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  1. Non-essentialist methods in pre-Darwinian taxonomy.Mary P. Winsor - 2003 - Biology and Philosophy 18 (3):387-400.
    The current widespread belief that taxonomic methods used before Darwin were essentialist is ill-founded. The essentialist method developed by followers of Plato and Aristotle required definitions to state properties that are always present. Polythetic groups do not obey that requirement, whatever may have been the ontological beliefs of the taxonomist recognizing such groups. Two distinct methods of forming higher taxa, by chaining and by examplar, were widely used in the period between Linnaeus and Darwin, and both generated polythetic groups. Philosopher (...)
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  • Heuristics and biases in evolutionary biology.David Magnus - 1997 - Biology and Philosophy 12 (1):21-38.
    Approaching science by considering the epistemological virtues which scientists see as constitutive of good science, and the way these virtues trade-off against one another, makes it possible to capture action that may be lost by approaches which focus on either the theoretical or institutional level. Following Wimsatt (1984) I use the notion of heuristics and biases to help explore a case study from the history of biology. Early in the 20th century, mutation theorists and natural historians fought over the role (...)
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  • Controlling the Unobservable: Experimental Strategies and Hypotheses in Discovering the Causal Origin of Brownian Movement.Klodian Coko - 2024 - In Jutta Schickore & William R. Newman (eds.), Elusive Phenomena, Unwieldy Things Historical Perspectives on Experimental Control. Springer. pp. 209-242.
    This chapter focuses on the experimental practices and reasoning strategies employed in nineteenth century investigations on the causal origin of the phenomenon of Brownian movement. It argues that there was an extensive and sophisticated experimental work done on the phenomenon throughout the nineteenth century. Investigators followed as rigorously as possible the methodological standards of their time to make causal claims and advance causal explanations of Brownian movement. Two major methodological strategies were employed. The first was the experimental strategy of varying (...)
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  • Humboldt, Darwin, and romantic resonance in science.Xuansong Liu - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92 (C):196-208.
    There have been constant and multiple endeavours to argue for Darwin's both epistemic and practical debt to Romanticism. Almost all of these arguments emphasise Darwin's theoretical and aesthetic associations with Alexander von Humboldt, who, from a prevailing Darwin-centred perspective, is in turn usually oversimplified as an undisputed incarnation of Romanticism. The antagonistic view, however, develops nothing other than another stereotype of Humboldt as an anti-idealistic, pro-French, and even highly Anglophone empiricist naturalist, and accordingly rejects the claim of a romantic Darwin (...)
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  • Descriptive Psychology: Brentano and Dilthey.Guillaume Fréchette - 2020 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 10 (1):290-307.
    Although Wilhelm Dilthey and Franz Brentano apparently were pursuing roughly the same objective—to offer a description of our mental functions and of their relations to objects—and both called their respective research programs ‘descriptive psychology’, they seem to have used the term to refer to two different methods of psychological research. In this article, I compare analyses of these differences. Against the reading of Orth but also against a possible application of recent relativist accounts of the epistemology of peer disagreement to (...)
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  • The Fate of William Whewell’s Four Palætiological Domains: A Comparative Study.Koen B. Tanghe - 2019 - Perspectives on Science 27 (6):810-838.
    In 1847, the British polymath William Whewell pointed out that the sciences for which he, in 1837, had coined the term “palætiological” have much in common and that they may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. This recommendation is here put into practice in a specific way, to wit, not by comparing the palaetiological sciences that Whewell distinguished himself but by comparing the general historical development of the scientific study of the four broad palætiological domains that he (...)
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  • Truth-Seeking by Abduction.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 2018 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
    This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The (...)
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  • hacia una filosofía de la ciencia centrada en prácticas.Sergio F. Martinez - 2015 - Mexico: UNAM-Bonilla Artigas.
    La filosofía de la ciencia se desarrolló durante la primera mitad del siglo xx bajo el supuesto de que la ciencia podía caracterizarse por la estructura lógica tanto del conocimiento articulado en las teorías más exitosas como de sus explicaciones. En la segunda mitad del siglo xx se cuestiona fuertemente esa idea, pero se sigue asumiendo que la filosofía de la ciencia debe hacerse siguiendo los cánones de una epistemología fundamentalista que considera que el avance de la ciencia pasa por (...)
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  • Sir John F. W. Herschel and Charles Darwin: Nineteenth-Century Science and Its Methodology.Charles H. Pence - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1):108-140.
    There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the manner that one (...)
