Philosophical analysis of ecological theories has lagged behind the study of evolutionary theory. The semantic conception of scientific theories, which has been employed successfully in the analysis of evolutionary theory, is adopted here to analyse ecological theory. Two general problems in ecology are discussed. One arises from the continued use of covering law models in ecology, and the other concerns the applicability of ecological theory in conservation biology. The semantic conception of ecological theories is used to resolve these problems.

Philosophical analysis of ecological theories has lagged behind the study of evolutionary theory. The semantic conception of scientific theories, which has been employed successfully in the analysis of evolutionary theory, is adopted here to analyse ecological theory. Two general problems in ecology are discussed. One arises from the continued use of covering law models in ecology, and the other concerns the applicability of ecological theory in conservation biology. The semantic conception of ecological theories is used to resolve these problems.

This article documents how biomedical researchers in the United Kingdom understand and enact the idea of “openness.” This is of particular interest to researchers and science policy worldwide in view of the recent adoption of pioneering policies on Open Science and Open Access by the U.K. government—policies whose impact on and implications for research practice are in need of urgent evaluation, so as to decide on their eventual implementation elsewhere. This study is based on 22 in-depth interviews with U.K. researchers (...) in systems biology, synthetic biology, and bioinformatics, which were conducted between September 2013 and February 2014. Through an analysis of the interview transcripts, we identify seven core themes that characterize researchers’ understanding of openness in science and nine factors that shape the practice of openness in research. Our findings highlight the implications that Open Science policies can have for research processes and outcomes and provide recommendations for enhancing their content, effectiveness, and implementation. (shrink)

The distinction between the context ofdiscovery and the context of justificationrestricts philosophy of science to the rationalreconstruction of theories, and characterizesscientific discovery as rare, theoreticalupheavals that defy rational reconstruction. Kuhnian challenges to the two contextsdistinction show that non-rational elementspersist in the justification of theories, butgo no further to provide a positive account ofdiscovery. A gradualist theory of discoverydeveloped in this paper shows, with supportfrom ecological cases, that discoveries areroutinely made in ecology by extending modelsto new domains, or by making additions (...) toearlier models. The logic of discovery isphilosophically accessible once it isappreciated that model truth is presumed, evenif counterfactually, in ecologists' applicationof models. A gradualist view shows thatmodels' heuristic power routinely leads todiscoveries. (shrink)

Academic-researcher-led public engagement and consultation on new biotechnology provides information about new biotechnology to the public, and solicits their attitudes, beliefs and understanding about the technology. A burden associated with the democratic ideals of transparency and accountability encourages researchers to provide accurate information to the public. Less recognized is their role as actual, or perceived, authorities to provide new knowledge and to make policy or regulatory decisions. This paper focuses on the first of these two – the conflation between expertise (...) on the subject of the engagement and the authority to represent that subject in an engagement process. While expertise, or at least accuracy in portraying expert knowledge, is consistent with transparency and accountability, it is argued here that authority in the representation of expert knowledge may be inconsistent with the intent of public engagement and consultation. (shrink)

Academic-researcher-led public engagement and consultation on new biotechnology provides information about new biotechnology to the public, and solicits their attitudes, beliefs and understanding about the technology. A burden associated with the democratic ideals of transparency and accountability encourages researchers to provide accurate information to the public. Less recognized is their role as actual, or perceived, authorities to provide new knowledge and to make policy or regulatory decisions. This paper focuses on the first of these two – the conflation between expertise (...) on the subject of the engagement and the authority to represent that subject in an engagement process. While expertise, or at least accuracy in portraying expert knowledge, is consistent with transparency and accountability, it is argued here that authority in the representation of expert knowledge may be inconsistent with the intent of public engagement and consultation. (shrink)

The present study combined magnetoencephalography recordings with fast periodic visual stimulation to investigate automatic neural responses to morphemes in developing and skilled readers. Native English-speaking children and adults were presented with rapid streams of base stimuli interleaved periodically with oddballs. In a manipulation-check condition, tapping into word recognition, oddballs featured familiar words embedded in a stream of consonant strings. In the experimental conditions, the contrast between oddball and base stimuli was manipulated in order to probe selective stem and suffix identification (...) in morphologically structured pseudowords. Neural responses at the oddball frequency and harmonics were analyzed at the sensor level using non-parametric cluster-based permutation tests. As expected, results in the manipulation-check condition revealed a word-selective response reflected by a predominantly left-lateralized cluster that emerged over temporal, parietal, and occipital sensors in both children and adults. However, across the experimental conditions, results yielded a differential pattern of oddball responses in developing and skilled readers. Children displayed a significant response that emerged in a mostly central occipital cluster for the condition tracking stem identification in the presence of suffixes. In contrast, adult participants showed a significant response that emerged in a cluster located in central and left occipital sensors for the condition tracking suffix identification in the presence of stems. The present results suggest that while the morpheme identification system in Grade 5–6 children is not yet adult-like, it is sufficiently mature to automatically analyze the morphemic structure of novel letter strings. These findings are discussed in the context of theoretical accounts of morphological processing across reading development. (shrink)

