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  1. Mechanism and Biological Explanation.William Bechtel - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (4):533-557.
    This article argues that the basic account of mechanism and mechanistic explanation, involving sequential execution of qualitatively characterized operations, is itself insufficient to explain biological phenomena such as the capacity of living organisms to maintain themselves as systems distinct from their environment. This capacity depends on cyclic organization, including positive and negative feedback loops, which can generate complex dynamics. Understanding cyclically organized mechanisms with complex dynamics requires coordinating research directed at decomposing mechanisms into parts and operations with research using computational (...)
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  • Flat Versus Dimensioned: the What and the How of Functional Realization.Ronald P. Endicott - 2011 - Journal of Philosophical Research 36:191-208.
    I resolve an argument over “flat” versus “dimensioned” theories of realization. The theories concern, in part, whether realized and realizing properties are instantiated by the same individual (the flat theory) or different individuals in a part-whole relationship (the dimensioned theory). Carl Gillett has argued that the two views conflict, and that flat theories should be rejected on grounds that they fail to capture scientific cases involving a dimensioned relation between individuals and their constituent parts. I argue on the contrary that (...)
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  • (4 other versions)Towards a Science of Consciousness.Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & Alwyn Scott (eds.) - 1996 - MIT Press.
    Toward a Science of Consciousness marks the first major gathering—a landmark event—devoted entirely to unlocking the mysteries of consciousness.
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  • (1 other version)Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology.Daniel Clement Dennett (ed.) - 1978 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Bradford Books.
    Intentional explanation and attributions of mentality -- International systems -- Reply to Arbib and Gunderson -- Brain writing and mind reading -- The nature of theory in psychology -- Skinner skinned -- Why the law of effect will not go away -- A cure for the common code? -- Artificial intelligence as philosophy and as psychology -- Objects of consciousness and the nature of experience -- Are dreams experiences? -- Toward a cognitive theory of consciousness -- Two approaches to mental (...)
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  • Nomic-Role Nonreductionism: Identifying Properties by Total Nomic Roles.Ronald P. Endicott - 2007 - Philosophical Topics 35 (1&2):217-240.
    I introduce "nomic-role nonreductionism" as an alternative to traditional causal-role functionalism in the philosophy of mind. Rather than identify mental properties by a theory that describes their intra-level causal roles via types of inputs, internal states, and outputs, I suggest that one identify mental properties by a more comprehensive theory that also describes inter-level realization roles via types of lower-level engineering, internal mental states, and still higher-level states generated by them. I defend this position on grounds that mental properties should (...)
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  • Non-reductive realization and the powers-based subset strategy.Jessica Wilson - 2011 - The Monist (Issue on Powers) 94 (1):121-154.
    I argue that an adequate account of non-reductive realization must guarantee satisfaction of a certain condition on the token causal powers associated with (instances of) realized and realizing entities---namely, what I call the 'Subset Condition on Causal Powers' (first introduced in Wilson 1999). In terms of states, the condition requires that the token powers had by a realized state on a given occasion be a proper subset of the token powers had by the state that realizes it on that occasion. (...)
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  • (3 other versions)On Leaving Out What It's Like.Joseph Levine - 1993 - In Martin Davies & Glyn W. Humphreys (eds.), Consciousness: psychological and philosophical essays. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell. pp. 543--557.
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  • (1 other version)Explaining the brain: mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience.Carl F. Craver - 2007 - New York : Oxford University Press,: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
    Carl Craver investigates what we are doing when we sue neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain.
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  • Review: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. [REVIEW]Andrew Melnyk - 1999 - Noûs 33 (1):144 - 154.
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  • (1 other version)Laws of nature.John W. Carroll - 1994 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    John Carroll undertakes a careful philosophical examination of laws of nature, causation, and other related topics. He argues that laws of nature are not susceptible to the sort of philosophical treatment preferred by empiricists. Indeed he shows that emperically pure matters of fact need not even determine what the laws are. Similar, even stronger, conclusions are drawn about causation. Replacing the traditional view of laws and causation requiring some kind of foundational legitimacy, the author argues that these phenomena are inextricably (...)
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  • (1 other version)Causal and metaphysical necessity.Sydney Shoemaker - 1998 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1):59–77.
