Results for 'mirror mechanism'

950 found
Order:
  1. Beyond sensorimotor segregation: On mirror neurons and social affordance space tracking.Maria Brincker - 2015 - Cognitive Systems Research 34:18-34.
    Mirror neuron research has come a long way since the early 1990s, and many theorists are now stressing the heterogeneity and complexity of the sensorimotor properties of fronto-parietal circuits. However, core aspects of the initial ‘ mirror mechanism ’ theory, i.e. the idea of a symmetric encapsulated mirroring function translating sensory action perceptions into motor formats, still appears to be shaping much of the debate. This article challenges the empirical plausibility of the sensorimotor segregation implicit in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  2. Moving Beyond Mirroring - a Social Affordance Model of Sensorimotor Integration During Action Perception.Maria Brincker - 2010 - Dissertation, City University of New York
    The discovery of so-called ‘mirror neurons’ - found to respond both to own actions and the observation of similar actions performed by others - has been enormously influential in the cognitive sciences and beyond. Given the self-other symmetry these neurons have been hypothesized as underlying a ‘mirror mechanism’ that lets us share representations and thereby ground core social cognitive functions from intention understanding to linguistic abilities and empathy. I argue that mirror neurons are important for very (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  3. Bounded Mirroring. Joint action and group membership in political theory and cognitive neuroscience.Machiel Keestra - 2012 - In Frank Vandervalk (ed.), Thinking about the Body Politic: Essays on Neuroscience and Political Theory. Routledge. pp. 222--249.
    A crucial socio-political challenge for our age is how to rede!ne or extend group membership in such a way that it adequately responds to phenomena related to globalization like the prevalence of migration, the transformation of family and social networks, and changes in the position of the nation state. Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant assumed that international connectedness between humans would inevitably lead to the realization of world citizen rights. Nonetheless, globalization does not just foster cosmopolitanism but simultaneously yields the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  4. After all, it’s still replication: A reply to Jacob on simulation and mirror neurons.Luca Barlassina - 2011 - Res Cogitans 8 (1):92-111.
    Mindreading is the ability to attribute mental states to other individuals. According to the simulation theory (ST), mindreading is based on the ability the mind has of replicating others' mental states and processes. Mirror neurons (MNs) are a class of neurons that fire both when an agent performs a goal-directed action and when she observes the same type of action performed by another individual. Since MNs appear to form a replicative mechanism in which a portion of the observer's (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  5. Equilibrium explanation as structural non-mechanistic explanation: The case long-term bacterial persistence in human hosts.Javier Suárez & Roger Deulofeu - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 3 (38):95-120.
    Philippe Huneman has recently questioned the widespread application of mechanistic models of scientific explanation based on the existence of structural explanations, i.e. explanations that account for the phenomenon to be explained in virtue of the mathematical properties of the system where the phenomenon obtains, rather than in terms of the mechanisms that causally produce the phenomenon. Structural explanations are very diverse, including cases like explanations in terms of bowtie structures, in terms of the topological properties of the system, or in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  6. (1 other version) Seeing with the hands.Sinigaglia Corrado - 2012 - In Paglieri F. (ed.), Consciousness in interaction: the role of the natural and social context in shaping consciousness. John Benjamins.
    When witnessing someone else's action people often take advantage of the same motor cognition that is crucial to successfully perform that action themselves. But how deeply is motor cognition involved in understanding another's action? Can it be selectively modulated by either the agent's or the witness's being actually in the position to act? If this is the case, what does such modulation imply for one's making sense of others? The paper aims to tackle these issues by introducing and discussing a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Manifestly Covariant Lagrangians, Classical Particles with Spin, and the Origins of Gauge Invariance.Jacob Barandes - manuscript
    In this paper, we review a general technique for converting the standard Lagrangian description of a classical system into a formulation that puts time on an equal footing with the system's degrees of freedom. We show how the resulting framework anticipates key features of special relativity, including the signature of the Minkowski metric tensor and the special role played by theories that are invariant under a generalized notion of Lorentz transformations. We then use this technique to revisit a classification of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  8. Integrating cognitive (neuro)science using mechanisms.Marcin Miłkowski - 2016 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies (2):45-67.
