conceptual change, centered around the formalization of several popular models of conceptual change and the collective assessment of their improved formal versions via nine evaluative dimensions. Among the models of conceptual change treated in the thesis are Carnap’s explication, Lakatos’ concept-stretching, Toulmin’s conceptual populations, Waismann’s open texture, Mark Wilson’s patches and facades, Sneed’s structuralism, and Paul Thagard’s conceptual revolutions. (...) -/- In order to analyze and compare the conception of conceptual change provided by these different models, I rely on several historical reconstructions of episodes of scientific conceptual change. The historical episodes of scientific change that figure in this work include the emergence of the morphological concept of fish in biological taxonomies, the development of scientific conceptions of temperature, the Church-Turing thesis and related axiomatizations of effective calculability, the history of the concept of polyhedron in 17th and 18th century mathematics, Hamilton’s invention of the quaternions, the history of the pre-abstract group concepts in 18th and 19th century mathematics, the expansion of Newtonian mechanics to viscous fluids forces phenomena, and the chemical revolution. I will also present five different formal and informal improvements of four specific models of conceptual change. I will first present two different improvements of Carnapian explication, a formal and an informal one. My informal improvement of Carnapian explication will consist of a more fine-grained version of the procedure that adds an intermediate, third step to the two steps of Carnapian explication. I will show how this novel three-step version of explication is more suitable than its traditional two-step relative to handle complex cases of explications. My second, formal improvement of Carnapian explication will be a full explication of the concept of explication itself within the theory of conceptual spaces. By virtue of this formal improvement, the whole procedure of explication together with its application procedures and its pragmatic desiderata will be reconceptualized as a precise procedure involving topological and geometrical constraints inside the theory of conceptual spaces. My third improved model of conceptual change will consist of a formal explication of Darwinian models of conceptual change that will make vast use of Godfrey-Smith’s population-based Darwinism for targeting explicitly mathematical conceptual change. My fourth improvement will be dedicated instead to Wilson’s indeterminate model of conceptual change. I will show how Wilson’s very informal framework can be explicated within a modified version of the structuralist model-theoretic reconstructions of scientific theories. Finally, the fifth improved model of conceptual change will be a belief-revision-like logical framework that reconstructs Thagard’s model of conceptual revolution as specific revision and contraction operations that work on conceptual structures. -/- At the end of this work, a general conception of conceptual change in science and philosophy emerges, thanks to the combined action of the three layers of my methodology. This conception takes conceptual change to be a multi-faceted phenomenon centered around the dynamics of groups of concepts. According to this conception, concepts are best reconstructed as plastic and inter-subjective entities equipped with a non-trivial internal structure and subject to a certain degree of localized holism. Furthermore, conceptual dynamics can be judged from a weakly normative perspective, bound to be dependent on shared values and goals. Conceptual change is then best understood, according to this conception, as a ubiquitous phenomenon underlying all of our intellectual activities, from science to ordinary linguistic practices. As such, conceptual change does not pose any particular problem to value-laden notions of scientific progress, objectivity, and realism. At the same time, this conception prompts all our concept-driven intellectual activities, including philosophical and metaphilosophical reflections, to take into serious consideration the phenomenon of conceptual change. An important consequence of this conception, and of the analysis that generated it, is in fact that an adequate understanding of the dynamics of philosophical concepts is a prerequisite for analytic philosophy to develop a realistic and non-idealized depiction of itself and its activities. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to present and analyse the basic assumptions of Leszek Nowak’s conception of the unity of science. According to Nowak, the unity of science is manifested in the common application of the method of idealisation in scientific research. In accordance with his conception, regardless of the discipline they represent, researchers go through the same stages in building a theory. Two key ones among them are: introducing idealising assumptions into the representation and then their concretisation. In (...) this view, idealisation is the basis of the scientific method, while other cognitive procedures complement it. Nowak’s conception has particular relevance in the context of the dispute between naturalism and anti-naturalism and in the context of the continuing rift between social scientists and natural scientists. It calls into question the anti-naturalist thesis of the ontological uniqueness of social sciences and the resulting methodological consequences. I argue that Nowak’s conception is a cognitively valuable contribution to the contemporary epistemology of science, but it also has weaknesses, mainly due to the limitations of applying the idealisation-concretisation scheme in research practice. For it turns out, as I point out in this essay, that many idealising assumptions are not subject to concretisation and that concretisations do not always condition an increase in the explanatory and/or predictive power of the representations. (shrink)

