This paper defends a unificationist theory of explanation. I first explore the notion of understanding entrenched by the unificationist. Then I present an overview of various kinds of causal statements and explanations. It is claimed that only genuine causal law statements have explanatory power. Finally, I attempt to fit causal explanations into the unificationist theory of explanation. In this way, I try to provide an account of how causal explanations provide understanding of the phenomena that they explain.

This paper focuses on the question of whether DNA patents help or hinder scientific discovery and innovation. While DNA patents create a wide variety of possible benefits and harms for science and technology, the evidence we have at this point in time supports the conclusion that they will probably promote rather than hamper scientific discovery and innovation. However, since DNA patenting is a relatively recent phenomena and the biotechnology industry is in its infancy, we should continue to gather evidence about (...) the effects of DNA patenting on scientific innovation and discovery as well the economic, social, and legal conditions relating to intellectual property in biotechnology. We should give the free market, the courts, researchers, and patent offices a chance to settle issues related to innovation and discovery, before we seek legislative remedies, since new laws proposed at this point would lack adequate foresight and could do more harm than good. However, we should be open to new laws or regulations on DNA patents if they are required to in order to deal with some of the biases and limitations of the free market. (shrink)

In the seventeenth century, Newton published his famous experimentum crucis, in which he claimed that light is heterogeneous and is composed of rays with different refrangibilities. Experiments, especially the crucial experiment, were important for justifying Newton’s theory of light, and eventually his theory of color. A century later, Goethe conducted a series of experiments on the nature of color, especially in contradistinction to Newton, and he defended his research with a methodological principle formulated in “Der Versuch als Vermittler.” Goethe’s principle (...) included two elements: a series of experiments and resultant higher empirical evidence, which functioned as mediator between the objective and the subjective . Although the notion of experimentum crucis became popular among scientists for reconstructing experimental research and for justifying theories, especially for rhetorical purposes, Newton’s justification of his theory of light and color is best reconstructed in terms of Goethe’s methodological principle. Finally, Goethe’s principle has important consequences for the contemporary philosophical underdetermination thesis. (shrink)

Meera Nanda arguers first-world intellectuals who espouse anti-science, anti-enlightenment, and relativist epistemological theories are guilty of supporting reactionary religious-political movements in India (and elsewhere in the third-world). I contend Nanda's argument betrays the very enlightenment ideas it aims to defend.

I argue that the feeling that one is the owner of his or her mental states is not an intrinsic property of those states. Rather, it consists in a contingent relation between consciousness and its intentional objects. As such, there are (a variety of) circumstances, varying in their interpretive clarity, in which this relation can come undone. When this happens, the content of consciousness still is apprehended, but the feeling that the content “belongs to me” no longer is secured. I (...) discuss the implications of a mechanism enabling personal ownership for understanding a variety of clinical syndromes as well normal mental function. (shrink)

