In this, the first book devoted to Peter Achinstein's influential work in philosophy of science, twenty distinguished philosophers, including four Lakatos award winners, address various aspects of Achinstein's influential views on the nature of scientific evidence, scientific explanation, and scientific realism. It includes short essays by Steve Gimbel and Jeff Maynes, Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Victor DiFate, Jerry Doppelt, Adam Goldstein, Philip Kitcher, Fred Kronz, Deborah Mayo, Greg Morgan, Helen Longino, John Norton, Michael Ruse, Bas van Fraassen, Stathis Psillos, Larry (...) Laudan, Richard Richards, Kent Staley, and Jim Woodward with replies to each contributor from Peter Achinstein. Readers will come away with an understanding of the current debate in multiple areas of philosophy of science and how various contemporary issues are connected. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Neurology of Culture, or How We Move From Rage to Ritual in the Process of HominizationGregory J. Lobo (bio)The most (or rather the only) effective form of reconciliation—that would stop this crisis, and save the community from total self-destruction—is the convergence of all collective anger and rage towards a random victim, a scapegoat, designated by mimetism itself, and unanimously adopted as such.—René Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 64.INTRODUCTIONHow do (...) we move from rage to ritual? How do we become human? The work of René Girard would seem to offer an answer to this question. In this brief essay I want to simply add some evolutionary and neuroscientific details to Girard's theory, which flesh out while also corroborating the basic components of it. [End Page 255]To do this I need to draw a distinction between religion and culture. I mention this from the outset because the main source upon which I draw to represent Girard's thinking is the book Evolution and Conversion. Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, published in 2008. I use this particular source because, as Girard's interlocutors say in their foreword to it, this book "is intended as a reassessment of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 30 years on,"1 and it evidences the "ways in which, over 30 years, mimetic theory has matured, and its fruitfulness become more apparent, even since the initial excitement of Girard's groundbreaking works in the 1970s."2 I highlight my need to distinguish between culture and religion due to the fact that in Evolution and Conversion Antonello and Castro Rocha state forthrightly that for Girard (and, one might presume, for Girardians), culture and religion "amount to the same thing."3 But it is not totally clear that this holds. For as Girard, in the same book, says, "religion, as an institution, comes into being through the scapegoat mechanism."4 Thus, the question arises as to what it is that allows humans to have institutions in the first place. Surely the answer is the capacity for culture as such, understood as the very capacity for symbolic thought, for the manipulation of mental images and their combination into new ones. Hopefully, in the discussion that follows, my insistence on the need to analytically distinguish between culture and religion will be born out. For now, I simply ask the reader to play along. If the reader is game, I can restate my purpose: What is the neurology of culture, such that we can become human, or move from blind rage to deliberate ritual?THE MIMETIC MECHANISMGirard, we should recall, insists that we start "from a purely naturalistic standpoint."5 With this injunction in mind, I will give an account of the "mimetic mechanism," an expression that "describes the whole process, beginning with mimetic desire, which then becomes mimetic rivalry, eventually escalating to the stage of a mimetic crisis and finally ending with the scapegoat resolution"6 that strives for naturalistic representation. Therefore, I will avoid terms like "community" or even "group," which already suggest the existence of something like cultural realities. A naturalistic standpoint, which I take to be a scientific standpoint, must strive to circumvent begging the question by using terms like these, for they refer exactly to the phenomena we are trying to explain: a self-conscious sense of belonging and community. [End Page 256]For those familiar enough with its presuppositions about the human nature that underlies, or is the foundation of, human culture, the mimetic mechanism can be presented in a somewhat straightforward fashion. This presentation relies on Chapter 2 of Evolution and Conversion.The desire of Homo sapiens is in essence mimetic. That is, an individual member of the species desires what its proximal conspecifics—its models—desire. That two conspecifics should desire the same thing leads, inevitably, to two intermediate outcomes. First, the desire for what the other desires intensifies, due to the effects of mimesis; second, this drives the two now mutual models almost inevitably into conflict, as they become doubles. This is conflictual mimesis. The conflict can turn violent and... (shrink)

"The author tells a history of the study of cancer-causing viruses from the early twentieth century to the development of an HPV vaccine for cervical cancer in 2006. He profiles the "cancer virus hunters" who made breakthroughs in tumor virology"--.

