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  1. (2 other versions)Why the Anti-Reductionist Consensus Won’t Survive: The Case of Classical Mendelian Genetics.C. Kenneth Waters - 1990 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990:125-139.
    Philosophers now treat the relationship between classical genetics and molecular biology as a paradigm of nonreduction and this example is playing an increasingly prominent role in debates about the reducibility of theories in other sciences. This paper shows that the anti-reductionist consensus about genetics will not withstand serious scrutiny. In addition to defusing the main anti-reductionist objections, this critical analysis uncovers tell-tale signs of a significant reduction in progress. It also identifies philosophical issues relevant to gaining a better understanding of (...)
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  • Philosophy of Natural Science.Carl G. Hempel - 1967 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 18 (1):70-72.
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  • How the Laws of Physics Lie.Malcolm R. Forster - 1985 - Philosophy of Science 52 (3):478-480.
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  • (1 other version)Explanation, Reduction and Empiricism.P. K. Feyerabend - 1967 - Critica 1 (2):103-106.
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  • Evolution and the Levels of Selection.Samir Okasha - 2009 - Critica 41 (123):162-170.
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  • Part-whole science.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2011 - Synthese 178 (3):397-427.
    A scientific explanatory project, part-whole explanation, and a kind of science, part-whole science are premised on identifying, investigating, and using parts and wholes. In the biological sciences, mechanistic, structuralist, and historical explanations are part-whole explanations. Each expresses different norms, explananda, and aims. Each is associated with a distinct partitioning frame for abstracting kinds of parts. These three explanatory projects can be complemented in order to provide an integrative vision of the whole system, as is shown for a detailed case study: (...)
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  • Philosophy of Experimental Biology.Marcel Weber - 2004 - Cambridge University Press.
    Philosophy of Experimental Biology explores some central philosophical issues concerning scientific research in experimental biology, including genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, and microbiology. It seeks to make sense of the explanatory strategies, concepts, ways of reasoning, approaches to discovery and problem solving, tools, models and experimental systems deployed by scientific life science researchers and also integrates developments in historical scholarship, in particular the New Experimentalism. It concludes that historical explanations of scientific change that are based on local laboratory (...)
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  • (1 other version)Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth.Stathis Psillos - 1999 - New York: Routledge.
    Scientific realism is the optimistic view that modern science is on the right track: that the world really is the way our best scientific theories describe it. In his book, Stathis Psillos gives us a detailed and comprehensive study which restores the intuitive plausibility of scientific realism. We see that throughout the twentieth century, scientific realism has been challenged by philosophical positions from all angles: from reductive empiricism, to instrumentalism and to modern sceptical empiricism. _Scientific Realism_ explains that the history (...)
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  • The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution.Stuart A. Kauffman - 1993 - Oxford University Press.
    Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order widely observed throughout nature. Kauffman here argues that self-organization plays an (...)
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  • The Structure and Confirmation of Evolutionary Theory.Elisabeth Anne Lloyd - 1988 - Princeton University Press.
    Traditionally a scientific theory is viewed as based on universal laws of nature that serve as axioms for logical deduction. In analyzing the logical structure of evolutionary biology, Elisabeth Lloyd argues that the semantic account is more appropriate and powerful. This book will be of interest to biologists and philosophers alike.
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  • Towards disciplinary disintegration in biology.Wim J. Van Der Steen - 1993 - Biology and Philosophy 8 (3):259-275.
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  • Analogical Mapping by Constraint Satisfaction.Keith J. Holyoak & Paul Thagard - 1989 - Cognitive Science 13 (3):295-355.
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  • Structure‐Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy.Dedre Gentner - 1983 - Cognitive Science 7 (2):155-170.
    A theory of analogy must describe how the meaning of an analogy is derived from the meanings of its parts. In the structure‐mapping theory, the interpretation rules are characterized as implicit rules for mapping knowledge about a base domain into a target domain. Two important features of the theory are (a) the rules depend only on syntactic properties of the knowledge representation, and not on the specific content of the domains; and (b) the theoretical framework allows analogies to be distinguished (...)
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  • (1 other version)Explaining the Brain.Carl F. Craver - 2007 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Carl F. Craver investigates what we are doing when we use neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain. When does an explanation succeed and when does it fail? Craver offers explicit standards for successful explanation of the workings of the brain, on the basis of a systematic view about what neuroscientific explanations are.
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  • Informal Aspects of Theory Reduction.David L. Hull - 1974 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1974:653 - 670.
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  • Fisherian and Wrightian Perspectives in Evolutionary Genetics and Model-Mediated Imposition of Theoretical Assumptions.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2006 - Journal of Theoretical Biology 240:218-232.
    I investigate how theoretical assumptions, pertinent to different perspectives and operative during the modeling process, are central in determining how nature is actually taken to be. I explore two different models by Michael Turelli and Steve Frank of the evolution of parasite-mediated cytoplasmic incompatility, guided, respectively, by Fisherian and Wrightian perspectives. Since the two models can be shown to be commensurable both with respect to mathematics and data, I argue that the differences between them in the (1) mathematical presentation of (...)
