Results for 'continuity theory'

948 found
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  1. Causal copersonality: in defence of the psychological continuity theory.Simon Beck - 2011 - South African Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):244-255.
    The view that an account of personal identity can be provided in terms of psychological continuity has come under fire from an interesting new angle in recent years. Critics from a variety of rival positions have argued that it cannot adequately explain what makes psychological states co-personal (i.e. the states of a single person). The suggestion is that there will inevitably be examples of states that it wrongly ascribes using only the causal connections available to it. In this paper, (...)
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  2. Continuous Lattices and Whiteheadian Theory of Space.Thomas Mormann - 1998 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 6:35 - 54.
    In this paper a solution of Whitehead’s problem is presented: Starting with a purely mereological system of regions a topological space is constructed such that the class of regions is isomorphic to the Boolean lattice of regular open sets of that space. This construction may be considered as a generalized completion in analogy to the well-known Dedekind completion of the rational numbers yielding the real numbers . The argument of the paper relies on the theories of continuous lattices and “pointless” (...)
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  3. Continuing commentary : challenges or misunderstandings? A defence of the two-factor theory against the challenges to its logic.Chenwei Nie - 2019 - Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 24 (4):300-307.
    Corlett (2019) raises two groups of challenges against the two-factor theory of delusions: One focuses on weighing “the evidence for … the two-factor theory”; the other aims to question “the logic of the two-factor theory” (p. 166). McKay (2019) has robustly defended the two-factor theory against the first group. But the second group, which Corlett believes is in many aspects independent of the first group and Darby (2019, p. 180) takes as “[t]he most important challenge to (...)
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  4. Personal Continuity and Instrumental Rationality in Rawls’ Theory of Justice.Adrian M. S. Piper - 1987 - Social Theory and Practice 13 (1):49-76.
    I want to examine the implications of a metaphysical thesis which is presupposed in various objections to Rawls' theory of justice.Although their criticisms differ in many respects, they concur in employing what I shall refer to as the continuity thesis. This consists of the following claims conjointly: (1) The parties in the original position (henceforth the OP) are, and know themselves to be, fully mature persons who will be among the members of the well-ordered society (henceforth the WOS) (...)
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  5. Continuity and break points: some aspects of the contemporary debate in narrative theory.Franco Passalacqua & Federico Pianzola - 2011 - Enthymema (4):19-34.
    This article presents some reflections on the concepts, terminology, and epistemological grounds of narrative theory. Our remarks are focused on the proposals advanced at the first RRN conference and they concern in particular two issues: the theoretical difference between classical and postclassical narratology and the paradigms of the contemporary debate. In the first part of the paper we focus on the definitional task of narrative theory; in the second part we describe the epistemology of and the theories built (...)
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  6. The Extreme Claim, Psychological Continuity and the Person Life View.Simon Beck - 2015 - South African Journal of Philosophy 34 (3):314-322.
    Marya Schechtman has raised a series of worries for the Psychological Continuity Theory of personal identity (PCT) stemming out of what Derek Parfit called the ‘Extreme Claim’. This is roughly the claim that theories like it are unable to explain the importance we attach to personal identity. In her recent Staying Alive (2014), she presents further arguments related to this and sets out a new narrative theory, the Person Life View (PLV), which she sees as solving the (...)
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  7. (1 other version)What Matters in Survival: Self-determination and The Continuity of Life Trajectories.Heidi Savage - 2024 - Acta Analytica 39 (1):37-56.
    In this paper, I argue that standard psychological continuity theory does not account for an important feature of what is important in survival – having the property of personhood. I offer a theory that can account for this, and I explain how it avoids the implausible consequences of standard psychological continuity theory, as well as having certain other advantages over that theory.
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  8. Continuity of change in Kant’s dynamics.Michael Bennett McNulty - 2019 - Synthese 196 (4):1595-1622.
    Since his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft was first published in 1786, controversy has surrounded Immanuel Kant’s conception of matter. In particular, the justification for both his dynamical theory of matter and the related dismissal of mechanical philosophy are obscure. In this paper, I address these longstanding issues and establish that Kant’s dynamism rests upon Leibnizian, metaphysical commitments held by Kant from his early pre-Critical texts on natural philosophy to his major critical works. I demonstrate that, throughout his corpus and (...)
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  9. Continuity and catastrophic risk.H. Orri Stefánsson - 2022 - Economics and Philosophy 38 (2):266-274.
