What exactly is a genetic disease? For a phrase one hears on a daily basis, there has been surprisingly little analysis of the underlying concept. Medical doctors seem perfectly willing to admit that the etiology of disease is typically complex, with a great many factors interacting to bring about a given condition. On such a view, descriptions of diseases like cancer as genetic seem at best highly simplistic, and at worst philosophically indefensible. On the other hand, there is (...) clearly some practical value to be had by classifying diseases according to their predominant cause when this can be accomplished in a theoretically satisfactory manner. The question therefore becomes exactly how one should go about selecting a single causal factor among many to explain the presence of disease. When an attempt to defend such causal selection is made at all, the standard accounts offered (Koch’s postulates, Hill’s epidemiological criteria, manipulability) are all clearly inadequate. I propose, however, an epidemiological account of disease causation which walks the fine line between practical applicability and theoretical considerations of causal complexity and attempts to compromise between patientcentered and population-centered concepts of disease. The epidemiological account is the most basic framework consistent with our strongly held intuitions about the causal classification of disease, yet it avoids the difficulties encountered by its competitors. (shrink)
Tharae history of argument and explanation especially in the mathematical and biomedical sciences and arts. 3 vols. 2456 pp., ills. Duckworth, London, 1994, £180 ISBN 0?7156?2439?3.
Every day, thousands of polls, surveys, and rating scales are employed to elicit the attitudes of humankind. Given the ubiquitous use of these instruments, it seems we ought to have firm answers to what is measured by them, but unfortunately we do not. To help remedy this situation, we present a novel approach to investigate the nature of attitudes. We created a self-transforming paper survey of moral opinions, covering both foundational principles, and current dilemmas hotly debated in the media. This (...) survey used a magic trick to expose participants to a reversal of their previously stated attitudes, allowing us to record whether they were prepared to endorse and argue for the opposite view of what they had stated only moments ago. The result showed that the majority of the reversals remained undetected, and a full 69% of the participants failed to detect at least one of two changes. In addition, participants often constructed coherent and unequivocal arguments supporting the opposite of their original position. These results suggest a dramatic potential for flexibility in our moral attitudes, and indicates a clear role for self-attribution and post-hoc rationalization in attitude formation and change. (shrink)
Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We asked our (...) participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (69.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change. (shrink)
The emergence of private authority has become a feature of the post-Cold War world. The contributors to this volume examine the implications of this erosion of the power of the state for global governance. They analyse actors as diverse as financial institutions, multinational corporations, religious terrorists and organised criminals. The themes of the book relate directly to debates concerning globalization and the role of international law, and will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, politics, sociology and (...) law. (shrink)
Global consumption, production, and trade of livestock products have increased rapidly in the last two decades and are expected to continue. At the same time, safety concerns regarding human and animal disease associated with livestock products are increasing. Efforts to increase public health safety standards aimed at legitimately reducing the risks of human and animal disease have focused internationally on standards to regulate the movement of livestock products. There is concern, though, that measures to regulate these standards internationally, such as (...) the WTO SPS measures that in part aim to open international markets, may marginalize small-scale poor producers. The cycle of poverty they are trying to escape through livestock production may, in fact, widen, leading to increased global poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Developing and developed nations alike should be concerned with public and private efforts to address appropriate food safety policies to reduce the likelihood of this effect. Analysis of the impact on small-scale livestock farmers is needed, as well as solutions that consider joint public and private sector initiatives. Costly farm to table tracking systems are not an option, but locally orchestrated vertically integrated systems may have merit in reducing food safety risks and in providing small-scale farmers with increased access to markets, locally and internationally. Increased scientific and technical capacity, and training of WTO officials from developing nations is also needed. (shrink)