    In this paper, an account of theoretical integration in cognitive (neuro)science from the mechanistic perspective is defended. It is argued that mechanistic patterns of integration can be better understood in terms of constraints on representations of mechanisms, not just on the space of possible mechanisms, as previous accounts of integration had it. This way, integration can be analyzed in more detail with the help of constraintsatisfaction account of coherence between scientific representations. In particular, the account has resources to talk of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  9. Space: Negative Selection, Physical Constraint and Symmetry.Marvin E. Kirsh - manuscript
    A descriptive role is suggested for uracil as a temporal divide in the immediate aspects of metabolism verses long term maintained genetic transmission. In particular, details of the mechanism of excision repair of uracil from DNA based on differential parameters of spatial distortion of the planar uracil molecule within the DNA helix verses RNA, when viewed in analogy to a proposed model for space involving the substitution of the act of mirroring for the element of time in processes and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. Noise from the Periphery in Autism.Maria Brincker & Elizabeth B. Torres - 2013 - Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 7:34.
    No two individuals with the autism diagnosis are ever the same—yet many practitioners and parents can recognize signs of ASD very rapidly with the naked eye. What, then, is this phenotype of autism that shows itself across such distinct clinical presentations and heterogeneous developments? The “signs” seem notoriously slippery and resistant to the behavioral threshold categories that make up current assessment tools. Part of the problem is that cognitive and behavioral “abilities” typically are theorized as high-level disembodied and modular functions—that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  11. Neuroscientific Kinds Through the Lens of Scientific Practice.Jacqueline Anne Sullivan - 2015 - In Catherine Kendig (ed.), Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice. Routledge. pp. 47-56.
    In this chapter, I argue that scientific practice in the neurosciences of cognition is not conducive to the discovery of natural kinds of cognitive capacities. The “neurosciences of cognition” include cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology, two research areas that aim to understand how the brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. Some philosophers of neuroscience have claimed that explanatory progress in these research areas ultimately will result in the discovery of the underlying mechanisms of cognitive capacities. Once such mechanistic understanding (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  12. Automata, man-machines and embodiment: deflating or inflating Life?Charles T. Wolfe - forthcoming - In A. Radman & H. Sohn (eds.), Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press.
    Early modern automata, understood as efforts to ‘model’ life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. They challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported ‘mechanistic’ worldpicture, its ontology and its goals, and on the other (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13. Holoimmunity Revisited.Bartlomiej Swiatczak & Alfred I. Tauber - 2018 - Bioessays 40 (11):1800117.
    Commensal and pathogenic organisms employ camouflage and mimicry to mediate mutualistic interactions and predator escape. However, the immune mechanisms accounting for the establishment and maintenance of symbiotic bacterial populations are poorly understood. A promising hypothesis suggests that molecular mimicry, a condition in which different organisms share common antigens, is a mechanism of establishing tolerance between commensals and their hosts. On this view, certain bacteria may mimic the structural features of some of their host’s T-cell receptors (TCRs), namely those that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14. Freud's (de)Construction of the Conflictual Mind.José Brunner - 2002 - Thesis Eleven 71 (1):24-39.
    Freud uses paradoxical and conflictual rhetoric to create an unstable and conflictual picture of the mind. Thus he diverges from both dominant traditions of thought in the West: the Judeo-Christian way of filling all gaps in meaning by putting a single omnipotent divinity in charge of them, and the Enlightenment quest for a final, causal language to describe reality. By both suggesting and displacing a plurality of perspectives on the unconscious, Freud’s text mirrors what it claims happens in our minds, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  15. The Brand Imaginarium, or on the iconic constitution of brand image.George Rossolatos - 2015 - In Handbook of Brand Semiotics. Kassel: Kassel University Press. pp. 390-457.
