Philosophers of science have recently begun to pay more attention to scientific practice, moving away from the discipline’s focus on theories. The creation of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice in 2006, as well as the emergence of scholarship on experimental practice (e.g. Sullivan 2009; 2010; 2016) as well as on the tools scientists use to construct explanations and theories (e.g. Feest 2011) all point to a disciplinary shift towards a more practice-conscious philosophy of science. In addition, scholars (...) are realizing the potential social relevance of philosophy of science and identifying the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing said potential (e.g. Douglas 2010). The aim of this dissertation is to propose a novel descriptive framework for philosophy of science, one that rests on the idea that scientific practice should be described as accurately as possible so that philosophical discussions of science rest on a solid descriptive base and can more easily be of use in engaging users and practitioners of science. The dissertation is organized along the stages of developing what I call the dynamic-iterative model of scientific practice. In chapter 1, I clarify the project’s philosophical background and outline six conditions of adequacy on a descriptive model of science. These conditions allow me to evaluate the three descriptive models reviewed in chapter 2. Chapter 3 combines Nickles’ problem-solving view of science (1981) with core insights from the heuristics and biases literature into a workable version of the dynamic-iterative model. I then apply the model to the case of place cell research in chapter 4 as a test of the model’s usefulness and applicability. In chapter 5 I evaluate the model with respect to my six conditions and assess its strengths and weaknesses. The dynamic-iterative model is a flexible descriptive framework that not only allows for more complete philosophical analyses of cases than other current models, but also supports important practical applications. (shrink)

We explicate representational content by addressing how representations that ex- plain intelligent behavior might be acquired through processes of Darwinian evo- lution. We present the results of computer simulations of evolved neural network controllers and discuss the similarity of the simulations to real-world examples of neural network control of animal behavior. We argue that focusing on the simplest cases of evolved intelligent behavior, in both simulated and real organisms, reveals that evolved representations must carry information about the creature’s environ- ments (...) and further can do so only if their neural states are appropriately isomor- phic to environmental states. Further, these informational and isomorphism rela- tions are what are tracked by content attributions in folk-psychological and cognitive scientific explanations of these intelligent behaviors. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the question of how artificial life might be used to get a handle on philosophical issues concerning the mind-body problem. I focus on questions concerning what the physical precursors were to the earliest evolved versions of intelligent life. I discuss how cellular automata might constitute an experimental platform for the exploration of such issues, since cellular automata offer a unified framework for the modeling of physical, biological, and psychological processes. I discuss what it would take (...) to implement in a cellular automaton the evolutionary emergence of cognition from non-cognitive artificial organisms. I review work on the artificial evolution of minimally cognitive organisms and discuss how such projects might be translated into cellular automata simulations. (shrink)

I propose and defend the Allocentric-Egocentric Interface Theory of Con- sciousness. Mental processes form a hierarchy of mental representations with maxi- mally egocentric (self-centered) representations at the bottom and maximally allocentric (other-centered) representations at the top. Phenomenally conscious states are states that are relatively intermediate in this hierarchy. More speci.