Causal selection and priority are at the heart of discussions of the causal parity thesis, which says that all causes of a given effect are on a par, and that any justified priority assigned to a given cause results from causal explanatory interests. In theories of causation that provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of causal claims, status as cause is an either/or issue: either a given cause satisfies the conditions or it does not. Consequently, assessments of causal (...) parity and priority require more resources, which can either be additional or part of the causal analysis itself. While adding resources in terms of a theory of causal explanation has been standard, here we develop a unified conceptual analysis that includes a range of different precise causal concepts that allows for assessments of causal priority in terms of different kinds of causal relevance. (shrink)

Normality judgements are frequently used in everyday communication as well as in biological and social science. Moreover they became increasingly relevant to formal logic as part of defeasible reasoning. This paper distinguishes different kinds of normality statements. It is argued that normality laws like “Birds can normally fly” should be understood essentially in a statistical way. The argument has basically two parts: firstly, a statistical semantic core is mandatory for a descriptive reading of normality in order to explain the logical (...) features of normality laws. Secondly, a statistical justification of normality statements can be derived by game theoretic considerations if the normality law is understood as communication convention. (shrink)

This paper presents a way of classifying different forms of naturalness and unnaturalness. Three main forms of (un)naturalness are found as the following: history- based (un)naturalness, property-based (un)naturalness and relation-based (un)naturalness. Numerous subforms (and some subforms of the subforms) of each are presented. The subforms differ with respect to the entities that are found (un)natural, with respect to their all-inclusiveness, and whether (un)naturalness is seen as all-or-nothing affair, or a continuous gradient. This kind of conceptual analysis is needed, first, because (...) discussion concerning (un)naturalness is common in current bioethics and environmental ethics, and second, because the terms natural and unnatural are highly ambiguous. Thus, the lack of an exact definition of the type of (un)naturalness may lead into equivocation, other forms of bad argumentation, or at least vagueness. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 329-344, October 2011.

Conservation scientists are arguing whether naturalness provides a reasonable imperative for conservation. To clarify this debate and the interpretation of the term natural, I analyze three management strategies – ecosystem preservation, ecosystem restoration, and ecosystem engineering – with respect to the naturalness of their outcomes. This analysis consists in two parts. First, the ambiguous term natural is defined in a variety of ways, including (1) naturalness as that which is part of nature, (2) naturalness as a contrast to artifactuality, (3) (...) naturalness as an historical independence from human actions, and (4) naturalness as possession of certain properties. After that, I analyze the different conceptions with respect to their implications for the three management strategies. The main conclusion is that there exists no single conception of naturalness that could distinguish between the outcomes of the three management methods. Therefore, as long as the outcomes of the different methods are regarded as being of a different value in conservation, we should either abandon the idea of naturalness as the guiding concept in conservation or use the term natural only in the ways that take both its historical and feature dependent meanings into consideration. (shrink)

Many enhancement technologies are distributed by healthcare professionals—by physicians—who are held to the Hippocratic Oath and the goals of medicine. While the ethics of enhancement has been widely discussed with regard to the social justice, humanism, morals and normative values of these interventions, their place in medicine has not attracted a great deal of attention. This paper investigates the potential for enhancement technologies to fulfil the goals of medicine, arguing that they play a role in promoting the health of individuals, (...) and thus, an unavoidable place in medicine. It also warns of potential dangers, suggesting a set of guidelines to initiate conversations regarding the role and responsibilities of physicians practising in an era of enhancement. (shrink)

Normic laws have the form "if A, then normally B." They are omnipresent in everyday life and non-physical 'life' sciences such as biology, psychology, social sciences, and humanities. They differ significantly from ceteris-paribus laws in physics. While several authors have doubted that normic laws are genuine laws at all, others have argued that normic laws express a certain kind of prototypical normality which is independent of statistical majority. This paper presents a foundation for normic laws which is based on generalized (...) evolution theory and explains their omnipresence, lawlikeness, and reliability. It is argued that the fact that normic laws are a product of evolution must establish a systematic connection between prototypical and statistical normality. (shrink)