    Brand image constitutes one of the most salient, over-defined, heavily explored and multifariously operationalized conceptual constructs in marketing theory and practice. In this Chapter, definitions of brand image that have been offered by marketing scholars will be critically addressed in the context of a culturally oriented discussion, informed by the semiotic notion of iconicity. This cultural bend, in conjunction with the concept’s semiotic contextualization, are expected both to dispel terminological confusions in the either inter-changeable or fuzzily differentiated employment of such (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. THE SPECTACLE OF REFLECTION: ON DREAMS, NEURAL NETWORKS AND THE VISUAL NATURE OF THOUGHT.Magdalena Szalewicz - manuscript
    The article considers the problem of images and the role they play in our reflection turning to evidence provided by two seemingly very distant theories of mind together with two sorts of corresponding visions: dreams as analyzed by Freud who claimed that they are pictures of our thoughts, and their mechanical counterparts produced by neural networks designed for object recognition and classification. Freud’s theory of dreams has largely been ignored by philosophers interested in cognition, most of whom focused solely on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  17. Mirror Neurons and Social Cognition.Shannon Spaulding - 2013 - Mind and Language 28 (2):233-257.
    Mirror neurons are widely regarded as an important key to social cognition. Despite such wide agreement, there is very little consensus on how or why they are important. The goal of this paper is to clearly explicate the exact role mirror neurons play in social cognition. I aim to answer two questions about the relationship between mirroring and social cognition: What kind of social understanding is involved with mirroring? How is mirroring related to that understanding? I argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  18. Mirrors and Misleading Appearances.Vivian Mizrahi - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):354-367.
    ABSTRACTAlthough philosophers have often insisted that specular perception is illusory or erroneous in nature, few have stressed the reliability and indispensability of mirrors as optical instrumen...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  19. Mirror neuron activity is no proof for action understanding.Alina Steinhorst & Joachim Funke - 2014 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8:1-4.
    We focus on the thesis that action understanding is a function of the mirror neuron system. According to our opinion, understanding is a process that runs through hermeneutic circles from the “Vorverständnis” (“previous understanding”) to steps of deeper understanding. Our critique relates to the narrow neuroscientific definition of action understanding as the capacity to recognize several movements as belonging to one action. After a reconstruction of the model's developments, we will challenge the claims of the model by Rizzolatti and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. Mirror, Mirror in the Brain, What's the Monkey Stand to Gain?Colin Allen - 2010 - Noûs 44 (2):372 - 391.
    Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called "mirror neurons" in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionahty, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  21. Social mirrors and shared experiential worlds.Charles Whitehead - 2001 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (4):3-36.
    We humans have a formidable armamentarium of social display behaviours, including song-and-dance, the visual arts, and role-play. Of these, role-play is probably the crucial adaptation which makes us most different from other apes. Human childhood, a sheltered period of ‘extended irresponsibility’, allows us to develop our powers of make-believe and role-play, prerequisites for human cooperation, culture, and reflective consciousness. Social mirror theory, originating with Dilthey, Baldwin, Cooley and Mead, holds that there cannot be mirrors in the mind without mirrors (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  22. Mechanistic Levels, Reduction, and Emergence.Mark Povich & Carl F. Craver - 2017 - In Stuart Glennan & Phyllis McKay Illari (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 185-97.
    We sketch the mechanistic approach to levels, contrast it with other senses of “level,” and explore some of its metaphysical implications. This perspective allows us to articulate what it means for things to be at different levels, to distinguish mechanistic levels from realization relations, and to describe the structure of multilevel explanations, the evidence by which they are evaluated, and the scientific unity that results from them. This approach is not intended to solve all metaphysical problems surrounding physicalism. Yet it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  23.  69
    The Contribution of the Rejection Mechanism to Scientific Knowledge Production: A View from Granular Interaction Thinking and Information Theories.Quan-Hoang Vuong & Minh-Hoang Nguyen - 2024 - Qeios Preprint.