The following is dedicated to promoting a version of the disability critique of negative genetic selection while navigating claims that launching such a critique threatens reproductive liberty or is unavoidably antichoice. I highlight problematic conceptual assumptions regarding genetics and choice made by proponents and opponents of selection alike and bring out the underlying ableist values of the prevailing conversation. Ableism is discrimination against persons on the basis of perceived disability. I conclude that the existing social and institutional milieu surrounding genetic (...) selection threatens persons who experience difference with stigma and its accompanying political and social disadvantages. My .. (shrink)
To what extent is the scientist's endeavor qua scientist influenced by his philosophic image of himself? A preliminary and partial answer to this question is suggested by a study of eight physiological thinkers of the second half of the eighteenth century, a period during which biology was much influenced by the scientific and philosophical ideas of Isaac Newton. At this time, physiologists invoked certain "principles," "properties," and "powers" which were deemed useful as explanatory devices, even though they could not themselves (...) be explained. The use of these devices in physiology was often defended in terms of their supposed similarity to devices used in mathematics and Newtonian physics. The results of this practice are considered critically, partly in the light of current studies of scientific explanation. (shrink)
Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e—the cause and its effect—both occur, but: had (...) c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation. Neither should the diversity of opinion about the prospects for a philosophical analysis of causation obscure their importance. For even those philosophers who see these prospects as dim—perhaps because they suffer post-Quinean queasiness at the thought of any analysis of any concept of interest—can often be heard to say such things as that causal relations among events are somehow “a matter of” the patterns of counterfactual dependence to be found in them. It was not always so. Thirty-odd years ago, so-called “regularity” analyses (so-called, presumably, because they traced back to Hume’s well-known analysis of causation as constant conjunction) ruled the day, with Mackie’s Cement of the Universe embodying a classic statement. But they fell on hard times, both because of internal problems—which we will review in due course—and because dramatic improvements in philosophical understanding of counterfactuals made possible the emergence of a serious and potent rival: a counterfactual analysis of causation resting on foundations firm enough to be repel the kind of philosophical suspicion that had formerly warranted dismissal.. (shrink)
A significant portion of the world’s text is tagged by readers on social bookmarking websites. Credit attribution is an inherent problem in these corpora because most pages have multiple tags, but the tags do not always apply with equal specificity across the whole document. Solving the credit attribution problem requires associating each word in a document with the most appropriate tags and vice versa. This paper introduces Labeled LDA, a topic model that constrains Latent Dirichlet Allocation by defining a one-to-one (...) correspondence between LDA’s latent topics and user tags. This allows Labeled LDA to directly learn word-tag correspondences. We demonstrate Labeled LDA’s improved expressiveness over traditional LDA with visualizations of a corpus of tagged web pages from del.icio.us. Labeled LDA outperforms SVMs by more than 3 to 1 when extracting tag-specific document snippets. As a multi-label text classifier, our model is competitive with a discriminative baseline on a variety of datasets. (shrink)
How can the development of ideas in a scientific field be studied over time? We apply unsupervised topic modeling to the ACL Anthology to analyze historical trends in the field of Computational Linguistics from 1978 to 2006. We induce topic clusters using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and examine the strength of each topic over time. Our methods find trends in the field including the rise of probabilistic methods starting in 1988, a steady increase in applications, and a sharp decline of research (...) in semantics and understanding between 1978 and 2001, possibly rising again after 2001. We also introduce a model of the diversity of ideas, topic entropy, using it to show that COLING is a more diverse conference than ACL, but that both conferences as well as EMNLP are becoming broader over time. Finally, we apply Jensen-Shannon divergence of topic distributions to show that all three conferences are converging in the topics they cover. (shrink)
pt. I. Ethics, by J. H. Tufts. Aesthetics, by D. H. Parker. Axiology, by W. M. Urban. Philosophy of law, by Roscoe Pound. Philosophy of history, by J. E. Boodin. Philosophy of science, by V. F. Lenzen. Philosophy of life, by A. N. Whitehead. Metaphysics, by E. W. Hall. Theology and metaphysics, by D. C. Mackintosh.--pt. II. Philosophy of the twentieth century, by Bertrand Russell. Kantianism, by A. C. Ewing. Philosophy of Hegelianism, by Richard Hoenigswald. The humanism of St. (...)Thomas Aquinas, by Jacques Maritain. Transcendental absolutism, by George Santayana. (shrink)