Normic Laws and the Significance of Nonmonotonic Reasoning for Philosophy of Science. Normic laws have the form ‘if A then normally B’. They have been discovered in the explanation debate, but were considered as empirically vacuous (§1). I argue that the prototypical (or ideal) normality of normic laws implies statistical normality (§2), whence normic laws have empirical content. In §3–4 I explain why reasoning from normic laws is nonmonotonic, and why the understanding of the individual case is so important here. (...) After sketching some foundations of nonmonotonic reasoning as developed by AI-researchers (§5), Iargue that normic laws are also the best way to understand ceteris paribus laws (§6). §7 deals with the difference between physical and non-physical disciplines and §9 with the difference between normicity and approximation. In §8 it is shown how nonmonotonic reasoning provides a new understanding of the protection of theories against falsification by auxiliary hypotheses. §10, finally, gives a system- and evolution-theoretical explanation of the deeper reason for the omnipresence of normic laws in practice and science, and forthe connection between ideal and statistical normality. (shrink)

How do scientific explanations for beliefs affect people's confidence that those beliefs are true? For example, do people think neuroscience-based explanations for belief in God support or challenge God's existence? In five experiments, we find that people tend to think explanations for beliefs corroborate those beliefs if the explanations invoke normally-functioning mechanisms, but not if they invoke abnormal functioning (where “normality” is a matter of proper functioning). This emerges across a variety of kinds of scientific explanations and beliefs (religious, moral, (...) and scientific). We also find evidence that these effects can interact with people's prior beliefs to produce motivated judgments. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that selection history accounts of function can support a fully reductive naturalization of functional properties. I argue that this assumption is false. A problem with the alternative causal role account of function in this context is that it invokes the teleological notion of a goal in analysing real function. The selection history account, if it is to have reductive status, must not do the same. But attention to certain cases of selection history in biology, specifically those (...) involving meiotic drive, shows that selection historical explanations are available in the case of items without any plausible function. Making contributions to goals, here fitness, must be introduced as an additional constraint in the analysis, either explicitly, or implicitly by appeal to individual functions or the selection-of/selection-for distinction. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the consequences of new scientific and philosophical approaches for the practical-theoretical framework of modern developmental biology. I highlight normal development, and the instructive-permissive distinction, as key parts of this framework which shape how variation is conceptualised and managed. Furthermore, I establish the different dimensions of biological variation: the units, temporality and mode of variation. Using the analytical frame established by this, I interpret a selection of examples as challenges to the instructive-permissive distinction. These examples include (...) the phenomena of developmental plasticity and transdifferentiation, the role of the microbiome in development, and new methodological approaches to standardisation and the assessment of causes. Furthermore, I argue that investigations into organismal development should investigate the effects of a wider range of kinds of variation including variation in the units, modes and temporalities of development. I close by examining various possible opportunities for producing and using normal development free of the assumptions of the instructive-permissive distinction. These opportunities are afforded by recent developments, which include new ways of producing standards incorporating more natural variation and being based on function rather than structure, and the ability to produce, store, and process large quantities of data. (shrink)

From the standpoint of disability advocacy, further exploration of the concept of well-being stands to be availing. The notion that “welfarism” about disability, which Julian Savulescu and Guy Kahane debuted, qualifies as helpful is encouraged by their claim that welfarism shares important commitments with that advocacy. As becomes clear when they apply their welfarist frame to procreative decisions, endorsing welfarism would, in fact, sharply undermine it. Savulescu and Kahane's Principle of Procreative Beneficence—which reflects transhumanism, or advocacy of radical bioenhancement—morally requires (...) parents to choose the child who will, in all probability, have “the best life.” Assuming the emergence of potent biotechnologies, procreative decision-making would be highly standardized, for prospective parents would be morally obliged to maximize select capacities, including intelligence, self-control, and hedonic set-point, in their children. Welfarism, applied to reproduction, is staunchly objectivist about what course is incumbent on decision-makers, giving no credence to first-personal values, aspirations, and experiences. Though this dismissal of individual perspectives applies to everyone, its implications for disability advocacy are especially severe. With that advocacy in view, greater attention to “well-being” should, therefore, be severed from the welfarism of Savulescu and Kahane. (shrink)

