Results for 'Evolutionary causation'

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  1. Evolutionary Causation and Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2023 - In José Manuel Viejo & Mariano Sanjuán (eds.), Life and Mind - New Directions in the Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences. Springer.
    Disputes about the causal structure of natural selection have implications for teleosemantics. Etiological, mainstream teleosemantics is based on a causalist view of natural selection. The core of its solution to Brentano’s Problem lies in the solution to Kant’s Puzzle provided by the Modern Synthesis concerning populational causation. In this paper, I suggest that if we adopt an alternative, statisticalist view on natural selection, the door is open for two reflections. First, it allows for setting different challenges to etiological teleosemantics (...)
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  2. The Phylogeny Fallacy and Evolutionary Causation.Tiago Rama - manuscript
    Abstract: The use of evolutionary explanations to account for proximate phenomena has been labeled by various authors as an explanatory error, the so-called phylogeny fallacy. In this paper, this fallacy will be analyzed in the context of teleosemantics. I will discuss whether teleosemantics projects that rely on the Selected-Effect Theory of Functions (i.e., mainstream teleosemantics) generally commit the fallacy. To frame the discussion, I will present two desiderata that, as argued here, every teleosemantic project must fulfill. The actuality desideratum, (...)
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  3. Evolutionary Causation: Biological and Philosophical Reflections. Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology edited by Tobias Uller and Kevin N. Laland. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2020 - The Quarterly Review of Biology 95 (2):150-151.
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  4. Mutationism and the Dual Causation of Evolutionary Change.Arlin Stoltzfus - 2006 - Evolution and Development 8 (3):304-317.
    The rediscovery of Mendel's laws a century ago launched the science that William Bateson called "genetics," and led to a new view of evolution combining selection, particulate inheritance, and the newly characterized phenomenon of "mutation." This "mutationist" view clashed with the earlier view of Darwin, and the later "Modern Synthesis," by allowing discontinuity, and by recognizing mutation (or more properly, mutation-and-altered-development) as a source of creativity, direction, and initiative. By the mid-20th century, the opposing Modern Synthesis view was a prevailing (...)
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  5. Explanatory Domains and Reciprocal Causation: How (not) integrate development and evolution.Tiago Rama - manuscript
    A common explanatory error in science concerns the conflation of the epistemological roles between two domains. Here we will address a specific case: when explanations of development replace evolutionary explanations or vice versa. Ernst Mayr famously distinguished between proximate and ultimate causal explanations in biology. His view was central to the Modern Synthesis’ exclusion of development from evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, the explanatory role of developmental processes in evolution is a central theme in current theoretical biology which has prompted (...)
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  6. Hierarchies, Networks, and Causality: The Applied Evolutionary Epistemological Approach.Nathalie Gontier - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (2):313-334.
    Applied Evolutionary Epistemology is a scientific-philosophical theory that defines evolution as the set of phenomena whereby units evolve at levels of ontological hierarchies by mechanisms and processes. This theory also provides a methodology to study evolution, namely, studying evolution involves identifying the units that evolve, the levels at which they evolve, and the mechanisms and processes whereby they evolve. Identifying units and levels of evolution in turn requires the development of ontological hierarchy theories, and examining mechanisms and processes necessitates (...)
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  7. Situating physiology within evolutionary theory.Nathalie Gontier - forthcoming - Journal of Physiology.
    Traditionally defined as the science of the living, or as the field that beyond anatomical structure and bodily form studies functional organization and behaviour, physiology has long been excluded from evolutionary research. The main reason for this exclusion is that physiology has a presential and futuristic outlook on life, while evolutionary theory is traditionally defined as the study of natural history. In this paper, I re-evaluate these classic science divisions and situate physiology within the history of the (...) sciences, as well as within debates on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and the need for a Third Way of Evolution. I then briefly point out how evolutionary physiology in particular contributes to research on function, causation, teleonomy, agency and cognition. (shrink)
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  8. Hierarchy Theory of Evolution and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Some Epistemic Bridges, Some Conceptual Rifts.Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda & Francisco Vergara-Silva - 2018 - Evolutionary Biology 45 (2):127-139.
