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  1. Reduction.Marie I. Kaiser - 2013 - In Dubitzky W., Wolkenhauer O., Cho K.-H. & Yokota H. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Systems Biology, Vol. X. Springer. pp. 1827-1830.
    This is a contribution to the encyclopedia of systems biology on reduction.
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  • (5 other versions)Complexity.Marie I. Kaiser - 2013 - In Dubitzsky, Wolkenhauer, Cho & Yokota (eds.), Encyclopedia of Systems Biology. Springer. pp. 456-460.
    This is a contribution to the encyclopedia of systems biology on complexity.
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  • Science and common sense: perspectives from philosophy and science education.Sara Green - 2019 - Synthese 196 (3):795-818.
    This paper explores the relation between scientific knowledge and common sense intuitions as a complement to Hoyningen-Huene’s account of systematicity. On one hand, Hoyningen-Huene embraces continuity between these in his characterization of scientific knowledge as an extension of everyday knowledge, distinguished by an increase in systematicity. On the other, he argues that scientific knowledge often comes to deviate from common sense as science develops. Specifically, he argues that a departure from common sense is a price we may have to pay (...)
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  • The individuality thesis (3 ways).Matthew H. Haber - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):913-930.
    I spell out and update the individuality thesis, that species are individuals, and not classes, sets, or kinds. I offer three complementary presentations of this thesis. First, as a way of resolving an inconsistent triad about natural kinds; second, as a phylogenetic systematics theoretical perspective; and, finally, as a novel recursive account of an evolved character. These approaches do different sorts of work, serving different interests. Presenting them together produces a taxonomy of the debates over the thesis, and isolates ways (...)
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  • A Philosophical Evaluation of Adaptationism as a Heuristic Strategy.Sara Green - 2014 - Acta Biotheoretica 62 (4):479-498.
    Adaptationism has for decades been the topic of sophisticated debates in philosophy of biology but methodological adaptationism has not received as much attention as the empirical and explanatory issues. In addition, adaptationism has mainly been discussed in the context of evolutionary biology and not in fields such as zoophysiology and systems biology where this heuristic is also used in design analyses of physiological traits and molecular structures. This paper draws on case studies from these fields to discuss the productive and (...)
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  • Heuristics and Meta-heuristics in Scientific Judgement.Spencer Phillips Hey - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (2):471-495.
    Despite the increasing recognition that heuristics may be involved in myriad scientific activities, much about how to use them prudently remains obscure. As typically defined, heuristics are efficient rules or procedures for converting complex problems into simpler ones. But this increased efficiency and problem-solving power comes at the cost of a systematic bias. As Wimsatt showed, biased modelling heuristics can conceal errors, leading to poor decisions or inaccurate models. This liability to produce errors presents a fundamental challenge to the philosophical (...)
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  • (1 other version)Understanding human action. Integrating meanings, mechanisms, causes, and contexts.Machiel Keestra - 2015 - In V. Bazhanov & R. W. Scholz (eds.), Transdisciplinarity in philosophy and science: approaches, problems, prospects. Mosocow: Russian Academy of Science. pp. 201-235.
    Humans are capable of understanding an incredible variety of actions performed by other humans. Even though these range from primary biological actions, like eating and fleeing, to acts in parliament or in poetry, humans generally can make sense of each other’s actions. Action understanding is the cognitive ability to make sense of another person’s action by integrating perceptual information about the behavior with knowledge about the immediate and sociocultural contexts of the action, understanding of relevant meanings and one’s own experience. (...)
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  • What determines biological fitness? The problem of the reference environment.Marshall Abrams - 2009 - Synthese 166 (1):21-40.
    Organisms' environments are thought to play a fundamental role in determining their fitness and hence in natural selection. Existing intuitive conceptions of environment are sufficient for biological practice. I argue, however, that attempts to produce a general characterization of fitness and natural selection are incomplete without the help of general conceptions of what conditions are included in the environment. Thus there is a "problem of the reference environment"—more particularly, problems of specifying principles which pick out those environmental conditions which determine (...)
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  • Activities of kinding in scientific practice.Catherine Kendig - 2015 - In Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice. Routledge.