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  • Philosophy of natural science.Carl Gustav Hempel - 1966 - Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.
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  • Foundations of Space-Time Theories.Micheal Friedman - 1983 - Princeton University Press.
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  • Philosophy of biological science.David L. Hull - 1974 - Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.
    Compares classic and contemporary theories of genetics and evolution and explores the role of teleological thought in biology.
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  • Problems of empiricism.Paul Feyerabend - 1965 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Over the past thirty years Paul Feyerabend has developed an extremely distinctive and influentical approach to problems in the philosophy of science. The most important and seminal of his published essays are collected here in two volumes, with new introductions to provide an overview and historical perspective on the discussions of each part. Volume 1 presents papers on the interpretation of scientific theories, together with papers applying the views developed to particular problems in philosophy and physics. The essays in volume (...)
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  • Darwinian reductionism, or, How to stop worrying and love molecular biology.Alexander Rosenberg - 2006 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, Alexander Rosenberg asks, can these self-proclaimed physicalists also be antireductionists? With clarity and (...)
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  • Evolution and the levels of selection.Samir Okasha - 2006 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? The question of levels of selection - on which biologists and philosophers have long disagreed - is central to evolutionary theory and to the philosophy of biology. Samir Okasha's comprehensive analysis gives a clear account of the philosophical issues at stake in the current debate.
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  • Laws and symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...)
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  • How the laws of physics lie.Nancy Cartwright - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    In this sequence of philosophical essays about natural science, the author argues that fundamental explanatory laws, the deepest and most admired successes of modern physics, do not in fact describe regularities that exist in nature. Cartwright draws from many real-life examples to propound a novel distinction: that theoretical entities, and the complex and localized laws that describe them, can be interpreted realistically, but the simple unifying laws of basic theory cannot.
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  • The reduction(?) Of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics.Lawrence Sklar - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 95 (1-2):187 - 202.
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  • (2 other versions)Special sciences (or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis).J. Fodor - 1974 - Synthese 28 (2):97-115.
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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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  • The Watson-Crick model and reductionism.Kenneth F. Schaffner - 1969 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 20 (4):325-348.
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  • Approaches to reduction.Kenneth F. Schaffner - 1967 - Philosophy of Science 34 (2):137-147.
    Four current accounts of theory reduction are presented, first informally and then formally: (1) an account of direct theory reduction that is based on the contributions of Nagel, Woodger, and Quine, (2) an indirect reduction paradigm due to Kemeny and Oppenheim, (3) an "isomorphic model" schema traceable to Suppes, and (4) a theory of reduction that is based on the work of Popper, Feyerabend, and Kuhn. Reference is made, in an attempt to choose between these schemas, to the explanation of (...)
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  • Explanatory unification.Philip Kitcher - 1981 - Philosophy of Science 48 (4):507-531.
    The official model of explanation proposed by the logical empiricists, the covering law model, is subject to familiar objections. The goal of the present paper is to explore an unofficial view of explanation which logical empiricists have sometimes suggested, the view of explanation as unification. I try to show that this view can be developed so as to provide insight into major episodes in the history of science, and that it can overcome some of the most serious difficulties besetting the (...)
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  • 1953 and all that. A tale of two sciences.Philip Kitcher - 1984 - Philosophical Review 93 (3):335-373.
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  • (1 other version)Studies in the logic of explanation.Carl Gustav Hempel & Paul Oppenheim - 1948 - Philosophy of Science 15 (2):135-175.
    To explain the phenomena in the world of our experience, to answer the question “why?” rather than only the question “what?”, is one of the foremost objectives of all rational inquiry; and especially, scientific research in its various branches strives to go beyond a mere description of its subject matter by providing an explanation of the phenomena it investigates. While there is rather general agreement about this chief objective of science, there exists considerable difference of opinion as to the function (...)
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  • Explanation and scientific understanding.Michael Friedman - 1974 - Journal of Philosophy 71 (1):5-19.
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  • Theoretical modeling and biological laws.Gregory Cooper - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (3):35.
    Recent controversy over the existence of biological laws raises questions about the cognitive aims of theoretical modeling in that science. If there are no laws for successful theoretical models to approximate, then what is it that successful theories do? One response is to regard theoretical models as tools. But this instrumental reading cannot accommodate the explanatory role that theories are supposed to play. Yet accommodating the explanatory function, as articulated by Brandon and Sober for example, seems to involve us once (...)
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  • Reducing thermodynamics to statistical mechanics: The case of entropy.Craig Callender - 1999 - Journal of Philosophy 96 (7):348-373.
    This article argues that most of the approaches to the foundations of statistical mechanics have severed their link with the original foundational project, the project of demonstrating how real mechanical systems can behave thermodynamically.
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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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  • Models of reduction and categories of reductionism.Sahotra Sarkar - 1992 - Synthese 91 (3):167-94.