Functional neuroimaging (NI) technologies like Positron Emission Tomography and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) have revolutionized neuroscience, and provide crucial tools to link cognitive psychology and traditional neuroscientific models. A growing discipline of 'neurophilosophy' brings fMRI evidence to bear on traditional philosophical issues such as weakness of will, moral psychology, rational choice, social interaction, free will, and consciousness. NI has also attracted critical attention from psychologists and from philosophers of science. I review debates over the evidential status of fMRI, including (...) the differences between brain scans and ordinary images, the legitimacy of forward inference and reverse inference, and deductive versus probabilistic accounts of NI evidence. I conclude with a discussion of fMRI as exploratory rather than confirmatory evidence, linking this debate to the growing literature on cognitive ontology. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss philosophical and psychological treatments of the question "how do we decide that an occurrent mental state is a memory and not, say a thought or imagination?" This issue has proven notoriously difficult to resolve, with most proposed indices, criteria and heuristics failing to achieve consensus. Part of the difficulty, I argue, is that the indices and analytic solutions thus far offered seldom have been situated within a well-specified theory of memory function. As I hope to (...) show, when such an approach is adopted, not only does a new, functionally-grounded answer emerge; we also gain insight into the adaptive significance of the process proposed to underwrite our belief in the memorial status of a mental state (i.e.,autonoetic awareness). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005) 75-99 [Access article in PDF] Gynocentric Eco-Logics Trish Glazebrook All of our teachings come from things in nature, they come from the growing cycle, and everything is tied to the earth.1Ludwig Fleck describes in his Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact how the concept of syphilis is "a result of the development and confluence of several lines of collective thought" (Fleck 1979, (...) 23). Diagnosis and treatment of the disease required that its symptomatology undergo transformation from "an undifferentiated and confused mass of information about chronic diseases characterized by skin symptoms" (1979, 1) into the concept of a single disease. Identifying the Spirochaeta pallida bacterium and diagnosing syphilis by means of the Wasserman reaction was only possible when an unclearly related collection of symptoms could be experienced as belonging together in a unified phenomenology.Likewise, I wish to provide a diagnosis and etiology, and suggest a curative possibility for a disease of modernity I will call phallic logic. Symptomatic of this sickness are wide-spread social alienation, global domination and oppression on the basis of gender, race, class and color, and epidemic eco-destruction. A body of critique exists in ecofeminist analyses that experiences these symptoms as a single disease: the phallic logic of modernity. "Logic" in this context does not mean the formal discipline [End Page 75] in which rules for the proper manipulation of abstract statements are laid down. Rather, "logic" in the sense used here is an epistemological term. It means the ways that understanding is structured. Phallic logic is the structure of understanding that permeates patriarchy. This logic takes its paradigm from scientific objectivity, but even voices from within the sciences themselves are arguing that contemporary human being must establish new ways of thinking about nature.I propose that such new eco-logics, that is, ways of thinking about nature, take their guidance from the physical environment. If nature informs knowledge claims, then knowledge itself is construed organically: it is finite and changing rather than fixed and eternal. Such logics can encompass the finitude of physical embodiment as an epistemological principle, and hence I identify them as gynocentric. They are not grounded in the disembodied Cartesian subject that feminists have shown so often and clearly to be typical of androcentric philosophizing. These logics draw instead on the physicality of environmental elements as well as of the thinker, and thus they allow nature's temporality to resonate within knowledge itself. They are not satisfied with a conceptual contrast between nature's on-going coming-to-be and passing-away and the alleged universality of knowledge. Rather, they take nature as a model for truth and acknowledge that nature infuses the things we say to be truth.There is an abundance of arguments for the differences between male and female writing and thinking.2 I speak in accord with these voices, but I frame my project differently. I will begin by presenting evidence of a call for alternative epistemologies from within the sciences, and then use ecofeminist analyses to argue that the scientists in question are moving away from a phallic logic toward gynocentric eco-logics. Next I will make clear three assumptions that underlie my account. The first two are Heideggerian. I accept his argument that the logic of modernity is scientific objectivity, and I use his account of truth and essence to argue that knowledge is situated rather than universal. Hence gynocentric eco-logics entail an essentialism that is historical rather than biological. I give up biology as the fixative for essence, but avoid a decline into what is entirely arbitrary and subjective by fixing essence in terms of cultural and historical location. Hence I am using a Heideggerian notion of situatedness, but applying it specifically to gender such that I can maintain that the category of "woman" is neither universal, nor shattered irreparably into [End Page 76] fragmented individualism. My Heideggerianism is further qualified in that I am not writing in the spirit of Heidegger's life-time project. I will take the force of his insights to be epistemological rather than metaphysical or ontological... (shrink)

In this paper, we reconsider the context of Barbara Carper's alternative ways of knowing, a prominent discourse in modern nursing theory in North America. We explore this relative to the concepts of realism, non‐realism and nominalism, and investigate the philosophical divisions behind the original typology, particularly in relationship to modern scientific enquiry. We examine forms of knowledge relative to realist and nominalist positions and make an argument ad absurdum against relativistic interpretations of knowledge using the example of Borge's Chinese Emporium (...) of Benevolent Knowledge. We propose a contentious postpositivist practical classification for nursing knowledge that demonstrates and supports the idea that knowledge has both individual and subjective components. This classification supports the practical application of nursing knowledge within the paradigm of realist postpositivist science. (shrink)

This paper examines the epistemological significance of the present situation of underdetermination in quantum mechanics. After analyzing this underdetermination at three levels---formal, ontological, and methodological---the paper considers implications for a number of variants of the thesis of scientific realism in fundamental physics and reassesses Lakatos‘ characterization of progress in physical theory in light of the present situation. Next, this paper considers the implications of underdetermination for Weinberg’s ‘‘dream of a final theory.’’ Finally, the paper concludes by suggesting how one might (...) still think of realism and progress in fundamental physics despite the possibility of persistent underdetermination in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

