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  1. Not All Computational Methods Are Effective Methods.Mark Sprevak - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (5):113.
    An effective method is a computational method that might, in principle, be executed by a human. In this paper, I argue that there are methods for computing that are not effective methods. The examples I consider are taken primarily from quantum computing, but these are only meant to be illustrative of a much wider class. Quantum inference and quantum parallelism involve steps that might be implemented in multiple physical systems, but cannot be implemented, or at least not at will, by (...)
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  • Generalized darwinism as modest unification.Thomas A. C. Reydon - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (1):79-94.
    This paper examines the nature of Hodgson and Knudsen’s version of Generalized Darwinism, asking to what extent it has explanatory force. The paper develops two criteria for potential explanatory transfer of theories between disciplines, and argues that Generalized Darwinism does not meet these. The paper proposes that Hodgson and Knudsen’s version of Generalized Darwinism is best understood as a research program aimed at modest unificationism sensu Kitcher, that provides a heuristic perspective to guide research, but does not produce actual evolutionary (...)
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  • A Middle Way: A Non-Fundamental Approach to Many-Body Physics by Robert Batterman: Autonomy and Varieties of Reduction. [REVIEW]Alexander Franklin & Katie Robertson - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 97:1223-125.
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  • Social Groups Are Concrete Material Particulars.Kevin Richardson - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (4):468-483.
    It is natural to think that social groups are concrete material particulars, but this view faces an important objection. Suppose the chess club and nature club have the same members. Intuitively, these are different clubs even though they have a common material basis. Some philosophers take these intuitions to show that the materialist view must be abandoned. I propose an alternative explanation. Social groups are concrete material particulars, but there is a psychological explanation of nonidentity intuitions. Social groups appear coincident (...)
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  • Book Forum.Alexander Franklin & Katie Robertson - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 97 (C):123-125.
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  • Book Forum.Michael E. Miller - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 97 (C):126-127.
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  • Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General Framework.Christian List - forthcoming - In Alastair Wilson & Katie Robertson (eds.), Levels of Explanation. Oxford University Press.
    This expository paper presents a general framework for representing levels and inter-level relations. The framework is intended to capture both epistemic and ontological notions of levels and to clarify the sense in which levels of explanation might or might not be related to a levelled ontology. The framework also allows us to study and compare different kinds of inter-level relations, especially supervenience and reduction but also grounding and mereological constitution. This, in turn, enables us to explore questions such as whether (...)
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  • Themes of Consolidation in Eugene P. Odum’s Publicization of the Levels Concept in Ecology Textbooks, 1953–1975.Daniel S. Brooks - 2023 - Perspectives on Science 31 (4):437-464.
    Following its initial development in the 1920’s and 1930’s, by mid-century the concept of “levels of organization” began to disperse throughout the life science textbook literature. Among other early textbooks that first applied the levels concept, Eugene P. Odum’s usage of the notion in his textbook series Fundamentals of Ecology (and his later series Ecology) stands out due to the marked emphasis placed on the concept as a foundational, erotetically-oriented organizing principle. In this paper, I examine Odum’s efforts toward advocating (...)
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  • The Strangest Sort of Map: Reply to Commentaries.Stephen Asma - 2021 - Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 5 (2):75-82.
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  • Naturalness by law.Verónica Gómez Sánchez - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):100-127.
    The intuitive distinction between natural and unnatural properties (e.g., green vs. grue) informs our theorizing not only in fundamental physics, but also in non-fundamental domains. This paper develops a reductive account of this broad notion of naturalness that covers non-fundamental properties: for a property to be natural, I propose, is for it to figure in a law of nature. After motivating the account, I defend it from a potential circularity charge. I argue that a suitably broad notion of lawhood can (...)
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  • How to minimize ontological commitments: a grounding-reductive approach.Reuben Sass - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-22.
