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  1. Vision.David Marr - 1982 - W. H. Freeman.
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  • (1 other version)Models in Science (2nd edition).Roman Frigg & Stephan Hartmann - 2021 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Models are of central importance in many scientific contexts. The centrality of models such as inflationary models in cosmology, general-circulation models of the global climate, the double-helix model of DNA, evolutionary models in biology, agent-based models in the social sciences, and general-equilibrium models of markets in their respective domains is a case in point (the Other Internet Resources section at the end of this entry contains links to online resources that discuss these models). Scientists spend significant amounts of time building, (...)
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  • Thinking about mechanisms.Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden & Carl F. Craver - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (1):1-25.
    The concept of mechanism is analyzed in terms of entities and activities, organized such that they are productive of regular changes. Examples show how mechanisms work in neurobiology and molecular biology. Thinking in terms of mechanisms provides a new framework for addressing many traditional philosophical issues: causality, laws, explanation, reduction, and scientific change.
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  • Language and Mind.Noam Chomsky - 1968 - Cambridge University Press.
    This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind, first published in 2006. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system, through the rules and principles of which (...)
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  • Explanation: a mechanist alternative.William Bechtel & Adele Abrahamsen - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2):421-441.
    Explanations in the life sciences frequently involve presenting a model of the mechanism taken to be responsible for a given phenomenon. Such explanations depart in numerous ways from nomological explanations commonly presented in philosophy of science. This paper focuses on three sorts of differences. First, scientists who develop mechanistic explanations are not limited to linguistic representations and logical inference; they frequently employ diagrams to characterize mechanisms and simulations to reason about them. Thus, the epistemic resources for presenting mechanistic explanations are (...)
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  • (3 other versions)The Oxford dictionary of philosophy.Simon Blackburn - 2008 - Oxford ;: Oxford University Press.
    This bestselling dictionary is written by one of the leading philosophers of our time, and it is widely recognized as the best dictionary of its kind. Comprehensive and authoritative, it covers every aspect of philosophy from Aristotle to Zen. With clear and concise definitions, it provides lively and accessible coverage of not only Western philosophical traditions, but also themes from Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy. New entries on philosophy of economics, social theory, neuroscience, philosophy of the mind, and moral (...)
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  • Language and nature.Noam Chomsky - 1995 - Mind 104 (413):1-61.
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  • Behavior, purpose and teleology.Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener & Julian Bigelow - 1943 - Philosophy of Science 10 (1):18-24.
    This essay has two goals. The first is to define the behavioristic study of natural events and to classify behavior. The second is to stress the importance of the concept of purpose.Given any object, relatively abstracted from its surroundings for study, the behavioristic approach consists in the examination of the output of the object and of the relations of this output to the input. By output is meant any change produced in the surroundings by the object. By input, conversely, is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Language and Problems of Knowledge.Noam Chomsky - 1989 - Studia Logica 48 (1):132-133.
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  • Mental causation and neural mechanisms.James Woodward - 2008 - In Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 218-262.
    This paper discusses some issues concerning the relationship between the mental and the physical, including the so-called causal exclusion argument, within the framework of a broadly interventionist approach to causation.
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  • What Kind of Creatures Are We?Noam Chomsky - 2013 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Noam Chomsky is widely known and deeply admired for being the founder of modern linguistics, one of the founders of the field of cognitive science, and perhaps the most avidly read political theorist and commentator of our time. In these lectures, he presents a lifetime of philosophical reflection on all three of these areas of research to which he has contributed for over half a century. In clear, precise, and non-technical language, Chomsky elaborates on fifty years of scientific development in (...)
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  • (1 other version)Language and Problems of Knowledge.Noam Chomsky - 1997 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 16 (2).
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  • Inference to the best explanation, coherence and other explanatory virtues.Adolfas Mackonis - 2013 - Synthese 190 (6):975-995.
    This article generalizes the explanationist account of inference to the best explanation. It draws a clear distinction between IBE and abduction and presents abduction as the first step of IBE. The second step amounts to the evaluation of explanatory power, which consist in the degree of explanatory virtues that a hypothesis exhibits. Moreover, even though coherence is the most often cited explanatory virtue, on pain of circularity, it should not be treated as one of the explanatory virtues. Rather, coherence should (...)
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  • Two outbreaks of lawlessness in recent philosophy of biology.Elliott Sober - 1997 - Philosophy of Science 64 (4):467.
    John Beatty (1995) and Alexander Rosenberg (1994) have argued against the claim that there are laws in biology. Beatty's main reason is that evolution is a process full of contingency, but he also takes the existence of relative significance controversies in biology and the popularity of pluralistic approaches to a variety of evolutionary questions to be evidence for biology's lawlessness. Rosenberg's main argument appeals to the idea that biological properties supervene on large numbers of physical properties, but he also develops (...)
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  • (1 other version)Précis of Inference to the Best Explanation, 2 nd Edition.Peter Lipton - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):421-423.
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  • The mysteries of nature: How deeply hidden?Noam Chomsky - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy 106 (4):167-200.