    Contemporary evolutionary biology comprises a plural landscape of multiple co-existent conceptual frameworks and strenuous voices that disagree on the nature and scope of evolutionary theory. Since the mid-eighties, some of these conceptual frameworks have denounced the ontologies of the Modern Synthesis and of the updated Standard Theory of Evolution as unfinished or even flawed. In this paper, we analyze and compare two of those conceptual frameworks, namely Niles Eldredge’s Hierarchy Theory of Evolution (with its extended ontology of (...) entities) and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (with its proposal of an extended ontology of evolutionary processes), in an attempt to map some epistemic bridges (e.g. compatible views of causation; niche construction) and some conceptual rifts (e.g. extra-genetic inheritance; different perspectives on macroevolution; contrasting standpoints held in the “externalism–internalism” debate) that exist between them. This paper seeks to encourage theoretical, philosophical and historiographical discussions about pluralism or the possible unification of contemporary evolutionary biology. (shrink)
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  9.  57
    Probabilistic causation and the explanatory role of natural selection.Pablo Razeto-Barry & Ramiro Frick - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (3):344-355.
    The explanatory role of natural selection is one of the long-term debates in evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, the consensus has been slippery because conceptual confusions and the absence of a unified, formal causal model that integrates different explanatory scopes of natural selection. In this study we attempt to examine two questions: (i) What can the theory of natural selection explain? and (ii) Is there a causal or explanatory model that integrates all natural selection explananda? For the first question, we argue (...)
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  10. Causation and Explanation in Phenotype Research.Özlem Yılmaz - 2017 - Balkan Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):63-70.
    A phenome occurs through the many pathways of the complex net of interaction between the phenome and its environment; therefore researching and understanding how it arises requires investigation into many possible causes that are in constant interaction with each other. The most comprehensive investigations in biology are the ones in which many biologists from different sub-areas—evolutionary biology, developmental biology, molecular biology, physiology, genetics, epigenetics, ecology—have collaborated. Still, biologists do not always need to collaborate or look for the most comprehensive (...)
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  11. The Scope of Reciprocal Causation.Yasmin Haddad - forthcoming - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology.
    The role of reciprocal causation in Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) is controversial. Proponents of EES argue that reciprocal causation is a key innovation, underpinning the necessity of EES. Conversely, critics of the EES maintain that Standard Evolutionary Theory (SET) adequately encompasses the concept of reciprocal causation, challenging the need for EES. This skepticism is rooted in two primary critiques. First, the mischaracterization of causal dynamics within SET by EES advocates leads to a misrepresentation of SET. (...)
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  12. Reciprocal Causation and Statistical Reciprocity.Tiago Rama - manuscript
    Abstract: A common explanatory error concerns conflating epistemological roles between two domains. Here I deal with a special case: when explanations of development replace evolutionary explanations or vice versa. Ernst Mayr famously distinguished between proximate and ultimate causal explanations in biology. His view was central to keeping development outside the theory of evolution. Nevertheless, the explanatory role of developmental processes in evolution is a central theme in current theoretical biology, which has led to several revisions of Mayr’s distinction. In (...)
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  13. Drift and evolutionary forces: scrutinizing the Newtonian analogy.Víctor J. Luque - 2016 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 31 (3):397-410.
    This article analyzes the view of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces. The analogy with Newtonian mechanics has been challenged due to the alleged mismatch between drift and the other evolutionary forces. Since genetic drift has no direction several authors tried to protect its status as a force: denying its lack of directionality, extending the notion of force and looking for a force in physics which also lacks of direction. I analyse these approaches, and although this strategy (...)
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  14. Developmental Channeling and Evolutionary Dappling.Grant Ramsey & Cristina Villegas - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    The developmental properties of organisms play important roles in the generation of variation necessary for evolutionary change. But how can individual development steer the course of evolution? To answer this question, we introduce developmental channeling as a disposition of individual organisms that shapes their possible developmental trajectories and evolutionary dappling as an evolutionary outcome in which the space of possible organismic forms is dappled—it is only partially filled. We then trace out the implications of the channeling-dappling framework (...)
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  15. Demystifying Downward Causation in Biology.Yasmin Haddad - forthcoming - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie.
    The concept of downward causation is frequently used in an explanatory capacity in biology to account for certain regularities and processes. Some philosophers, however, argue that downward causation is metaphysically incoherent, providing three main objections. Underlying these objections is the assumption that entities are connected by compositional hierarchies of levels of organization. In this paper, I introduce the notions of weak and strong compositional relations using examples from evolutionary developmental biology. I argue that downward causation becomes (...)
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  16. Genes, Causation and Intentionality.Marcel Weber - 2005 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 27 (3/4):399-411.
