bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Marjorle Grene, Aristotle's Philosophy of Science and Aristotle's Biology
Authors: Lennox James G 
Published: January 2016

During a period stretching from the publication of the Phoenix Books edition A Portrait of Aristotle In the early 1960's through the appearance of a number of papers in the mid-197O's, Marjorie Grene turned her attention to the relevance of Aristotle's biological interests to his overall philosophy, and to the relevance of that philosophy to contemporary philosophy of biology.A Portrait of Aristotle was one among the influences which, turned me, as an undergraduate, toward Aristotle and his biology. As I re-read Professor Grene's work on Aristotle in the summer of 1981, a number of key themes emerged which are relevant to her own views about the nature of biological science.
Anthropic Explanations in Cosmology
Authors: Leslie John 
Published: January 2016

Cosmologists often claim that our universe is “fine tuned” for life. A change by 1% in the strong nuclear force would have meant little carbon would exist, and carbon can seem biologically essential. Again, the riches of chemistry and biochemistry depend on the neutron’s being heavier than the proton by no more than 0.1%. The early cosmic expansion rate may have needed fine tuning to one part in l055 to prevent speedy recollapse and speedy disintegration. To prevent excess turbulence the “smoothness” perhaps needed fine tuning to one part in 10 raised to the power of 10123 (a number far greater than 101230). Etcetera (Leslie 1982, 1983a, 1985, 1986).The list of such claims is very long. No doubt some of its items are mistakes. Others may be dictated by basic physics so that they are not fine-tunable.
Problems in the Development of Cognitive Neuroscience Effective Communication between Scientific Domains
Authors: Manier Edward 
Published: January 2016

Could anything provide a philosophically convincing mark of the mental in simple organisms (Lloyd 1984)? Individual organisms’ capacities to modify behavior adaptively as a result of past encounters with the environment might mark the first step in the phylogeny of minds. The simplest examples of mental representation are likely to be found in the simplest forms of animal learning.The most scientifically rigorous test case of “bottom- up” strategies in cognitive neuroscience is provided by current studies of the cellular and molecular biology of associative learning in higher invertebrates, but particularly gastropod molluscs, snails or slugs (Quinn 1984). For the relevant neurobiological research community (Farley and Alkon 1985; Hawkins, Clark, and Kandel 1986), “Bottom-up” does not just mean letting one’s study of the properties of the nervous system control one’s analyses of animal behavior or cognition.
Judgment and Reasoning in the Evaluation of Theories
Authors: Finocchiaro Maurice A. 
Published: January 2016

A consensus has recently emerged concerning the role of values in scientific inquiry. The idea that science is value-laden has been elaborated by writers as diverse as Kuhn, McMullin, Hempel, Putnam, Laudan, Feyerabend, Scriven, and Graham.1 Although they all agree that values, value judgment, and evaluation play an important role in science, their emphases and their arguments are different. In fact, I believe that enough work has been done, and enough issues have been raised, that it is becoming increasingly useful and instructive to discuss and explore further the main issues that divide this group of thinkers.One of these issues is whether it is advisable to treat as a value any type of controversial position, such as belief in God or the thesis of metaphysical materialism; some writers do this, but it is questionable whether it is useful to mix together such disparate items.2
Null Hypotheses in Ecology: Towards the Dissolution of a Controversy
Authors: Sloep Peter B. 
Published: January 2016

In present day ecology, competition is a subject typically generating controversies that pervade the whole field. Ecology is concerned with relations between organisms and their environment. As the environment of any organism has biotic besides physical components, relations between organisms are obviously important. Competition is one of them. According to many ecologists it crucially affects the fate of populations and species. Precisely this assumption has led to vigorous debates (cf. Lewin 1984).I intend to show that elementary methodological analysis could easily dissolve the controversy. Methodology, indeed, has not always been brought to bear on biology as it should. This point is elaborated at the end of the paper.Ecologists use a variety of descriptive units, beside individual organisms. Here the population - a group of individual organisms of the same species and the community - a group of populations are of special importance.
Fitness As a Function
Authors: Byerly Henry 
Published: January 2016

Recent attempts to clarify the fitness in evolutionary theory as a propensity (Brandon 1978; Brandon and Beatty 1984; Burian 1983; Mills and Beatty 1979; Sober 1984a, 1984b) or as a primitive theoretical term (Rosenberg 1983, 1985; Williams 1970, Williams and Rosenberg 1985) all miss the mark in clarifying the empirical content and explanatory power of natural selection theory.I shall argue that the crucial distinction missing in these accounts is between the sense of fitness common in population genetics as actual relative rate of increase of genotypes and fitness in the more ordinary sense--and Darwin’s--of adaptedness of organisms. The relation between these senses of ‘fitness’ is that fitness as actual reproduction success depends on, is a function of, variables representing adaptive capacities and environmental properties.
Methodology's Prospects
Authors: Laudan Larry 
Published: January 2016