    Rejection is an essential part of the scholarly publishing process, acting as a filter to distinguish between robust and less credible scientific works. This study examines the advantages and limitations of the rejection mechanism through the lens of Shannon’s information theory and the theory of granular interactions thinking. We argue that while rejection helps reduce entropy and increase the likelihood of disseminating useful knowledge, the process is not devoid of subjectivity. We propose two recommendations to improve the rejection (...): providing more informative rejection letters to guide authors and encouraging humility among editors and reviewers to minimize bias against novel ideas. These steps could enhance the efficiency of knowledge production by ensuring that valuable scientific contributions are not overlooked. (shrink)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. Vision, Mirror and Expression: The Genesis of the Ethical Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works.Alia Al-Saji - 2006 - In James Hatley (ed.), Interrogating Ethics: Embodying the Good in Merleau-Ponty. Duquesne. pp. 39-63.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  25. Mechanistic explanation without the ontic conception.Cory Wright - 2012 - European Journal of Philosophy of Science 2 (3):375-394.
    The ontic conception of scientific explanation has been constructed and motivated on the basis of a putative lexical ambiguity in the term explanation. I raise a puzzle for this ambiguity claim, and then give a deflationary solution under which all ontically-rendered talk of explanation is merely elliptical; what it is elliptical for is a view of scientific explanation that altogether avoids the ontic conception. This result has revisionary consequences for New Mechanists and other philosophers of science, many of whom have (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   40 citations  
  26. Mechanistic trends in chemistry.Louis Caruana - 2018 - Substantia 2 (1):29-40.
    During the twentieth century, the mechanistic worldview came under attack mainly because of the rise of quantum mechanics but some of its basic characteristics survived and are still evident within current science in some form or other. Many scholars have produced interesting studies of such significant mechanistic trends within current physics and biology but very few have bothered to explore the effects of this worldview on current chemistry. This paper makes a contribution to fill this gap. It presents first a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. Toward Mechanism 2.1: A Dynamic Causal Approach.Wei Fang - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (5):796-809.
    I propose a dynamic causal approach to characterizing the notion of a mechanism. Levy and Bechtel, among others, have pointed out several critical limitations of the new mechanical philosophy, and pointed in a new direction to extend this philosophy. Nevertheless, they have not fully fleshed out what that extended philosophy would look like. Based on a closer look at neuroscientific practice, I propose that a mechanism is a dynamic causal system that involves various components interacting, typically nonlinearly, with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  28.  94
    The mechanism of action in a spontaneous resolution of chronic depression, anxiety, and burnout—a retrospective case study.Mika Turkia - manuscript
    There is currently no generally agreed-upon definition of the mechanism of action of psychedelic therapy. Existing proposals have approached the issue from various perspectives, utilizing concepts on many layers of abstraction. Most commonly, mechanisms based on neurotransmitters have been proposed. From a clinical perspective, explanations on the psychological level would be more useful. This study provides one such explanation, focusing on the destabilization of trauma-related memories and their replacement with memories that allow for more adaptive behaviors. This mechanism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. The Mechanistic Approach to Psychiatric Classification.Elisabetta Sirgiovanni - 2009 - Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences 2 (2):45-49.
    A Kuhnian reformulation of the recent debate in psychiatric nosography suggested that the current psychiatric classification system (the DSM) is in crisis and that a sort of paradigm shift is awaited (Aragona, 2009). Among possible revolutionary alternatives, the proposed fi ve-axes etiopathogenetic taxonomy (Charney et al., 2002) emphasizes the primacy of the genotype over the phenomenological level as the relevant basis for psychiatric nosography. Such a position is along the lines of the micro-reductionist perspective of E. Kandel (1998, 1999), which (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  30. The Concept of Mechanism in Biology.Daniel J. Nicholson - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1):152-163.