Conceptual analysis of health and disease is portrayed as consisting in the confrontation of a set of criteria—a “definition”—with a set of cases, called instances of either “health” or “ disease.” Apart from logical counter-arguments, there is no other way to refute an opponent’s definition than by providing counter-cases. As resorting to intensional stipulation is not forbidden, several contenders can therefore be deemed to have succeeded. This implies that conceptual analysis alone is not likely to decide between naturalism and normativism. (...) An alternative to this approach would be to examine whether the concept of disease can be naturalized. (shrink)

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

In discussions of the ethics of human gene therapy, it has become standard to draw a distinction between the use of human gene transfer techniques to treat health problems and their use to enhance or improve normal human traits. Some dispute the normative force of this distinction by arguing that it is undercut by the legitimate medical use of human gene transfer techniques to prevent disease - such as genetic engineering to bolster immune function, improve the efficiency of DNA repair, (...) or add cellular receptors to capture and process cholesterol. If disease prevention is a proper goal of medicine, these critics argue, and the use of gene transfer techniques to enhance human health maintenance capacities will help achieve that goal, then the “treatment/enhancement‘ distinction cannot define the limits of legitimate gene therapy. In this paper, I argue that a line can be drawn between prevention and enhancement for gene therapy (and thus between properly medical and nonmedical uses of gene therapy), but only if one is willing to accept two rather old-fashioned claims: 1) Some health problems are best understood as if they were entities in their own right, reifiable as processes or parts in a biological system, with at least as much ontological objectivity and theoretical significance as the functions that they inhibit. 2) Legitimate preventive genetic health care should be limited to efforts to defend people from attack by these more robust pathological entities, rather than changing their bodies to evade social injustices. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, first, that ecologists have routinely treated humans—or more specifically, anthropogenic causal factors—as disturbing conditions. I define disturbing conditions as exogenous variables, variables “outside” a model, that when present in a target system, inhibit the applicability or accuracy of the model. This treatment is surprising given that humans play a dominant role in many ecosystems and definitions of ecology contain no fundamental distinction between human and natural. Second, I argue that the treatment of humans as disturbing (...) conditions is an idealization: since it is, and has long been, known that humans are pervasive, this treatment amounts to an intentionally introduced theoretical distortion. Finally, characterizing this treatment as idealization forces us to confront the question of its justification, and so, drawing on three different kinds of idealization, I evaluate how this treatment may be justified. (shrink)

The relationship of man himself to his environment is an inseparable part of ecology; for he also is an organism and other organisms are a part of his environment. Ecology, therefore, broadly conceived and rightly understood, instead of being an academic science merely, out of touch with humanistic interests, is really that part of every other biological science which brings it into immediate relation to human kind. The proper place of humans in ecological study has been a recurring issue for (...) ecology. Of course humans are part of Nature writ large, but are they part of the ecologist's nature? The question bothered biologists even before the discipline of ecology was firmly institutionalized.... (shrink)

In the discussion about consequences of the release of genetically modified (GM) crops, the meaning of the term “environmental damage” is difficult to pin down. We discuss some established concepts and criteria for understanding and evaluating such damages. Focusing on the concepts of familiarity, biological integrity, and ecosystem health, we argue that, for the most part, these concepts are highly ambiguous. While environmental damage is mostly understood as significant adverse effects on conservation resources, these concepts may not relate directly to (...) effects on tangible natural resources but rather to parameters of land use or ecological processes (e.g., the concept of biological integrity). We stress the importance of disclosing the normative assumptions underlying damage concepts and procedures for the evaluation of damages by GM crops. A conceptualization of environmental damage should precede its operationalization. We recommend an unambiguous definition for damage developed earlier and recommend that evaluation criteria be based on this. However, a general damage definition cannot replace case-specific operationalization of damage, which remains an important future challenge. (shrink)