    Some revisionary ontologies are highly parsimonious: they posit far fewer entities than what we quantify over in ordinary discourse. The most radical examples are minimal ontologies, on which physical simples are the only things that exist. Highly parsimonious ontologies, and especially minimal ones, face the challenge of either accounting for the truth of our ordinary quantificational discourse, or paraphrasing such discourse away. Common strategies for addressing this challenge include classical reduction, paraphrase nihilism, and a distinction between ontological and existence commitments. (...)
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  • Of Chimeras, Harmony, and Kintsugi: Towards a Historicist Epistemology of Paleontological Reconstruction, Theory-Change, and Exploring Heuristics.Ali Mirza - 2022 - Perspectives on Science 30 (4):657-695.
    I analyze the epistemic strategies used by paleontologists (between 1830–1930) to reconstruct features of ancient organisms from fossilized bodies and footprints by presenting two heuristics: (1) a “claim of harmony” which posits the harmonious interaction of natural objects in order for complex systems to be simplified and (2) the “kintsugi heuristic” which is used inter-theoretically to explore new claims of harmony. I apply these to three successive historical cases: Georges Cuvier’s laws of correlation, the panpsychist paleontology of Edward Drinker Cope, (...)
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  • Two Approaches to Reduction: A Case Study from Statistical Mechanics.Bixin Guo - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science:1-36.
    I argue that there are two distinct approaches to understanding reduction: the ontology-first approach and the theory-first approach. They concern the relation between ontological reduction and inter-theoretic reduction. Further, I argue for the significance of this distinction by demonstrating that either one or the other approach has been taken as an implicit assumption in, and has in fact shaped, our understanding of what statistical mechanics is. More specifically, I argue that the Boltzmannian framework of statistical mechanics assumes and relies on (...)
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  • Vertical-horizontal distinction in resolving the abstraction, hierarchy, and generality problems of the mechanistic account of physical computation.Jesse Kuokkanen - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-18.
    Descriptive abstraction means omission of information from descriptions of phenomena. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between vertical and horizontal descriptive abstraction. Vertical abstracts away levels of mechanism or organization, while horizontal abstracts away details within one level of organization. The distinction is implicit in parts of the literature, but it has received insufficient attention and gone mainly unnoticed. I suggest that the distinction can be used to clarify how computational descriptions are formed in some variants of the mechanistic (...)
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  • If Naturalism is True, then Scientific Explanation is Impossible.Tomas Bogardus - forthcoming - Religious Studies:1-24.
    I begin by retracing an argument from Aristotle for final causes in science. Then, I advance this ancient thought, and defend an argument for a stronger conclusion: that no scientific explanation can succeed, if Naturalism is true. The argument goes like this: (1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity. Next, I argue that (2) any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks (...)
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  • On Leszek Nowak’s Conception of the Unity of Science.Mateusz Wajzer - 2024 - Foundations of Science 29 (2):307-324.
    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 (...)
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  • Foregrounding and backgrounding: a new interpretation of “levels” in science.Eric Hochstein - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (2):1-22.
    Talk of “levels” can be found throughout the sciences, from “levels of abstraction”, to “levels of organization”, to “levels of analysis”. This has led to substantial disagreement regarding the ontology of levels, and whether the various senses of levels each have genuine value and utility to scientific practice. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for thinking about levels in science which ties together the various ways in which levels are invoked in science, and which can overcome the problems (...)
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  • Consciousness, Neuroscience, and Physicalism: Pessimism About Optimistic Induction.Giacomo Zanotti - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (2):283-297.
    Nowadays, physicalism is arguably the received view on the nature of mental states. Among the arguments that have been provided in its favour, the inductive one seems to play a pivotal role in the debate. Leveraging the past success of materialistic science, the physicalist argues that a materialistic account of consciousness will eventually be provided, hence that physicalism is true. This article aims at evaluating whether this strategy can provide support for physicalism. According to the standard objection raised against the (...)
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  • The Two Davids and Australian Materialism.A. R. J. Fisher - 2022 - In Peter R. Anstey & David Braddon-Mitchell (eds.), Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 29-51.