    Discussions over whether these natural kinds exist, what is the nature of their existence, and whether natural kinds are themselves natural kinds aim to not only characterize the kinds of things that exist in the world, but also what can knowledge of these categories provide. Although philosophically critical, much of the past discussions of natural kinds have often answered these questions in a way that is unresponsive to, or has actively avoided, discussions of the empirical use of natural kinds and (...)
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  • Construct Stabilization and the Unity of the Mind-Brain Sciences.Jacqueline Anne Sullivan - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (5):662-673.
    This paper offers a critique of an account of explanatory integration that claims that explanations of cognitive capacities by functional analyses and mechanistic explanations can be seamlessly integrated. It is shown that achieving such explanatory integration requires that the terms designating cognitive capacities in the two forms of explanation are stable but that experimental practice in the mind-brain sciences currently is not directed at achieving such stability. A positive proposal for changing experimental practice so as to promote such stability is (...)
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  • Natural Kinds, Psychiatric Classification and the History of the DSM.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2016 - History of Psychiatry 27 (4):406-424.
    This paper addresses philosophical issues concerning whether mental disorders are natural kinds and how the DSM should classify mental disorders. I argue that some mental disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, depression) are natural kinds in the sense that they are natural classes constituted by a set of stable biological mechanisms. I subsequently argue that a theoretical and causal approach to classification would provide a superior method for classifying natural kinds than the purely descriptive approach adopted by the DSM since DSM-III. My argument (...)
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  • Philosophy as conceptual engineering: Inductive logic in Rudolf Carnap's scientific philosophy.Christopher F. French - 2015 - Dissertation, University of British Columbia
    My dissertation explores the ways in which Rudolf Carnap sought to make philosophy scientific by further developing recent interpretive efforts to explain Carnap’s mature philosophical work as a form of engineering. It does this by looking in detail at his philosophical practice in his most sustained mature project, his work on pure and applied inductive logic. I, first, specify the sort of engineering Carnap is engaged in as involving an engineering design problem and then draw out the complications of design (...)
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  • Design Explanation and Idealization.Dingmar van Eck & Julie Mennes - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (5):1051-1071.
    In this paper we assess the explanatory role of idealizations in ‘design explanations’, a type of functional explanation used in biology. In design explanations, idealizations highlight which factors make a difference to phenomena to be explained: hypothetical, idealized, organisms are invoked to make salient which traits of extant organisms make a difference to organismal fitness. This result negates the view that idealizations serve only pragmatic benefits, and complements the view that idealizations highlight factors that do not make a difference. This (...)
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  • (1 other version)Giving up on convergence and autonomy: Why the theories of psychology and neuroscience are codependent as well as irreconcilable.Eric Hochstein - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A:1-19.
    There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science regarding how best to interpret the relationship between neuroscience and psychology. It has traditionally been argued that either the two domains will evolve and change over time until they converge on a single unified account of human behaviour, or else that they will continue to work in isolation given that they identify properties and states that exist autonomously from one another (due to the multiple-realizability of psychological (...)
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  • Model robustness as a confirmatory virtue: The case of climate science.Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 49:58-68.
    I propose a distinct type of robustness, which I suggest can support a confirmatory role in scientific reasoning, contrary to the usual philosophical claims. In model robustness, repeated production of the empirically successful model prediction or retrodiction against a background of independentlysupported and varying model constructions, within a group of models containing a shared causal factor, may suggest how confident we can be in the causal factor and predictions/retrodictions, especially once supported by a variety of evidence framework. I present climate (...)
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  • Rational analysis, intractability, and the prospects of ‘as if’-explanations.Iris van Rooij, Johan Kwisthout, Todd Wareham & Cory Wright - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):491-510.
    Despite their success in describing and predicting cognitive behavior, the plausibility of so-called ‘rational explanations’ is often contested on the grounds of computational intractability. Several cognitive scientists have argued that such intractability is an orthogonal pseudoproblem, however, since rational explanations account for the ‘why’ of cognition but are agnostic about the ‘how’. Their central premise is that humans do not actually perform the rational calculations posited by their models, but only act as if they do. Whether or not the problem (...)
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  • Minds, models and mechanisms: a new perspective on intentional psychology.Eric Hochstein - 2012 - Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 24 (4):547-557.