    A classification of models of reduction into three categories — theory reductionism, explanatory reductionism, and constitutive reductionism — is presented. It is shown that this classification helps clarify the relations between various explications of reduction that have been offered in the past, especially if a distinction is maintained between the various epistemological and ontological issues that arise. A relatively new model of explanatory reduction, one that emphasizes that reduction is the explanation of a whole in terms of its parts is (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Multiple realization and the metaphysics of reduction.Jaegwon Kim - 1992 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1):1-26.
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  • The multiple realizability argument against reductionism.Elliott Sober - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (4):542-564.
    Reductionism is often understood to include two theses: (1) every singular occurrence that the special sciences can explain also can be explained by physics; (2) every law in a higher-level science can be explained by physics. These claims are widely supposed to have been refuted by the multiple realizability argument, formulated by Putnam (1967, 1975) and Fodor (1968, 1975). The present paper criticizes the argument and identifies a reductionistic thesis that follows from one of the argument's premises.
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  • (1 other version)Marcel Weber: Philosophy of Experimental Biology: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, USD 75.00, ISBN 0521829453 (hbk), 374 pp. [REVIEW]Jacob Stegenga - 2009 - Erkenntnis 71 (3):431-436.
    Philosophers have committed sins while studying science, it is said – philosophy of science focused on physics to the detriment of biology, reconstructed idealizations of scientific episodes rather than attending to historical details, and focused on theories and concepts to the detriment of experiments. Recent generations of philosophers of science have tried to atone for these sins, and by the 1980s the exculpation was in full swing. Marcel Weber’s Philosophy of Experimental Biology is a zenith mea culpa for philosophy of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Laws and Symmetry.Bas C. Van Fraassen - 1989 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 182 (3):327-329.
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  • Genetics and Reductionism.Sahotra Sarkar - 2012 - Cambridge University Press.
    With the advent of the Human Genome Project there have been many claims for the genetic origins of complex human behavior including insanity, criminality, and intelligence. But what does it really mean to call something 'genetic'? This is the fundamental question that Sahotra Sarkar's book addresses. The author analyses the nature of reductionism in classical and molecular genetics. He shows that there are two radically different kinds of reductionist explanation: genetic reduction (as found in classical genetics) and physical reduction (found (...)
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  • Reductionism in Biology.Ingo Brigandt & Alan Love - 2008 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Reductionism encompasses a set of ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims about the relation of different scientific domains. The basic question of reduction is whether the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from one scientific domain (typically at higher levels of organization) can be deduced from or explained by the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from another domain of science (typically one about lower levels of organization). Reduction is germane to a variety of issues in philosophy of science, including the structure of (...)
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  • Models for modeling.Michael Weisberg - manuscript
    Contemporary literature in philosophy of science has begun to emphasize the practice of modeling, which differs in important respects from other forms of representation and analysis central to standard philosophical accounts. This literature has stressed the constructed nature of models, their autonomy, and the utility of their high degrees of idealization. What this new literature about modeling lacks, however, is a comprehensive account of the models that figure in to the practice of modeling. This paper offers a new account of (...)
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  • Mechanisms and the nature of causation.Stuart S. Glennan - 1996 - Erkenntnis 44 (1):49--71.
    In this paper I offer an analysis of causation based upon a theory of mechanisms-complex systems whose internal parts interact to produce a system's external behavior. I argue that all but the fundamental laws of physics can be explained by reference to mechanisms. Mechanisms provide an epistemologically unproblematic way to explain the necessity which is often taken to distinguish laws from other generalizations. This account of necessity leads to a theory of causation according to which events are causally related when (...)
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  • The supervenience of biological concepts.Alexander Rosenberg - 1978 - Philosophy of Science 45 (3):368-386.
    In this paper the concept of supervenience is employed to explain the relationship between fitness as employed in the theory of natural selection and population biology and the physical, behavioral and ecological properties of organisms that are the subjects of lower level theories in the life sciences. The aim of this analysis is to account simultaneously for the fact that the theory of natural selection is a synthetic body of empirical claims, and for the fact that it continues to be (...)
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  • Theory change and the indeterminacy of reference.Hartry Field - 1973 - Journal of Philosophy 70 (14):462-481.
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  • Does biology have laws? The experimental evidence.Robert N. Brandon - 1997 - Philosophy of Science 64 (4):457.
    In this paper I argue that we can best make sense of the practice of experimental evolutionary biology if we see it as investigating contingent, rather than lawlike, regularities. This understanding is contrasted with the experimental practice of certain areas of physics. However, this presents a problem for those who accept the Logical Positivist conception of law and its essential role in scientific explanation. I address this problem by arguing that the contingent regularities of evolutionary biology have a limited range (...)
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  • (1 other version)Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine.Kenneth F. Schaffner - 1995 - Journal of the History of Biology 28 (1):172-174.
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  • (1 other version)The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation.Ernest Nagel - 1981 - Science and Society 45 (4):475-480.
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