    The concept of mechanism in biology has three distinct meanings. It may refer to a philosophical thesis about the nature of life and biology (‘mechanicism’), to the internal workings of a machine-like structure (‘machine mechanism’), or to the causal explanation of a particular phenomenon (‘causal mechanism’). In this paper I trace the conceptual evolution of ‘mechanism’ in the history of biology, and I examine how the three meanings of this term have come to be featured in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   79 citations  
  31. (1 other version)The Mechanism of Transbipolitical Transition in Geopolitics.Valentin Cheshko, Nina Konnova & Oleh Kuz - 2022 - Філософія Та Політологія В Контексті Сучасної Культури 14 (2):119-129.
    Problem Statement. The process of global evolution has entered the Anthropocene. This fact has almost simultaneously generated two cardinal, inseparable imperatives in the rapidly changing ideological and outlook basis of modern civilization. Firstly, the feeling that the new geological epoch also requires fundamentally new algorithms guiding practical activity and its theoretical comprehension, justification in all spheres of political reality, with inevitable exit to the level of international relations and geopolitics. Secondly, the content of the categories of ANTHROPOCEN and (GLOBAL) CRISIS (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32. Intersubjectivity, Mirror Neurons and the Limits of Naturalism.Anthony Longo - 2023 - In Andrej Božič (ed.), Thinking Togetherness: Phenomenology and Sociality. Institute Nova Reijva for the Humanities. pp. 103-116.
    The paper explores the possibilities and limits of naturalizing the experience of intersubjectivity. The existence of mirror neurons illustrates that an experience of intersubjectivity is already present on a more primitive, precognitive, and embodied level. A similar argument had been made in the first half of the twentieth century by phenomenologists, such as Edmund Husserl. This motivated Vittorio Gallese, one of the discoverers of mirror neurons, and other philosophers to connect the functioning of mirror neurons with Husserl’s (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. Mirroring,Symbolism and Need : A Two-Timing Nature or a Whole Concept.Marvin E. Kirsh - manuscript
    Methodology and theory in science are related to a philosophy in which the centric position of the first person, perception and cognition are made the exclusive focus for interpretation involving mirroring, symbolism, and need, criteria from which major first scientific works in Anthropology originated. A new orientation is found for some notions in physics and cosmology, especially those revolved around an ether as a substrate for the transmission of light that are used in explanation in Theory of Relativity, interpretation of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34. Mechanist idealisation in systems biology.Dingmar van Eck & Cory Wright - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1555-1575.
    This paper adds to the philosophical literature on mechanistic explanation by elaborating two related explanatory functions of idealisation in mechanistic models. The first function involves explaining the presence of structural/organizational features of mechanisms by reference to their role as difference-makers for performance requirements. The second involves tracking counterfactual dependency relations between features of mechanisms and features of mechanistic explanandum phenomena. To make these functions salient, we relate our discussion to an exemplar from systems biological research on the mechanism for (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  35. A Mechanistic Account of Wide Computationalism.Luke Kersten - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3):501-517.
    The assumption that psychological states and processes are computational in character pervades much of cognitive science, what many call the computational theory of mind. In addition to occupying a central place in cognitive science, the computational theory of mind has also had a second life supporting “individualism”, the view that psychological states should be taxonomized so as to supervene only on the intrinsic, physical properties of individuals. One response to individualism has been to raise the prospect of “wide computational systems”, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  36. Mechanistic Causation: Difference-Making is Enough.Stathis Psillos & Stavros Ioannidis - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 3 (38):53-75.
    In this paper we defend the view that mechanisms are underpinned by networks of difference-making relations. First, we distinguish and criticise two different kinds of arguments in favour of an activity-based understanding of mechanism: Glennan’s metaphysics- first approach and Illari and Williamson’s science-first approach. Second, we present an alternative difference-making view of mechanism and illustrate it by looking at the history of the case of scurvy prevention. We use the case of scurvy to argue that evidence for a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  37. Mechanistic Explanation in Psychology.Mark Povich - forthcoming - In Hank Stam & Huib Looren De Jong (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Theoretical Psychology. (Eds.) Hank Stam and Huib Looren de Jong. Sage.