    In this article, I argue that intentional psychology (i.e. the interpretation of human behaviour in terms of intentional states and propositional attitudes) plays an essential role in the sciences of the mind. However, this role is not one of identifying scientifically respectable states of the world. Rather, I argue that intentional psychology acts as a type of phenomenological model, as opposed to a mechanistic one. I demonstrate that, like other phenomenological models in science, intentional psychology is a methodological tool with (...)
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  • The diverse aims of science.Angela Potochnik - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 53:71-80.
    There is increasing attention to the centrality of idealization in science. One common view is that models and other idealized representations are important to science, but that they fall short in one or more ways. On this view, there must be an intermediary step between idealized representation and the traditional aims of science, including truth, explanation, and prediction. Here I develop an alternative interpretation of the relationship between idealized representation and the aims of science. In my view, continuing, widespread idealization (...)
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  • Explanatory completeness and idealization in large brain simulations: a mechanistic perspective.Marcin Miłkowski - 2016 - Synthese 193 (5):1457-1478.
    The claim defended in the paper is that the mechanistic account of explanation can easily embrace idealization in big-scale brain simulations, and that only causally relevant detail should be present in explanatory models. The claim is illustrated with two methodologically different models: Blue Brain, used for particular simulations of the cortical column in hybrid models, and Eliasmith’s SPAUN model that is both biologically realistic and able to explain eight different tasks. By drawing on the mechanistic theory of computational explanation, I (...)
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  • Engineering and Biology: Counsel for a Continued Relationship.Brett Calcott, Arnon Levy, Mark L. Siegal, Orkun S. Soyer & Andreas Wagner - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (1):50-59.
    Biologists frequently draw on ideas and terminology from engineering. Evolutionary systems biology—with its circuits, switches, and signal processing—is no exception. In parallel with the frequent links drawn between biology and engineering, there is ongoing criticism against this cross-fertilization, using the argument that over-simplistic metaphors from engineering are likely to mislead us as engineering is fundamentally different from biology. In this article, we clarify and reconfigure the link between biology and engineering, presenting it in a more favorable light. We do so (...)
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  • Broadening the Perspective: Epistemic, Social, and Historical Aspects of Scientific Modelling.Jaakko Kuorikoski - 2015 - Perspectives on Science 23 (4):381-385.
    The recognition that models and simulations play a central role in the epistemology of science is about fifteen years old. Although models had long been discussed as possible foundational units in the logical analysis of scientific knowledge, the philosophical study of modelling as a distinct epistemic practice really got going in the wake of the Models as Mediators anthology edited by Margaret Morrison and Mary Morgan. In spite of the broad agreement that in fact much of science is model-based, however, (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • The mind, the lab, and the field: Three kinds of populations in scientific practice.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Ryan Giordano, Michael D. Edge & Rasmus Nielsen - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52:12-21.
    Scientists use models to understand the natural world, and it is important not to conflate model and nature. As an illustration, we distinguish three different kinds of populations in studies of ecology and evolution: theoretical, laboratory, and natural populations, exemplified by the work of R.A. Fisher, Thomas Park, and David Lack, respectively. Biologists are rightly concerned with all three types of populations. We examine the interplay between these different kinds of populations, and their pertinent models, in three examples: the notion (...)
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  • Carving the mind by its joints. Natural kinds and social construction in psychiatry.Samuli Pöyhönen - 2013 - In Talmont-Kaminski K. Milkowski M. (ed.), Regarding the Mind, Naturally: Naturalist Approaches to the Sciences of the Mental. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press. pp. 30-48.
    I propound a mechanistic theory of natural kinds in the human sciences. By examining a culture- bound psychiatric disorder, bulimia nervosa, I illustrate how partially socially constructed phenomena raise a serious challenge to traditional theories of natural kinds. As a solution to the challenge, I show how the mechanistic approach allows us to include real but partly socially sustained phenomena among natural kinds. This is desirable because the theory of natural kinds supplies the human sciences with a clear normative account (...)
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  • Design sans adaptation.Sara Green, Arnon Levy & William Bechtel - 2015 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 5 (1):15-29.
