William James’ Principles of Psychology, in which he made famous the ‘specious present’ doctrine of temporal experience, and Edmund Husserl’s Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, were giant strides in the philosophical investigation of the temporality of experience. However, an important set of precursors to these works has not been adequately investigated. In this article, we undertake this investigation. Beginning with Reid’s essay ‘Memory’ in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, we trace out a line of development of ideas about (...) the temporality of experience that runs through Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, William Hamilton, and finally the work of Shadworth Hodgson and Robert Kelly, both of whom were immediate influences on James (though James pseudonymously cites the latter as ‘E.R. Clay’). Furthermore, we argue that Hodgson, especially his Metaphysic of Experience (1898), was a significant influence on Husserl. (shrink)

Leuridan (2010) argued that mechanisms cannot provide a genuine alternative to laws of nature as a model of explanation in the sciences, and advocates Mitchell’s (1997) pragmatic account of laws. I first demonstrate that Leuridan gets the order of priority wrong between mechanisms, regularity, and laws, and then make some clarifying remarks about how laws and mechanisms relate to regularities. Mechanisms are not an explanatory alternative to regularities; they are an alternative to laws. The existence of stable regularities in nature (...) is necessary for either model of explanation: regularities are what laws describe and what mechanisms explain. (shrink)

I argue for two main points in historiography of physics regarding the significance of Du Châtelet's Foundations of Physics in the development of mechanics. The first is that, despite Du Châtelet calling it a textbook in the Preface, it should not be understood as 'merely' a textbook. Instead, it fits in a tradition of women involved in natural philosophy in that era using liminal publication opportunities, and to reduce some of the resistance to their publication. Even these liminal opportunities were (...) rare and mostly available to women of very high social standing and wealth, who also happened to have supportive families or spouses, and were usually associated with some other well-known male thinker. The second point is that, even if we treat Foundations as a textbook, the way in which it synthesizes and refines work by Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, and others, meets the criteria given by Kuhn for the establishment of a first paradigm, which is not complete without such a definitive statement that enables the mop-up work characteristic of normal science. I conclude that by Kuhn's own criteria, he ought to have identified Du Châtelet as a key part of establishing the first paradigm in physics. She blazed a trail for others to follow. (shrink)

Patterns and pattern ontologies are a powerful way for pragmatists to address metaphysical issues by rejecting a false dichotomy between pluralism and realism. However, there is a common misconception about patterns that I call the philosophically perverse patterns (PPP) problem. Here, critics of patterns invent perverse examples that meet the metaphysical criteria to count as patterns. I defuse this concern by showing how PPP misunderstands what the pragmatist metaphysics of patterns is supposed to accomplish: the bare definition should not rule (...) out, or in, substantive examples of patterns that instead should involve methodological considerations. I use this response to the PPP problem to show how the metaphysical definition of 'pattern' allows the pragmatist to capture the rich intricacies of ontologies in the sciences and yields two illustrative norms by which methodology can be guided in developing or refining ontologies: cohesion and coherence. (shrink)

This chapter discusses several kinds of reduction that are often found in the biomedical sciences, in contrast to reduction in fields such as physics. This includes reduction as a methodological assumption for how to investigate phenomena like complex diseases, and reduction as a conceptual tool for relating distinct models of the same phenomenon. The case of Parkinson’s disease illustrates a wide variety of ways in which reductionism is an important tool in medicine.

The two-times problem, where time as experienced seems to have distinctive features different than those found in fundamental physics, appears to be more intractable than necessary, I argue, because the two times are marked out from the positions furthest apart: neuroscience and physics. I offer causation as exactly the kind of bridge between these two times that authors like Buonomano and Rovelli (forthcoming) are seeking. It is a historical contingency from philosophical discussions around phenomenology, and a methodological artefact from neuroscience, (...) that most studies of temporal features of experience require subjects to be sufficiently still that their engagement with affordances in the environment can be at best tested in artificial and highly constrained ways. Physics does not offer an account of causation, but accounts of causation are tied to or grounded in physics in ways that can be clearly delineated. Causation then serves as a bridge that coordinates time as experienced, via interaction with affordances in the environment, with time in physics as it constrains causal relationships. I conclude by showing how an information-theoretic account of causation fits neatly into and extends the information gathering and utilizing system (IGUS) of Gruber et al. (Front. Psychol., 13, 718505). (shrink)

This chapter discusses several kinds of reduction that are often found in the biomedical sciences, in contrast to reduction in fields such as physics. This includes reduction as a methodological assumption for how to investigate phenomena like complex diseases, and reduction as a conceptual tool for relating distinct models of the same phenomenon. The case of Parkinson’s disease illustrates a wide variety of ways in which reductionism is an important tool in medicine.

Shadworth Hodgson offers an account of how philosophy relates to science - both physical and psychological - in which three different conceptions of time can be identified. He distinguishes the methods of philosophy, involving analysis of the contents of immediate consciousness, and of science, which presumes the existence of the world of common sense. Hodgson holds that philosophical analysis of immediate consciousness, or the analysis of a present moment in the experience, provides the ultimate justification for knowledge in science. Time (...) as an object of study in science must be distinguished from the temporal structure of immediate consciousness. Time as a target of scientific study is thus differentiable into time in physical science, and time in psychology, where the temporal characteristics of consciousness can be studied, but only from a perspective external to that consciousness. Each of those scientific conceptions of time still presupposes and are evidentially dependent on the analysis of immediate consciousness, itself already temporal. The result is that time as a fundamental unit of experience could not, even in principle, conflict with time as studied in science, because it is presupposed by and the evidential base for claims about time in science. (shrink)