Ever since Aristotle, the philosophy of science has had two clearly delineated components: (a) conceptual foundations and (b) methodology. These rather closely correspond to what one might call the metaphysical and the epistemic bases of scientific knowledge. Both branches of philosophy of science have co-existed for a long time. If anything, methodology has usually tended to predominate over foundations.Recently, however, methodology has come onto hard times and, since the 1960s especially, it has come in for considerable abuse. Some of that abuse is doubtless well-deserved. Much of traditional methodology made assumptions about the nature of scientific inference which simply cannot be sustained.
From Methodology to Dialectics: A post-Cartesian Approach to Scientific Rationality
Authors: Pera Marcello 
Published: January 2016

The problem of scientific rationality is one of the most controversial in the contemporary philosophy of science. If I am so foolhardy as to raise it again, it is because I do not feel comfortable with most present-day solutions and because I hope I may suggest a more promising, although still tentative, line of research.In order to illustrate the particular angle from which I intend to deal with this problem, I shall make use of the words of a great cosmologist, Fred Hoyle, and I shall also refer to the current debate in cosmology. What I have to say, however, is intended to apply to science in general and not only to a single discipline or to a specific episode.
Reduction and Realism
Authors: Morrison Margaret 
Published: January 2016

In his recent book Foundations of Space-Time Theories Michael Friedman argues for a realism about theoretical structure based on specific methodological practices concerning theory unification. Theoretical structures that are essential to the unifying process are to be given a literal realistic interpretation while the remaining ones can be considered as having merely representational status. Friedman’s account of unification involves the notion of a literal reduction or identification of observational properties of entities or objects with their theoretical counterparts. The relationship between these two levels of theory can be construed as that of submodel to model. Once the appropriate reductions are achieved we are then free to conjoin certain theoretical structures with others thereby enabling us, over time, to produce a unified theory encompassing a variety of domains.The alternative to this view Friedman describes as the representationalist approach. Instead of characterizing the relationship between observational and theoretical structures as that of submodel to model the observational properties are simply correlated by way of an embedding (as opposed to an identity) map with their appropriate theoretical counterparts.
Causal Explanation in Laboratory Ecology: The Case of Competitive Indeterminacy
Authors: Griesemer James R. 
Published: January 2016

In this paper I contrast two causal explanations of the outcome of a set of laboratory experiments in population ecology conducted by Thomas Park in the 1940s and 1950s. These experiments shed light on the problem of adducing evidence for the operation of competition (see Lloyd 1987 for a recent philosophical discussion) and are central to the group selection controversy because they form the empirical base for experimental studies of group selection conducted over the last 12 years (see Griesemer and Wade 1988 for an analysis).The experiments investigated competition in laboratory populations of two flour beetle species, Tribolium confusum and Tribolium castaneum, but the results were more complex and interesting than expected; in addition to demonstrating competition in a laboratory system, they exhibited what Park called “competitive indeterminacy.” This phenomenon was of great interest to statisticians, who devised stochastic models to describe its demographic basis (e.g., M.S. Bartlett, P.H. Leslie, and J. Neyman; see Mertz 1972 for references).
Multiple Constraints, Simultaneous Solutions
Authors: Galison Peter 
Published: January 2016

Historians and philosophers of science have, of late, found a new common ground. During the 1960s the two fields worked together to answer the general question: “how does one theory supersede another?” — followed immediately by a second query: “Is the process rational?” Historians provided examples from the chronicles of science, and philosophers tested these cases against universal models of change. Together the two helped ground an important avenue of inquiry, and today the best of that work — by Feyerabend, Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper, and others — forms a staple of the philosophy of science.But despite the best of intentions, in the 1970s the two fields began to pull apart centrifugally. On one side, the philosophers found their concerns concentrated ever more on fundamental issues about meaning and reference, and these seemed to demand idealized histories with simpler structures.
Scientific Realism in Real Science
Authors: Jones Roger 
Published: January 2016

Scientific realism is a doctrine about the relationship of our ideas on the nature of things to the nature of things itself. Part of the doctrine is that there is a nature of things itself. With regard to the rest, Jarrett Leplin has said, “Like the Equal Rights Movement, scientific realism is a majority position whose advocates are so divided as to appear a minority” (Leplin 1984, p. 1). Still, it can be said that what realists would like is that the account of the nature of things provided by science be true and that those things really exist.Characterized in this way, realism would seem to be a majority position indeed. As Ernst Mach has said of the doctrine,It has arisen in the process of immeasurable time without the intentional assistance of man. It is a product of nature, and is preserved by nature. Everything that philosophy has accomplished…is, as compared with it, but an insignificant and ephemeral product of art. The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation…, immediately returns [to realism]. (Mach 1959, p. 37, quoted in Fine 1986, p. 134)
Decisions, Games and Equilibrium Solutions
Authors: Harper William 
Published: January 2016