    Design thinking in general, and optimality modeling in particular, have traditionally been associated with adaptationism—a research agenda that gives pride of place to natural selection in shaping biological characters. Our goal is to evaluate the role of design thinking in non-evolutionary analyses. Specifically, we focus on research into abstract design principles that underpin the functional organization of extant organisms. Drawing on case studies from engineering-inspired approaches in biology we show how optimality analysis, and other design-related methods, play a specific methodological (...)
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  • Brains, Neuroscience, and Animalism: On the Implications of Thinking Brains.Carl Gillett - 2014 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1):41-52.
    The neuroscience revolution has led many scientists to posit “expansive” or “thinking” brains that instantiate rich psychological properties. As a result, some scientists now even claim you are identical to such a brain. However, Eric Olson has offered new arguments that thinking brains cannot exist due to their intuitively “abominable” implications. After situating the commitment to thinking brains in the wider scientific discussions in which they are posited, I then critically assess Olson's arguments against such entities. Although highlighting an important (...)
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  • The normative structure of mathematization in systematic biology.Beckett Sterner & Scott Lidgard - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 46 (1):44-54.
    We argue that the mathematization of science should be understood as a normative activity of advocating for a particular methodology with its own criteria for evaluating good research. As a case study, we examine the mathematization of taxonomic classification in systematic biology. We show how mathematization is a normative activity by contrasting its distinctive features in numerical taxonomy in the 1960s with an earlier reform advocated by Ernst Mayr starting in the 1940s. Both Mayr and the numerical taxonomists sought to (...)
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  • The Practical Value of Biological Information for Research.Beckett Sterner - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (2):175-194,.
    Many philosophers are skeptical about the scientific value of the concept of biological information. However, several have recently proposed a more positive view of ascribing information as an exercise in scientific modeling. I argue for an alternative role: guiding empirical data collection for the sake of theorizing about the evolution of semantics. I clarify and expand on Bergstrom and Rosvall’s suggestion of taking a “diagnostic” approach that defines biological information operationally as a procedure for collecting empirical cases. The more recent (...)
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  • Many Meanings of ‘Heuristic’.Sheldon J. Chow - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (4):977-1016.
    A survey of contemporary philosophical and scientific literatures reveals that different authors employ the term ‘heuristic’ in ways that deviate from, and are sometimes inconsistent with, one another. Given its widespread use in philosophy and cognitive science generally, it is striking that there appears to be little concern for a clear account of what phenomena heuristics pick out or refer to. In response, I consider several accounts of ‘heuristic’, and I draw a number of distinctions between different sorts of heuristics (...)
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  • Sculpting the space of actions. Explaining human action by integrating intentions and mechanisms.Machiel Keestra - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Amsterdam
    How can we explain the intentional nature of an expert’s actions, performed without immediate and conscious control, relying instead on automatic cognitive processes? How can we account for the differences and similarities with a novice’s performance of the same actions? Can a naturalist explanation of intentional expert action be in line with a philosophical concept of intentional action? Answering these and related questions in a positive sense, this dissertation develops a three-step argument. Part I considers different methods of explanations in (...)
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  • 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 (...)
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  • Epistemic justification in the context of pursuit: a coherentist approach.Dunja Šešelja & Christian Straßer - 2014 - Synthese 191 (13):3111-3141.
    The aim of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic justification suitable for the context of theory pursuit, that is, for the context in which new scientific ideas, possibly incompatible with the already established theories, emerge and are pursued by scientists. We will frame our account paradigmatically on the basis of one of the influential systems of epistemic justification: Laurence Bonjour’s coherence theory of justification. The idea underlying our approach is to develop a set of criteria which indicate (...)
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  • Sens et neurosciences. Étude critique de Paul Thagard, The Brain and the Meaning of Life, Princeton University Press, 2010, 274 pagesÉtude critique de Paul Thagard, The Brain and the Meaning of Life, Princeton University Press, 2010, 274 pages. [REVIEW]Jean-Frédéric de Pasquale - 2011 - Philosophiques 38 (2):579-595.
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  • Distributed Cognition in Sports Teams: Explaining successful and expert performance.Kellie Williamson & Rochelle Cox - 2014 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 46 (6):1-15.