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  • Neutral Theory, Biased World.William Bausman - 2016 - Dissertation, University of Minnesota
    The ecologist today finds scarce ground safe from controversy. Decisions must be made about what combination of data, goals, methods, and theories offers them the foundations and tools they need to construct and defend their research. When push comes to shove, ecologists often turn to philosophy to justify why it is their approach that is scientific. Karl Popper’s image of science as bold conjectures and heroic refutations is routinely enlisted to justify testing hypotheses over merely confirming them. One of the (...)
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  • Phylogenetic inference to the best explanation and the bad lot argument.Aleta Quinn - 2016 - Synthese 193 (9).
    I respond to the bad lot argument in the context of biological systematics. The response relies on the historical nature of biological systematics and on the availability of pattern explanations. The basic assumption of common descent enables systematic methodology to naturally generate candidate explanatory hypotheses. However, systematists face a related challenge in the issue of character analysis. Character analysis is the central problem for contemporary systematics, yet the general problem of which it is a case—what counts as evidence?—has not been (...)
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  • The History and Reception of Charles Darwin’s Hypothesis of Pangenesis.Kate Holterhoff - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (4):661-695.
    This paper explores Charles Darwin’s hypothesis of pangenesis through a popular and professional reception history. First published in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), pangenesis stated that inheritance can be explained by sub-cellular “gemmules” which aggregated in the sexual organs during intercourse. Pangenesis thereby accounted for the seemingly arbitrary absence and presence of traits in offspring while also clarifying some botanical and invertebrates’ limb regeneration abilities. I argue that critics largely interpreted Variation as an extension of On (...)
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  • Experiment in Cartesian Courses: The Case of Professor Burchard de Volder.Tammy Nyden - 2010 - The Circulation of Science and Technology.
    In 1675, Burchard de Volder became the first university physics professor to introduce the demonstration of experiments into his lectures and to create a special university classroom, The Leiden Physics Theatre, for this specific purpose. This is surprising for two reasons: first, early pre-Newtonian experiment is commonly associated with Italy and England, and second, de Volder is committed to Cartesian philosophy, including the view that knowledge gathered through the senses is subject to doubt, while that deducted from first principles is (...)
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  • Centrality and marginalisation.Brian Weatherson - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 171 (3):517-533.
    A contribution to a symposium on Herman Cappelen's Philosophy without Intuitions.
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  • Biological essentialism and the tidal change of natural kinds.John S. Wilkins - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (2):221-240.
    The vision of natural kinds that is most common in the modern philosophy of biology, particularly with respect to the question whether species and other taxa are natural kinds, is based on a revision of the notion by Mill in A System of Logic. However, there was another conception that Whewell had previously captured well, which taxonomists have always employed, of kinds as being types that need not have necessary and sufficient characters and properties, or essences. These competing views employ (...)
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  • Answers to these comments.Ernst Mayr - 1987 - Biology and Philosophy 2 (2):212-225.
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  • Ernst Mayr's influence on the history and philosophy of biology: A personal memoir. [REVIEW]David L. Hull - 1994 - Biology and Philosophy 9 (3):375-386.
    Mayr has made both conceptual and professional contributions to the establishment of the history and philosophy of biology. His conceptual contributions include, among many others, the notion of population thinking. He has also played an important role in the establishment of history and philosophy of biology as viable professional disciplines.
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  • Dangerous epistemology.Pablos Kubes - 2022 - E-Logos 29 (1):19-31.
    Epistemologie a kognitivní věda se zabývají studiem procesů poznání. Z výsledků takového bádání vyplývají určité diagnostické a preskriptivní závěry s cílem pozitivně regulovat způsob myšlení. Předložená práce má za cíl ukázat, že epistemické a kognitivní studie nejsou doposud dostatečně vyvinuté, aby mohly kategoricky doporučit správný a universální způsob myšlení. Pokrok ve vědě je výsledek kolektivního úsilí nejen současnosti, ale i minulých objevů a omylů. Na historickém případě chybné teorie flogistonu se tato práce bude snažit doložit, že se na objevení pravdy (...)
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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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  • Alexander Moritzi, a Swiss Pre-Darwinian Evolutionist: Insights into the Creationist-Transmutationist Debates of the 1830s and 1840s. [REVIEW]William E. Friedman & Peter K. Endress - 2020 - Journal of the History of Biology 53 (4):549-585.
    Alexander Moritzi is one of the most obscure figures in the early history of evolutionary thought. Best known for authoring a flora of Switzerland, Moritzi also published Réflexions sur l’espèce en histoire naturelle, a remarkable book about evolution with an overtly materialist viewpoint. In this work, Moritzi argues that the generally accepted line between species and varieties is artificial, that varieties can over time give rise to new species, and that deep time and turnover of species in the fossil record (...)