    Suppose that a decision-maker's aim, under certainty, is to maximise some continuous value, such as lifetime income or continuous social welfare. Can such a decision-maker rationally satisfy what has been called "continuity for easy cases" while at the same time satisfying what seems to be a widespread intuition against the full-blown continuity axiom of expected utility theory? In this note I argue that the answer is "no": given transitivity and a weak trade-off principle, continuity for easy (...)
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  10. Consciousness and Continuity.Andrew Y. Lee - manuscript
    Let a "smooth experience" be an experience with perfectly gradual changes in phenomenal character. Consider, as examples, your visual experience of a blue sky or your auditory experience of a rising pitch. Do the phenomenal characters of smooth experiences have continuous or discrete structures? If we appeal merely to introspection, then it may seem that we should think that smooth experiences are continuous. This paper (1) uses formal tools to clarify what it means to say that an experience is continuous (...)
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  11. Continuous Organismic Sentience as the Integration of Core Affect and Vitality.Ignacio Cea & David Martínez-Pernía - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (3-4):7-33.
    In consciousness studies there is a growing tendency to consider experience as (i) fundamentally affective and (ii) deeply interlinked with interoceptive and homeostatic bodily processes. However, this view still needs further development to be part of any rigorous theory of consciousness. To advance in this direction, we ask: (1) is there any affective type that is always present in consciousness?, (2) is it related to interoception and homeostasis?, and (3) what are its properties? Here we analyse and compare Jim (...)
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  12. Life-mind continuity: untangling categorical, extensional, and systematic aspects.Sebastian Sander Oest - 2024 - Synthese 203 (6):1-22.
    In this paper, I argue that current attempts at classifying life–mind continuity (LMC) feature several important ambiguities. We can resolve these ambiguities by distinguishing between the extensional, categorical, and systematic relationships that LMC might encompass. In Sect. 1, I begin by introducing the notion of LMC and the theory behind it. In Sect. 2, I show how different ideas of mind shape different approaches to continuity and how to achieve its aim. In Sect. 3, I canvas various (...)
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  13. Psychological Continuity, Fission, and the Non-Branching Constraint.Robert Francescotti - 2008 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (1):21-31.
    Abstract: Those who endorse the Psychological Continuity Approach (PCA) to analyzing personal identity need to impose a non-branching constraint to get the intuitively correct result that in the case of fission, one person becomes two. With the help of Brueckner's (2005) discussion, it is shown here that the sort of non-branching clause that allows proponents of PCA to provide sufficient conditions for being the same person actually runs contrary to the very spirit of their theory. The problem is (...)
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  14. Disadvantage, Autonomy, and the Continuity Test.Ben Colburn - 2014 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (3):254-270.
    The Continuity Test is the principle that a proposed distribution of resources is wrong if it treats someone as disadvantaged when they don't see it that way themselves, for example by offering compensation for features that they do not themselves regard as handicaps. This principle — which is most prominently developed in Ronald Dworkin's defence of his theory of distributive justice — is an attractive one for a liberal to endorse as part of her theory of distributive (...)
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  15. Mental filing, continued.Rachel Goodman & Aidan Gray - 2024 - Synthese 204 (1):1-26.
    According to traditional versions of the mental file theory, we should posit _mental files_—that is, mental representations with containment structure—to explain both rational relations between the attitudes, and the persistence of the attitudes across time. However, Goodman and Gray ( 2022 ) offer a revisionary interpretation of the file framework, according to which its explanatory commitments are better presented by positing _mental filing_, as a process, but not _mental files_, as mental representations with file structure. Goodman and Gray focus (...)
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  16. Continuity and Discontinuity in Visual Experience.Michael A. R. Biggs - 1992 - Critica 24 (70):3-15.
    This paper investigates the role of visual experience in Wittgenstein's work. The specific thesis is that visual experience provides not only diverse illustrative examples of what could be an explanation of meaning, but that it also provides a recurrent metaphor for the whole process of meaning and understanding. Wittgenstein uses a great number of visual examples in his texts. Their diversity may be accounted for by the great diversity of ways in which he attempts to describe the relationship between a (...)
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  17. Temporal externalism, conceptual continuity, meaning, and use.Henry Jackman - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10):959-973.
    ABSTRACT Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either that future use must be added to the grounding base, or that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, (...)
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  18. Psychological Continuity: A Discussion of Marc Slors’s Account, Traumatic Experience, and the Significance of Our Relations to Others.Pieranna Garavaso - 2014 - Journal of Philosophical Research 39:101-125.