1. The Shmagency Challenge to Constitutivism In metaethics – and indeed, meta-normativity – constitutivism is a family of views that hope to ground normativity in norms, or standards, or motives, or aims that are constitutive of action and agency. And mostly because of the influential work of Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman, constitutivism seems to be gaining grounds in the current literature. The promises of constitutivism are significant. Perhaps chief among them are the hope to provide with some kind (...) of answer to the skeptic about morality or perhaps practical reason, and the hope to secure for practical reason a kind of objectivity that is consistent with its practical, motivationally engaged nature. The former philosophical motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in much of Korsgaard’s relevant work[1] – relies on the fact that constitutive norms seem to be less mysterious than not-clearly-constitutive norms. There arguably is nothing mysterious about, say, the norms of certain reasonably-well-defined activities, like building a house, or playing chess. And challenges by the relevant skeptic – the one asking "Why should I make sure the house I’m building can shelter people from the weather?" or "Why should I not castle when my king is checked?" – seem very rare, barely intelligible, and anyway remarkably easy to cope with. We should explain to the misguided skeptic that if he doesn’t even try to build something that can protect people from the weather, he’s not in the business of building a house at all; that if she doesn’t even try to play by the rules of chess, she’s not in the business of playing chess at all; and so on. It would be nice, the constitutivist hope seems to go, if we had something equally powerful by way of a response to the skeptic asking "Why be moral?". The other main motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in David Velleman’s relevant work[2] – starts from a commitment to some rather strong kind of existence-internalism about reasons: An agent has a reason to?, according to such views ), only if she can come to?, or at least to be motivated to?, by sound deliberation starting from her actual motivational set. (shrink)

This Note argues that the fourth pseudo-hieroglyph from the left in Giorgio vasari’s Chatsworth Allegory of a Dream, previously regarded as a symbol of the sin of pride or else not interpreted, is, in fact, the depiction of a castle in the air (castello in aria). I show that the rare iconography of an upside-down castle was inspired by an illustration from an Italian translation of the dialogues of Lucian of Samosata and give a brief overview of the (...) importance of the motif of the castle in the air in sixteenth-century Italian culture. I also propose that Vasari’s drawing was a design for a ceiling panel intended for Giovanni Corner’s palace in venice and show its dependence on Francesco Primaticcio’s Allegory of the Nile for the palace of François Ier at Fontainebleau. (shrink)

Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new (...) word for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and lofty room; but as French speakers applied it more and more to social functions occurring in such spaces, English speakers did so too. Then came a fork: a phonological adaptation produced saloon, which drifted off as a fully naturalized word of English toward hotels, carriages, bars, and cars; but salon persisted nonetheless. By retaining the stress pattern and marginally nasal final vowel of its source language, the doublet has remained in use as a xenism—a word of English understood to be not English, but understood in English all the same.How many such words are there? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Coupé, du jour, fuselage, pizza, paparazzi, sauerkraut, Zeitgeist—all signal their foreignness either by nonstandard pronunciation of written consonants (s, g, j, z), the presence of foreign diacritics, or irregular tonic stress. These are the kinds of loanwords that Scholar calls “émigrés,” but he gives us not thousands or hundreds or even a dozen of them: his chapters deal only with four: à la mode, ennui, naïveté, and caprice. The histories of these words do not really teach us any more about the cultural, social, and political relations between England and France than do saloon and salon, which is not much at all, or any other set of loanwords that retain phonetic or orthographic signs of foreignness. Scholar nonetheless does his level best to put his favored four at the heart of early modern English culture. Lengthy accounts of a play by Dryden, a famous work of Schiller's, an essay by Raymond Williams, Caribbean notions of creolization, and a John le Carré novel, learned though they all may be, do not really make the argument more persuasive, or even clear. By the end of this beautifully produced and floridly written book, the reader (or at least this reader) is not quite sure what it was really about. The very title of Émigrés repurposes a xenism which in regular usage is associated with high social status (we never talk of émigré workers, for example), thus exhibiting what I suppose the whole field ought to demonstrate: the ways in which new, hard, or nonnative words are always used to establish pecking orders between speakers, between their interlocutors and between their worlds. In Bourdieusian terms: not to make distinctions, but to create distinction. (shrink)