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  • Introducción: Modelos y teorías en biología.Pablo Lorenzano - 2016 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 6:5--46.
    Two metascientific concepts that have been ― and still are ― object of philosophical analysis are the concepts of model and theory. But while the concept of scientific theory was one of the concepts to which philosophers of science devoted most attention during the 20th century, it is only in recent decades that the concept of scientific model has come to occupy a central position in philosophical reflection. However, it has done so in such a way that, at present, as (...)
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  • The Phenomenology of Mentality.Arnaud Dewalque - 2021 - In Denis Fisette, Guillaume Fréchette & Hynek Janoušek (eds.), Franz Brentano’s Philosophy After One Hundred Years: From History of Philosophy to Reism. New York: Springer. pp. 23-40.
    This chapter offers a phenomenological interpretation of Brentano’s view of mentality. The key idea is that mental phenomena are not only characterized by intentionality; they also exhibit a distinctive way of appearing or being experienced. In short, they also have a distinctive phenomenology. I argue this view may be traced back to Brentano’s theory of inner perception. Challenging the self-representational reading of IP, I maintain the latter is best understood as a way of appearing, that is, in phenomenological terms. Section (...)
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  • Communication and content.Prashant Parikh - 2019 - Berlin, Germany: Language Science Press.
    Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic (...)
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  • Natural Classes in Brentano's Psychology.Arnaud Dewalque - 2018 - Brentano‐Studien: Internationales Jahrbuch der Franz Brentano Forschung 16:111-142.
    This article argues that Brentano’s classification of mental phenomena is best understood against the background of the theories of natural classification held by Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. Section 1 offers a reconstruction of Brentano’s two-premise argument for his tripartite classification. Section 2 gives a brief overview of the reception and historical background of the classification project. Section 3 addresses the question as to why a classification of mental phenomena is needed at all and traces the answer back to (...)
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  • Booknotes.R. M. - 1994 - Biology and Philosophy 9 (4):507-514.
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  • Entiteettien kategorioiden onttisesta statuksesta.Markku Keinänen - 2012 - Maailma.
    This paper (in Finnish) concerns the ontological status of categories of entities. I argue that categories are not be considered as further entities. Rather, it is suffcient for entities belonging to the same category that they are in exactly the same formal ontological relations and have the same general category features.
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  • Carl Prantl y la historia de la lógica de la investigación científica.Daniel Antonio Di Liscia & Javier Legris - 2016 - Scientiae Studia 14 (2):527.
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  • Probabilistic Reasoning in Cosmology.Yann Benétreau-Dupin - 2015 - Dissertation, The University of Western Ontario
    Cosmology raises novel philosophical questions regarding the use of probabilities in inference. This work aims at identifying and assessing lines of arguments and problematic principles in probabilistic reasoning in cosmology. -/- The first, second, and third papers deal with the intersection of two distinct problems: accounting for selection effects, and representing ignorance or indifference in probabilistic inferences. These two problems meet in the cosmology literature when anthropic considerations are used to predict cosmological parameters by conditionalizing the distribution of, e.g., the (...)
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  • Consilience and a Hierarchy of Species Concepts: Advances Toward Closure on the Species Puzzle.Richard L. Mayden - 1999 - Journal of Nematology 31 (2):95–116.
    Numerous concepts exist for biological species. This diversity of ideas derives from a number of sources ranging from investigative study of particular taxa and character sets to philosophical aptitude and world view to operationalism and nomenclatorial rules. While usually viewed as counterproductive, in reality these varied concepts can greatly enhance our efforts to discover and understand biological diversity. Moreover, this continued "turf war" and dilemma over species can be resolved if the various concepts are viewed in a hierarchical system and (...)
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  • Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing it Better, Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie. Oxford University Press, 2013, ix + 196 pages. [REVIEW]Naftali Weinberger - 2014 - Economics and Philosophy 30 (1):113-120.
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  • Environmental Ethics.Roberta L. Millstein - 2013 - In Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: a Companion for Educators. Dordrecht: Springer.
    A number of areas of biology raise questions about what is of value in the natural environment and how we ought to behave towards it: conservation biology, environmental science, and ecology, to name a few. Based on my experience teaching students from these and similar majors, I argue that the field of environmental ethics has much to teach these students. They come to me with pent-up questions and a feeling that more is needed to fully engage in their subjects, and (...)