    I want to exhibit the deeper metaphysical reasons why some common ways of describing the causal role of genes in development and evolution are problematic. Specifically, I show why using the concept of information in an intentional sense in genetics is inappropriate, even given a naturalistic account of intentionality. Furthermore, I argue that descriptions that use notions such as programming, directing or orchestrating are problematic not for empirical reasons, but because they are not strictly causal. They are intentional. By contrast, (...)
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  17. Teleonomy as a problem of self-causation.Nathalie Gontier - forthcoming - Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 139:388–414.
    A theoretical framework is provided to explore teleonomy as a problem of self-causation, distinct from upward, downward and reticulate causation. Causality theories in biology are often formulated within hierarchy theories, where causation is conceptualized as running up or down the rungs of a ladder-like hierarchy or, more recently, as moving between multiple hierarchies. Research on the genealogy of cosmologies demonstrates that in addition to hierarchy theories, causality theories also depend upon ideas of time. This paper explores the (...)
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  18. Population thinking vs. essentialism in biology and evolutionary economics.George Liagouras - 2017 - In Evolutionary Political Economy in Action. A Cyprus Symposium, Routledge. London & New York: pp. 36-53.
    The standard perception of the dichotomy between population thinking and essentialism (typological thinking) in evolutionary economics descends from the golden age of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Over the last few decades the received view on population thinking has been seriously challenged in biology and its philosophy. First, the strong version of population thinking that banishes essentialism witnessed important tensions stemming from the ontological status of species. These tensions have been amplified by the demise of positivism and the rise of a (...)
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  19. Niche construction and teleology: organisms as agents and contributors in ecology, development, and evolution.Bendik Hellem Aaby & Hugh Desmond - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (5):1-20.
    Niche construction is a concept that captures a wide array of biological phenomena, from the environmental effects of metabolism to the creation of complex structures such as termite mounds and beaver dams. A central point in niche construction theory is that organisms do not just passively undergo developmental, ecological, or evolutionary processes, but are also active participants in them Evolution: From molecules to men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983; Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Feldman MW, In: KN Laland and T (...)
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  20. The evolution of the biological sciences.Nathalie Gontier - 2024 - In Nathalie Gontier, Andy Lock & Chris Sinha (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. OUP. pp. 3-25.
    This chapter introduces the main research schools and paradigms along which the field of evolutionary biology has been developing. Evolutionary thinking was originally founded upon the Neo-Darwinian paradigm that combines the teachings of traditional Darwinism with those of the Modern Synthesis. The Neo-Darwinian paradigm has since further diversified into the Micro-, Meso-, and Macroevolutionary schools, and it has also started to integrate the school of Ecology. Together, these schools establish the paradigm called Ecological Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Eco-Evo-Devo). (...)
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  21. The phylogeny fallacy and the ontogeny fallacy.Adam Hochman - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (4):593-612.
    In 1990 Robert Lickliter and Thomas Berry identified the phylogeny fallacy, an empirically untenable dichotomy between proximate and evolutionary causation, which locates proximate causes in the decoding of ‘ genetic programs’, and evolutionary causes in the historical events that shaped these programs. More recently, Lickliter and Hunter Honeycutt argued that Evolutionary Psychologists commit this fallacy, and they proposed an alternative research program for evolutionary psychology. For these authors the phylogeny fallacy is the proximate/evolutionary distinction (...)
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  22. A Third Way to the Selected Effect/Causal Role Distinction in the Great Encode Debate.Ehud Lamm & Sophie Veigl - 2023 - Theoretical Biology Forum 2023 (1-2):53-74.
    Since the ENCODE project published its final results in a series of articles in 2012, there is no consensus on what its implications are. ENCODE’s central and most controversial claim was that there is essentially no junk DNA: most sections of the human genome believed to be «junk» are functional. This claim was met with many reservations. If researchers disagree about whether there is junk DNA, they have first to agree on a concept of function and how function, given a (...)
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  23. Non-genetic inheritance: Evolution above the organismal level.Anton Sukhoverkhov & Nathalie Gontier - 2021 - Biosystems 1 (200):104325.
    The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for (...)
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  24. Acquaintance, Parsimony, and Epiphenomenalism.Brie Gertler - 2019 - In Sam Coleman (ed.), The Knowledge Argument. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 62-86.