    This paper addresses a question concerning psycho­logical continuity, i.e., which features preserve the same psychological subject over time; this is not the same question as the one concerning the necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity. Marc Slors defends an account of psychological continuity that adds two features to Derek Parfit’s Relation R, namely narrativity and embodiment. Slors’s account is a significant improvement on Parfit’s, but still lacks an explicit acknowledgment of a third feature that I call relationality. (...)
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  19. Continuity as vagueness: The mathematical antecedents of Peirce’s semiotics.Peter Ochs - 1993 - Semiotica 96 (3-4):231-256.
    In the course of. his philosophic career, Charles Peirce made repeated attempts to construct mathematical definitions of the commonsense or experimental notion of 'continuity'. In what I will label his Final Definition of Continuity, however, Peirce abandoned the attempt to achieve mathe­matical definition and assigned the analysis of continuity to an otherwise unnamed extra-mathematical science. In this paper, I identify the Final Definition, attempt to define its terms, and suggest that it belongs to Peirce's emergent semiotics of (...)
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  20. Sensorimotor Theory and Enactivism.Jan Degenaar & J. Kevin O’Regan - 2017 - Topoi 36 (3):393-407.
    The sensorimotor theory of perceptual consciousness offers a form of enactivism in that it stresses patterns of interaction instead of any alleged internal representations of the environment. But how does it relate to forms of enactivism stressing the continuity between life and mind? We shall distinguish sensorimotor enactivism, which stresses perceptual capacities themselves, from autopoietic enactivism, which claims an essential connection between experience and autopoietic processes or associated background capacities. We show how autopoiesis, autonomous agency, and affective dimensions (...)
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  21. Discrete and continuous: a fundamental dichotomy in mathematics.James Franklin - 2017 - Journal of Humanistic Mathematics 7 (2):355-378.
    The distinction between the discrete and the continuous lies at the heart of mathematics. Discrete mathematics (arithmetic, algebra, combinatorics, graph theory, cryptography, logic) has a set of concepts, techniques, and application areas largely distinct from continuous mathematics (traditional geometry, calculus, most of functional analysis, differential equations, topology). The interaction between the two – for example in computer models of continuous systems such as fluid flow – is a central issue in the applicable mathematics of the last hundred years. This (...)
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  22.  51
    Continuing the search for structure of the experiencing subject.Silvere Gangloff - manuscript
    In the last decades, the development of advanced imagery techniques made possible a better understanding of the functioning of the brain as well as the formulation of cognitive theories on how conscious experience may rise from its activity. However, it is sometimes challenging to distin- guish which of these theories are actually about consciousness (addressing ‘easy’ problems instead of the hard problem). In this text, I put into evidence that, for two prominent of these theories, what makes them the- ories (...)
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  23. Psychological continuity, fission, and the non-branching constraint.By Robert Francescotti - 2008 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (1):21–31.
    Those who endorse the Psychological Continuity Approach (PCA) to analyzing personal identity need to impose a non-branching constraint to get the intuitively correct result that in the case of fission, one person becomes two. With the help of Brueckner's (2005) discussion, it is shown here that the sort of non-branching clause that allows proponents of PCA to provide sufficient conditions for being the same person actually runs contrary to the very spirit of their theory. The problem is first (...)
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  24. On the continuum fallacy: is temperature a continuous function?Aditya Jha, Douglas Campbell, Clemency Montelle & Phillip L. Wilson - 2023 - Foundations of Physics 53 (69):1-29.
    It is often argued that the indispensability of continuum models comes from their empirical adequacy despite their decoupling from the microscopic details of the modelled physical system. There is thus a commonly held misconception that temperature varying across a region of space or time can always be accurately represented as a continuous function. We discuss three inter-related cases of temperature modelling — in phase transitions, thermal boundary resistance and slip flows — and show that the continuum view is fallacious on (...)
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  25. Ideal Theory, Literary Theory, Whither Transfeminism?Matthew J. Cull - 2025 - In Hilkje Charlotte Hänel & Johanna M. Müller (eds.), The Routledge handbook of non-ideal theory. New York, NY: Routledge.
    In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting (...)
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  26. The Continuous Model of Culture: Modernity Decline—a Eurocentric Bias? An Attempt to Introduce an Absolute value into a Model of Culture.Giorgi Kankava - 2013 - Human Studies 36 (3):411-433.