    In this article we use a hybrid methodology to better understand the skilful performance of sports teams as an exemplar of distributed cognition. We highlight key differences between a team of individual experts and an expert team, and outline the kinds of shared characteristics likely to be found in an expert team. We focus on the way that shared knowledge contributes to expert team performance. In particular, we suggest that certain kinds of shared knowledge and shared skill, potentially developed through (...)
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  • Intentional Models as Essential Scientific Tools.Eric Hochstein - 2013 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 27 (2):199-217.
    In this article, I argue that the use of scientific models that attribute intentional content to complex systems bears a striking similarity to the way in which statistical descriptions are used. To demonstrate this, I compare and contrast an intentional model with a statistical model, and argue that key similarities between the two give us compelling reasons to consider both as a type of phenomenological model. I then demonstrate how intentional descriptions play an important role in scientific methodology as a (...)
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  • Formalization and the Meaning of “Theory” in the Inexact Biological Sciences.James Griesemer - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (4):298-310.
    Exact sciences are described as sciences whose theories are formalized. These are contrasted to inexact sciences, whose theories are not formalized. Formalization is described as a broader category than mathematization, involving any form/content distinction allowing forms, e.g., as represented in theoretical models, to be studied independently of the empirical content of a subject-matter domain. Exactness is a practice depending on the use of theories to control subject-matter domains and to align theoretical with empirical models and not merely a state of (...)
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  • On a paradox of truth, or how not to obscure the issue of whether explanatory models can be true.Uskali Mäki - 2013 - Journal of Economic Methodology 20 (3):268 - 279.
    It is argued that Reiss (2012) fails to refute attempts to resolve the paradox of false explanatory models. His article fails to provide an articulate conception of what exactly the presumed paradox is, it suffers from uncontrolled ambiguities and inconsistencies, and it fails to adequately address accounts of economic models that might contribute to reconciling their apparent falsehood and explanatoriness. Some details in my account of how apparently false models may explain are clarified.
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  • Stabilizing Mental Disorders: Prospects and Problems.Jacqueline Anne Sullivan - 2014 - In H. Kincaid & J. Sullivan (eds.), Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds. MIT Press. pp. 257-281.
    In this chapter I investigate the kinds of changes that psychiatric kinds undergo when they become explanatory targets of areas of sciences that are not “mature” and are in the early stages of discovering mechanisms. The two areas of science that are the targets of my analysis are cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology.
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  • Well-Structured Biology: Numerical Taxonomy's Epistemic Vision for Systematics.Beckett Sterner - 2014 - In Andrew Hamilton (ed.), Patterns in Nature. University of California Press. pp. 213-244.
    What does it look like when a group of scientists set out to re-envision an entire field of biology in symbolic and formal terms? I analyze the founding and articulation of Numerical Taxonomy between 1950 and 1970, the period when it set out a radical new approach to classification and founded a tradition of mathematics in systematic biology. I argue that introducing mathematics in a comprehensive way also requires re-organizing the daily work of scientists in the field. Numerical taxonomists sought (...)
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  • Learning, evolvability and exploratory behaviour: extending the evolutionary reach of learning.Rachael L. Brown - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (6):933-955.
    Traditional accounts of the role of learning in evolution have concentrated upon its capacity as a source of fitness to individuals. In this paper I use a case study from invasive species biology—the role of conditioned taste aversion in mitigating the impact of cane toads on the native species of Northern Australia—to highlight a role for learning beyond this—as a source of evolvability to populations. This has two benefits. First, it highlights an otherwise under-appreciated role for learning in evolution that (...)
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  • Causal and Constitutive Explanation Compared.Petri Ylikoski - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (2):277-297.
    This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their interrelations. These explanations have different kinds of explananda and they track different sorts of dependencies. Constitutive explanations do not address events or behaviors, but causal capacities. While there are some interesting relations between building and causal manipulation, causation and constitution are not to be confused. Constitution is a synchronous and (...)
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  • Explanatory power of extended cognition.Samuli Pöyhönen - 2014 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (5):735-759.