This essay develops an account of health, the functional efficiency theory, which derives from Christopher Boorse's biostatistical theory. Like the BST, the functional efficiency theory is a nonevaluative view of health, but unlike the BST, it argues that the fundamental theoretical task is to distinguish levels of efficiency with which the parts and processes within organisms and within systems within organisms function. Which of these to label as healthy or pathological is of secondary importance. Because the statistical distributions that Boorse's (...) account relies on are distributions of functional efficiency, the functional efficiency theory arguably complements rather than challenges the BST. (shrink)

Is nanotechnology-based human enhancement morally permissible? One reason to question such enhancement stems from a concern for preserving our species. It is harder than one might think, however, to explain what could be wrong with altering our own species. One possibility is to turn to the environmental ethics literature. Perhaps some of the arguments for preserving other species can be applied against nanotechnology-based human enhancements that alter human nature. This paper critically examines the case for using two of the strongest (...) arguments in the environmental ethics literature to show that nanotechnology-based human enhancements are impermissible: 1) Our species, like many other naturally occurring species, has aesthetic value. So, nanotechnology-based human enhancements that alter our species should be prohibited. 2) Our species plays valuable ecological roles. Nanotechnology-based human enhancements that alter our species are likely to interfere with our species playing our ecologically valuable roles. So, such enhancements should be prohibited. Neither argument, ultimately, proves conclusive. The paper concludes, however, that considerations underlying both arguments may show us that some nanotechnology-based human enhancements are impermissible. (shrink)

Christopher Boorse’s bio-statistical theory of health and disease argues that the central discipline on which theoretical medicine relies is physiology. His theory has been much discussed but little has been said about its focus on physiology or, conversely, about the role that other biomedical disciplines may play in establishing a theoretical concept of health. Since at least the 1950s, epidemiology has gained in strength and legitimacy as an independent medical science that contributes to our knowledge of health and disease. Indeed, (...) it not only provides important information about disease distribution and aetiology, but the risk-factor approach it employs seems to challenge BST’s binary conception of health and disease. The objective of the article is to show, firstly, how important information deriving from descriptive and analytical epidemiology forms part of our contemporary medical concepts of health and disease, and secondly, that these elements are not taken into account by BST in a satisfactory way. The article’s central contention, therefore, is that if the project of defining the theoretical concept of health is to be maintained, more importance should be accorded to the contribution made by epidemiology—alongside physiology—in defining health. (shrink)

Much research in the philosophy of psychiatry has been devoted to the characterization of the normal and the pathological. In this article, we identify and deconstruct two postulates that have held sway in the philosophy of psychiatry. The first postulate concerns the belief that clinicians would benefit from conceiving of psychiatric disorders as stable entities with clear boundaries. By relying on a symptom-based approach, we support a conception of psychiatric disorders whose symptoms are the products of many activated mechanisms in (...) mutual interactions. The second postulate concerns the way in which the philosophy of psychiatry has approached the question of harm. We posit that clinicians perceive harms primarily through networks of clinical manifestations. The identification and deconstruction of these two postulates leads us to propose a practical definition of a psychiatric disorder that is useful for the clinician, while adopting a principle of prudential conservatism that does not exclude other theoretical definitions of psychiatric disorder that are useful as an epistemic hub. Thus, we propose the following definition of a psychiatric disorder that is relevant to clinical practice: “a set of clinical manifestations belonging to the prototypical central core of psychiatry, organized in a causal network, involving at least one harm, and whose set of harms exceeds the traditional threshold of significance for a given psychiatric disorder, directly related to an activated mechanism. Such a network composed of clinical manifestations is frozen in a state that is unable to allow the deactivation of these manifestations spontaneously without a therapeutic intervention”. (shrink)