    This paper means to demonstrate the theoretical-and- methodological potential of a particular pattern of thought about culture. Employing an end-means and absolute value plus concept of reality approach, the continuous model of culture aims to embrace from one holistic standpoint various concepts and debates of the modern human, social, and political sciences. The paper revisits the debates of fact versus value, nature versus culture, culture versus structure, agency versus structure, and economics versus politics and offers the concepts of the rule (...)
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  27. (1 other version)Structural realism: Continuity and its limits.Ioannis Votsis - 2011 - In Alisa Bokulich & Peter Bokulich (eds.), Scientific Structuralism. Springer Science+Business Media. pp. 105--117.
    Structural realists of nearly all stripes endorse the structural continuity claim. Roughly speaking, this is the claim that the structure of successful scientific theories survives theory change because it has latched on to the structure of the world. In this paper I elaborate, elucidate and modify the structural continuity claim and its associated argument. I do so without presupposing a particular conception of structure that favours this or that kind of structural realism. Instead I focus on how (...)
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  28. Systematicity theory meets Socratic scientific realism: the systematic quest for truth.Timothy D. Lyons - 2019 - Synthese 196 (3):833-861.
    Systematicity theory—developed and articulated by Paul Hoyningen-Huene—and scientific realism constitute separate encompassing and empirical accounts of the nature of science. Standard scientific realism asserts the axiological thesis that science seeks truth and the epistemological thesis that we can justifiably believe our successful theories at least approximate that aim. By contrast, questions pertaining to truth are left “outside” systematicity theory’s “intended scope” ; the scientific realism debate is “simply not” its “focus”. However, given the continued centrality of that debate (...)
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  29. Constructing a Naturalistic Theory of Intentionality.J. H. van Hateren - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (1):473-493.
    A naturalistic theory of intentionality is proposed that differs from previous evolutionary and tracking theories. Full-blown intentionality is constructed through a series of evolvable refinements. A first, minimal version of intentionality originates from a conjectured internal process that estimates an organism’s own fitness and that continually modifies the organism. This process produces the directedness of intentionality. The internal estimator can be parsed into intentional components that point to components of the process that produces fitness. It is argued that such (...)
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  30. The Continuity of Action and Thinking in Learning.Bente Elkjaer - 2000 - Outlines. Critical Practice Studies 2 (1):85-102.
    In recent years, there have been many attempts at defining learning as a social phenomenon as opposed to an individual and primarily psychological matter. The move towards understanding learning as social processes has also altered the concept of knowledge as a well-defined element stored in books, brains, CD-Roms, disks, videos or on the Internet. Instead, knowledge has been perceived as a social and context related construction. The roots of the social angle within theories on learning and knowledge are much older (...)
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  31. Metaphysics of Change and Continuity: Exactly What is Changing and What Gets Continued?Soraj Hongladarom - 2015 - Kilikya Felsefe Dergisi / Cilicia Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):41-60.
    This is a metaphysical and conceptual analysis of the concepts ‘change’ and ‘continuity’. The Buddhists are in agreement with Heraclitus that all are flowing and nothing remains. However, the Buddhists have a much more elaborate theory about change and continuity, and this theory is a key element in the entire Buddhist system of related doctrines, viz., that of karma and rebirth, the possibility of Liberation and others. Simply put, the Buddhist emphasizes that change is there in (...)
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  32. Just Cause and the Continuous Application of Jus ad Bellum.Uwe Steinhoff - forthcoming - In Larry May May, Shannon Elizabeth Fyfe & Eric Joseph Ritter (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook on Just War Theory. Cambridge University Press.
    What one is ultimately interested in with regard to ‘just cause’ is whether a specific war, actual or potential, is justified. I call this ‘the applied question’. Answering this question requires knowing the empirical facts on the ground. However, an answer to the applied question regarding a specific war requires a prior answer to some more general questions, both descriptive and normative. These questions are: What kind of thing is a ‘just cause’ for war (an aim, an injury or wrong (...)
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  33. Kantian Themes in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception.Samantha Matherne - 2016 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 98 (2):193-230.
    It has become typical to read Kant and Merleau-Ponty as offering competing approaches to perceptual experience. Kant is interpreted as an ‘intellectualist’ who regards perception as conceptual ‘all the way out’, while Merleau-Ponty is seen as Kant’s challenger, who argues that perception involves non-conceptual, embodied ‘coping’. In this paper, however, I argue that a closer examination of their views of perception, especially with respect to the notion of ‘schematism’, reveals a great deal of historical and philosophical continuity between them. (...)