The past decade or so has witnessed an increase in the number of philosophical discussions about emergence and reduction in science. However, many of these discussions (though not all) remain too abstract and theoretical, and are wanting with respect to concrete examples taken from the sciences. This dissertation studies the topics of reduction and emergence in the context of a case study. I focus on the case of chemistry and investigate how emergentism can help us secure the autonomy of this (...) discipline in relation to the underlying microphysics. I develop an account of emergence (called functional emergence) that is, I argue, capable of answering the question of why we have chemistry instead of just applied quantum mechanics. I argue that functionally emergent properties in chemistry -- properties that are defined by their behaviour, not by some shared microphysical constituent -- can help us defend the autonomy of chemistry; they allow for the existence of sui generis chemical regularities, which can be used in sui generis chemical explanations. Functional emergence generates difficulties for some accounts of inter-theoretic reduction, but unlike other theories of emergence it is compatible with weaker forms of reductionism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the importance of treating mental experience on its own terms. In defense of “experiential realism” I offer a critique of modern psychology’s all-too-frequent attempts to effect an objectification and quantification of personal subjectivity. The question is “What can we learn about experiential reality from indices that, in the service of scientific objectification, transform the qualitative properties of experience into quantitative indices?” I conclude that such treatment is neither necessary for realizing, nor sufficient for capturing, (...) subjectively given states (such as perception, pain, imagery, fear, thought, memory) – that is, for understanding many of the principle objects of psychological inquiry. A “science of mind” that approaches its subject matter from a third-person perspective should, I contend, be treated with a healthy amount of informed skepticism. (shrink)

This article builds on ideas presented in Klein (2015a) concerning the importance of a more nuanced, conceptually rigorous approach to the scientific understanding and use of the construct “memory”. I first summarize my model, taking care to situate discussion within the terminological practices of contemporary philosophy of mind. I then elucidate the implications of the model for a particular operation of mind – the manner in which content presented to consciousness realizes its particular phenomenological character (i.e., mode of presentation). Finally, (...) I discuss how the model offers a reconceptualization of the technical language used by psychologists and neuroscientists to formulate and test ideas about memory. (shrink)

I argue that academic psychology’s quest to achieve scientific respectability by reliance on quantification and objectification is deeply flawed. Specifically, psychological theory typically cannot support prognostication beyond the binary opposition of “effect present/effect absent”. Accordingly, the “numbers” assigned to experimental results amount to little more than affixing names (e.g., more than, less than) to the members of an ordered sequence of outcomes. This, in conjunction with the conceptual under-specification characterizing the targets of experimental inquiry, is, I contend, a primary reason (...) why psychologists find it difficult to discriminate between competing, explanations of the effects of mind on behavior. Absent well-specified theory capable of enabling precise and detailed quantitative prediction, inferring underlying mental mechanisms from experimental outcomes becomes a difficult, if not impossible, task. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that radiological attempts to elucidate the properties of self -- an endeavor currently popular in the social neurosciences -- are fraught with conceptual difficulties. I first discuss several philosophical criteria that increase the chances we are posing the “right” questions to nature. I then discuss whether these criteria are met when empirical efforts are directed at one of the central constructs in the social sciences – the human self. In particular, I consider whether recent attempts (...) to map the neural correlates of self and its assumed properties using brain scanning technology satisfy the conceptual conditions minimally required to ask well-formed, theoretically satisfying questions of nature. I conclude that much theoretical work remains to be done. (shrink)

We examine the question of whether scientific theories can ever be complete. For two closely related reasons, we will argue that they cannot. The first reason is the inability to determine what are “valid empirical observations”, a result that is based on a self-reference Gödel/Tarski-like proof. The second reason is the existence of “meta-empirical” evidence of the inherent incompleteness of observations. These reasons, along with theoretical incompleteness, are intimately connected to the notion of belief and to theses within the philosophy (...) of science: the Quine-Duhem (and underdetermination) thesis and the observational/theoretical distinction failure. Some puzzling aspects of the philosophical theses will become clearer in light of these connections. Other results that follow are: no absolute measure of the informational content of empirical data, no absolute measure of the entropy of physical systems, and no complete computer simulation of the natural world are possible. The connections with the mathematical theorems of Gödel and Tarski reveal the existence of other connections between scientific and mathematical incompleteness: computational irreducibility, complexity, infinity, arbitrariness and self-reference. Finally, suggestions will be offered of where a more rigorous (or formal) “proof” of scientific incompleteness can be found. (shrink)

Following the seminal work of Ingvar (1985. “Memory for the future”: An essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness. Human Neurobiology, 4, 127–136), Suddendorf (1994. The discovery of the fourth dimension: Mental time travel and human evolution. Master’s thesis. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand), and Tulving (1985. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 26, 1–12), exploration of the ability to anticipate and prepare for future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty has grown into a thriving research enterprise. (...) A fundamental tenet of this line of inquiry is that future-oriented mental time travel, in most of its presentations, is underwritten by a property or an extension of episodic recollection. However, a careful conceptual analysis of exactly how episodic memory functions in this capacity has yet to be undertaken. In this paper I conduct such an analysis. Based on conceptual, phenomenological, and empirical considerations,I conclude that the autonoetic component of episodic memory, not episodic memory per se, is the causally determinative factor enabling an individual to project him or herself into a personal future. (shrink)