Epistemological realists have long struggled to explain perceptual error without introducing a tertium quid between perceivers and physical objects. Two leading realist philosophers, Thomas Reid and Everett Hall, agreed in denying that mental entities are the immediate objects of perceptions of the external world, but each relied upon strange metaphysical entities of his own in the construction of a realist philosophy of perception. Reid added ‘visible figures’ to sensory impressions and specific sorts of mental events, while Hall (...) utilized an array of ways that he maintained properties may participate in the world. This paper assesses each realist's attempt to explain perceptual relativity and illusion without contradicting either the science of his time or the structure of common sense. (shrink)
Leading philosophical accounts presume that Thomas H. Morgan’s transmission theory can be understood independently of experimental practices. Experimentation is taken to be relevant to confirming, rather than interpreting, the transmission theory. But the construction of Morgan’s theory went hand in hand with the reconstruction of the chief experimental object, the model organism Drosophila melanogaster . This raises an important question: when a theory is constructed to account for phenomena in carefully controlled laboratory settings, what knowledge, if any, indicates the (...) theory’s relevance to phenomena outside highly controlled settings? The answer, I argue, is found within the procedural knowledge embedded within laboratory practice. †To contact the author, please write to: Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, Department of Philosophy, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455‐0310; e‐mail: ckwaters@umn.edu. (shrink)
Book Symposium on Don Ihde’s Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science Content Type Journal Article Category Book Symposium Pages 1-22 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0060-5 Authors Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen Friis, University of Copenhagen, Nørre Farimagsgade 5 A, Room 10.0.27, 1014 Copenhagen, Denmark Larry A. Hickman, The Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA Robert Rosenberger, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, DM Smith Building, 685 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA 30332-0345, USA Robert C. Scharff, University of New (...) Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824-3574, USA Don Ihde, Stony Brook University, Harriman Hall 221, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3750, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)
The cipher of the zodiac Content Type Journal Article Category Book Symposium Pages 1-22 DOI 10.1007/s11016-012-9674-1 Authors Robert Fox, Faculty of History, Oxford University, George Street, Oxford, OX1 2RL UK Charles C. Gillispie, Program in History of Science, Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Theresa Levitt, Department of History, University of Mississippi, 310 Bishop Hall, University, MS 38677, USA David Aubin, Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu, Histoire des sciences mathématique, UPMC - case postale 247, 4, place (...) Jussieu, 75252 Paris cedex 05, France Jed Z. Buchwald, Humanities and Social Sciences 101-40, Caltech, 1200 East California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA Diane Greco Josefowicz, Writing Program, College of Arts and Sciences, Boston University, 730 Commonwealth Ave., Rm. 301, Boston, MA 02215, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)
There you are at the opera house. The soprano has just hit her high note – a glassshattering high C that fills the hall – and she holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds it. She holds the note for such a long time that after a while a funny thing happens: you no longer seem only to hear it, the note as it is currently sounding, that glass-shattering high C that is loud (...) and high and pure. In addition, you also seem to hear something more. It is difficult to express precisely what this extra feature is. One is tempted to say, however, that the note now sounds like it has been going on for a very long time. Perhaps it even sounds like a note that has been going on for too long. In any event, what you hear no longer seems to be limited to the pitch, timbre, loudness, and other strictly audible qualities of the note. You seem in addition to experience, even to hear, something about its temporal extent. (shrink)
In their book What Darwin Got Wrong , Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini construct an a priori philosophical argument and an empirical biological argument. The biological argument aims to show that natural selection is much less important in the evolutionary process than many biologists maintain. The a priori argument begins with the claim that there cannot be selection for one but not the other of two traits that are perfectly correlated in a population; it concludes that there cannot be an (...) evolutionary theory of adaptation. This article focuses mainly on the a priori argument. *Received March 2010; revised July 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: ersober@wisc.edu. (shrink)
