Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. On natural selection and Hume's second problem.Armando Aranda-Anzaldo - 1998 - Evolution and Cognition 4 (2):156-172.
    David Hume's famous riddle of induction implies a second problem related to the question of whether the laws and principles of nature might change in the course of time. Claims have been made that modern developments in physics and astrophysics corroborate the translational invariance of the laws of physics in time. However, the appearance of a new general principle of nature, which might not be derivable from the known laws of physics, or that might actually be a non-physical one (this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality.Thomas Pradeu - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):797-817.
    The definition of biological individuality is one of the most discussed topics in philosophy of biology, but current debate has focused almost exclusively on evolution-based accounts. Moreover, several participants in this debate consider the notions of a biological individual and an organism as equivalent. In this paper, I show that the debates would be considerably enriched and clarified if philosophers took into account two elements. First, physiological fields are crucial for the understanding of biological individuality. Second, the category of biological (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   47 citations  
  • (1 other version)Semiosis as an Emergent Process.Joao Queiroz & Charbel Nino El-Hani - 2006 - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (1):78-116.
    In this paper, we intend to discuss if and in what sense semiosis (meaning process, cf. C. S. Peirce) can be regarded as an "emergent" process in semiotic systems. It is not our problem here to answer when or how semiosis emerged in nature. As a prerequisite for the very formulation of these problems, we are rather interested in discussing the conditions which should be fulfilled for semiosis to be characterized as an emergent process. The first step in this work (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences.Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins & Trevor Pearce (eds.) - 2014 - Dordrecht: Springer.
    Despite the burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the organism-environment dyad by biologists and philosophers, little attention has been paid in the resulting discussions to the history of these ideas and to their deployment in disciplines outside biology—especially in the social sciences. Even in biology and philosophy, there is a lack of detailed conceptual models of the organism-environment relationship. This volume is designed to fill these lacunae by providing the first multidisciplinary discussion of the topic of organism-environment (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Rethinking Woodger’s Legacy in the Philosophy of Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson & Richard Gawne - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (2):243-292.
    The writings of Joseph Henry Woodger (1894–1981) are often taken to exemplify everything that was wrongheaded, misguided, and just plain wrong with early twentieth-century philosophy of biology. Over the years, commentators have said of Woodger: (a) that he was a fervent logical empiricist who tried to impose the explanatory gold standards of physics onto biology, (b) that his philosophical work was completely disconnected from biological science, (c) that he possessed no scientific or philosophical credentials, and (d) that his work was (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Molecular ecosystems.Marco J. Nathan - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (1):101-122.
    Biologists employ a suggestive metaphor to describe the complexities of molecular interactions within cells and embryos: cytological components are said to be part of “ecosystems” that integrate them in a complex network of relations with many other entities. The aim of this essay is to scrutinize the molecular ecosystem, a metaphor that, despite its longstanding history, has seldom be articulated in detail. I begin by analyzing some relevant analogies between the cellular environment and the biosphere. Next, I discuss the applicability (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Herbert Simon’s Silent Revolution.Werner Callebaut - 2007 - Biological Theory 2 (1):76-86.
    Simon’s bounded rationality , the first scientific research program to seriously take the cognitive limitations of decision makers into account, has often been conflated with his more restricted concept of satisficing—choosing an alternative that meets or exceeds specified criteria, but that is not guaranteed to be unique or in any sense “the best.” Proponents of optimization often dismiss bounded rationality out of hand with the following “hallway syllogism” : bounded rationality “boils down to” satisficing; satisficing is “simply” a theory of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Developmental Systems Theory Formulated as a Claim about Inherited Representations.Nicholas Shea - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (1):60-82.
    Developmental Systems Theory (DST) emphasises the importance of non-genetic factors in development and their relevance to evolution. A common, deflationary reaction is that it has long been appreciated that non-genetic factors are causally indispensable. This paper argues that DST can be reformulated to make a more substantive claim: that the special role played by genes is also played by some (but not all) non-genetic resources. That special role is to transmit inherited representations, in the sense of Shea (2007: Biology and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Do organisms have an ontological status?Charles T. Wolfe - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):195-232.
    The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • What is an organism? An immunological answer.Thomas Pradeu - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):247-267.
    The question “What is an organism?”, formerly considered as essential in biology, has now been increasingly replaced by a larger question, “What is a biological individual?”. On the grounds that i) individuation is theory-dependent, and ii) physiology does not offer a theory, biologists and philosophers of biology have claimed that it is the theory of evolution by natural selection which tells us what counts as a biological individual. Here I show that one physiological field, immunology, offers a theory, which makes (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   68 citations  
  • Consumers Need Information: supplementing teleosemantics with an input condition.Nicholas Shea - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2):404-435.