Von Neumann and Morgenstern based their theory of games on the representation of individual preferences for outcomes by utilities generated by preferences for gambles over these outcomes. A utility function (an assignment of numbers to outcomes) represents an agent's preferences just in case the agent's preference relation between any two gambles agrees with the numerical relation between their expected utilities (where these expectations are calculated using the objective probabilities specified in the gambles). This representation constrains the utility assignments up to scale transformations (multiplying each value by the same positive number) and adjustments of the zero point (adding the same positive or negative number to each value). This fixes the ratios of differences between utilities of outcomes.Von Neumann and Morgenstem proposed qualitative constraints on the agent's preferences among these gambles which are equivalent to the assertion that such a utility representation exists. Here is an equivalent formulation of such rationality postulates.
Risk Assessment and Uncertainty
Authors: Shrader-Frechette Kristin 
Published: January 2016

Risk assessments done by the Ford Foundation-Mitre Corporation and the Union of Concerned Scientists agree on the hazard probabilities and consequences associated with commercial nuclear fission, but make opposed recommendations regarding using atomic energy to generate electricity. The UCS risk analysis decided against use of the technology; the Ford-Mitre study advised in favor of it (Union of Concerned Scientists 1977; Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group 1977; Cooke 1982, p. 334).The two studies agreed on the data but made different policy recommendations because they followed different methodological rules at the third, risk-evaluation, stage of assessment. (The first two stages are risk identification and risk estimation.) The Ford-Mitre research was based on the widely accepted Bayesian decision criterion that it is rational to choose the action with the best expected value or utility, where ‘expected value’ or ‘expected utility’ is defined as the weighted sum of all possible consequences of the action, and where the weights are given by the probability associated with each consequence.
The Phenotype as the Level of Selection: Cave Organisms as Model Systems
Authors: Kane Thomas C. , Richardson Robert C. , Fong Daniel W. 
Published: January 2016

Selection operates at many levels. Some of the most obvious cases are organismic, such as changes in coloration under the influence of predation (cf. Kettlewell 1973; also Endler 1986). It also operates at other levels. Meiotic drive involves selection for a gene, independently of its effect on the organism. At a higher level, there may also be selection for patterns of colony growth in social insects, again under the influence of predation (cf. Wilson 1971). The appropriate level of selection is a matter of the causal patterns exhibited, or the target of selection. It can also be understood as a question of the appropriate level at which to seek explanatory laws.Robert Brandon (1982, 1990) first clearly distinguished the question of the level of selection from debates over the units of selection. In doing so, he argued that the phenotype is commonly the target of selection, whatever the unit of selection might be.
Visual Perception and the Wages of Indeterminacy
Authors: Montgomery Richard 
Published: January 2016

In Word and Object, W.V. Quine made thinkable the idea that speech and cognition bear a burden of semantic indeterminacy. On Quine’s account, the upshot of semantic indeterminacy is that meaning and mentalism resist successful naturalization, and thus fail the test of scientific respectibility. For Quine, semantic indeterminacy is a fatal shortcoming.Recent attempts to naturalize meaning in our thought and our talk (e.g. Dretske 1981, Fodor 1987), belonging to a tradition that has thrived in reaction to Quine, have sought to nail down semantic properties in a scientifically respectable fashion, avoiding the scourge of indeterminacy. However, both Quine and the new redeemers of mentalism may have missed the boat. Three case studies offered here will suggest that a thriving theory of visual perception still makes room for some rather striking indeterminacies.
Conditional Probabilities, Conditionalization, and Dutch Books
Authors: Sobel Jordan Howard 
Published: January 2016

Relations between conditional probabilities, revisions of probabilities in the light of new information, and conditions of ideal rationality are discussed herein. The formal character of conditional probabilities, and their significance for epistemic states of agents is taken up. Then principles are considered that would, under certain conditions, equate rationally revised probabilities on new information with probabilities reached by conditionalizing on this information. And lastly the possibility of kinds of ‘books’ against known non-conditionalizers is explored, and the question is taken up, What, if anything, would be wrong with a person against whom such a book could be made?1. The standard mathematical treatment takes probability functions as basic, and conditional probabilities defined. If P(-) is a probability function, then is its conditional probability function if and only if P(h/e) is defined only for e such that P(e) > 0, and is then equal to P(e & h)/P(e).
The Function of Credit in Hull's Evolutionary Model of Science
Authors: Koertge Noretta 
Published: January 2016