    Any property has two sorts of causal features: “forward-looking” ones, having to do with what its instantiation can contribute to causing, and ldquo;backward-looking” ones, having to do with how its instantiation can be caused. Such features of a property are essential to it, and properties sharing all of their causal features are identical. Causal necessity is thus a special case of metaphysical necessity. Appeals to imaginability have no more force against this view than they do against the Kripkean view that (...)
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  • Carnap and logical truth.Willard van Orman Quine - 1954 - Synthese 12 (4):350--74.
    Kant's question 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' pre- cipitated the Critique of Pure Reason. Question and answer notwith- standing, Mill and others persisted in doubting that such judgments were possible at all. At length some of Kant's own clearest purported.
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  • Dispositions and conditionals.C. B. Martin - 1994 - Philosophical Quarterly 44 (174):1-8.
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  • Role functions, mechanisms, and hierarchy.Carl F. Craver - 2001 - Philosophy of Science 68 (1):53-74.
    Many areas of science develop by discovering mechanisms and role functions. Cummins' (1975) analysis of role functions-according to which an item's role function is a capacity of that item that appears in an analytic explanation of the capacity of some containing system-captures one important sense of "function" in the biological sciences and elsewhere. Here I synthesize Cummins' account with recent work on mechanisms and causal/mechanical explanation. The synthesis produces an analysis of specifically mechanistic role functions, one that uses the characteristic (...)
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  • Orchestrated reduction of quantum coherence in brain microtubules: A model for consciousness.Stuart R. Hameroff & Roger Penrose - 1996 - In Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak & Alwyn Scott (eds.), Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates. MIT Press.
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  • (1 other version)Readings in Philosophy of Psychology: 1.Ned Joel Block (ed.) - 1980 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    ... PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY is the study of conceptual issues in psychology. For the most part, these issues fall equally well in psychology as in..
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  • "How does it work" versus "what are the laws?": Two conceptions of psychological explanation.Robert C. Cummins - 2000 - In Robert A. Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.), The Shadows and Shallows of Explanation. MIT Press.
    In the beginning, there was the DN (Deductive Nomological) model of explanation, articulated by Hempel and Oppenheim (1948). According to DN, scientific explanation is subsumption under natural law. Individual events are explained by deducing them from laws together with initial conditions (or boundary conditions), and laws are explained by deriving them from other more fundamental laws, as, for example, the simple pendulum law is derived from Newton's laws of motion.
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  • The Nature of Psychological Explanation.Robert Cummins - 1983 - MIT Press.
    In exploring the nature of psychological explanation, this book looks at how psychologists theorize about the human ability to calculate, to speak a language and the like. It shows how good theorizing explains or tries to explain such abilities as perception and cognition. It recasts the familiar explanations of "intelligence" and "cognitive capacity" as put forward by philosophers such as Fodor, Dennett, and others in terms of a theory of explanation that makes established doctrine more intelligible to professionals and their (...)
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  • The appeal to tacit knowledge in psychological explanation.Jerry A. Fodor - 1968 - Journal of Philosophy 65 (October):627-40.
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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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  • Mental causation.Stephen Yablo - 1992 - Philosophical Review 101 (2):245-280.
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  • Mind in a physical world: An essay on the mind–body problem and mental causation.Jaegwon Kim - 1998 - MIT Press.
    This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind...
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  • The metaphysics of realization, multiple realizability, and the special sciences.Carl Gillett - 2003 - Journal of Philosophy 100 (11):591-603.
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  • Emergence: Core ideas and issues.Jaegwon Kim - 2006 - Synthese 151 (3):547-559.
    This paper explores the fundamental ideas that have motivated the idea of emergence and the movement of emergentism. The concept of reduction, which lies at the heart of the emergence idea is explicated, and it is shown how the thesis that emergent properties are irreducible gives a unified account of emergence. The paper goes on to discuss two fundamental unresolved issues for emergentism. The first is that of giving a “positive” characterization of emergence; the second is to give a coherent (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Special sciences.Jerry A. Fodor - 1974 - Synthese 28 (2):97-115.
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  • The myth of supervenience.Thomas R. Grimes - 1988 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 69 (June):152-60.
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  • From supervenience to superdupervenience: Meeting the demands of a material world.Terence E. Horgan - 1993 - Mind 102 (408):555-86.