Over the last 2,300 years or so, many philosophers have believed that species are individuated by essences that are at least in part intrinsic. Psychologists tell us most folks also believe this view. But most philosophers of biology have abandoned the view, in light of evolutionary conceptions of species. In defiance, Michael Devitt has attempted in this journal to resurrect a version of the view, which he calls Intrinsic Biological Essentialism. I show that his arguments for the resurrection fail, and (...) I identify challenges that face anyone wishing to defend Intrinsic Biological Essentialism. *Received February 2009; revised September 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e‐mail: mjbarker2@wisc.edu. (shrink)
The early twentieth century witnessed a shift in the way philosophers of science thought about traditional 'problems of induction'. Keynes championed the idea that Hume's Problem was not a problem about causation (which had been the traditional reading of Hume) but rather a problem about induction. Moreover, Keynes (and later Nicod) viewed such problems as having both logical and epistemological components. Hempel picked up where Keynes and Nicod left off, by formulating a rigorous formal theory of inductive logic. This spawned (...) a new branch of philosophy of science called confirmation theory. Hempel's theory of confirmation was based on a few very simple (and seemingly plausible) assumptions about (instantial) 'inductive-logical support'. However, as Hempel himself was keenly aware, even such simple and seemingly plausible assumptions give rise to various puzzles and paradoxes. The two most famous paradoxes of confirmation were discovered by Hempel and Goodman. This article discusses Hempel's paradox (which is known as 'the' paradox of confirmation, since it was discovered first). However, many of the historical developments surrounding Hempel's paradox (also known as the 'raven paradox') are also crucial for understanding Goodman's later ('grue') paradox. Author Recommends: Branden Fitelson, 'The Paradox of Confirmation', Philosophy Compass 1/1 (2006): 95–113, doi: [DOI link]. In this article, I explain how the inconsistency between Hempel's intuitive resolution and his official theory of confirmation affects the historical dialectic about the paradox and how it illuminates the nature of confirmation. After the survey, I argue that Hempel's intuitions about the paradox of confirmation were basically correct, and that it is his theory that should be rejected, in favor of a (broadly) Bayesian account of confirmation. C. G. Hempel, 'Studies in the Logic of Confirmation' (I and II), Mind 54 (1945): 1–26, 97–121, dois: [DOI link]; [DOI link]. This is the locus classicus of traditional (instantial) confirmation theory. It is here that original motivations for, traditional approaches to, and paradoxes of confirmation are discussed in depth for the first time, under the rubric 'confirmation theory'. Hempel's discussion (which picks up where Keynes and Nicod left off) is chock full of crucial historical, logical, and epistemological insights. J. M. Keynes, A Treatise on Probability (London: Macmillan, 1921). Keynes does not get enough credit in this context. But, basically, chapters 18 to 23 of this classic book planted the seeds for almost all of modern confirmation theory. Nicod and Hempel (as well as Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, Carnap, and others) were, basically, just picking-up where Keynes left off. J. Nicod, The Logical Problem of Induction (1923), reprinted in Foundations of Geometry and Induction (London: Routledge, 2000). Nicod's essay expands upon Keynes's work. Nicod is the first to use the term 'confirmation', in connection with a relation of 'inductive-logical support'. Nicod endorses several key confirmation-theoretic principles (which were already advanced by Keynes). In the hands of Hempel, Nicod's work later becomes an important historical foil. J. Hosiasson–Lindenbaum, 'On Confirmation', Journal of Symbolic Logic 5 (1940): 133–48. This essay contains most (if not all) of the basic ingredients of the 'Bayesian' approaches to the paradox of confirmation that appeared later. It also sheds much light on an important dispute between Keynes and Nicod concerning one of the claims Keynes makes (in his Treatise) about 'long-run convergence' in certain (instantial) confirmation-theoretic problems. This paper also contains one of the earliest rigorous axiomatizations of conditional (subjective or logical) probability. R. Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1950). This is Carnap's encyclopaedic work on inductive logic and probability. There is a tremendous amount of wisdom in here. For present purposes, the sections on Hempel's theory of confirmation (in contrast to probabilistic approaches to confirmation, such as Hosiasson–Lindenbaum's and Carnap's) are probably most important and salient (see §§87–8). I. J. Good, 'The Paradox of Confirmation', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 11 (1960): 145–9. C. Chihara, 'Quine and the Confirmational Paradoxes', in Midwest Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 6: The Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, eds. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 425–52. J. Earman, Bayes or Bust: A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), specifically: pp. 63–73. R. M. Royall, Statistical Evidence: A Likelihood Paradigm (New York, NY: Chapman & Hall, 1997), specifically: the Appendix on 'The Paradox of the Ravens'. C. McKenzie and L. Mikkelsen, 'The Psychological Side of Hempel's Paradox of Confirmation', Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 7 (2000): 360–6. P. Maher, 'Probability Captures the Logic of Scientific Confirmation', in Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Christopher Hitchcock (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 69–93. P. Vranas, 'Hempel's Raven Paradox: A Lacuna in the Standard Bayesian Solution', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2004): 545–60. This is a list of seven of my favourite papers on the paradox of confirmation, since 1950 (listed in chronological order). Most of these are coming from a broadly 'Bayesian' perspective. In particular, I recommend Vranas as a good starting point here. Online Materials: http://fitelson.org/probability/ Probability & Induction (PHIL 148, UC-Berkeley, Spring 2008) This is the Web site for an undergraduate course on probability and induction that I taught at UC-Berkeley in Spring 2008. Much of the course focuses on confirmation theory (including the paradoxes of confirmation). There are many links there to lecture notes, papers, books and other salient online resources. http://fitelson.org/confirmation/ Confirmation (graduate seminar, UC-Berkeley, Fall 2007) This is the Web site for a graduate seminar on confirmation that I taught at UC-Berkeley in Fall 2007. This seminar is a historical trace of induction/confirmation, from Aristotle to Goodman (mostly, focusing on the 20th century and the paradoxes of confirmation). Sample Syllabus: See the online syllabi for Confirmation and/or Probability & Induction (above). Note: those online syllabi contain electronic copies of many of the salient readings. (shrink)
This essay comments on the theory of social norms developed by Cristina Bicchieri in The Grammar of Society ( 2006 ). It applauds her theory of norms but argues that it cannot account for the experimental results concerning ultimatum games. A theory of fairness is also needed. It develops a number of specific criticisms of her way of incorporating the influence of norms into preferences. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5197 Helen C. (...)WhiteHall, 600 N. Park Street, Madison, WI 53706‐1474; e‐mail: dhausman@wisc.edu. (shrink)
When conceived as an empirical claim, it is natural to wonder how one might test the hypothesis of multiple realization. I consider general issues of testability, show how they apply specifically to the hypothesis of multiple realization, and propose an auxiliary assumption that, I argue, must be conjoined to the hypothesis of multiple realization to ensure its testability. I argue further that Bechtel and Mundale (1999) go astray because they fail to appreciate the need for this auxiliary assumption. †To (...) contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e‐mail: lshapiro@wisc.edu. (shrink)
Abstract A small but significant number of residents of Second Life (SL) insist that SL is as real to them as Real Life (RL) and that their SL avatars are as much themselves as their offscreen selves. This paper investigates whether this claim can be literally true in any philosophically interesting way. Using a narrative account of personal identity I argue that there is a way of understanding these identity claims according to which the actions and experiences of the offscreen (...) user and the online avatar are indeed actions and experiences of a single person. In the course of describing how this is so, the paper also uncovers new insights into how a narrative approach to personal identity should be structured and developed. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-15 DOI 10.1007/s13347-012-0062-y Authors Marya Schechtman, Department of Philosophy M/C 267, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1423 University Hall, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60607, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)
This paper brings needed clarity to the influential view that species are cohesive entities held together by gene flow, and then develops an empirical argument against that view: Neglected data suggest gene flow is neither necessary nor sufficient for species cohesion. Implications are discussed. ‡I'm grateful to Rob Wilson, Alex Rueger and Lindley Darden for important comments on earlier drafts, and to Joseph Nagel, Heather Proctor, Ken Bond, members of the DC History and Philosophy of Biology reading group, and audience (...) members at the November 2006 meeting of the PSA, for helpful comments or discussion. Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada fellowship 752-2005-1208 supported research. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: mjbarker2@wisc.edu. (shrink)
There has recently been a renewed interest in the “force” interpretation of evolutionary biology. In this article, I present the general structure of the arguments for the force interpretation and identify a problem in its overly permissive conditions for being a Newtonian force. I then attempt a solution that (1) helps to illuminate the difference between forces and other types of causes and (2) makes room for random genetic drift as a force. In particular, I argue that forces are not (...) different in kind from other types of causes but rather that forces are situated on a continuum of causes distinguished by their unifying power. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, Madison, WI 53706; e‐mail: filler@wisc.edu. (shrink)