    The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   81 citations  
  • Evolutionary innovations and developmental resources: From stability to variation and back again.Jonathan Kaplan - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (5):861-873.
    Will a synthesis of developmental and evolutionary biology require a focus on the role of nongenetic resources in evolution? Nongenetic variation may exist but be hidden because the phenotypes are stable (developmentally canalized) under certain background conditions. In this case, those differences may come to play important roles in evolution when background conditions change. If this is so, then a focus on the way that developmental resources are made reliable, and the ways in which reliability fails, may prove to be (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Adaptationism and the adaptive landscape.Jon F. Wilkins & Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2009 - Biology and Philosophy 24 (2):199-214.
    Debates over adaptationism can be clarified and partially resolved by careful consideration of the ‘grain’ at which evolutionary processes are described. The framework of ‘adaptive landscapes’ can be used to illustrate and facilitate this investigation. We argue that natural selection may have special status at an intermediate grain of analysis of evolutionary processes. The cases of sickle-cell disease and genomic imprinting are used as case studies.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Three kinds of adaptationism.Peter Godfrey-Smith - unknown
    Debate about adaptationism in biology continues, in part because within “the” problem of assessing adaptationism, three distinct problems are mixed together. The three problems concern the assessment of three distinct adaptationist positions, each of which asserts the central importance of adaptation and natural selection to the study of evolution, but conceives this importance in a different way. As there are three kinds of adaptationism, there are three distinct "anti-adaptationist" positions as well. Or putting it more formally, there are three different (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   106 citations  
  • Viability explanation.Arno Wouters - 1995 - Biology and Philosophy 10 (4):435-457.
    This article deals with a type of functional explanation, viability explanation, that has been overlooked in recent philosophy of science. Viability explanations relate traits of organisms and their environments in terms of what an individual needs to survive and reproduce. I show that viability explanations are neither causal nor historical and that, therefore, they should be accounted for as a distinct type of explanation.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality. [REVIEW]Andreas Weber & Francisco J. Varela - 2002 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2):97-125.
    This paper proposes a basic revision of the understanding of teleology in biological sciences. Since Kant, it has become customary to view purposiveness in organisms as a bias added by the observer; the recent notion of teleonomy expresses well this as-if character of natural purposes. In recent developments in science, however, notions such as self-organization (or complex systems) and the autopoiesis viewpoint, have displaced emergence and circular self-production as central features of life. Contrary to an often superficial reading, Kant gives (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   221 citations  
  • The extended replicator.Kim Sterelny, Kelly C. Smith & Michael Dickison - 1996 - Biology and Philosophy 11 (3):377-403.
    This paper evaluates and criticises the developmental systems conception of evolution and develops instead an extension of the gene's eye conception of evolution. We argue (i) Dawkin's attempt to segregate developmental and evolutionary issues about genes is unsatisfactory. On plausible views of development it is arbitrary to single out genes as the units of selection. (ii) The genotype does not carry information about the phenotype in any way that distinguishes the role of the genes in development from that other factors. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   130 citations  
  • The use and abuse of sir Karl Popper.David L. Hull - 1999 - Biology and Philosophy 14 (4):481-504.
    Karl Popper has been one of the few philosophers of sciences who has influenced scientists. I evaluate Popper's influence on our understanding of evolutionary theory from his earliest publications to the present. Popper concluded that three sorts of statements in evolutionary biology are not genuine laws of nature. I take him to be right on this score. Popper's later distinction between evolutionary theory as a metaphysical research program and as a scientific theory led more than one scientist to misunderstand his (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Adaptationism and the power of selection.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 1999 - Biology and Philosophy 14 (2):181-194.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • The units of selection revisited: The modules of selection. [REVIEW]Robert N. Brandon - 1999 - Biology and Philosophy 14 (2):167-180.
    Richard Lewontin's (1970) early work on the units of selection initiated the conceptual and theoretical investigations that have led to the hierarchical perspective on selection that has reached near consensus status today. This paper explores other aspects of his work, work on what he termed continuity and quasi-independence, that connect to contemporary explorations of modularity in development and evolution. I characterize such modules and argue that they are the true units of selection in that they are what evolution by natural (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • On organism: Environment buffers and their ecological significance.José-Leonel Torres & Lynn Trainor - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (3):403-416.