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  • Concepts of supervenience.Jaegwon Kim - 1984 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (December):153-76.
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  • Causal powers, forces, and superdupervenience.Jessica M. Wilson - 2002 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 63 (1):53-77.
    Horgan (1993) proposed that "superdupervenience" - supervenience preserving physicalistic acceptability - is a matter of robust explanation. I argued against him (1999) that (as nearly all physicalist and emergentist accounts reflect) superdupervenience is a matter of Condition on Causal Powers (CCP): every causal power bestowed by the supervenient property is identical with a causal power bestowed by its base property. Here I show that CCP is, as it stands, unsatisfactory,for on the usual understandings of causal power bestowal, it is trivially (...)
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  • How superduper does a physicalist supervenience need to be?Jessica Wilson - 1999 - Philosophical Quarterly 49 (194):33-52.
    Note: this is the first published presentation and defense of the 'proper subset strategy' for making sense of non-reductive physicalism or the associated notion of realization; this is sometimes, inaccurately, called "Shoemaker's subset strategy"; if people could either call it the 'subset strategy' or better yet, add my name to the mix I would appreciate it. Horgan claims that physicalism requires "superdupervenience" -- supervenience plus robust ontological explanation of the supervenient in terms of the base properties. I argue that Horgan's (...)
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  • Supervenience-based formulations of physicalism.Jessica Wilson - 2005 - Noûs 39 (3):426-459.
    The physicalist thesis that all entities are nothing over and above physical entities is often interpreted as appealing to a supervenience-based account of "nothing over and aboveness”, where, schematically, the A-entities are nothing over and above the B-entities if the A-entities supervene on the B-entities. The main approaches to filling in this schema correspond to different ways of characterizing the modal strength, the supervenience base, or the supervenience connection at issue. I consider each approach in turn, and argue that the (...)
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  • (2 other versions)What is functionalism?Ned Block - 1996 - In Donald M. Borchert (ed.), [Book Chapter]. MacMillan.
    What is Functionalism? Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. Solutions to the mind/body problem usually try to answer questions such as: What is the ultimate nature of the mental? At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental? Or more specifically, What do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? That is, what makes a thought a thought? What makes a pain a pain? (...)
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  • Functional analysis.Robert E. Cummins - 1975 - Journal of Philosophy 72 (November):741-64.
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  • Physicalism, or Something Near Enough.Jaegwon Kim - 2005 - Princeton University Press.
    "This is a fine volume that clarifies, defends, and moves beyond the views that Kim presented in Mind in a Physical World.
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  • Being a physicalist: How and (more importantly) why.Andrew Melnyk - 1994 - Philosophical Studies 74 (2):221-241.
    A standard objection to any version of physicalism, an objection which may be encountered both in conversation and in the literature, is that there is just no reason to be a physicalist; even if there are no good arguments against physicalism, there are none for it either. My main aim in this paper is to defeat this objection by supplying a trio of positive reasons for adopting a particular brand of physicalism, which I call realization physicalism. The arguments I shall (...)
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  • How to keep the 'physical' in physicalism.Andrew Melnyk - 1997 - Journal of Philosophy 94 (12):622-637.
    This paper introduces the term "Hempel's Dilemma" to refer to the following challenge to any formulation of physicalism that appeals to the content of physics: if physical properties are those mentioned as such in current physics, then physicalism is probably false; but if they are those mentioned as such in a completed physics, then, since we have no idea what completed physics will look like, the resulting formulation of physicalism will lack content that is determinable by us now. It shows (...)
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  • Toward a homuncular theory of believing.William G. Lycan - 1981 - Cognition and Brain Theory 4 (2):139-59.
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  • (1 other version)Mind the gap.David Papineau - 1998 - Philosophical Perspectives 12:373-89.
    On the first page of The Problem of Consciousness , Colin McGinn asks "How is it possible for conscious states to depend on brain states? How can technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter?" Many philosophers feel that questions like these pose an unanswerable challenge to physicalism. They argue that there is no way of bridging the "explanatory gap" between the material brain and the lived world of conscious experience , and that physicalism about the mind can therefore provide no (...)
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  • Consciousness.William G. Lycan - 1987 - MIT Press.