How should we define ‘health’ and ‘disease’? There are three main positions in the literature. Naturalists desire value-free definitions based on scientific theories. Normativists believe that our uses of ‘health’ and ‘disease’ reflect value judgments. Hybrid theorists offer definitions containing both normativist and naturalist elements. This paper discusses the problems with these views and offers an alternative approach to the debate over ‘health’ and ‘disease’. Instead of trying to find the correct definitions of ‘health’ and ‘disease’ we should explicitly talk (...) about the considerations that are central in medical discussions, namely state descriptions and normative claims . This distinction avoids the problems facing the major approaches to defining ‘health’ and ‘disease’, and it more clearly captures what matters in medical discussions. (shrink)

Christopher Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory of Health has been the main contender among naturalistic accounts of health for the last 40 years. Yet, a recent criticism of this theory, presented by Elselijn Kingma, identifies a dilemma resulting from the BST’s conceptual linking of health and statistical typicality. Kingma argues that the BST either cannot accommodate the situation- specificity of many normal functions or cannot account for many situation-specific diseases. In this article, we expand upon with Daniel Hausman’s response to Kingma’s dilemma. (...) We propose that recalling Boorse’s specification that health is an intrinsic property of its bearers and explicating this intrinsic property in relation to the concept of homeostasis can illuminate how proponents of naturalistic accounts of health should deal with the situation- specificity of normal functions. We argue that beyond what Boorse and Hausman have delineated, the situation- specificity of normal function cannot be fully captured in a simple dichotomy between normal and abnormal environment or between relevant and irrelevant situations. By bringing homeostasis to the fore of the analysis of health, we set out a richer picture of what the various situations that affect living organisms’ functional performance can be. Accordingly, we provide a broader classification of these various situations which, we contend, better accounts for the main intuitions that philosophers of medicine have sought to accommodate than previous naturalistic theories of health. (shrink)

The philosophy of medicine is an area that has experienced significant growth and change in the last decade or so. While usually thought to be distinct from bioethics, the philosophy of medicine addresses a wide range of questions having to do with epistemology, metaphysics, and values. In this survey, I use the concept of the reference class to draw connections between a number of questions of longstanding and of more recent concern in the philosophy of medicine. By focusing on the (...) way in which the reference class plays a role in questions and approaches that sometimes seem to be at odds with one another, I hope to illustrate the ways in which these oppositions are less complete than they might at first appear, and to show how the connections between different problems are being redrawn. (shrink)

The status of risk factors and disease remains a disputed question in the theory and practice of medicine and healthcare, and so does the related question of delineating disease boundaries. I present a framework based on Bernard Lonergan’s account of emergent probability for differentiating (1) generically distinct levels of systematic function within organisms and between organisms and their environments and (2) the methods of functional, genetic, and statistical investigation. I then argue on this basis that it is possible to understand (...) disease in terms of biological or higher intra-level dysfunction, risk factors—including genetic risk factors—in terms of statistical inter-level conditioning of a given stage or developmental sequence of systematic functioning, and the empirical boundaries of disease in terms of the limits of both functional categorization (from an epistemic standpoint) and upper-level integration of lower-level processes and events (from an ontological standpoint). (shrink)

Defining disease and delineating its boundaries is a contested area in contemporary philosophy of medicine. The leading naturalistic theory faces a new round of difficulties related to defining a normal environment alongside normal organismic functioning and to delineating a discrete boundary between risk factors and disease. Normative theories face ongoing and seemingly intractable difficulties related to value pluralism and the problematic relation between theory and practice. In this article, I argue for an integral—as opposed to a hybrid—philosophy of health based (...) on Bernard Lonergan’s notion of generalized empirical method that provides a way to settle these difficulties dynamically and comprehensively, both in theory, by orienting functional and statistical investigation toward an explanatory ecological viewpoint, and in practice, by framing critiques in relation to the normativity intrinsic to all human inquiry. (shrink)