    Philosophers of psychology debate, among other things, which psychological models, if any, are (or provide) mechanistic explanations. This should seem a little strange given that there is rough consensus on the following two claims: 1) a mechanism is an organized collection of entities and activities that produces, underlies, or maintains a phenomenon, and 2) a mechanistic explanation describes, represents, or provides information about the mechanism producing, underlying, or maintaining the phenomenon to be explained (i.e. the explanandum phenomenon) (Bechtel (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  38. Aristotelian Mechanistic Explanation.Monte Johnson - 2017 - In Julius Rocca (ed.), Teleology in the Ancient World: Philosophical and Medical Approaches. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 125-150.
    In some influential histories of ancient philosophy, teleological explanation and mechanistic explanation are assumed to be directly opposed and mutually exclusive alternatives. I contend that this assumption is deeply flawed, and distorts our understanding both of teleological and mechanistic explanation, and of the history of mechanistic philosophy. To prove this point, I shall provide an overview of the first systematic treatise on mechanics, the short and neglected work Mechanical Problems, written either by Aristotle or by a very early member of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  39. Mirrors, Windows, and Paintings.Calabi Clotilde, Huemer Wolfgang & Santambrogio Marco - 2022 - Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 1:22-32.
    What do we see in a mirror? There is an ongoing debate whether mirrors present us with images of objects or whether we see, through the mirror, the objects themselves. Roberto Casati has recently argued that there is a categorical difference between images and mirror-reflections. His argument depends on the observation that mirrors, but not paintings, are sensitive to changes in the observer’s prospective. In our paper we scrutinize Casati’s argument and present a modal argument that shows (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  40. Anatomy’s role in mechanistic explanations of organism behaviour.Aliya R. Dewey - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-32.
    Explanations in behavioural neuroscience are often said to be mechanistic in the sense that they explain an organism’s behaviour by describing the activities and organisation of the organism’s parts that are “constitutively relevant” to organism behaviour. Much has been said about the constitutive relevance of working parts (in debates about the so-called “mutual manipulability criterion”), but relatively little has been said about the constitutive relevance of the organising relations between working parts. Some New Mechanists seem to endorse a simple causal-linking (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  41. The Metaphysics of Constitutive Mechanistic Phenomena.Marie I. Kaiser & Beate Krickel - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (3).
    The central aim of this article is to specify the ontological nature of constitutive mechanistic phenomena. After identifying three criteria of adequacy that any plausible approach to constitutive mechanistic phenomena must satisfy, we present four different suggestions, found in the mechanistic literature, of what mechanistic phenomena might be. We argue that none of these suggestions meets the criteria of adequacy. According to our analysis, constitutive mechanistic phenomena are best understood as what we will call ‘object-involving occurrents’. Furthermore, on the basis (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   48 citations  
  42. Cascade versus Mechanism: The Diversity of Causal Structure in Science.Lauren N. Ross - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    According to mainstream philosophical views causal explanation in biology and neuroscience is mechanistic. As the term ‘mechanism’ gets regular use in these fields it is unsurprising that philosophers consider it important to scientific explanation. What is surprising is that they consider it the only causal term of importance. This paper provides an analysis of a new causal concept—it examines the cascade concept in science and the causal structure it refers to. I argue that this concept is importantly different from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  43. Mechanism, autonomy and biological explanation.Leonardo Bich & William Bechtel - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-27.
    The new mechanists and the autonomy approach both aim to account for how biological phenomena are explained. One identifies appeals to how components of a mechanism are organized so that their activities produce a phenomenon. The other directs attention towards the whole organism and focuses on how it achieves self-maintenance. This paper discusses challenges each confronts and how each could benefit from collaboration with the other: the new mechanistic framework can gain by taking into account what happens outside individual (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  44. New Mechanistic Explanation and the Need for Explanatory Constraints.L. R. Franklin-Hall - 2016 - In Ken Aizawa & Carl Gillett (eds.), Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 41-74.