Sewall Wright first encountered the complex systems characteristic of gene combinations while a graduate student at Harvard's Bussey Institute from 1912 to 1915. In Mendelian breeding experiments, Wright observed a hierarchical dependence of the organism's phenotype on dynamic networks of genetic interaction and organization. An animal's physical traits, and thus its autonomy from surrounding environmental constraints, depended greatly on how genes behaved in certain combinations. Wright recognized that while genes are the material determinants of the animal phenotype, operating with great (...) regularity, the special nature of genetic systems contributes to the animal phenotype a degree of spontaneity and novelty, creating unpredictable trait variations by virtue of gene interactions. As a result of his experimentation, as well as his keen interest in the philosophical literature of his day, Wright was inspired to see genetic systems as conscious, living organisms in their own right. Moreover, he decided that since genetic systems maintain ordered stability and cause unpredictable novelty in their organic wholes (the animal phenotype), it would be necessary for biologists to integrate techniques for studying causally ordered phenomena (experimental method) and chance phenomena (correlation method). From 1914 to 1921 Wright developed his "method of path coefficient" (or "path analysis"), a new procedure drawing from both laboratory experimentation and statistical correlation in order to analyze the relative influence of specific genetic interactions on phenotype variation. In this paper I aim to show how Wright's philosophy for understanding complex genetic systems (panpsychic organicism) logically motivated his 1914-1921 design of path analysis. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated stressors have impacted the daily lives and sleeping patterns of many individuals, including university students. Dreams may provide insight into how the mind processes changing realities; dreams not only allow consolidation of new information, but may give the opportunity to creatively “play out” low-risk, hypothetical threat simulations. While there are studies that analyze dreams in high-stress situations, little is known of how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted dreams of university students. The aim of this (...) study was to explore how the dream content of students was affected during the university COVID-19 lockdown period (March–July, 2020). Using online survey methods, we analyzed dream recall content (n= 71) using the Hall-Van de Castle dream coding system and Fisher's exact tests for sex comparisons. Preliminary results indicate that female students experienced more nightmares as compared to male students. Dream analysis found that, relative to normative American College Student (ACS) samples generated pre-COVID-19, women were more likely to experience aggressive interactions in their dream content, including increased physical aggression. Results indicate that university students did experience changes in dream content due to the pandemic lockdown period, with women disproportionally affected. These findings can aid universities in developing support programs for students by bringing forth an understanding of students' concerns and anxieties as they process the “new normal” of social distancing. (shrink)

We examine Paul Halmos’ comments on category theory, Dedekind cuts, devil worship, logic, and Robinson’s infinitesimals. Halmos’ scepticism about category theory derives from his philosophical position of naive set-theoretic realism. In the words of an MAA biography, Halmos thought that mathematics is “certainty” and “architecture” yet 20th century logic teaches us is that mathematics is full of uncertainty or more precisely incompleteness. If the term architecture meant to imply that mathematics is one great solid castle, then modern logic tends (...) to teach us the opposite lesson, namely that the castle is floating in midair. Halmos’ realism tends to color his judgment of purely scientific aspects of logic and the way it is practiced and applied. He often expressed distaste for nonstandard models, and made a sustained effort to eliminate first-order logic, the logicians’ concept of interpretation, and the syntactic vs semantic distinction. He felt that these were vague, and sought to replace them all by his polyadic algebra. Halmos claimed that Robinson’s framework is “unnecessary” but Henson and Keisler argue that Robinson’s framework allows one to dig deeper into set-theoretic resources than is common in Archimedean mathematics. This can potentially prove theorems not accessible by standard methods, undermining Halmos’ criticisms. (shrink)

Animals and Science Fiction is the first edited collection to be published focusing on the intersection of animal studies and science fiction studies. It offers a broad range of theoretical approaches and primary source texts—including novels, short stories, poetry, film and TV, photography, erotica, video games, and urban planning documents—that explore the ways works of science fiction can transform how we see and interact with nonhuman others. With an eye toward more just multispecies futures, it argues that speculative imaginaries can (...) be pivotal in changing attitudes toward and understandings of nonhuman animals in our world today. Chapters appeal to those interested in biopolitics, posthumanism, new materialism, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, ocean humanities, postcolonial studies, critical race studies, Indigenous studies, global sf studies, film studies, and food studies. Taken together, the collection works to showcase a diverse and growing field of scholarly inquiry into animals and science fiction. (shrink)

Dehaene (in Reading in the Brain) reviews and finds support for the phonological deficit hypothesis of developmental dyslexia, which proposes that dyslexics have a basic deficit in processing the constituents of spoken words. This hypothesis can be seen as reflecting three associated claims: a) there is only one basic kind of dyslexia; b) all (or most) dyslexic children have phonological impairments, and c) these phonological impairments cause their dyslexia. We consider each of these claims, and the evidence presented by Dehaene, (...) and conclude that questions remain about all three. Phonological deficits alone seem unlikely to be able to account for the complexity and heterogeneity of developmental dyslexia. (shrink)

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or (...) indeed our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question (...) whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and any legitimate claim to moral consideration. The machine question poses a (...) fundamental challenge to moral thinking, questioning the traditional philosophical conceptualization of technology as a tool or instrument to be used by human agents. Gunkel begins by addressing the question of machine moral agency: whether a machine might be considered a legitimate moral agent that could be held responsible for decisions and actions. He then approaches the machine question from the other side, considering whether a machine might be a moral patient due legitimate moral consideration. Finally, Gunkel considers some recent innovations in moral philosophy and critical theory that complicate the machine question, deconstructing the binary agent--patient opposition itself. Technological advances may prompt us to wonder if the science fiction of computers and robots whose actions affect their human companions could become science fact. Gunkel's argument promises to influence future considerations of ethics, ourselves, and the other entities who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)