This essay replies to critics since 1995 of my “biostatistical theory” of health. According to the BST, a pathological condition is a state of statistically species-subnormal biological part-functional ability, relative to sex and age. Theoretical health, the total absence of pathological conditions, is then a value-free scientific notion. Recent critics offer a mixture of old and new objections to this analysis. Some new ones relate to choice of reference class, situation-specificity of function, common diseases and healthy populations, improvements in population (...) health, the practice of pathologists, “Cambridge changes” in health status, and comparative vs. absolute health concepts. I make no changes in doctrine, except to consider treating “normal aging” as pathological by taking young adults as the standard for all adults. (shrink)

There is a widespread and largely unchallenged assumption within philosophy that the word ‘normal’ is ambiguous: i.e., that it can mean different things in different contexts. This assumption appears in work within topics as varied as the philosophy of biology, medicine, justification, causation, and more. In this paper I argue that we currently lack any independent reason for adopting such an assumption. The reason that would most likely be offered in its favour requires us to ignore an alternative and equally (...) plausible explanation for the seeming variety of different meanings that ‘normal’ is taken to have. Meanwhile, the well-known conjunction reduction test for ambiguity provides no evidence for the ambiguity of ‘normal’, and in fact suggests that maintaining this ambiguity claim is more difficult than has been initially supposed. Therefore, with the way things stand at present, it should not be assumed without argument that ‘normal’ is an ambiguous term. (shrink)

The animalist says we are animals. This thesis is commonly understood as the universal generalization that all human persons are human animals. This article proposes an alternative: the thesis is a generic that admits of exceptions. We defend the resulting view, which we call ‘generic animalism’, and show its aptitude for diagnosing the limits of eight case-based objections to animalism.

Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) (...) appear to have—maybe not surprisingly—different features than the laws of physics. Special science laws—for instance, the economic law “Under the condition of perfect competition, an increase of demand of a commodity leads to an increase of price, given that the quantity of the supplied commodity remains constant” and, in biology, Mendel's Laws—are usually taken to “have exceptions”, to be “non-universal” or “to be ceteris paribus laws”. How and whether the laws of physics and the laws of the special sciences differ is one of the crucial questions motivating the debate on ceteris paribus laws. Another major, controversial question concerns the determination of the precise meaning of “ceteris paribus”. Philosophers have attempted to explicate the meaning of ceteris paribus clauses in different ways. The question of meaning is connected to the problem of empirical content, i.e., the question whether ceteris paribus laws have non-trivial and empirically testable content. Since many philosophers have argued that ceteris paribus laws lack empirically testable content, this problem constitutes a major challenge to a theory of ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on teleology and functions in biology. More precisely, it focuses on the scientific legitimacy of teleofunctional attributions and explanations in biology. It belongs to a multi-faceted debate that can be traced back to at least the 1970s. One aspect of the debate concerns the naturalization of functions. Most authors try to reduce, translate or explain functions and teleology in terms of efficient causes so that they find their place in the framework of the natural sciences. Our approach (...) here is radically different, as we question the premise that teleological explanations are disguised causal explanations. On the contrary, we defend that they are acceptable in natural sciences and in biology in particular. We challenge the idea that teleological explanations are immature causal explanations, as well as the idea that teleology and functions are some sort of intentional explanations. We therefore reject the accusations of anthropomorphism, vitalism and finalism. On the contrary, we defend that teleology, causality and intentionality correspond to different, autonomous and complementary modes of representation of the outside world. -/- ———[FRANÇAIS]——— -/- Ce travail de thèse porte sur la téléologie et les fonctions en biologie. Plus précisément, il porte sur la légitimité scientifique des attributions et des explications téléofonctionnelles en biologie. Il s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un débat à plusieurs facettes que l’on peut faire remonter au moins jusqu’aux années 1970 et qui est encore très actif aujourd’hui. L’un des aspects du débat porte sur la naturalisation des fonctions, c’est-à-dire sur la manière de les réduire, de les traduire ou de les expliciter en termes de causes efficientes de sorte qu’elles trouvent leur place dans le cadre des sciences de la nature. Notre approche ici est radicalement différente, car nous remettons en question la prémisse selon laquelle les explications téléologiques seraient des explications causales déguisées. Nous défendons au contraire qu’elles sont acceptables en tant que telles aussi bien de façon générale que dans le domaine scientifique et en particulier en biologie. De façon générale, nous remettons en question l’idée selon laquelle la pensée téléologique serait une pensée causale immature, ainsi que sa dépendance présumée vis-à-vis de la psychologie, c’est-à-dire de l’intentionnalité. Nous rejetons donc les accusations d’anthropomorphisme, de vitalisme et de finalisme formulées contre elle. Nous défendons au contraire que la téléologie, la causalité et l’intentionnalité correspondent à des modes différents, autonomes et complémentaires de représentation du monde extérieur. (shrink)