    In this book, William Lycan reviews the diverse philosophical views on consciousness--including those of Kripke, Block, Campbell, Sellars, and Casteneda--and ..
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  • Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology.Gilbert Harman & Daniel C. Dennett - 1980 - Philosophical Review 89 (1):115.
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  • A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism.Andrew Melnyk - 2003 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue in (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Materialist Theory of the Mind.D. M. Armstrong - 1968 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Ted Honderich.
    Breaking new ground in the debate about the relation of mind and body, David Armstrong's classic text - first published in 1968 - remains the most compelling and comprehensive statement of the view that the mind is material or physical. In the preface to this new edition, the author reflects on the book's impact and considers it in the light of subsequent developments. He also provides a bibliography of all the key writings to have appeared in the materialist debate.
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  • Troubles on moral twin earth: Moral queerness revived.Terence Horgan & Mark Timmons - 1992 - Synthese 92 (2):221 - 260.
    J. L. Mackie argued that if there were objective moral properties or facts, then the supervenience relation linking the nonmoral to the moral would be metaphysically queer. Moral realists reply that objective supervenience relations are ubiquitous according to contemporary versions of metaphysical naturalism and, hence, that there is nothing especially queer about moral supervenience. In this paper we revive Mackie's challenge to moral realism. We argue: (i) that objective supervenience relations of any kind, moral or otherwise, should be explainable rather (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Understanding the new reductionism: The metaphysics of science and compositional reduction.Carl Gillett - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy 104 (4):193-216.
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  • The nature and plausibility of cognitivism.John Haugeland - 1978 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (2):215-26.
    Cognitivism in psychology and philosophy is roughly the position that intelligent behavior can (only) be explained by appeal to internal that is, rational thought in a very broad sense. Sections 1 to 5 attempt to explicate in detail the nature of the scientific enterprise that this intuition has inspired. That enterprise is distinctive in at least three ways: It relies on a style of explanation which is different from that of mathematical physics, in such a way that it is not (...)
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  • The dimensions of realization: A critique of the standard view.Carl Gillett - 2002 - Analysis 62 (4):316-323.
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  • On characterizing the physical.Jessica Wilson - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 131 (1):61-99.
    How should physical entities be characterized? Physicalists, who have most to do with the notion, usually characterize the physical by reference to two components: 1. The physical entities are the entities treated by fundamental physics with the proviso that 2. Physical entities are not fundamentally mental (that is, do not individually possess or bestow mentality) Here I explore the extent to which the appeals to fundamental physics and to the NFM (“no fundamental mentality”) constraint are appropriate for characterizing the physical, (...)
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  • Remnants of Meaning.Stephen R. Schiffer - 1987 - MIT Press.
    In this foundational work on the theory of linguistic and mental representation, Stephen Schiffer surveys all the leading theories of meaning and content in the philosophy of language and finds them lacking. He concludes that there can be no correct, positive philosophical theory or linguistic or mental representation and, accordingly advocates the deflationary "no-theory theory of meaning and content." Along the way he takes up functionalism, the nature of propositions and their suitability as contents, the language of thought and other (...)
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  • Realization, Micro‐Realization, and Coincidence.Sydney Shoemaker - 2003 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (1):1-23.
    Let thin properties be properties shared by coincident entities, e.g., a person and her body, and thick properties ones that are not shared. Thick properties entail sortal properties, e.g., being a person, and the associated persistence conditions. On the first account of realization defined here, the realized property and its realizers will belong to the same individual. This restricts the physical realizers of mental properties, which are thick, to thick physical properties. We also need a sense in which mental properties (...)
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  • Multilevel Research Strategies and Biological Systems.Maureen A. O’Malley, Ingo Brigandt, Alan C. Love, John W. Crawford, Jack A. Gilbert, Rob Knight, Sandra D. Mitchell & Forest Rohwer - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):811-828.
    Multilevel research strategies characterize contemporary molecular inquiry into biological systems. We outline conceptual, methodological, and explanatory dimensions of these multilevel strategies in microbial ecology, systems biology, protein research, and developmental biology. This review of emerging lines of inquiry in these fields suggests that multilevel research in molecular life sciences has significant implications for philosophical understandings of explanation, modeling, and representation.
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