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  1. (1 other version)Foundation of statistical mechanics: Mechanics by itself.Orly Shenker - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (12):e12465.
    Statistical mechanics is a strange theory. Its aims are debated, its methods are contested, its main claims have never been fully proven, and their very truth is challenged, yet at the same time, it enjoys huge empirical success and gives us the feeling that we understand important phenomena. What is this weird theory, exactly? Statistical mechanics is the name of the ongoing attempt to apply mechanics, together with some auxiliary hypotheses, to explain and predict certain phenomena, above all those described (...)
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  • The Hierarchical Correspondence View of Levels: A Case Study in Cognitive Science.Luke Kersten - 2024 - Minds and Machines 34 (18):1-21.
    There is a general conception of levels in philosophy which says that the world is arrayed into a hierarchy of levels and that there are different modes of analysis that correspond to each level of this hierarchy, what can be labelled the ‘Hierarchical Correspondence View of Levels” (or HCL). The trouble is that despite its considerable lineage and general status in philosophy of science and metaphysics the HCL has largely escaped analysis in specific domains of inquiry. The goal of this (...)
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  • (1 other version)Mechanisms and the problem of abstract models.Natalia Carrillo & Tarja Knuuttila - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (3):1-19.
    New mechanical philosophy posits that explanations in the life sciences involve the decomposition of a system into its entities and their respective activities and organization that are responsible for the explanandum phenomenon. This mechanistic account of explanation has proven problematic in its application to mathematical models, leading the mechanists to suggest different ways of aligning abstract models with the mechanist program. Initially, the discussion centered on whether the Hodgkin-Huxley model is explanatory. Network models provided another complication, as they apply to (...)
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  • Flat Physicalism: some implications.Orly Shenker - 2017 - Iyyun 66:211-225.
    Flat Physicalism is a theory of through and through type reductive physicalism, understood in light of recent results in the conceptual foundations of physics. In Flat Physicalism, as in physics, so-called "high level" concepts and laws are nothing but partial descriptions of the complete states of affairs of the universe. "Flat physicalism" generalizes this idea, to form a reductive picture in which there is no room for levels, neither explanatory nor ontological. The paper explains how phenomena that seem to be (...)
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  • Assessing the quality of evidence from epidemiological agent-based models for the COVID-19 pandemic.Martin Zach & Mariusz Maziarz - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-4.
    Agent-based models (ABMs) are one of the main sources of evidence for decisions regarding mitigation and suppression measures against the spread of SARS-CoV-2. These models have not been previously included in the hierarchy of evidence put forth by the evidence-based medicine movement, which prioritizes those research methods that deliver results less susceptible to the risk of confounding. We point out the need to assess the quality of evidence delivered by ABMs and ask the question of what is the risk that (...)
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  • Why Functionalism Is a Form of ‘Token-Dualism’.Meir Hemmo & Orly R. Shenker - 2022 - In Meir Hemmo, Stavros Ioannidis, Orly Shenker & Gal Vishne (eds.), Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy: Re-Examining the Multi-Level Structure of Reality. Springer.
    We present a novel reductive theory of type-identity physicalism, which is inspired by the foundations of statistical mechanics as a general theory of natural kinds. We show that all the claims mounted against type-identity physicalism in the literature don’t apply to Flat Physicalism, and moreover that this reductive theory solves many of the problems faced by the various non-reductive approaches including functionalism. In particular, we show that Flat Physicalism can account for the appearance of multiple realizability in the special sciences, (...)
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  • A Dilemma for Davidson’s Anomalous Monism.Meir Hemmo & Orly Shenker - unknown
    Is freedom compatible with determinism? Davidson famously rephrased this question by replacing “freedom” with “anomaly of the mental”, that is, failure to fall under a law. In order to prove that the anomaly of the mental is compatible with other conjectures he makes, in particular that: there is psycho-physical causation; “where there is causality, there must be a law” ; and the mental supervenes on the physical, Davidson proposed a model, that came to be known as anomalous monism. Accepting all (...)
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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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  • The epistemic benefits of generalisation in modelling II: expressive power and abstraction.Aki Lehtinen - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-24.
    This paper contributes to the philosophical accounts of generalisation in formal modelling by introducing a conceptual framework that allows for recognising generalisations that are epistemically beneficial in the sense of contributing to the truth of a model result or component. The framework is useful for modellers themselves because it is shown how to recognise different kinds of generalisation on the basis of changes in model descriptions. Since epistemically beneficial generalisations usually de-idealise the model, the paper proposes a reformulation of the (...)
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  • Is the mind in the brain in contemporary computational neuroscience?Meir Hemmo & Orly Shenker - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 100 (C):64-80.
    According to contemporary computational neuroscience the mental is associated with computations implemented in the brain. We analyze in physical terms based on recent results in the foundations of statistical mechanics two well-known (independent) problems that arise for this approach: the problem of multiple-computations and the problem of multiple-realization. We show that within the computational theory of the mind the two problems are insoluble by the physics of the brain. We further show that attempts to solve the problems by the interactions (...)
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  • Revisiting abstraction and idealization: how not to criticize mechanistic explanation in molecular biology.Martin Zach - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (1):1-20.
    Abstraction and idealization are the two notions that are most often discussed in the context of assumptions employed in the process of model building. These notions are also routinely used in philosophical debates such as that on the mechanistic account of explanation. Indeed, an objection to the mechanistic account has recently been formulated precisely on these grounds: mechanists cannot account for the common practice of idealizing difference-making factors in models in molecular biology. In this paper I revisit the debate and (...)
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  • Thinking about idealization, abstraction and scientific models: an introduction.Demetris Portides - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 24):5849-5853.
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