    This chapter by Fisher continues the theme of the relation between Armstrong and Lewis, only Fisher casts the net far wider. He begins by arguing that there were at least two different lines of influence from early twentieth-century behaviourism to the identity theory: one through logical positivism and the other through ordinary language philosophy, the latter involving Place and Smart, and Lewis and Armstrong. It was Armstrong and Lewis who were to have a profound influence on subsequent developments in analytic (...)
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  • Against Representational Levels.Nicholas K. Jones - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):140-157.
    Some views articulate reality's hierarchical structure using relations from the fundamental to representations of reality. Other views instead use relations from the fundamental to constituents of non-representational reality. This paper argues against the first kind of view.
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  • Stating structural realism: mathematics‐first approaches to physics and metaphysics.David Wallace - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):345-378.
    I respond to the frequent objection that structural realism fails to sharply state an alternative to the standard predicate-logic, object / property / relation, way of doing metaphysics. The approach I propose is based on what I call a ‘math-first’ approach to physical theories (close to the so-called ‘semantic view of theories') where the content of a physical theory is to be understood primarily in terms of its mathematical structure and the representational relations it bears to physical systems, rather than (...)
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  • Autonomy generalised; or, Why doesn’t physics matter more?Katie Robertson - forthcoming - Ergo.
    In what sense are the special sciences autonomous of fundamental physics? Autonomy is an enduring theme in discussions of the relationship between the special sciences and fundamental physics or, more generally, between higher and lower-level facts. Discussion of ‘autonomy’ often fails to recognise that autonomy admits of degrees; consequently, autonomy is either taken to require full independence, or risk relegation to mere apparent autonomy. In addition, the definition of autonomy used by Fodor, the most famous proponent of the autonomy of (...)
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  • Scientific Pluralism.Ludwig David & Ruphy Stéphanie - 2021 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Fundamentality and Levels in Everettian Quantum Mechanics.Alastair Wilson - 2022 - In Valia Allori (ed.), Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality: Naturalizing Quantum Theory between Scientific Realism and Ontological Indeterminacy. Cham: Springer.
    Distinctions in fundamentality between different levels of description are central to the viability of contemporary decoherence-based Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM). This approach to quantum theory characteristically combines a determinate fundamental reality (one universal wave function) with an indeterminate emergent reality (multiple decoherent worlds). In this chapter I explore how the Everettian appeal to fundamentality and emergence can be understood within existing metaphysical frameworks, identify grounding and concept fundamentality as promising theoretical tools, and use them to characterize a system of explanatory (...)
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  • Framing the Epistemic Schism of Statistical Mechanics.Javier Anta - 2021 - Proceedings of the X Conference of the Spanish Society of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science.
    In this talk I present the main results from Anta (2021), namely, that the theoretical division between Boltzmannian and Gibbsian statistical mechanics should be understood as a separation in the epistemic capabilities of this physical discipline. In particular, while from the Boltzmannian framework one can generate powerful explanations of thermal processes by appealing to their microdynamics, from the Gibbsian framework one can predict observable values in a computationally effective way. Finally, I argue that this statistical mechanical schism contradicts the Hempelian (...)
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  • Whewell’s hylomorphism as a metaphorical explanation for how mind and world merge.Ragnar van der Merwe - 2023 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (1):19-38.
    William Whewell’s 19th century philosophy of science is sometimes glossed over as a footnote to Kant. There is however a key feature of Whewell’s account worth noting. This is his appeal to Aristotle’s form/matter hylomorphism as a metaphor to explain how mind and world merge in successful scientific inquiry. Whewell’s hylomorphism suggests a middle way between rationalism and empiricism reminiscent of experience pragmatists like Steven Levine’s view that mind and world are entwined in experience. I argue however that Levine does (...)
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  • All flash, no substance?Elizabeth Miller - 2022 - In Valia Allori (ed.), Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality: Naturalizing Quantum Theory between Scientific Realism and Ontological Indeterminacy. Cham: Springer. pp. 113-26.