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  • Can science advance effectively through philosophical criticism and reflection?Roberto Torretti - unknown
    Prompted by Hasok Chang’s conception of the history and philosophy of science (HPS) as the continuation of science by other means, I examine the possibility of obtaining scientific knowledge through philosophical criticism and reflection, in the light of four historical cases, concerning (i) the role of absolute space in Newtonian dynamics, (ii) the purported contraction of rods and retardation of clocks in Special Relativity, (iii) the reality of the electromagnetic ether, and (iv) the so-called problem of time’s arrow. In all (...)
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  • Booknotes.R. M. - 1993 - Biology and Philosophy 8 (1):403-406.
    There is a rather striking video currently used in police training. A firearms officer is caught on video shooting an armed suspect. The officer then gives his account of what happened, and there is no suggestion that he is tying to fabricate evidence. He says that he shot the suspect once; his partner says that he fired two shots. On the video we see four shots being deliberately fired. Memory, it seems, is an unreliable witness in situations of stress.
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  • Reduction, integration, and the unity of science: Natural, behavioral, and social sciences and the humanities.William P. Bechtel & Andrew Hamilton - 2007 - In T. Kuipers (ed.), Philosophy of Science: Focal Issues (Volume 1 of the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science). Elsevier.
    1. A Historical Look at Unity 2. Field Guide to Modern Concepts of Reduction and Unity 3. Kitcher's Revisionist Account of Unification 4. Critics of Unity 5. Integration Instead of Unity 6. Reduction via Mechanisms 7. Case Studies in Reduction and Unification across the Disciplines.
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  • Question-driven stepwise experimental discoveries in biochemistry: two case studies.Michael Fry - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (2):1-52.
    Philosophers of science diverge on the question what drives the growth of scientific knowledge. Most of the twentieth century was dominated by the notion that theories propel that growth whereas experiments play secondary roles of operating within the theoretical framework or testing theoretical predictions. New experimentalism, a school of thought pioneered by Ian Hacking in the early 1980s, challenged this view by arguing that theory-free exploratory experimentation may in many cases effectively probe nature and potentially spawn higher evidence-based theories. Because (...)
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  • The Making of Peacocks Treatise on Algebra: A Case of Creative Indecision.Menachem Fisch - 1999 - Archive for History of Exact Sciences 54 (2):137-179.
    A study of the making of George Peacock's highly influential, yet disturbingly split, 1830 account of algebra as an entanglement of two separate undertakings: arithmetical and symbolical or formal.
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  • Maxwellian Electrodynamics Genesis and Development: Intertheoretic Context.Rinat Magdievich Nugayev - 2016 - Spontaneous Generations 8 (1):55-92.
    Key words: rationality, communication, maxwellian revolution, Ampere-Weber research programme, synthesis, Kantian epistemology.. Why did Maxwell’s programme supersede the Ampere-Weber one? – To answer the question one has to consider the intertheoretic context of maxwellian electrodynamics genesis and development. It is demonstrated that maxwellian electrodynamics was created as a result of the old pre-maxwellian programmes reconciliation: the electrodynamics of Ampere-Weber, the wave theory of Young-Fresnel and Faraday’s programme. The programmes’ meeting led to construction of the hybrid theory at first with an (...)
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  • “I would sooner die than give up”: Huxley and Darwin's deep disagreement.Mary P. Winsor - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-36.
    Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed with (...)
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  • A Dialogue of Social Philosophy with W. Whewell’s Logic of Science.L. A. Markova - 2019 - Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences 12:26-43.
    In the 21stcentury, there is a turn of thinking toward its reorientation first of all to the human as an author of thought and not to the nature, existing independently of us and of the process of scientific knowledge obtaining. It is possible to see the difference of these two types of thinking in the context of dialogue between W. Whewell’s philosophy and the scientific investigations after the scientific revolution in the beginning of the 20thcentury. In the philosophy of 21stcentury, (...)
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  • Suppressing Synonymy with a Homonym: The Emergence of the Nomenclatural Type Concept in Nineteenth Century Natural History.Joeri Witteveen - 2016 - Journal of the History of Biology 49 (1):135-189.
    ‘Type’ in biology is a polysemous term. In a landmark article, Paul Farber (Journal of the History of Biology 9(1): 93–119, 1976) argued that this deceptively plain term had acquired three different meanings in early nineteenth century natural history alone. ‘Type’ was used in relation to three distinct type concepts, each of them associated with a different set of practices. Important as Farber’s analysis has been for the historiography of natural history, his account conceals an important dimension of early nineteenth (...)
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  • Common minds, uncommon thoughts: a philosophical anthropological investigation of uniquely human creative behavior, with an emphasis on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study.Johan De Smedt - unknown
    The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...)
