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  1. Mechanisms, Laws, and Regularities.Holly K. Andersen - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (2):325-331.
    Leuridan (2010) argued that mechanisms cannot provide a genuine alternative to laws of nature as a model of explanation in the sciences, and advocates Mitchell’s (1997) pragmatic account of laws. I first demonstrate that Leuridan gets the order of priority wrong between mechanisms, regularity, and laws, and then make some clarifying remarks about how laws and mechanisms relate to regularities. Mechanisms are not an explanatory alternative to regularities; they are an alternative to laws. The existence of stable regularities in nature (...)
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  2. Blazing: Du Châtelet as central to the first paradigm in Newtonian mechanics.Holly K. Andersen - forthcoming - In Fatema Amijee (ed.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Du Châtelet. Bloomsbury.
    I argue for two main points in historiography of physics regarding the significance of Du Châtelet's Foundations of Physics in the development of mechanics. The first is that, despite Du Châtelet calling it a textbook in the Preface, it should not be understood as 'merely' a textbook. Instead, it fits in a tradition of women involved in natural philosophy in that era using liminal publication opportunities, and to reduce some of the resistance to their publication. Even these liminal opportunities were (...)
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  3. Pattern Ontologies at Work.Holly K. Andersen - forthcoming - In Roberto Gronda (ed.), Pragmatism and Philosophy of Science. Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science series.
    Patterns and pattern ontologies are a powerful way for pragmatists to address metaphysical issues by rejecting a false dichotomy between pluralism and realism. However, there is a common misconception about patterns that I call the philosophically perverse patterns (PPP) problem. Here, critics of patterns invent perverse examples that meet the metaphysical criteria to count as patterns. I defuse this concern by showing how PPP misunderstands what the pragmatist metaphysics of patterns is supposed to accomplish: the bare definition should not rule (...)
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  4. Reduction in the Biomedical Sciences.Holly K. Andersen - 2016 - In Miriam Solomon, Jeremy R. Simon & Harold Kincaid (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Medicine. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This chapter discusses several kinds of reduction that are often found in the biomedical sciences, in contrast to reduction in fields such as physics. This includes reduction as a methodological assumption for how to investigate phenomena like complex diseases, and reduction as a conceptual tool for relating distinct models of the same phenomenon. The case of Parkinson’s disease illustrates a wide variety of ways in which reductionism is an important tool in medicine.
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