    We consider, from a physical perspective, the case where the interface between an organism and its environment becomes large enough that it acts as a buffer regulating their matter and energy exchanges. We illustrate the physiological and evolutionary role of buffers through the example of lungfish estivation. Then we ponder the relevance of buffers of this kind to the quest for a general definition of concepts like niche construction, the extended phenotype, and related ones, whose meaning is conveyed at present (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Made by each other: Organisms and their environment. [REVIEW]Kim Sterelny - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):21-36.
    The standard picture of evolution, is externalist: a causal arrow runs from environment to organism, and that arrow explains why organisms are as they are (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Natural selection allows a lineage to accommodate itself to the specifics of its environment. As the interior of Australia became hotter and drier, phenotypes changed in many lineages of plants and animals, so that those organisms came to suit the new conditions under which they lived. Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman, building on the work (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • (1 other version)Semiosis as an emergent process.Joao Queiroz & Charbel Nino El-Hani - 2006 - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (1):78-116.
    : In this paper, we intend to discuss if and in what sense semiosis (meaning process, cf. C. S. Peirce) can be regarded as an "emergent" process in semiotic systems. It is not our problem here to answer when or how semiosis emerged in nature. As a prerequisite for the very formulation of these problems, we are rather interested in discussing the conditions which should be fulfilled for semiosis to be characterized as an emergent process. The first step in this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • (1 other version)The evolution and evolvability of culture.Kim Sterelny - 2006 - Mind and Language 21 (2):137-165.
    Joseph Henrich and Richard McElreath begin their survey of theories of cultural evolution with a striking historical example. They contrast the fate of the Bourke and Wills expedition — an attempt to explore some of the arid areas of inland Australia — with the routine survival of the local aboriginals in exactly the same area. That expedition ended in failure and death, despite the fact that it was well equipped, and despite the fact that those on the expedition were tough (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  • Environmental complexity and the evolution of cognition.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2001 - In Robert J. Sternberg & James C. Kaufman (eds.), The Evolution of Intelligence. Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 233--249.
    One problem faced in discussions of the evolution of intelligence is the need to get a precise fix on what is to be explained. Terms like "intelligence," "cognition" and "mind" do not have simple and agreed-upon meanings, and the differences between conceptions of intelligence have consequences for evolutionary explanation. I hope the papers in this volume will enable us to make progress on this problem. The present contribution is mostly focused on these basic and foundational issues, although the last section (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Mindreading, mindshaping, and evolution.Matteo Mameli - 2001 - Biology and Philosophy 16 (5):595-626.
    I present and apply some powerful tools for studying human evolution and the impact of cultural resources on it. The tools in question are a theory of niche construction and a theory about the evolutionary significance of extragenetic (and, in particular, of psychological and social) inheritance. These tools are used to show how culturally transmitted resources can be recruited by development and become generatively entrenched. The case study is constituted by those culturally transmitted items that social psychologists call ‘expectancies’. Expectancy (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   54 citations  
  • Fodor on cognition, modularity, and adaptationism.Samir Okasha - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (1):68-88.
    This paper critically examines Jerry Fodor's latest attacks on evolutionary psychology. Contra Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Fodor argues (i) there is no reason to think that human cognition is a Darwinian adaptation in the first place, and (ii) there is no valid inference from adaptationism about the mind to massive modularity. However, Fodor maintains (iii) that there is a valid inference in the converse direction, from modularity to adaptationism, but (iv) that the language module is an exception to the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Evolution, selection, and cognition: From learning to parameter setting in biology and in the study of language.Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini - 1989 - Cognition 31 (1):1-44.
    Most biologists and some cognitive scientists have independently reached the conclusion that there is no such thing as learning in the traditional “instructive‘ sense. This is, admittedly, a somewhat extreme thesis, but I defend it herein the light of data and theories jointly extracted from biology, especially from evolutionary theory and immunology, and from modern generative grammar. I also point out that the general demise of learning is uncontroversial in the biological sciences, while a similar consensus has not yet been (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   239 citations  
  • Is a Cognitive Revolution in Theoretical Biology Underway?Tiago Rama - 2024 - Foundations of Science 1:1-22.
    The foundations of biology have been a topic of debate for the past few decades. The traditional perspective of the Modern Synthesis, which portrays organisms as passive entities with limited role in evolutionary theory, is giving way to a new paradigm where organisms are recognized as active agents, actively shaping their own phenotypic traits for adaptive purposes. Within this context, this article raises the question of whether contemporary biological theory is undergoing a cognitive revolution. This inquiry can be approached in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Biological Autonomy. [REVIEW]Maxim Raginsky - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (4):303-308.