According to the variety of evidence thesis items of evidence from independent lines of investigation are more confirmatory, ceteris paribus, than, for example, replications of analogous studies. This thesis is known to fail (Bovens and Hartmann; Claveau). However, the results obtained by Bovens and Hartmann only concern instruments whose evidence is either fully random or perfectly reliable; instead, for Claveau, unreliability is modelled as deterministic bias. In both cases, the unreliable instrument delivers totally irrelevant information. We present a model that (...) formalizes both reliability and unreliability differently. Our instruments either are reliable, but affected by random error, or are biased but not deterministically so.Bovens and Hartmann’s results are counter-intuitive in that in their model a long series of consistent reports from the same instrument does not raise suspicion of ‘too-good-to-be-true’ evidence. This happens precisely because they contemplate neither the role of systematic bias, nor unavoidable random error of reliable instruments. In our model, the variety of evidence thesis fails as well, but the area of failure is considerably smaller than for Bovens and Hartmann and Claveau, and holds for (the majority of) realistic cases (that is, where biased instruments are very biased). The essential mechanism that triggers variety of evidence thesis failure is the rate of false to true positives for the two kinds of instruments. Our emphasis is on modelling beliefs about sources of knowledge and their role in hypothesis confirmation in interaction with dimensions of evidence, such as variety and consistency. (shrink)

Efforts to formalize qualitative accounts of inference to the best explanation (IBE) confront two obstacles: the imprecise nature of such accounts and the unusual logical properties that explanations exhibit, such as contradiction-intolerance and irreflexivity. This paper aims to surmount these challenges by utilising a new, more precise theory that treats explanations as expressions that codify defeasible inferences. To formalise this account, we provide a sequent calculus in which IBE serves as an elimination rule for a connective that exhibits many of (...) the properties associated with the behaviour of the English expression ‘That... best explains why ... ’. We first construct a calculus that encodes these properties at the level of the turnstile, i.e. as a metalinguistic expression for classes of defeasible consequence relations. We then show how this calculus can be conservatively extended over a language that contains a best-explains-why operator. (shrink)

To explain their role in discovery and contrast them with theory-driven research, philosophers of science have characterized exploratory experiments in terms of what they lack: namely, that they lack direction from what have been called “local theories” of the target system or object under investigation. I argue that this is incorrect: it’s not whether or not there is direction from a local theory that matters, but instead how such a theory is used to direct an experiment that matters. Appealing to (...) contemporary exploratory experiments that involve the use of experimental techniques—specifically, examples where scientists explore the interaction of neural activity and human behavior by magnetically stimulating brains—I argue that local theories of a target system can inform auxiliary hypotheses in exploratory experiments, which direct these experiments. These examples illustrate how local theories can direct the exploration of target systems where researchers do not aim to evaluate these theories. (shrink)

The use of idealized scientific theories in explanations of empirical facts and regularities is problematic in two ways: they don’t satisfy the condition that the explanans is true, and they may fail to entail the explanandum. An attempt to deal with the latter problem was proposed by Hempel and Popper with their notion of approximate explanation. A more systematic perspective on idealized explanations was developed with the method of idealization and concretization by the Poznan school in the 1970s. If idealizational (...) laws are treated as counterfactual conditionals, they can be true or truthlike, and the concretizations of such laws may increase their degree of truthlikeness. By replacing Hempel’s truth requirement with the condition that an explanatory theory is truthlike one can distinguish several important types of approximate, corrective, and contrastive explanations by idealized theories. The conclusions have important consequences for the debates about scientific realism and anti-realism. (shrink)

Intertheoretic relations are an important topic in the philosophy of science. However, since their classical discussion by Ernest Nagel, such relations have mostly been restricted to relations between pairs of theories in the natural sciences. This paper presents a case study of a new type of intertheoretic relation that is inspired by Montague’s analysis of the linguistic syntax-semantics relation. The paper develops a simple model of this relation. To motivate the adoption of our new model, we show that this model (...) extends the scope of application of the Nagelian models and that it shares the epistemological advantages of the Nagelian model. The latter is achieved in a Bayesian framework. (shrink)

A recently published hypothesis on the nature of time by physicist Richard A. Muller seeks to provide an objective account of the present moment and the ‘flow’ of time. Muller also claims that his hypothesis makes testable predictions. It is shown that the predictions offered cannot be used to test Muller’s hypothesis, that the hypothesis does not rate scientific status, has a number of questionable metaphysical premises, and is merely a re-fashioning of the Growing Block theory of time.