    The GRW dynamics propose a novel, relevantly “observer”-independent replacement for orthodox “measurement”-induced collapse. Yet the tails problem shows that this dynamical innovation is not enough: a principled alternative to the orthodox account demands some corresponding ontological advancement as well. In fact, there are three rival fundamental ontologies on offer for the GRW dynamics. Debate about the relative merits of these candidates is a microcosm of broader disagreement about the role of ontology in our physical theorizing. According to imprimitivists, the GRW (...)
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  • Fundamentality.Steven French - 2022 - In Eleanor Knox & Alastair Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Physics. London, UK: Routledge. pp. 679-688.
    The idea that there is some fundamental “level” or “ground” where our description of the world bottoms out has acquired the status of ‘the received view’ in metaphysics ; for a more recent critical defense, see Cameron, 2008). Typically this view is cashed out in terms of some set of ‘basic building blocks’ populating this level, which sits at the bottom of a hierarchy ordered according to some set of compositional principles. These fundamental building blocks are thus taken to have (...)
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  • Philosophical foundations of neuroeconomics: economics and the revolutionary challenge from neuroscience.Roberto Fumagalli - 2011 - Dissertation, London School of Economics
    This PhD thesis focuses on the philosophical foundations of Neuroeconomics, an innovative research program which combines findings and modelling tools from economics, psychology and neuroscience to account for human choice behaviour. The proponents of Neuroeconomics often manifest the ambition to foster radical modifications in the accounts of choice behaviour developed by its parent disciplines. This enquiry provides a philosophically informed appraisal of the potential for success and the relevance of neuroeconomic research for economics. My central claim is that neuroeconomists can (...)
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  • The continuity of inquiry and normative philosophy of science.Somogy Varga - 2021 - Metaphilosophy 52 (5):655-667.
    This paper aims to contribute to debates about the nature of philosophical inquiry and its relation to science. The starting point is the Discontinuity View (DV), which holds that philosophy is discontinuous with science. Upon critically engaging two lines of argument in favor of DV, the paper presents and defends the Continuity View (CV), according to which philosophy and science are continuous forms of inquiry. The critical engagement sheds light on continuities between philosophical and scientific inquiry while underlining special normative (...)
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  • Levellism and the method of abstraction.Luciano Floridi & J. W. Sanders - 2004 - IEG Research Report.
    The use of "levels of abstraction" in philosophical analysis (levellism) has recently come under attack. In this paper, we argue that a refined version of epistemological levellism should be retained as a fundamental method, which we call the method of abstraction. After a brief introduction, in section two we make clear the nature and applicability of the (epistemological) method of levels of abstraction. In section three, we show the fruitfulness of the new method by applying it to five case studies: (...)
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  • Are bio-ontologies metaphysical theories?Oliver M. Lean - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11587-11608.
    Bio-ontologies are digital frameworks for handling biological and biomedical data. They consist of theoretical entities and relations with explicitly defined logical structures and precise definitions, whose purpose is to provide a shared language for representing information to be distributed and integrated across diverse scientific contexts. It is tempting to view bio-ontologies as clear and formal expressions of a scientific community’s ontological commitments about their domain of inquiry, and to view their integration as tantamount to the metaphysical unification of science that (...)
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  • Limits to levels in the methodological individualism–holism debate.Julie Zahle - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6435-6454.
    It is currently common to conceive of the classic methodological individualism–holism debate in level terms. Accordingly, the dispute is taken to concern the proper level of explanations in the social sciences. In this paper, I argue that the debate is not apt to be characterized in level terms. The reason is that widely adopted notions of individualist explanations do not qualify as individual-level explanations because they span multiple levels. I defend this claim relative to supervenience, emergence, and other accounts of (...)
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  • The Ups and Downs of Mechanism Realism: Functions, Levels, and Crosscutting Hierarchies.Joe Dewhurst & Alistair M. C. Isaac - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (3):1-23.