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  • Resources for Research on Analogy: A Multi-disciplinary Guide.Marcello Guarini, Amy Butchart, Paul Simard Smith & Andrei Moldovan - 2009 - Informal Logic 29 (2):84-197.
    Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...)
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  • 193 and 246 of Philosophia botanica do not support that Linnaeus was a "typologist".Magnus Lidén - 2020 - Taxon 69 (2):213-216.
    193 and 246 of Linnaeus's Philosophia botanica have recently been invoked to suggest that Linnaeus used, or even introduced, the "Method of Type", which implies that a genus is centred around a "typical" species. However, there is no support for this conclusion in either of the two paragraphs, rather the opposite. A recapitulation of the last twenty years' reassessment of Linnaeus's taxonomic philosophy is given.
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  • Bayesianism and Explanatory Unification: A Compatibilist Account.Thomas Blanchard - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (4):682-703.
    Proponents of IBE claim that the ability of a hypothesis to explain a range of phenomena in a unifying way contributes to the hypothesis’s credibility in light of these phenomena. I propose a Bayesian justification of this claim that reveals a hitherto unnoticed role for explanatory unification in evaluating the plausibility of a hypothesis: considerations of explanatory unification enter into the determination of a hypothesis’s prior by affecting its ‘explanatory coherence’, that is, the extent to which the hypothesis offers mutually (...)
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  • Newton's Regulae Philosophandi.Zvi Biener - 2018 - In Chris Smeenk & Eric Schliesser (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Isaac Newton. Oxford University Press.
    Newton’s Regulae philosophandi—the rules for reasoning in natural philosophy—are maxims of causal reasoning and induction. This essay reviews their significance for Newton’s method of inquiry, as well as their application to particular propositions within the Principia. Two main claims emerge. First, the rules are not only interrelated, they defend various facets of the same core idea: that nature is simple and orderly by divine decree, and that, consequently, human beings can be justified in inferring universal causes from limited phenomena, if (...)
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  • Aggregating Evidence in Climate Science: Consilience, Robustness and the Wisdom of Multiple Models.Martin A. Vezér - unknown
    The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the epistemology of science by addressing a set of related questions arising from current discussions in the philosophy and science of climate change: (1) Given the imperfection of computer models, how do they provide information about large and complex target systems? (2) What is the relationship between consilient reasoning and robust evidential support in the production of scientific knowledge? (3) Does taking the mean of a set of model outputs provide epistemic (...)
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  • On what is a priori about necessities.Jens Kipper - 2018 - Analysis 78 (2):235-243.
    Many have argued that there is something that is a priori about all necessary truths, including a posteriori necessities. According to a particularly popular claim of this kind, one can know a priori whether a sentence is G-necessary, i.e. whether it is either necessarily true or necessarily false. In this paper, I identify the most plausible version of this claim and I argue that it fails. My discussion also reveals, and depends upon, an important feature of putative natural kind terms (...)
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  • Objectivity in confirmation: Post hoc monsters and novel predictions.Ioannis Votsis - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 45:70-78.
    The aim of this paper is to put in place some cornerstones in the foundations for an objective theory of confirmation by considering lessons from the failures of predictivism. Discussion begins with a widely accepted challenge, to find out what is needed in addition to the right kind of inferential–semantical relations between hypothesis and evidence to have a complete account of confirmation, one that gives a definitive answer to the question whether hypotheses branded as “post hoc monsters” can be confirmed. (...)
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  • Charles Sanders Peirce, A Mastermind of (Legal) Arguments.Vadim Verenich - 2012 - International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 25 (1):31-55.
    In this article, we try to trace the relationship between semiotics and theory of legal reasoning using Peirce’s idea that all reasoning must be necessarily in signs: every act of reasoning/argumentation is a sign process, leading to “the growth of knowledge. The broad scope and universal character of Peirce’s sign theory of reasoning allows us to look for new conciliatory paradigms, which must be presented in terms of possible synthesis between the traditional approaches to argumentation. These traditional approaches are strongly (...)
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  • Natural theology and the plurality of worlds: Observations on the Brewster-Whewell debate.John Hedley Brooke - 1977 - Annals of Science 34 (3):221-286.
    Summary The object of this study is to analyse certain aspects of the debate between David Brewster and William Whewell concerning the probability of extra-terrestrial life, in order to illustrate the nature, constitution and condition of natural theology in the decades immediately preceding the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's Origin of species. The argument is directed against a stylised picture of natural theology which has been drawn from a backward projection of the Darwinian antithesis between natural selection and certain (...)
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