    Some physicalists (Balog 2012, Howell 2013), and most dualists, endorse the acquaintance response to the Knowledge Argument. This is the claim that Mary gains substantial new knowledge, upon leaving the room, because phenomenal knowledge requires direct acquaintance with phenomenal properties. The acquaintance response is an especially promising way to make sense of the Mary case. I argue that it casts doubt on two claims often made on behalf of physicalism, regarding parsimony and mental causation. I show that those who (...)
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  25. A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion.Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt - 2014 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
    [from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De (...)
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  26. Biological constraints as norms in evolution.Mathilde Tahar - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (1):1-21.
    Biology seems to present local and transitory regularities rather than immutable laws. To account for these historically constituted regularities and to distinguish them from mathematical invariants, Montévil and Mossio (Journal of Theoretical Biology 372:179–191, 2015) have proposed to speak of constraints. In this article we analyse the causal power of these constraints in the evolution of biodiversity, i.e., their positivity, but also the modality of their action on the directions taken by evolution. We argue that to fully account for the (...)
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  27. Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  28. Causal depth, theoretical appropriateness, and individualism in psychology.Robert A. Wilson - 1994 - Philosophy of Science 61 (1):55-75.
    Individualists claim that wide explanations in psychology are problematic. I argue that wide psychological explanations sometimes have greater explanatory power than individualistic explanations. The aspects of explanatory power I focus on are causal depth and theoretical appropriateness. Reflection on the depth and appropriateness of other wide explanations of behavior, such as evolutionary explanations, clarifies why wide psychological explanations sometimes have more causal depth and theoretical appropriateness than narrow psychological explanations. I also argue for the rejection of eliminative materialism.
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  29. The "history" of biodiversity. A Bergsonian look at the theory of evolution.Mathilde Tahar - 2021 - Thaumàzein 8:89-106.
    Neo-Darwinism, through the combination of natural selection and genetics, has made possible an explanation of adaptive phenomena that claims to be devoid of metaphysical presuppositions. What Bergson already deplored and what we explore in this paper is the implicit finalism of such evolutionary explanations, which turn living beings into closed and static systems rather than understanding biological evolution as a process characterized by its interactions and temporal openness. Without denying the heuristic efficiency of the explanation resting upon natural selection, (...)
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  30. How Subjects Can Emerge from Neurons.Eric LaRock & Mostyn Jones - 2019 - Process Studies 48 (1):40-58.
    We pose a foundational problem for those who claim that subjects are ontologically irreducible, but causally reducible (weak emergence). This problem is neuroscience’s notorious binding problem, which concerns how distributed neural areas produce unified mental objects (such as perceptions) and the unified subject that experiences them. Synchrony, synapses and other mechanisms cannot explain this. We argue that this problem seriously threatens popular claims that mental causality is reducible to neural causality. Weak emergence additionally raises evolutionary worries about how we’ve (...)
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  31. Integration is a metaphysical fundamental.Daihyun Chung - manuscript
    What are some metaphysical fundamentals which constitute the reality? This question has occupied philosophers for a long time. The western tradition once dealt with conceptions of earth, air, water, fire, ether whereas the eastern tradition has studied notions like yin-yang(陰陽), taiji(太極), lichi(理氣). The question is now being researched under the name of physicalism or naturalism, and yet what is not yet clarified is the relationship between electromagnetic force as the fundamental of the physical and consciousness as the fundamental of the (...)
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  32. Critical Reread of a Debate: Anscombe and Lewis Dispute in Rejection of Atheistic Naturalism.Religious Thought, Ahmad Ebadi & Mohammad Emdadi Masuleh - 2021 - JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 21 (78):53-76.
    In 1948 a legendary debate occurred at the Oxford Socratic Club between C. S. Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe. In this meeting, Lewis shows that atheistic naturalism is refute in meaning the strict materialism. Anscombe makes three basic criticisms against Lewis' argument:1. Lack of distinction between irrational and non-rrational causes of belief,2. The threat of skepticism,3. Lack of distinction between types of “full” explanations. Lewis and Anscombe's views can be considered in several ways: 1. Despite Anscombe's correct critique, the lack of (...)
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  33. (1 other version)An Aristotelian Account of Evolution and the Contemporary Philosophy of Biology.Mariusz Tabaczek - 2014 - Dialogo 1 (1):57-69.