    The nature of biological autonomy and the choice of an appropriate framework for understanding it are subjects of ongoing debates in philosophy of biology and cognitive science. The enactivist view, originating with Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, emphasizes the concepts of organizational or operational closure and structural coupling between the organism and its environment as central in the context of autonomy. The proponents of this view contrast it with the traditional cybernetic paradigm based on inputs, outputs, feedback, and internal representations. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Health, consciousness, and the evolution of subjects.Walter Veit - 2022 - Synthese 201 (1):1-24.
    The goal of this programmatic paper is to highlight a close connection between the core problem in the philosophy of medicine, i.e. the concept of health, and the core problem of the philosophy of mind, i.e. the concept of consciousness. I show when we look at these phenomena together, taking the evolutionary perspective of modern state-based behavioural and life-history theory used as the teleonomic tool to Darwinize the agent- and subject-side of organisms, we will be in a better position to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Organism-Environment Interactions in Evolutionary Theory.Bendik Hellem Aaby - 2021 - Dissertation, Ku Leuven
    This dissertation concerns the active role of the organism in evolutionary theory. In particular, it concerns how our conception of the relationship between organism and environment, and the nature of natural selection, influences the causal and explanatory role of organismic activity and behavior in evolutionary explanations. The overarching aim is to argue that the behaviors and activities of organisms can serve both as the explananda (that which is explained) and the explanantia (that which explains) in evolutionary explanations. I attempt to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A biosocial return to race? A cautionary view for the postgenomic era.Maurizio Meloni - 2022 - American Journal of Human Biology.
    Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. Here, we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions of direct environmental effects on bodies have been used to naturalize racial hierarchy and inequalities in the past. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • A taste for the infinite: What philosophy of biology can tell us about religious belief.Helen De Cruz - 2022 - Zygon 57 (1):161-180.
    According to Friedrich Schleiermacher, religiosity is rooted in feeling (Gefühl). As a result of our engagement with the world, on which we depend and which we can influence, we have both a sense of dependence and of freedom. Schleiermacher speculated that a sense of absolute dependence in reflective beings with self-consciousness (human beings) gave rise to religion. Using insights from contemporary philosophy of biology and cognitive science, I seek to naturalize Schleiermacher's ideas. I moreover show that this naturalization is in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Scaffolding Natural Selection.Walter Veit - 2022 - Biological Theory 17 (2):163-180.
    Darwin provided us with a powerful theoretical framework to explain the evolution of living systems. Natural selection alone, however, has sometimes been seen as insufficient to explain the emergence of new levels of selection. The problem is one of “circularity” for evolutionary explanations: how to explain the origins of Darwinian properties without already invoking their presence at the level they emerge. That is, how does evolution by natural selection commence in the first place? Recent results in experimental evolution suggest a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Evolutionary Epistemology: Two Research Avenues, Three Schools, and A Single and Shared Agenda.Nathalie Gontier & Michael Bradie - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (2):197-209.
    This special issue for the Journal for General Philosophy of Science is devoted to exploring the impact and many ramifications of current research in evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology is an inter- and multidisciplinary area of research that can be divided into two ever-inclusive research avenues. One research avenue expands on the EEM program and investigates the epistemology of evolution. The other research avenue builds on the EET program and researches the evolution of epistemology. Since its conception, EE has developed three (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The Plurality of Evolutionary Worldviews.Nathalie Gontier - 2021 - Biosemiotics 14 (1):35-40.
    Evolutionary biologists, evolutionary epistemologists, and biosemioticians have demonstrated that organisms not merely adapt to an external world, but that they actively construct their environmental, sociocultural, and cognitive niches. Denis Noble demonstrates that such is no different for those organisms that engage in science, and he lays bare several crucial assumptions that define the scientific dogmas and practices of evolutionary biology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Modelling ourselves: what the free energy principle reveals about our implicit notions of representation.Matt Sims & Giovanni Pezzulo - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7801-7833.
    Predictive processing theories are increasingly popular in philosophy of mind; such process theories often gain support from the Free Energy Principle —a normative principle for adaptive self-organized systems. Yet there is a current and much discussed debate about conflicting philosophical interpretations of FEP, e.g., representational versus non-representational. Here we argue that these different interpretations depend on implicit assumptions about what qualifies as representational. We deploy the Free Energy Principle instrumentally to distinguish four main notions of representation, which focus on organizational, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Defining the Environment in Organism–Environment Systems.Amanda Corris - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:1285.