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  34. Evaluating Time-Continuous Action Alternatives from the Perspective of Negative Utilitarianism: a Layered Approach.Erich Rast - 2013 - Proceedings of the GV-Conf 2013.
    A layered approach to the evaluation of action alternatives with continuous time for decision making under the moral doctrine of Negative Utilitarianism is presented and briefly discussed from a philosophical perspective.
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  35. Confronting Language, Representation, and Belief: A Limited Defense of Mental Continuity.Kristin Andrews & Ljiljana Radenovic - 2012 - In Shackelford Todd & Vonk Jennifer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford University Press. pp. 39-60.
    According to the mental continuity claim (MCC), human mental faculties are physical and beneficial to human survival, so they must have evolved gradually from ancestral forms and we should expect to see their precursors across species. Materialism of mind coupled with Darwin’s evolutionary theory leads directly to such claims and even today arguments for animal mental properties are often presented with the MCC as a premise. However, the MCC has been often challenged among contemporary scholars. It is usually (...)
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  36. Critical Race Structuralism and Non-Ideal Theory.Elena Ruíz & Nora Berenstain - 2025 - In Hilkje Charlotte Hänel & Johanna M. Müller (eds.), The Routledge handbook of non-ideal theory. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolonial approach (...)
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  37. The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes.Sean M. Carroll - 2022 - In Meir Hemmo, Stavros Ioannidis, Orly Shenker & Gal Vishne (eds.), Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy: Re-Examining the Multi-Level Structure of Reality. Springer. pp. 27-46.
    Effective Field Theory (EFT) is the successful paradigm underlying modern theoretical physics, including the "Core Theory" of the Standard Model of particle physics plus Einstein's general relativity. I will argue that EFT grants us a unique insight: each EFT model comes with a built-in specification of its domain of applicability. Hence, once a model is tested within some domain (of energies and interaction strengths), we can be confident that it will continue to be accurate within that domain. Currently, (...)
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  38. A Model-Invariant Theory of Causation.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (1):45-96.
    I provide a theory of causation within the causal modeling framework. In contrast to most of its predecessors, this theory is model-invariant in the following sense: if the theory says that C caused (didn't cause) E in a causal model, M, then it will continue to say that C caused (didn't cause) E once we've removed an inessential variable from M. I suggest that, if this theory is true, then we should understand a cause as something (...)
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  39. Developmental Systems Theory as a Process Theory.Paul Edmund Griffiths & Karola Stotz - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 225-245.
    Griffiths and Russell D. Gray (1994, 1997, 2001) have argued that the fundamental unit of analysis in developmental systems theory should be a process – the life cycle – and not a set of developmental resources and interactions between those resources. The key concepts of developmental systems theory, epigenesis and developmental dynamics, both also suggest a process view of the units of development. This chapter explores in more depth the features of developmental systems theory that favour treating (...)
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  40. A Theory of Granular Partitions.Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith - 2003 - In Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild & Michael Worboys (eds.), Foundations of Geographic Information Science. London: Taylor & Francis. pp. 117-151.
    We have a variety of different ways of dividing up, classifying, mapping, sorting and listing the objects in reality. The theory of granular partitions presented here seeks to provide a general and unified basis for understanding such phenomena in formal terms that is more realistic than existing alternatives. Our theory has two orthogonal parts: the first is a theory of classification; it provides an account of partitions as cells and subcells; the second is a theory of (...)
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  41. Similarity and Continuous Quality Distributions.Thomas Mormann - 1996 - The Monist 79 (1):76-88.
    In the philosophy of the analytical tradition, set theory and formal logic are familiar formal tools. I think there is no deep reason why the philosopher’s tool kit should be restricted to just these theories. It might well be the case—to generalize a dictum of Suppes concerning philosophy of science—that the appropriate formal device for doing philosophy is mathematics in general; it may be set theory, algebra, topology, or any other realm of mathematics. In this paper I want (...)
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  42. Remembering, Imagining, and Memory Traces: Toward a Continuist Causal Theory.Peter Langland-Hassan - 2022 - In Andre Sant'Anna, Christopher McCarroll & Kourken Michaelian (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Memory. Current Controversies in Philosophy.
    The (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory concerns whether remembering is continuous with episodic future thought and episodic counterfactual thought in being a form of constructive imagining. I argue that settling that dispute will hinge on whether the memory traces (or “engrams”) that support remembering impose arational, perception-like constraints that are too strong for remembering to constitute a kind of constructive imagining. In exploring that question, I articulate two conceptions of memory traces—the replay theory and (...)