    The anti-reductionist character of the recent philosophy of biology and the dynamic development of the science of emergent properties prove that the time is ripe to reintroduce the thought of Aristotle, the first advocate of a “top-down” approach in life-sciences, back into the science/philosophy debate. His philosophy of nature provides profound insights particularly in the context of the contemporary science of evolution, which is still struggling with the questions of form, teleology, and the role of chance in evolutionary processes. (...)
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  34. Genetic Evolvability: Using a Restricted Pluralism to Tidy Up the Evolvability Concept.Mitchell Ryan Distin - forthcoming - London, UK: Springer Nature.
    Advances in the empirical sectors of biology are beginning to reveal evolvability as a major evolutionary process. Yet evolvability’s theoretical role is still intensely debated. Since its inception nearly thirty years ago, the evolvability research front has put a strong emphasis on the non-genetic mechanisms that influence the short-term evolvability of individuals within populations by causing phenotypic heterogeneity, such as developmental trait plasticity, phenotypic plasticity, modularity, the G-P map, robustness, and/or epigenetic variation. However, genetic evolvability mechanisms such as mutation (...)
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    Globalization and Transformation : State, Ideas, and Economic Policy in Bangladesh.A. S. M. Mostafizur Rahman - 2024 - Dissertation, Heidelberg University
    Understanding the policymaking process in an emerging economy in the global south, such as Bangladesh, holds significant importance. The country's remarkable socio-economic development, once the most impoverished in the region, has been facilitated by post-globalization economic transformation. While the literature on institutional change has predominantly focused on states in industrialist countries, this dissertation presents an innovative theoretical approach. It deeply explores primary case materials to illustrate how the state engages in policy evolution in a developing country's gradual shift from the (...)
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  36. Ellebogenwerk en stress. De evolutie staat nooit stil.Pouwel Slurink - 2000 - Filosofie Magazine 9 (08):40-45.
    Evolution never stops. Stress is often a manifestation of competition which seems to drive human gene-culture coevolution. A popular, Dutch account on evolution in everyday life. People often claim that we are thoroughly cultural beings, but culture is based on a series of talents which are a product of directional and stabilizing selection. Culture also presupposes certain psychological characteristics. People adopt and change culture to fit their biopsychological needs.
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  37. Mental causation without downward causation.John Gibbons - 2006 - Philosophical Review 115 (1):79-103.
    The problem of downward causation is that an intuitive response to an intuitive picture leads to counterintuitive results. Suppose a mental event, m1, causes another mental event, m2. Unless the mental and the physical are completely independent, there will be a physical event in your brain or your body or the physical world as a whole that underlies this event. The mental event occurs at least partly in virtue of the physical event’s occurring. And the same goes for m2 (...)
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  38. Probabilistic causation and causal processes: A critique of Lewis.Peter Menzies - 1989 - Philosophy of Science 56 (4):642-663.
    This paper examines a promising probabilistic theory of singular causation developed by David Lewis. I argue that Lewis' theory must be made more sophisticated to deal with certain counterexamples involving pre-emption. These counterexamples appear to show that in the usual case singular causation requires an unbroken causal process to link cause with effect. I propose a new probabilistic account of singular causation, within the framework developed by Lewis, which captures this intuition.
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  39. Causation: Determination and difference-making.Boris Kment - 2010 - Noûs 44 (1):80-111.
    Much of the modern philosophy of causation has been governed by two ideas: (i) causes make their effects inevitable; (ii) a cause is something that makes a difference to whether its effect occurs. I focus on explaining the origin of idea (ii) and its connection to (i). On my view, the frequent attempts to turn (ii) into an analysis of causation are wrongheaded. Patterns of difference-making aren't what makes causal claims true. They merely provide a useful test for (...)
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  40. Debunking Evolutionary Debunking.Katia Vavova - 2014 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 9:76-101.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments start with a premise about the influence of evolutionary forces on our evaluative beliefs, and conclude that we are not justified in those beliefs. The value realist holds that there are attitude-independent evaluative truths. But the debunker argues that we have no reason to think that the evolutionary forces that shaped human evaluative attitudes would track those truths. Worse yet, we seem to have a good reason to think that they wouldn’t: evolution selects for (...)
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  41. Causation and Time Reversal.Matt Farr - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (1):177-204.
    What would it be for a process to happen backwards in time? Would such a process involve different causal relations? It is common to understand the time-reversal invariance of a physical theory in causal terms, such that whatever can happen forwards in time can also happen backwards in time. This has led many to hold that time-reversal symmetry is incompatible with the asymmetry of cause and effect. This article critiques the causal reading of time reversal. First, I argue that the (...)