The simple question, what is empirical success? turns out to have a surprisingly complicated answer. We need to distinguish between meritorious fit and ‘fudged fit', which is akin to the distinction between prediction and accommodation. The final proposal is that empirical success emerges in a theory dependent way from the agreement of independent measurements of theoretically postulated quantities. Implications for realism and Bayesianism are discussed. ‡This paper was written when I was a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of (...) Science at the University of Pittsburgh; I thank everyone for their support. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: mforster@wisc.edu. (shrink)
Prominent defenders of the extended cognition thesis have looked to evolutionary theory for support. Roughly, the idea is that natural selection leads one to expect that cognitive strategies should exploit the environment, and exploitation of the right sort results in a cognitive system that extends beyond the head of the organism. I argue that proper appreciation of evolutionary theory should create no such expectation. This leaves open whether cognitive systems might in fact bear a relationship to the environment that leads (...) to their extension. *Received July 2009; revised January 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706; e‐mail: lshapiro@wisc.edu. (shrink)
Robert Smid is senior lecturer in philosophy and religion at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. This book, a slightly revised version of his recent PhD dissertation from Boston University, is dedicated to Robert Cummings Neville, under whose guidance it was originally written. As the title suggests, this volume explores various methods of comparative philosophers in the pragmatist and process traditions of American philosophy. Smid thus focuses his analytic lens on William Ernest Hocking (1873–1966), F. S. C. Northrop (1893–1992), the collaborative (...) work of David Hall (1937–2001) and Roger Ames (1947-), and Neville himself (1939-). The four chapters at the heart of the book—between the introduction and final .. (shrink)
A priori knowledge of the way the world works Content Type Journal Article Category Essay Review Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9631-4 Authors Michael Bishop, Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, 156 C Dodd Hall, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
The allure of perennial questions in biology: temporary excitement or substantive advance? Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9533-5 Authors Alan C. Love, Department of Philosophy, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave. S, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0310, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
This article aims at providing a general picture of the idea of correlative thinking developed by sinologists and philosophers in the field of Chinese and comparative studies, including Marcel Granet, Joseph Needham, A. C. Graham, David Hall and Roger Ames. As a matter of fact, there is no exactly the same view among these scholars when they use the term "correlative thinking"? to describe the Chinese mode of thinking; but they all recognize, more or less, the term's implication as (...) "non-logical"? or "pre-logical", "non-rational"? or "irrational", "intuitive-associative"? or "beyond analytic thinking". ?Based on this presumption, some of them think that there is "irreducibility"?from the root level of (correlative) thinking to the upper level of (analytic) thinking or that there is "incommensurability"? between correlative and analytic thinking. Based on the contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, especially Donald Davidson's holism of the mental and the principle of charity, I shall argue that the thesis of "pre-logical", ?"illogical"? or "non-logical" is self-refuting. I shall also demonstrate that the view of "incommensurability"? between correlative and analytic thinking and the thesis of "unanalyzability" of correlative thinking shared by most of these scholars are not well-argued but taken as a primary fact. The conclusion of this article is that there is no thinking by correlation and analogy which cannot be understood in terms of analytic concepts and which can escape from the logical or rational space. (shrink)
The Variety of Evidence Thesis (VET) says that (ceteris paribus) the more diverse (or varied) of two bodies of evidence is the more confirmatory of a hypothesis H. Two recent types of Bayesian explication of VET account for the intuitive force of VET by defining variety as some function of the probabilities of the propositions which collectively constitute a body of evidence. I show that these two accounts of VET are not tracking a meaningful property of bodies of evidence, but (...) rather are tracking artifacts of how those bodies of evidence are described. According to each account, whether a body of evidence is more varied than another depends on how the bodies are split into parts. Furthermore, for each type of account there exists a way to redescribe the total evidence such that any two totalities are equally varied. ‡I would like to thank Elliott Sober for comments on multiple drafts of this paper, and Malcolm Forster, John Koolage, and Joel Velasco for comments on a verbal delivery. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail: gmnovack@wisc.edu. (shrink)