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  43. Middle Theory, Inner Freedom, and Moral Health.Donald Wilson - 2007 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (4):393 - 413.
    In her influential book, The Practice of Moral Judgment, Barbara Herman argues that Kantian ethics requires a “middle theory” applying formal rational constraints on willing to the particular circumstances and nature of human existence. I claim that a promising beginning to such a theory can be found in Kant’s discussion of duties of virtue in The Metaphysics of Morals. I argue that Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties of virtue should be understood as a distinction between duties (...)
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  44. Neutral and niche theory in community ecology: a framework for comparing model realism.Katie H. Morrow - 2024 - Biology and Philosophy 39 (1):1-19.
    Ecological neutral theory has been controversial as an alternative to niche theory for explaining community structure. Neutral theory, which explains community structure in terms of ecological drift, is frequently charged with being unrealistic, but commentators have usually not provided an account of theory or model realism. In this paper, I propose a framework for comparing the “realism” or accuracy of alternative theories within a domain with respect to the extent to which the theories abstract and idealize. (...)
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  45. Assessing theories, Bayes style.Franz Huber - 2008 - Synthese 161 (1):89-118.
    The problem addressed in this paper is “the main epistemic problem concerning science”, viz. “the explication of how we compare and evaluate theories [...] in the light of the available evidence” (van Fraassen, BC, 1983, Theory comparison and relevant Evidence. In J. Earman (Ed.), Testing scientific theories (pp. 27–42). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Sections 1– 3 contain the general plausibility-informativeness theory of theory assessment. In a nutshell, the message is (1) that there are two values a (...)
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  46. Transplant Thought-Experiments: Two costly mistakes in discounting them.Simon Beck - 2014 - South African Journal of Philosophy 33 (2):189-199.
    ‘Transplant’ thought-experiments, in which the cerebrum is moved from one body to another, have featured in a number of recent discussions in the personal identity literature. Once taken as offering confirmation of some form of psychological continuity theory of identity, arguments from Marya Schechtman and Kathleen Wilkes have contended that this is not the case. Any such apparent support is due to a lack of detail in their description or a reliance on predictions that we are in no (...)
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  47. Bundle Theory and the Identity of Indiscernibles.Philip Swenson & Bradley Rettler - 2019 - Res Philosophica 96 (4):495-508.
    A and B continue their conversation concerning the Identity of Indiscernibles. Both are aware of recent critiques of the principle that haven’t received replies; B summarizes those critiques, and A offers the replies that are due. B then raises a new worry.
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  48.  59
    Theory-construction in comparative cognition: assessing the case of animal normativity.Nicolás Sebastián Sánchez - 2024 - ArtefaCToS. Revista de Estudios Sobre la Ciencia y la Tecnología 13 (1):255-277.
    With an extensive amount of research on the social lives of primates, Frans de Waal has been a pioneering advocate for the continuity of human and non-human minds, putting forward the idea that these creatures exhibit rudimentary political and moral behaviors. One of the traits which de Waal focuses on is animal normativity, a set of behaviors functionally defined as adherence to social standards. Recently, some philosophers have endorsed this position, holding that animals show a psychological capacity called normative (...)
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  49. Biopolitics of COVID-19: Capitalist Continuities and Democratic Openings.Karsten Schubert - 2022 - Interalia - a Journal for Queer Studies (16 (2021)):95-105.
    "Biopolitics" has become a popular concept for interpreting the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the term is often used vaguely, as a buzzword, and therefore loses its specificity and relevance. This article systematically explains what the biopolitical lens offers for analyzing and normatively criticizing the politics of the coronavirus. I argue that biopolitics are politics of differentiated vulnerability that are intrinsic to capitalist modernity. The situation resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is, therefore, less of a state of exception than it might appear; (...)
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  50. An Individualist Theory of Meaning.Jesper Ahlin Marceta - 2021 - Journal of Value Inquiry 57 (1):41-58.
    According to some critics of liberal individualism, it is fundamentally problematic that individualists focus on rights instead of community and on decision-making processes instead of substantial goods. Among other things, it is claimed that liberal individualism therefore fails to provide meaning to people’s lives. The view has recently gained momentum as it has been incorporated in novel conservative and nationalist arguments. This article presents an individualist theory of meaning in response to a recent nationalist reiteration of the critique. The (...)
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