    This paper critiques the new mechanistic explanatory program on grounds that, even when applied to the kinds of examples that it was originally designed to treat, it does not distinguish correct explanations from those that blunder. First, I offer a systematization of the explanatory account, one according to which explanations are mechanistic models that satisfy three desiderata: they must 1) represent causal relations, 2) describe the proper parts, and 3) depict the system at the right ‘level.’ Second, I argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  45. Mechanistic artefact explanation.Jeroen de Ridder - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 37 (1):81-96.
    One thing about technical artefacts that needs to be explained is how their physical make-up, or structure, enables them to fulfil the behaviour associated with their function, or, more colloquially, how they work. In this paper I develop an account of such explanations based on the familiar notion of mechanistic explanation. To accomplish this, I outline two explanatory strategies that provide two different types of insight into an artefact’s functioning, and show how human action inevitably plays a role in artefact (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  46. (1 other version)As if: Connecting Phenomenology, Mirror Neurons, Empathy, and Laughter.Chris A. Kramer - 2012 - PhaenEx 7 (1):275-308.
    The discovery of mirror neurons in both primates and humans has led to an enormous amount of research and speculation as to how conscious beings are able to interact so effortlessly among one another. Mirror neurons might provide an embodied basis for passive synthesis and the eventual process of further communalization through empathy, as envisioned by Edmund Husserl. I consider the possibility of a phenomenological and scientific investigation of laughter as a point of connection that might in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  47. The Elusive Higgs Mechanism.Chris Smeenk - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):487-499.
    The Higgs mechanism is an essential but elusive component of the Standard Model of particle physics. Without it Yang‐Mills gauge theories would have been little more than a warm‐up exercise in the attempt to quantize gravity rather than serving as the basis for the Standard Model. This article focuses on two problems related to the Higgs mechanism clearly posed in Earman’s recent papers (Earman 2003, 2004a, 2004b): what is the gauge‐invariant content of the Higgs mechanism, and what (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  48. The mechanistic approach of The Theory of Island Biogeography and its current relevance.Viorel Pâslaru - 2014 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 45 (1):22-33.
    Philosophers of science have examined The Theory of Island Biogeography by Robert MacArthur and E. O. Wilson (1967) mainly due to its important contribution to modeling in ecology, but they have not examined it as a representative case of ecological explanation. In this paper, I scrutinize the type of explanation used in this paradigmatic work of ecology. I describe the philosophy of science of MacArthur and Wilson and show that it is mechanistic. Based on this account and in light of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  49. A Regularist Approach to Mechanistic Type-Level Explanation.Beate Krickel - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4):1123-1153.
    Most defenders of the new mechanistic approach accept ontic constraints for successful scientific explanation (Illari 2013; Craver 2014). The minimal claim is that scientific explanations have objective truthmakers, namely mechanisms that exist in the physical world independently of any observer and that cause or constitute the phenomena-to- be-explained. How can this idea be applied to type-level explanations? Many authors at least implicitly assume that in order for mechanisms to be the truthmakers of type-level explanation they need to be regular (Andersen (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  50. Mechanistic Computational Individuation without Biting the Bullet.Nir Fresco & Marcin Miłkowski - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science:axz005.
    Is the mathematical function being computed by a given physical system determined by the system’s dynamics? This question is at the heart of the indeterminacy of computation phenomenon (Fresco et al. [unpublished]). A paradigmatic example is a conventional electrical AND-gate that is often said to compute conjunction, but it can just as well be used to compute disjunction. Despite the pervasiveness of this phenomenon in physical computational systems, it has been discussed in the philosophical literature only indirectly, mostly with reference (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
1 — 50 / 950