David Hull’s book (1988) provides an evolutionary account of the development of science which pays attention to both the social and conceptual aspects of that process. Unlike most philosophers who only invoke Darwinian metaphors in a casual way, Hull takes the analogy between the biological evolution of species and the growth of scientific knowledge quite seriously and by providing abstract definitions of terms such as replicator, interactor and lineage, he makes it possible for us to see clearly the structural similarities between the two historical processes.Other symposiasts will comment on how tight that analogy really is. I must remark in passing that I have never understood the intense interest which evolutionary epistemologists take in this comparison. Surely our major job is to understand how science works, perhaps by using evolutionary theory as a fallible heuristic, but nothing seems to hinge on the extent of the formal analogy.
Giving up Certainties
Authors: Kyburg Henry E. 
Published: January 2016

People have worried for many years — centuries — about how you perform large changes in your body of beliefs. How does the new evidence lead you to replace a geocentric system of planetary motion by a heliocentric system? How do we decide to abandon the principle of the conservation of mass?The general approach that we will try to defend here is that an assumption, presupposition, framework principle, will be rejected or altered when a large enough number of improbabilities must be accepted on be basis of our experience. If I think that all swans are white, and a student claims to have a counterexample, I will assume that he has made some observational error. I will reject his result, and continue to accept the generalization. When a lot of people claim to have seen counterexamples, I will come around: to continue to accept the generalization would require me to accept too many improbabilities.
Between Mathematics and Physics
Authors: Resnik Michael D. 
Published: January 2016

The distinction between mathematical and physical objects has probably played a greater role shaping the philosophy of mathematics than the distinction between observable and theoretical entities has had in defining the philosophy of science. All the major movements in the philosophy of mathematics may be seen as attempts to free mathematics of an abstract ontology or to come to terms with it. The reasons are epistemic. Most philosophers of mathematics believe that the abstractaess of mathematical objects introduces special difficulties in accounting for our ability to know them, to refer to them and even to entertain beliefs about them. These difficulties—supposedly absent even in the case of the most theoretical physical objects—make mathematical objects especially problematic and philosophically unattractive.Few have questioned this epistemic thesis or the ontic distinction it presupposes. LaVerne Shelton (1980) challenged the abstract-concrete distinction some years ago in an unpublished APA address.
Structuralism and Conceptual Change in Mathematics
Authors: Menzel Christopher 
Published: January 2016

Professor Grosholz packs a lot into her interesting and suggestive paper “Formal Unities and Real Individuals” (Grosholz 1990b). In the limited space available I can comment briefly on its several parts, or direct more substantive comments at a single issue. I will opt for the latter; specifically, I want to address her critique of mathematical structuralism, as found especially in the writings of Michael Resnik.I begin with a brief, hence necessarily caricatured, summary of Resnik’s influential view. According to structuralism, the subject matter of a mathematical theory is a given pattern, or structure, and the objects of the theory are intrinsically unstructured points, or positions, within that pattern. Mathematical objects thus have no identity, and no intrinsic features, outside of the patterns in which they occur. Hence, they cannot be given in isolation but only in their role within an antecedently given pattern, and are distinguishable from one another only in virtue of the relations they bear to one another in the pattern (see, e.g., Resnik (1981)).
Implications of the Cognitive Sciences for the Philosophy of Science
Authors: Giere Ronald N. 
Published: January 2016

Does recent work in the cognitive sciences have any implications for theories or methods employed within the philosophy of science itself? The answer to this question depends first on one’s conception of the philosophy of science and then on the nature of work being done in the various different fields comprising the cognitive sciences. For example, one might think of the philosophy of science as being an autonomous discipline that is both logically and epistemologically prior to any empirical inquiry. If the cognitive sciences are empirical sciences, then research in the cognitive sciences could not have any significant implications for the philosophy of science. And that would be the end of the matter. Logical Empiricism is now typically understood as having exemplified this point of view.More specifically, Logical Empiricism took it for granted (i) that scientific knowledge should be understood as ideally having the structure of a formal logical calculus, and (ii) that the empirical warrant for scientific claims is given by directly observed data together with formal rules which determine the weight of the evidence for or against the particular claims in question.
Determinism in Deterministic Chaos
Authors: Jones Roger 
Published: January 2016

In a paper fifteen years ago about the meaning and the possibility of the beginning and end of time, our redoubtable session chair, John Earman, ended up like this:…[T]he answers to the questions posed at the outset lie somewhere in a thicket of problems growing out of the intersection of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. This paper has only located the thicket and engaged in a little initial bush beating. This is not much progress, but knowing which bushes to beat is a necessary first step.Some philosophers will be disappointed that the thicket is populated by so many problems of a technical and scientific nature. On the contrary, I am encouraged by this result because it shows that a long-standing philosophical problem has a nontrivial and, indeed, a surprisingly large content. Moreover, this result is a good illustration of the artificiality and danger of trying to separate philosophy from science. (Earman 1977, p. 131-2)These remarks are a kind of manifesto of an approach to philosophical questions about space and time dating from the late 1960’s.