    I argue that examining the explanatory power of the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) offers a fruitful approach to the problem of cognitive system demarcation. Although in the discussions on HEC it has become common to refer to considerations of explanatory power as a means for assessing the plausibility of the extended cognition approach, to date no satisfying account of explanatory power has been presented in the literature. I suggest that the currently most prominent theory of explanation in the special (...)
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  • (1 other version)The self as a system of multilevel interacting mechanisms.Paul Thagard - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology (2):1-19.
    This paper proposes an account of the self as a multilevel system consisting of social, individual, neural, and molecular mechanisms. It argues that the functioning of the self depends on causal relations between mechanisms operating at different levels. In place of reductionist and holistic approaches to cognitive science, I advocate a method of multilevel interacting mechanisms. This method is illustrated by showing how self-concepts operate at several different levels.
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  • The Limits of Reductionism in the Life Sciences.Marie I. Kaiser - 2011 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 33 (4):453-476.
    In the contemporary life sciences more and more researchers emphasize the “limits of reductionism” (e.g. Ahn et al. 2006a, 709; Mazzocchi 2008, 10) or they call for a move “beyond reductionism” (Gallagher/Appenzeller 1999, 79). However, it is far from clear what exactly they argue for and what the envisioned limits of reductionism are. In this paper I claim that the current discussions about reductionism in the life sciences, which focus on methodological and explanatory issues, leave the concepts of a reductive (...)
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  • The relationship between psychological capacities and neurobiological activities.Gregory Johnson - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (3):453-480.
    This paper addresses the relationship between psychological capacities, as they are understood within cognitive psychology, and neurobiological activities. First, Lycan’s (1987) account of this relationship is examined and certain problems with his account are explained. According to Lycan, psychological capacities occupy a higher level than neurobiological activities in a hierarchy of levels of nature, and psychological entities can be decomposed into neurobiological entities. After discussing some problems with Lycan’s account, a similar, more recent account built around levels of mechanisms is (...)
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  • Implicit and Explicit Goal-Directedness.Michael A. Trestman - 2012 - Erkenntnis 77 (2):207-236.
    In this paper, I develop and defend a theory of what I call 'implicit goal-directedness', which is a purely causal or dynamical notion, and can be separated from the notion of 'explicit goal-directedness', which implies the representation of a goal-state. I describe the problems that plagued earlier attempts at analyzing goal-directedness in causal/dynamical terms, and then present my own novel solution. I argue that implicit goal-directedness, in the sense presented, plays an important conceptual role in biology and cognitive science, and (...)
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  • A glass half-full: Brian Skyrms's signals.Kim Sterelny - 2012 - Economics and Philosophy 28 (1):73-86.
    ExtractBrian Skyrms's Signals has the virtues familiar from his Evolution of the Social Contract and The Stag Hunt. He begins with a very simple model of agents in interaction, and in a series of brief and beautifully clear chapters, this model and its successors are explored, elaborated, connected and illustrated through biological theory and the social sciences. Signals borrows its core model from David Lewis: it is Lewis's signalling game. In this game, two agents interact. One agent can observe which (...)
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  • Hierarchical structures.Stanley N. Salthe - 2012 - Axiomathes 22 (3):355 - 383.
    This paper compares the two known logical forms of hierarchy, both of which have been used in models of natural phenomena, including the biological. I contrast their general properties, internal formal relations, modes of growth (emergence) in applications to the natural world, criteria for applying them, the complexities that they embody, their dynamical relations in applied models, and their informational relations and semiotic aspects.
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  • Solidarity: A Motivational Conception.Mariam Thalos - 2012 - Philosophical Papers 41 (1):57-95.
    This essay offers a motivational conception of solidarity that can be employed across the entire range of sciences and humanities, while also filling a gap in the motivational spectrum conceived by decision theorists and economists—and expanding the two-part division between altruistic and selfish motivations into a tripartite analysis that suggests a spectrum instead. According to the present proposal, solidarity is a condition of action-readiness on behalf of a group or its interests. The proposal will admit of measuring the extent to (...)
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  • (1 other version)Special Issue: Philosophical Considerations in the Teaching of Biology. Part I, Philosophy of Biology and Biological Explanation.Kostas Kampourakis (ed.) - 2013 - Springer (Science & Education).
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