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  • Law and explanation in biology: Invariance is the kind of stability that matters.James Woodward - 2001 - Philosophy of Science 68 (1):1-20.
    This paper develops an account of explanation in biology which does not involve appeal to laws of nature, at least as traditionally conceived. Explanatory generalizations in biology must satisfy a requirement that I call invariance, but need not satisfy most of the other standard criteria for lawfulness. Once this point is recognized, there is little motivation for regarding such generalizations as laws of nature. Some of the differences between invariance and the related notions of stability and resiliency, due respectively to (...)
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  • Thinking again about biological mechanisms.Lindley Darden - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (5):958-969.
    The new research program to understand mechanisms in biology has developed rapidly in the last 10 years. Reconsideration of the characterization of mechanisms in biology in the light of this recent work is now in order. This article discusses the perspectival aspect of the characterization of mechanisms, refinements in claims about working entities and kinds of activities, challenges and responses to claims about regularity, productive continuity, and the organizational aspects of a mechanism, and issues about representations of mechanisms in schemas (...)
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  • There may be strict empirical laws in biology, after all.Mehmet Elgin - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (1):119-134.
    This paper consists of four parts. Part 1 is an introduction. Part 2 evaluates arguments for the claim that there are no strict empirical laws in biology. I argue that there are two types of arguments for this claim and they are as follows: (1) Biological properties are multiply realized and they require complex processes. For this reason, it is almost impossible to formulate strict empirical laws in biology. (2) Generalizations in biology hold contingently but laws go beyond describing contingencies, (...)
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  • How objective are biological functions?Marcel Weber - 2017 - Synthese 194 (12):4741-4755.
    John Searle has argued that functions owe their existence to the value that we put into life and survival. In this paper, I will provide a critique of Searle’s argument concerning the ontology of functions. I rely on a standard analysis of functional predicates as relating not only a biological entity, an activity that constitutes the function of this entity and a type of system but also a goal state. A functional attribution without specification of such a goal state has (...)
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  • Mechanistic Explanation in Systems Biology: Cellular Networks.Dana Matthiessen - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (1):1-25.
    It is argued that once biological systems reach a certain level of complexity, mechanistic explanations provide an inadequate account of many relevant phenomena. In this article, I evaluate such claims with respect to a representative programme in systems biological research: the study of regulatory networks within single-celled organisms. I argue that these networks are amenable to mechanistic philosophy without need to appeal to some alternate form of explanation. In particular, I claim that we can understand the mathematical modelling techniques of (...)
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  • Is Cultural Fitness Hopelessly Confused?Grant Ramsey & Andreas De Block - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2).
    Fitness is a central concept in evolutionary theory. Just as it is central to biological evolution, so, it seems, it should be central to cultural evolutionary theory. But importing the biological fitness concept to CET is no straightforward task—there are many features unique to cultural evolution that make this difficult. This has led some theorists to argue that there are fundamental problems with cultural fitness that render it hopelessly confused. In this essay, we defend the coherency of cultural fitness against (...)
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  • What is right with the miracle argument: Establishing a taxonomy of natural kinds.Martin Carrier - 1993 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 24 (3):391-409.
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  • Explanation: Mechanism, modularity, and situated cognition.William Bechtel - 2008 - In Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 155--170.
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  • Theory comparison and choice in chemistry, 1766–1791.Geoffrey Blumenthal & James Ladyman - 2017 - Foundations of Chemistry 20 (3):169-189.
    This is the second of a pair of papers, of which the first showed how each of the main late phlogistic theories effectively reached impasses due to internal problems or included features which made them unacceptable even to other phlogistians. This paper deals with theory comparison and theory change. It gives an unprecedentedly detailed comparison between the available theories in 1790–1791, and shows that this was overwhelmingly in favour of the new chemistry. This time period correlates well with many chemists (...)
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  • So the laws of physics needn't lie.Alan Chalmers - 1993 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (2):196 – 205.
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  • Key Philosophical Writings.René Descartes - 1997 - Wordsworth Editions.
    Rene Descartes has been described as the "father" of modern philosophy. This selection of Descartes' writings attempt to answer central questions surrounding self, God, free-will and knowledge, using the science of thought as opposed to received wisdom based on the tenets of faith.
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  • How was teleology eliminated in early molecular biology?Phillip R. Sloan - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1):140-151.
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  • Mind and Brain: Toward an Understanding of Dualism.Kristopher Phillips, Alan Beretta & Harry A. Whitaker - 2014 - In C. U. M. Smith & Harry Whitaker (eds.), Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 355-369.
    A post-Newtonian understanding of matter includes immaterial forces; thus, the concept of ‘physical’ has lost what usefulness it previously had and Cartesian dualism has, consequently, ceased to support a divide between the mental and the physical. A contemporary scientific understanding of mind that goes back at least as far as Priestley in the 18th century, not only includes immaterial components but identifies brain parts in which these components correlate with neural activity. What are we left with? The challenge is no (...)
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  • Précis of I nference to the Best Explanation, 2 n d Edition. [REVIEW]Peter Lipton - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):421–423.
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