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  42. Evolutionary Debunking of Moral Realism.Katia Vavova - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (2):104-116.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments move from a premise about the influence of evolutionary forces on our moral beliefs to a skeptical conclusion about those beliefs. My primary aim is to clarify this empirically grounded epistemological challenge. I begin by distinguishing among importantly different sorts of epistemological attacks. I then demonstrate that instances of each appear in the literature under the ‘evolutionary debunking’ title. Distinguishing them clears up some confusions and helps us better understand the structure and potential of (...)
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  43. (1 other version)Causation and the Silly Norm Effect.Levin Güver & Markus Kneer - 2023 - In Stefan Magen & Karolina Prochownik (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Law. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 133–168.
    In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to (...)
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  44. Graded Causation and Moral Responsibility.Vera Hoffmann-Kolss & Matthias Rolffs - 2024 - Erkenntnis:1-19.
    Theories of graded causation attract growing attention in the philosophical debate on causation. An important field of application is the controversial relationship between causation and moral responsibility. However, it is still unclear how exactly the notion of graded causation should be understood in the context of moral responsibility. One question is whether we should endorse a proportionality principle, according to which the degree of an agent’s moral responsibility is proportionate to their degree of causal contribution. A (...)
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  45. Causation.Douglas Kutach - 2014 - Malden, MA: Polity.
    In most academic and non-academic circles throughout history, the world and its operation have been viewed in terms of cause and effect. The principles of causation have been applied, fruitfully, across the sciences, law, medicine, and in everyday life, despite the lack of any agreed-upon framework for understanding what causation ultimately amounts to. In this engaging and accessible introduction to the topic, Douglas Kutach explains and analyses the most prominent theories and examples in the philosophy of causation. (...)
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  46.  57
    Evolutionary Aesthetics.Luca Marchetti - 2024 - International Lexicon of Aesthetics.
    Evolutionary aesthetics (EA) investigates the origins and evolution of aesthetic preferences and artistic behaviors, along with the underlying capacities that support these preferences and behaviors. EA is a multidisciplinary approach that intersects various disciplines – e.g. evolutionary psychology, biology, neurosciences, art history, archeology, anthropology, philosophical aesthetics – providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the deep-rooted biological and evolutionary underpinnings of human aesthetic preferences and artistic expressions. Central to EA, in fact, is the exploration of when, how and (...)
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  47. Actual Causation: Apt Causal Models and Causal Relativism.Jennifer McDonald - 2022 - Dissertation, The Graduate Center, Cuny
    This dissertation begins by addressing the question of when a causal model is apt for deciding questions of actual causation with respect to some target situation. I first provide relevant background about causal models, explain what makes them promising as a tool for analyzing actual causation, and motivate the need for a theory of aptness as part of such an analysis (Chapter 1). I then define what it is for a model on a given interpretation to be accurate (...)
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  48. Mental Causation for Standard Dualists.Bram Vaassen - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (4):978-998.
    The standard objection to dualist theories of mind is that they seemingly cannot account for the obvious fact that mental phenomena cause our behaviour. On the plausible assumption that all our behaviour is physically necessitated by entirely physical phenomena, there appears to be no room for dualist mental causation. Some argue that dualists can address this problem by making minimal adjustments in their ontology. I argue that no such adjustments are required. Given recent developments in philosophy of causation, (...)
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  49. Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Meet Evolutionary Science.Arnon Levy & Yair Levy - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (3):491-509.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments appeal to selective etiologies of human morality in an attempt to undermine moral realism. But is morality actually the product of evolution by natural selection? Although debunking arguments have attracted considerable attention in recent years, little of it has been devoted to whether the underlying evolutionary assumptions are credible. In this paper, we take a closer look at the evolutionary hypotheses put forward by two leading debunkers, namely Sharon Street and Richard Joyce. We raise (...)
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  50. Causation comes in degrees.Huzeyfe Demirtas - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-17.
    Which country, politician, or policy is more of a cause of the Covid-19 pandemic death toll? Which of the two factories causally contributed more to the pollution of the nearby river? A wide-ranging portion of our everyday thought and talk, and attitudes rely on a graded notion of causation. However, it is sometimes highlighted that on most contemporary accounts, causation is on-off. Some philosophers further question the legitimacy of talk of degrees of causation and suggest that we (...)
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