Finality, design and purpose have started to be excluded from the language of the natural sciences since the XVIIth century. Darwin succeeded in excluding them from his theory of evolution appealing to a blind and mechanical natural selection. Today, the most usual definitions for the concept of biological function take for granted that functions: 1) are not dependent on a goal; 2) are not dependent on observers, but only on nature; 3) are explicable in causal terms, either with reference to (...) the causal history of the organ (etiological definition), or with reference to its present structure and causal capabilities (dispositional definition). However, we shall see that such presuppositions cannot take into account the normative character of the concept of biological function. We show that a generalization of the concept of scientific objectivity lets us affirm that functions: 1’) are dependent on a goal; 2’) are dependent on both observers and nature; 3’) cannot be reduced to causality, nor break the laws of physics; and yet, 4) are truly objective. (shrink)

A plausible naturalistic virtue ethics requires a plausible naturalistic account of virtue. One way of naturalizing virtue is to give an account of the virtues as those traits that enable realization of the ends of creatures like us. However, three important concerns threaten the theoretical adequacy ofthe view. It appears that the fact of human variability entails that there is no human lifeform comparable to that of other living things. It appears that, even if there is a human lifeform, this (...) notion essentially involves a problematic concept of normality. And human beings differ fromother types of organisms in that they can set their own ends. I argue that naturalized virtue ethics can meet these concerns and therefore has a more than decent chance as a plausible form of ethical naturalism. However, in examining the theory we are led to a more modest understanding of whatthe ambitions of this kind of ethical naturalism ought to be. (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

This thesis is about the notions of health and pathology in medical theory. I develop a theory, which defines ‘health’ and ‘pathology’ in a way that solves several problems with earlier suggestions of how to define these terms. I call the theory ‘the disposition profile efficiency theory’, abbreviated ‘the DPE-theory’. According to the DPE-theory, a trait token is healthy, roughly, if and only if all of its dispositions for performing physiological functions are efficient enough. A trait token is pathological, roughly, (...) if and only if at least one of its dispositions for performing a physiological function is not efficient enough. The notion of efficiency, I suggest, is reference class-relative: the efficiency of a trait token’s disposition for performing a physiological function expresses a relation between the trait token and a health standard for the trait token’s bearer’s reference class. The thesis also examines the most discussed theory of health and pathology, “the biostatistical theory” proposed by Boorse. Both the DPE-theory and the biostatistical theory are evaluated against a number of desiderata: the theory should be theoretically sound; only use empirical, statistical, and logical terms; not involve values; be clear; both account for health and pathology as reference class-relative properties, and account for the importance of integration of different physiological functions for health; and have reasonable implications. It is argued that the DPE-theory satisfies the desiderata, and that it does so better than the biostatistical theory. The main contributions of the thesis are the DPE-theory’s models of dispositions, its approach to defining reference classes, its efficiency measure, and its way of drawing the line between high enough efficiencies and too low efficiencies. Other important contributions concern the desideratum about reasonable implications. It is shown how the DPE-theory contributes to solving two much discussed objections directed towards the biostatistical theory, “the problem of common diseases” and “Kingma’s dilemma”. Further, the DPE-theory is used to illuminate discussions about certain types of conditions for which it is contested whether they should count as healthy or pathological. (shrink)