This study deals with the school instruction of the concept of weight. The historical review reveals the major steps in changing weight definition reflecting the epistemological changes in physics. The latest change drawing on the operation of weighing has been not widely copied into physics education. We compared the older instruction based on the gravitational definition of weight with the newer one based on the operational definition. The experimental teaching was applied in two versions, simpler and extended. The study examined (...) the impact of this instruction on the middle school students in regular teaching environment. The experiment involved three groups of 14-year-old students. The assessment drew on a written questionnaire and personal interviews. The elicited schemes of conceptual knowledge allowed to evaluate the impact on students’ pertinent knowledge. The advantage of the new teaching manifested itself in the significant decrease of the well-known misconceptions such as “space causes weightlessness,” “weight is an unchanged property of the body considered,” and “heavier objects fall faster”. The twofold advantage—epistemological and conceptual—of the operational definition of weight supports the correspondent curricular changes of its adoption. (shrink)

Šio straipsnio tikslas – bendrais bruožais aptarti reduktyvizmo raišką šiuolaikinėje analitinėje sąmonės, moralės, veiksmo ir priežastingumo filosofijoje bei įvertinti redukcijos strategijų šiose filosofijos šakose panašumus ir skirtumus. Straipsnyje aptariamos šešios reduktyvizmo strategijos – sąvokų sinonimija paremta redukcija, a posteriori tapatybės tezė, analitinis funkcionalizmas, anomalusis monizmas, analizė pasitelkiant pareities sąvoką, konceptualinė analizė be sąvokų sinonimijos – ir konstatuojama, kad skirtingose filosofijos srityse šios strategijos reiškiasi skirtingai, taip pat yra skirtingai kritikuojamos ir interpretuojamos. Straipsnyje mėginama paaiškinti kai kuriuos šių skirtumų ir daroma (...) išvada, kad šiuolaikinėje analitinėje filosofijoje neperspektyvu kalbėti apie reduktyvizmą apskritai, kaip vieną visas sritis apimantį reiškinį, paremtą visas reduktyvistines koncepcijas vienijančiu reduktyvizmo modeliu, forma ar vizija. (shrink)

A central reason that undergirds the significance of evo-devo is the claim that development was left out of the Modern synthesis. This claim turns out to be quite complicated, both in terms of whether development was genuinely excluded and how to understand the different kinds of embryological research that might have contributed. The present paper reevaluates this central claim by focusing on the practice of model organism choice. Through a survey of examples utilized in the literature of the Modern synthesis, (...) I identify a previously overlooked feature: exclusion of research on marine invertebrates. Understanding the import of this pattern requires interpreting it in terms of two epistemic values operating in biological research: theoretical generality and explanatory completeness. In tandem, these values clarify and enhance the significance of this exclusion. The absence of marine invertebrates implied both a lack of generality in the resulting theory and a lack of completeness with respect to particular evolutionary problems, such as evolvability and the origin of novelty. These problems were salient to embryological researchers aware of the variation and diversity of larval forms in marine invertebrates. In closing, I apply this analysis to model organism choice in evo-devo and discuss its relevance for an extended evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

How should the “physical” in “physicalism” be understood? I here set out systematic criteria of adequacy, propose an account, and show how the account meets those criteria. The criteria of adequacy focus on the idea of rational management: to vindicate philosophical practice, the account must make it plausible that we can assess various questions about physicalism. The account on offer is dubbed the “Ideal Naturalist Physics” account, according to which the physical is that which appears in an ideal theory that (...) both meets the explanatory goals of physics and is naturalist in a sense to be explained. The combination of these two provides a satisfying account of the physical that meets the criteria of adequacy and can be used to predict puzzle cases as well. (shrink)

I offer an account of how the quantum theory we have helps us explain the enormous variety of phenomena it is generally taken to explain. The account depends on what I have elsewhere called a pragmatist interpretation of the theory. This rejects views according to which a quantum state describes or represents a physical system, holding instead that it functions as a source of sound advice to physically situated agents like us on the content and appropriate degree of belief about (...) matters concerning which they are currently inevitably ignorant. So while the account given here is incompatible with some views of structural explanation in quantum theory it is nevertheless able to incorporate what I take to be their valuable insights. (shrink)

This paper looks at an appeal to the authority of biomedical research that has recently been used by empirical economists to motivate and justify their methods. I argue that those who make this appeal mistake the nature of biomedical research. Randomised trials, which are said to have revolutionised biomedical research, are a central methodology, but according to only one paradigm. There is another paradigm at work in biomedical research, the inferentialist paradigm, in which randomised trials play no special role. I (...) outline the inferentialist alternative in broad strokes, apply it to a recent controversy in econometrics and draw some general conclusions concerning econometric methodology. (shrink)

In this article, I address epistemological questions regarding the status of linguistic rules and the pervasive--though seldom discussed--tension that arises between theory-driven object perception by linguists on the one hand, and ordinary speakers' possible intuitive knowledge on the other hand. Several issues will be discussed using examples from French verb morphology, based on the 6500 verbs from Le Petit Robert dictionary (2013).