In 1962, Donald Caspar and Aaron Klug published their classic theory of virus structure. They developed their theory with an explicit analogy between spherical viruses and Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. In this paper, I use the spherical virus-geodesic dome case to develop an account of analogy and deductive analogical inference based on the notion of an isomorphism. I also consider under what conditions there is a good reason to claim an experimentally untested analogy is plausible.

Reagan mixes the genres of biographical essay, memoir, philosophical essay, and interview to provide the reader with a fascinating and highly readable account. The biographical essay narrates Ricoeur’s early life, his experience as a POW during the Second World War, professorships at the Sorbonne, Nanterre, and Chicago, and his “rediscovery” in and return to France after the publication of Time and Narrative. Reagan’s analysis betrays Ricoeur’s comment that “no one is interested in my life... [since] my life is my work... (...) my books and my articles.” Ricoeur’s captivity as a prisoner of war, the problems he encountered at Nanterre University as doyen of the Faculty of Letters during the 1960s, and the pain and love he and Simone felt for Olivier, their fourth child who committed suicide, are some of the intriguing and touching elements of the narrative. After Olivier’s tragic death in 1986, Ricoeur added “suffering” to the phrase “human action” whenever he wrote about the problem of human action and suffering. (shrink)

This article is a response to Frank Hindriks’ “Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social World.”.

College of Medicine, University of South Alabama Mobile, AL 36688-0002, USA wbp501{at}jaguar1.usouthal.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Recent work in viral genomics has shown that bacteriophages exhibit a high degree of mosaicism, which is most likely due to a long history of prolific horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Given these findings, we argue that each of the most plausible attempts to properly classify bacteriophages into distinct species fail. Mayr's biological species concept fails because there is (...) no useful viral analog to sexual reproduction. Phenetic species concepts fail because they obscure the mosaicism and the rich reticulated viral histories. Phylogenetic species concepts, even when extended to take into account reticulation, fail because there is no non-arbitrary distinction between recombination events that create a new viral species and those that do not. There is good reason to think that bacteriophages, arguably the Earth's most abundant biological agent, evolve without forming species. Introduction The Biology of Viruses 2.1 Bacteriophage life cycles 2.2 Mechanisms of HGT The Species Problem and Species Concepts 3.1 Phenetic species concepts 3.2 The biological species concept 3.3 Phylogenetic species concepts 3.4 The ecological species concept 3.5 Homeostatic property cluster species Viruses and Species Taxonomy Reticular Phylogenies Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against John Beatty’s position in his paper “The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis” by counterexample. Beatty argues that there are no distinctly biological laws because the outcomes of the evolutionary processes are contingent. I argue that the heart of the Caspar–Klug theory of virus structure—that spherical virus capsids consist of 60T subunits (where T = k 2 + hk + h 2 and h and k are integers)—is a distinctly biological law even if the existence of spherical (...) viruses is evolutionarily contingent. (shrink)

The focus of this book is to explore teachers' evolving personal epistemologies, or the beliefs we hold about the origin and development of knowledge in the context of teaching. The chapters focus on a range of conceptual frameworks about how university and field-based experiences influence the connections between teachers' personal epistemologies and teaching practice. In an earlier volume we investigated ways in which we might change preservice teachers' beliefs and teaching practice (Brownlee, Schraw and Berthelsen, 2011). While we addressed the (...) nature of teachers' personal epistemology, learning and teaching practices, and approaches for changing beliefs throughout teacher education programs, the volume did not address conceptual frameworks for the development of teacher's personal epistemologies. The book is focused on teacher educators, teachers and teacher education programmers in universities with an overall aim of highlighting how we might support students to engage in learning that is challenging and to engage in professional experiences that promote changes in teaching practice. We argue that students need to be encouraged to question their beliefs and develop increasingly sophisticated beliefs about their knowledge and their students' knowledge that facilitate learning and intellectual growth. (shrink)

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Volume 51, Issue 6, Page 555-573, December 2021. John Searle’s social ontology distinguishes between linguistic and non-linguistic institutional facts. He argues that every instance of the latter is created by declarative speech acts, while the former are exceptions to this far-reaching claim: linguistic phenomena are autonomous, their meaning is “built in,” and this is necessary, Searle argues, to avoid “infinite regress.” In this essay I analyze Searle’s arguments for this linguistic exceptionalism and reveal its flaws. (...) My method is to follow Searle’s argument closely and comprehensively so as to avoid, insofar as is possible, a selective reading of his argument in my favor. Against Searle’s position, I argue that linguistic phenomena are not exceptions to his general theory of institutional facts, for they too always require supplementary representations in order to exist. Language itself is analogous to all other institutions and infinite regress turns out to be unavoidable. (shrink)

This is a reply to Weinfurt's article examining the Sweeping Model. Overall, our positions are not as incompatible as they may seem, although I feel that his conclusion, that the Sweeping Model cannot explain human attention, does not follow from his comments. I will proceed through his article and clarify issues as they arise. Our difference of opinion may result from differing goals, with Weinfurt being concerned with more abstract aspects of cognition, and myself with basic perception and how it (...) may be achieved before proceeding to the more abstract. (shrink)

Rationalization is the adjustment of one's beliefs about politically relevant information, the better to fit one's political behavior or one's political attitudes. This reverses the usual causal order, in which it is assumed that people start with values, add what little factual information they have, and produce policy, partisan, or ideological “attitudes” as a result. If people actually work backwards from their political behavior to their attitudes, and from their attitudes to their beliefs about “the facts,” there are obvious and (...) troubling implications for democratic legitimacy, as well as for the academic study of democratic competence. I confine myself here to exploring some of the empirical evidence for rationalization, and to thinking about how to solve the resulting research problems, bracketing the normative issues. (shrink)

The recent conception of biodiversity proposed by James Maclaurin and Sterelny was developed mostly with macrobiological life in mind. They suggest that we measure biodiversity by dividing life into natural units (typically species) and quantifying the differences among units using phenetic rather than phylogenetic measures of distance. They identify problems in implementing quantitative phylogenetic notions of difference for non-prokaryotic species. I suggest that if we focus on microbiological life forms that engage in frequent, promiscuous lateral gene transfer (LGT), and their (...) associated reticulated phylogenies, we need to rethink the notion of species as the natural unit, and we discover additional problems with phylogenetic notions of distance. These problems suggest that a phenetic approach based on morphospaces has just as much appeal, if not more, for microbes as they do for multi-cellular life. Facts about LGT, however, offer no new insight into the additional challenge of reconciling units and differences into a single measure of biodiversity. (shrink)

This article discusses John Searle’s status function account of human rights and Åsa Burman’s “A Critique of the Status Function Account of Human Rights.” While recognizing the validity of part of the critique, based on the distinction between types and tokens, the author argues that, nonetheless, one is not compelled to accept Burman’s conclusion, that “one must give up the status function account of human rights to explain how a human right can exist without collective recognition”. Specifically, the author accepts (...) Burman’s critique of Searle’s attempt to preserve the intuition that human rights have existed without collective recognition, but concludes offering three ways to understand human rights even in the absence of collective recognition, all of which preserve the status function account. (shrink)

In this paper I consider Kenneth Schaffner''s(1998) rendition of ''''developmentalism'''' from the point of viewof bacteriophage biology. I argue that the fact that a viablephage can be produced from purified DNA and host cellularcomponents lends some support to the anti-developmentalist, ifthey first show that one can draw a principled distinctionbetween genetic and environmental effects. The existence ofhost-controlled phage host range restriction supports thedevelopmentalist''s insistence on the parity of DNA andenvironment. However, in the case of bacteriophage, thedevelopmentalist stands on less firm (...) ground than when organismswith nervous systems, such as Schaffner''s C. elegans, areconsidered. (shrink)

The concept of population is central to ecology, yet it has received little attention from philosophers of ecology. Furthermore, the work that has been done often recycles ideas that have been developed for evolutionary biology. We argue that ecological populations and evolutionary populations, though intimately related, are distinct, and that the distinction matters to practicing ecologists. We offer a definition of ecological population in terms of demographic independence, where changes in abundance are a function of birth and death processes alone. (...) However, demographic independence is insufficient on its own so we supplement it with the idea of shared habitat. An ecological population is a group of organisms of the same species in a habitat that manifests DI. Given the importance of metapopulation dynamics to modern ecology, an account of ecological population must apply to this domain as well. Thus, we extend our definition of ecological population to the metapopulation. To facilitate the extension, we introduce the metahabitat—a collection of spatially segregated habitat patches shared by a single DI population. This enables us to diagnose some unhelpful trends in the metapopulation literature and emphasize the importance of habitat dynamics in pursuit of the goals of theoretical ecology and conservation biology. (shrink)

This accessible book gives a new, detailed and elementary explanation of the Gödel incompleteness theorems and presents the Chaitin results and their relation to the da Costa-Doria results, which are given in full, but with no ...