    Enactivism and ecological psychology converge on the relevance of the environment in understanding perception and action. On both views, perceiving organisms are not merely passive receivers of environmental stimuli, but rather form a dynamic relationship with their environments in such a way that shapes how they interact with the world. In this paper, I suggest that while enactivism and ecological psychology enjoy a shared specification of the environment as the cognitive domain, on both accounts, the structure of the environment, itself, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Babies Rule! Niches, Scaffoldings, and the Development of an Aesthetic Capacity in Humans.Mariagrazia Portera - 2020 - British Journal of Aesthetics 60 (3):299-314.
    Where does the human aesthetic come from? How does it develop? By introducing the notion of the ‘niche’ as a key term in an empirically and evolutionarily informed aesthetics, this paper aims to take a fresh look at these and similar questions. It also aims to shed new light on the development and functioning of the aesthetic capacity in humans and its trans-generational transmission. Drawing on recent research developments in evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, and cognitive sciences, I shall argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Biosemiotics, the Extended Synthesis, and Ecological Information: Making Sense of the Organism-Environment Relation at the Cognitive Level.Manuel Heras-Escribano & Paulo de Jesus - 2018 - Biosemiotics 11 (2):245-262.
    This paper argues that the Extended Synthesis, ecological information, and biosemiotics are complementary approaches whose engagement will help us explain the organism-environment interaction at the cognitive level. The Extended Synthesis, through niche construction theory, can explain the organism-environment interaction at an evolutionary level because niche construction is a process guided by information. We believe that the best account that defines information at this level is the one offered by biosemiotics and, within all kinds of biosemiotic information available, we believe that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Natural selection, plasticity, and the rationale for largest-scale trends.Hugh Desmond - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 68:25-33.
    Many have argued that there is no reason why natural selection should cause directional increases in measures such as body size or complexity across evolutionary history as a whole. In this paper I argue that this conclusion does not hold for selection for adaptations to environmental variability, and that, given the inevitability of environmental variability, trends in adaptations to variability are an expected feature of evolution by natural selection. As a concrete instance of this causal structure, I outline how this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • The Debunking Challenge to Realism: How Evolution (Ultimately) Matters.Levy Arnon & Yair Levy - 2016 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (1):1-8.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) have attracted extensive attention in meta-ethics, as they pose an important challenge to moral realism. Mogensen (2015) suggests that EDAs contain a fallacy, by confusing two distinct forms of biological explanation – ultimate and proximate. If correct, the point is of considerable importance: evolutionary genealogies of human morality are simply irrelevant for debunking. But we argue that the actual situation is subtler: while ultimate claims do not strictly entail proximate ones, there are important evidential connections between (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)The Evolution and Evolvability of Culture.Kim Sterelny - 2006 - Mind and Language 21 (2):137-165.
    In this paper I argue, first, that human lifeways depend on cognitive capital that has typically been built over many generations. This process of gradual accumulation produces an adaptive fit between human agents and their environments; an adaptive fit that is the result of hidden‐hand, evolutionary mechanisms. To explain distinctive features of human life, we need to understand how cultures evolve. Second, I distinguish a range of different evolutionary models of culture. Third, I argue that none of meme‐based models, dual (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • Social niche construction and evolutionary transitions in individuality.P. A. Ryan, S. T. Powers & R. A. Watson - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (1):59-79.
    Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Ontological Emergence: How is That Possible? Towards a New Relational Ontology.Gil C. Santos - 2015 - Foundations of Science 20 (4):429-446.
    In this article I address the issue of the ontological conditions of possibility for a naturalistic notion of emergence, trying to determine its fundamental differences from the atomist, vitalist, preformationist and potentialist alternatives. I will argue that a naturalistic notion of ontological emergence can only succeed if we explicitly refuse the atomistic fundamental ontological postulate that asserts that every entity is endowed with a set of absolutely intrinsic properties, being qualitatively immutable through its extrinsic relations. Furthermore, it will be shown (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • Pluralists about Pluralism? Versions of Explanatory Pluralism in Psychiatry.Jeroen Van Bouwel - 2014 - In Thomas Uebel (ed.), New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Cham: Springer. pp. 105-119.
    In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Another view of life.Kim Sterelny - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (3):585-593.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Holism and Reductionism in Biology and Ecology the Mutual Dependence of Higher and Lower Level Research Programmes.Rick C. Looijen - 2000 - Springer.
    Holism and reductionism are usually seen as opposite and mutually exclusive approaches to nature. Recently, some have come to see them as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. In this book I have argued that, even stronger, they should be seen as mutually dependent and co-operating research programmes. I have discussed holism and reductionism in biology in general and in ecology in particular. After an introductory chapter I have provided an overview of holistic and reductionistic positions in biology, and of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations