A square tabular array was introduced by R. C. Punnett in (1907) to visualize systematically and economically the combination of gametes to make genotypes according to Mendel’s theory. This mode of representation evolved and rapidly became standardized as the canonical way of representing like problems in genetics. Its advantages over other contemporary methods are discussed, as are ways in which it evolved to increase its power and efficiency, and responded to changing theoretical perspectives. It provided a natural visual decomposition of (...) a complex problem into a number of inter-related stages. This explains its computational and conceptual power, for one could simply “read off” answers to a wide variety of questions simply from the “right” visual representation of the problem, and represent multiple problems, and multiple layers of problems in the same diagram. I relate it to prior work on the evolution of Weismann diagrams by Griesemer and Wimsatt (What Philosophy of Biology Is, Martinus-Nijhoff, the Hague, 1989), and discuss a crucial change in how it was interpreted that midwifed its success. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , L, Supplement, 177-94, Fall 1990. Reprinted in M. Losonsky, ed., Language and Mind: Contemporary Readings in Philosopohy and Cognitive Science, Blackwells, 1995.

Let me attempt a drastic summary, or symbolic reduction, of Mr. Foss's adeptly metaphorical exposition. The use of the copula is, implicit in the appositive series, will do some violence to the complexity of the argument, but since causes and parts are frowned on by the same argument, the simpler arrangement cannot be altogether out of keeping. In logical and grammatical terms, we have on two sides of a profound ledger: "symbolic reduction," the divisive subject and predicate,--and "metaphoric process," the (...) underlying and unifying energy of the proposition, the subjectum. The negations of dialectic operate to show the insufficiency of symbolic concepts and are the "door to philosophic truth." And in ontological terms, we have on the one hand number, time, space, cause and effect, coincidence and contingency; and on the other the different, the naught, the apeiron, the potential, the tension of process, freedom and necessity in metaphoric lawful unity. There are two closely similar extremes of reduction between which one locates the transcendent philosophy of metaphor: that of sensationalism, the philosophy of the brute and atomic, and that of rationalism, the philosophy of expedient action. And in more or less theological terms, we have on the one hand the environment and its complement the ego, purposive and possessive; on the other, World, the I and the Thou, prayer, sin and grace in the metaphorical unity of consciousness, the widening power of personality in intercession or metaphorical representation. On the one hand, birth and death, past and future, and a present extending ad libitum into either; on the other, the eternal present of the integrated process stretching over past and future, expressed in its purest form in art. And so in aesthetic terms: on the one hand catharsis, a rationalized mixture of the ego's pleasure and pain, asceticism and hedonism, play; on the other, drama--especially tragedy, which par excellence action--Eudaimonia, purification, artistic distance, stylization, imagination, conscience, love. On the one hand, comedy in the sense of farce, environment symbolically reduced, actions and persons according to type, the mechanism of means and ends, rules, rituals, tricks, chance, the caricature of symbolic fixation--producing laughter: on the other hand, true and great comedy, the attempt to understand life in all its contradictions, producing the smile. (shrink)

It would therefore be reasonable to undertake a description and appreciation of this book precisely in its character as a dialectical dictionary or magazine of aesthetic issues and arguments. One could conduct a guided tour, stopping to admire the fullness of information, or fertility of invention, and the nicely graded series of the ideas collected in this locus or that, or in some area where one happened to be well enough informed, noting the omissions. One might even raise a theoretical (...) question about this whole aspect of the work, starting with the author's bald assertion: "What I have written is, simply and literally, a guide to aesthetics—a guide to the structure and problems of the subject, not to its literature." His "approach," he says, "is systematic, not historical." He "mentions names," but he says he is "not concerned much with who first said what," and his references are not always to the "earliest or best exponents of the views they illustrate". Much of the literature he says he has not read and does not mean to read. One who has himself not read all of the aesthetic literature can hardly object to this very strenuously. (shrink)

Nick Zangwill has done more than any person recently to resuscitate aesthetic formalism. I say "resuscitate" because formalism has not been in favor for several decades. Zangwill writes that "Aesthetic Formalism has fallen on hard times. At best it receives unsympathetic discussion and swift rejection. At worse it is the object of abuse and derision." The reasons many today believe aesthetic formalism is not viable have been the subject of discussion since the pendulum swing away from New Criticism, via the (...) work of William Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Clement Greenberg, André Levinson, and Heinrich Wolfflin. Most of these reasons have been discussed thoroughly, and those that I will review here that have been discussed I will spend little time reconsidering. I believe, though, that there are a few more reasons why formalism has fallen on hard times, reasons that have not been much discussed, or at least not directly. They are the subject of this article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Context Building and Educating Imaginative EngagementDavid E. W. Fenner (bio)IntroductionIn my experience—with students, colleagues, friends, myself—I find that most people view aesthetic objects and art objects (which sometimes overlap but not always) through a variety of "lenses": subjectively located, psychologically based perspectives or "contexts" through which the object is viewed, considered, appreciated, and many times even criticized. I believe that many times the depth and richness of aesthetic reward (...) depends on the perspective through which the subject attends to an object or event. While a part of aesthetic perspectival context is objective—such as the physical conditions surrounding and history concerning the aesthetic object—the majority of it is subjective, and I want to take another step and say that the majority is psychological.1 Aesthetic attenders bring to aesthetic experiences thick sets of background beliefs, personal associations, taste preferences, attitudes, and values—and this is not to mention the more temporal items like how they feel on the day or whether they are attending alongside friends, relatives, or colleagues. Hundreds of psychological factors result in differences in aesthetic experience; this is most likely true of all experiences, but it is even more the case in aesthetic experience and those kinds of experiences that set the occasions for attenders to think, feel, consider, spend time with, introspect, and be in a relationship—subject and object—that is distinct from the ordinary and the routine.Attenders can employ a single lens or multiple ones. It is entirely possible to attend in the absence of the employment of any lens—a purely disinterested or purely formalist perspective would be such a thing—but the vast majority of aesthetic attenders bring with them layers of lenses through which they naturally, nontheoretically (which is not to say noncognitively) view objects. On different occasions, given particular objects and particular subjects, the subject may view an aesthetic object from an art historical [End Page 109] perspective (whether or not the object is an art object); a moral perspective; a cultural, political, or national perspective; a social, class, race, ethnic, or gender perspective; a religious or spiritual point of view; an emotional point of view; a point of view colored by personal associations, personal history, personal identification, personal preference; and on and on.2 Sometimes the employment of lenses is distracting, and sometimes the experience is less than positive given such employment. But (1) many times—I want to say most times—the employment of such lenses results in a richer and more meaningful experience, and (2) it is the natural stance. Adopting a noncontextualized perspective requires conscious volitional effort. Seeing through particular psychological lenses is the default.I want to focus in this paper on a kind of perspective, a kind of psychological context, that has not been much discussed: I will call it aesthetic engagement preparation. Essentially, this has to do with the level of readiness that the subject possesses for engaging with particular objects aesthetically. To engage in a way that will provide a good return on her investment of attention, the subject must be open to the object, must be comfortable with the objective context, must be ready to enter into a relationship with the object—a relationship that may be psychologically associational in all sorts of ways (affectively, cognitively, and so forth)—and must be ready to employ a range of lenses, like the ones described above, to get the most out of her experience. Again, those who advocate noncontextualized (disinterested or formalist) approaches—Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Addison, Kant, Schopenhauer, Wilde, Whistler, Wimsatt, Greenberg, Brooks, Wolfflin, Bell, Moore, Bullough, Hanslick, Ortega y Gassett, Fry, Hampshire, Stolnitz, and Zangwill, just to name a few—will find aesthetic engagement preparation not only unnecessary but counterproductive. However, given its efficacy for enhancing actual aesthetic experience, I take this as a sign that these noncontextualists may have been on the wrong path. But of course this is an empirical question, and certainly there are cases—though rare, I claim—where employment of aesthetic lenses results in a less positive experience than otherwise.What I will try to do in this paper is to demonstrate (1) the scope of aesthetic engagement preparation on... (shrink)

This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world.

Willard van Orman Quine once said that he had a preference for a desert ontology. This was in an earlier day when concerns with logical structure and ontological simplicity reigned supreme. Ontological genocide was practiced upon whole classes of upper-level or ‘derivative’ entities in the name of elegance, and we were secure in the belief that one strayed irremediably into the realm of conceptual confusion and possible error the further one got from ontic fundamentalism. In those days, one paid more (...) attention to generic worries about possible errors than to actual errors derived from distancing oneself too far from the nitty-gritty details of actual theory, actual inferences from actual data, the actual conditions under which we posited and detected entities, calibrated and ‘burned in’ instruments, identified and rejected artifacts, debugged programs and procedures, explained the mechanisms behind regularities, judged correlations to be spurious, and in general, to the real complexities and richness of actual scientific practice. (shrink)

Scientific models may be more useful for false assumptions they make than true ones when one is interested not in the fit of the model, but in the form of the residuals. Modeling Darwin's “blending” theory of inheritance shows how it illuminates features of Mendelian theory. Insufficient understanding of it leads to incorrect moves in modeling population structure. But it may prove even more useful for organizing a theory of cultural evolution. Analysis of “blending” inheritance gives new tools for recognizing (...) population structure for culture and for understanding differences between biological and cultural inheritance. (shrink)

The use of multiple means of determination to “triangulate” on the existence and character of a common phenomenon, object, or result has had a long tradition in science but has seldom been a matter of primary focus. As with many traditions, it is traceable to Aristotle, who valued having multiple explanations of a phenomenon, and it may also be involved in his distinction between special objects of sense and common sensibles. It is implicit though not emphasized in the distinction between (...) primary and secondary qualities from Galileo onward. It is arguably one of several conceptions involved in Whewell’s method of the “consilience of inductions” (Laudan 1971) and is to be found in several places in Peirce. (From M. Brewer and B. Collins, eds., (1981); Scientific Inquiry in the Social Sciences (a festschrift for Donald T. Campbell), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 123–162.). (shrink)

Methodological reductionists practice ‘wannabe reductionism’. They claim that one should pursue reductionism, but never propose how. I integrate two strains in prior work to do so. Three kinds of activities are pursued as “reductionist”. “Successional reduction” and inter-level mechanistic explanation are legitimate and powerful strategies. Eliminativism is generally ill-conceived. Specific problem-solving heuristics for constructing inter-level mechanistic explanations show why and when they can provide powerful and fruitful tools and insights, but sometimes lead to erroneous results. I show how traditional metaphysical (...) approaches fail to engage how science is done. The methods used do so, and support a pragmatic and non-eliminativist realism. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are incompatible with reduction. Most scientists regard a system property as emergent relative to properties of the system's parts if it depends upon their mode of organization--a view consistent with reduction. Emergence can be analyzed as a failure of aggregativity--a state in which "the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts." Aggregativity requires four conditions, giving tools for analyzing modes of organization. Differently met for different decompositions of the system, and in different (...) degrees, these conditions provide powerful evaluation criteria for choosing decompositions, and heuristics for detecting biases of vulgar reductionisms. This analysis of emergence is compatible with reduction. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are incompatible with reduction. Most scientists regard a system property as emergent relative to properties of its parts if it depends upon their mode of organization-a view consistent with reduction. Emergence is a failure of aggregativity, in which ``the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts''. Aggregativity requires four conditions, giving powerful tools for analyzing modes of organization. Differently met for different decompositions of the system, and in different degrees, the structural conditions (...) can provide evaluation criteria for choosing decompositions, ``natural kinds'', and detecting functional localization fallacies, approximations, and various biases of vulgar reductionisms. This analysis of emergence and use of these conditions as heuristics is consistent with a broader reductionistic methodology. (shrink)

While the idea of philosophy as conceptual analysis has attracted many adherents and undergone a number of variations, in general it suffers from an authority problem with two dimensions. First, it is unclear why the analysis of a concept should have objective authority: why explicating what we mean should express how things are. Second, conceptual analysis seems to lack intersubjective authority: why philosophical analysis should apply to more than a parochial group of individuals. I argue that Hegel’s conception of social (...) ontology, focused on his concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit), helps to explain how concepts (and their explication) have both objective and intersubjective authority in the social domain. Hegel claims that modern institutions are the product of self-conscious purposes, so that they are conceptually constituted. Concepts do not just represent these objects and so depend on a contingent relation to them. As many contemporary social ontologists agree, this means that our concepts of these institutions are uniquely epistemically “transparent.” They have objective authority. Concepts have intersubjective authority in the modern world as well, according to Hegel. However, I show that this feature of Hegel’s account does not rely on the solution to a philosophical problem. Rather, since the concepts of modern ethical life are “essentially contested,” their content depends on the practical and political agreement of modern subjects. This means that concepts can only have objective authority if some prior intersubjective agreement has been reached. The role of philosophy as conceptual analysis is thus importantly dependent on political developments. (shrink)

The generative entrenchment of an entity is a measure of how much of the generated structure or activity of a complex system depends upon the presence or activity of that entity. It is argued that entities with higher degrees of generative entrenchment are more conservative in evolutionary changes of such systems. A variety of models of complex structures incorporating the effects of generative entrenchment are presented and we demonstrate their relevance in analyzing and explaining a variety of developmental and evolutionary (...) phenomena, both on a macroscopic developmental and evolutionary scale, and using models and strategies pioneered by Kauffman, on the more microscopic scale appropriate to the analysis of the structure and behavior of gene control networks. The resulting picture suggests that generative entrenchment acts as a powerful and constructive developmental constraint on the course of evolutionary processes. Since virtually any system exhibits varying degrees of generative entrenchment among its parts and activities, these studies and results have in addition broad potential application for the analysis of generative structures in other areas. (shrink)

Scientific models may be more useful for false assumptions they make than true ones when one is interested not in the fit of the model, but in the form of the residuals. Modeling Darwin’s “blending” theory of inheritance shows how it illuminates features of Mendelian theory. Insufficient understanding of it leads to incorrect moves in modeling population structure. But it may prove even more useful for organizing a theory of cultural evolution. Analysis of “blending” inheritance gives new tools for recognizing (...) population structure for culture and for understanding differences between biological and cultural inheritance. (shrink)