    Mechanism realists assert the existence of mechanisms as objective structures in the world, but their exact metaphysical commitments are unclear. We introduce Local Hierarchy Realism (LHR) as a substantive and plausible form of mechanism realism. The limits of LHR reveal a deep tension between two aspects of mechanists’ explanatory strategy. Functional decomposition identifies locally relevant entities and activities, while these same entities and activities are also embedded in a nested hierarchy of levels. In principle, a functional decomposition may identify entities (...)
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  • Thinking Crossroads: from Scientific Pluralism to Pluralist History of Science: Introduction.Ivan Moya-Diez, Laurent Loison & Matteo Vagelli - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (1):87-95.
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  • When Ecology Needs Economics and Economics Needs Ecology: Interdisciplinary Exchange during the Anthropocene.S. Andrew Inkpen & C. Tyler DesRoches - 2020 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 23 (2):203-221.
    1. A multidisciplinary group of scholars within the International Commission on Stratigraphy – known as the Anthropocene Working Group – recently recommended the Anthropocene as a new geological ep...
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  • Limiting the explanatory scope of extended active inference: the implications of a causal pattern analysis of selective niche construction, developmental niche construction, and organism-niche coordination dynamics.Regina E. Fabry - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (1):1-26.
    Research in evolutionary biology and philosophy of biology and cognition strongly suggests that human organisms modify their environment through active processes of niche construction. Recently, proponents of the free-energy principle and variational active inference have argued that their approach can deepen our understanding of the reciprocal causal relationship between organisms and their niche on various scales. This paper examines the feasibility and scope of variational formalisations and conceptualisations of the organism-niche nexus with a particular focus on the extended active inference (...)
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  • Thinking Crossroads: from Scientific Pluralism to Pluralist History of Science.Matteo Vagelli, Laurent Loison & Ivan Moya-Diez - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (1):87-95.
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  • Philosophical Investigation Series: Selected Texts on Metaphysics, Language and Mind / Série Investigação Filosófica: Textos Selecionados de Metafísica, Linguagem e Mente.Rodrigo Cid & Pedro Merlussi (eds.) - 2020 - Pelotas: Editora da UFPel / NEPFIL Online.
    Um dos grandes desafios da era da informação consiste em filtrar informações claras, rigorosas e atualizadas sobre tópicos importantes. O mesmo vale para a filosofia. Como encontrar conteúdo filosófico confiável em meio a milhares de artigos publicados diariamente na internet? Para ir ainda mais longe, como encontrar uma introdução a algum tópico com uma lista de referências bibliográficas atualizadas e que seja organizada por um especialista da área? Já que você começou a ler este livro, é provável que tenha ouvido (...)
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  • The mechanistic stance.Jonny Lee & Joe Dewhurst - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-21.
    It is generally acknowledged by proponents of ‘new mechanism’ that mechanistic explanation involves adopting a perspective, but there is less agreement on how we should understand this perspective-taking or what its implications are for practising science. This paper examines the perspectival nature of mechanistic explanation through the lens of the ‘mechanistic stance’, which falls somewhere between Dennett’s more familiar physical and design stance. We argue this approach implies three distinct and significant ways in which mechanistic explanation can be interpreted as (...)
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  • Understanding Stability in Cognitive Neuroscience Through Hacking's Lens.Jacqueline Anne Sullivan - 2021 - Philosophical Inquiries (1):189-208.
    Ian Hacking instigated a revolution in 20th century philosophy of science by putting experiments (“interventions”) at the top of a philosophical agenda that historically had focused nearly exclusively on representations (“theories”). In this paper, I focus on a set of conceptual tools Hacking (1992) put forward to understand how laboratory sciences become stable and to explain what such stability meant for the prospects of unity of science and kind discovery in experimental science. I first use Hacking’s tools to understand sources (...)
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  • Nomothetic Explanation and Humeanism about Laws of Nature.Harjit Bhogal - 2020 - In Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 12. Oxford University Press. pp. 164–202.
    Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical picture (...)
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  • Unity of Science.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Unity of science was once a very popular idea among both philosophers and scientists. But it has fallen out of fashion, largely because of its association with reductionism and the challenge from multiple realisation. Pluralism and the disunity of science are the new norm, and higher-level natural kinds and special science laws are considered to have an important role in scientific practice. What kind of reductionism does multiple realisability challenge? What does it take to reduce one phenomenon to another? How (...)
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  • Disciplinary Fields in the Life Sciences: Evolving Divides and Anchor Concepts.Alessandro Minelli - 2020 - Philosophies 5 (4):34.
    Recent and ongoing debates in biology and in the philosophy of biology reveal widespread dissatisfaction with the current definitions or circumscriptions, which are often vague or controversial, of key concepts such as the gene, individual, species, and homology, and even of whole disciplinary fields within the life sciences. To some extent, the long growing awareness of these conceptual issues and the contrasting views defended in their regard can be construed as a symptom of the need to revisit traditional unchallenged partitions (...)
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  • What is the Point of Reduction in Science?Karen Crowther - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1437-1460.
    The numerous and diverse roles of theory reduction in science have been insufficiently explored in the philosophy literature on reduction. Part of the reason for this has been a lack of attention paid to reduction2 (successional reduction)—although I here argue that this sense of reduction is closer to reduction1 (explanatory reduction) than is commonly recognised, and I use an account of reduction that is neutral between the two. This paper draws attention to the utility—and incredible versatility—of theory reduction. A non-exhaustive (...)
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  • Fundamental mentality in a physical world.Christopher Devlin Brown - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2841-2860.
    Regardless of whatever else physicalism requires, nearly all philosophers agree that physicalism cannot be true in a world which contains fundamental mentality. I challenge this widely held attitude, and describe a world which is plausibly all-physical, yet which may contain fundamental mentality. This is a world in which priority monism is true—which is the view that the whole of the cosmos is fundamental, with dependence relations directed from the whole to the parts—and which contains only a single mental system, like (...)
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  • Filosofía de la biología en Iberoamérica.Mario Casanueva, Carlos López Beltrán & Maximiliano Martínez - 2017 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 8:1--10.
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  • A Philosophical Analysis of the Relation between Chemistry and Quantum Mechanics.Vanessa Seifert - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Bristol
    This thesis investigates the epistemological and metaphysical relations between chemistry and quantum mechanics. These relations are examined with respect to how chemistry and quantum mechanics each describe a single inert molecule. A review of how these relations are understood in the literature shows that there is a proliferation of positions which focus on how chemistry is separate from quantum mechanics. This proliferation is accompanied by a tendency within the philosophy of chemistry community to connect the legitimacy of the field with (...)
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  • Fundamentality in metaphysics and the philosophy of physics. Part II: The philosophy of physics.Matteo Morganti - 2020 - Philosophy Compass 15 (10):e12703.
    This is the second part of an overview article on fundamentality in metaphysics and the philosophy of physics. Here, the notion of fundamentality is looked at from the viewpoint of the philosophical analysis of physics and physical theories. The questions are considered (1) whether physics can be regarded as fundamental with respect to other sciences, and in what sense; (2) what the label ‘fundamental physics’ should exactly be taken to mean; (3) on what grounds a particular physical theory should be (...)
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  • Shadows of Syntax: Revitalizing Logical and Mathematical Conventionalism.Jared Warren - 2020 - New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    What is the source of logical and mathematical truth? This book revitalizes conventionalism as an answer to this question. Conventionalism takes logical and mathematical truth to have their source in linguistic conventions. This was an extremely popular view in the early 20th century, but it was never worked out in detail and is now almost universally rejected in mainstream philosophical circles. Shadows of Syntax is the first book-length treatment and defense of a combined conventionalist theory of logic and mathematics. It (...)
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