33 found
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  1. What is this thing called Philosophy of Science? A computational topic-modeling perspective, 1934–2015.Christophe Malaterre, Jean-François Chartier & Davide Pulizzotto - 2019 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (2):215-249.
    What is philosophy of science? Numerous manuals, anthologies or essays provide carefully reconstructed vantage points on the discipline that have been gained through expert and piecemeal historical analyses. In this paper, we address the question from a complementary perspective: we target the content of one major journal of the field—Philosophy of Science—and apply unsupervised text-mining methods to its complete corpus, from its start in 1934 until 2015. By running topic-modeling algorithms over the full-text corpus, we identified 126 key research topics (...)
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  2. Beyond categorical definitions of life: a data-driven approach to assessing lifeness.Christophe Malaterre & Jean-François Chartier - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4543-4572.
    The concept of “life” certainly is of some use to distinguish birds and beavers from water and stones. This pragmatic usefulness has led to its construal as a categorical predicate that can sift out living entities from non-living ones depending on their possessing specific properties—reproduction, metabolism, evolvability etc. In this paper, we argue against this binary construal of life. Using text-mining methods across over 30,000 scientific articles, we defend instead a degrees-of-life view and show how these methods can contribute to (...)
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  3.  30
    Explanation in Biology. An Enquiry into the Diversity of Explanatory Patterns in the Life Sciences.Pierre-Alain Braillard & Christophe Malaterre - 2015 - Dordrecht: Springer. Edited by Pierre-Alain Braillard & Christophe Malaterre.
    Explanation in biology has long been characterized as being very different from explanation in other scientific disciplines, very much so from explanation in physics. One of the reasons was the existence in biology of explanation types that were unheard of in the physical sciences: teleological explanations (e.g. Hull 1974), evolutionary explanations (e.g. Mayr 1988), or even functional explanations (e.g. Neander 1991). More recently, and owing much to the rise of molecular biology, biological explanations have been depicted as mechanisms (e.g; Machamer, (...)
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  4.  56
    Revisiting three decades of Biology and Philosophy: a computational topic-modeling perspective.Christophe Malaterre, Davide Pulizzotto & Francis Lareau - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (1):5.
    Though only established as a discipline since the 1970s, philosophy of biology has already triggered investigations about its own history The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 11–33, 2008). When it comes to assessing the road since travelled—the research questions that have been pursued—manuals and ontologies also offer specific viewpoints, highlighting dedicated domains of inquiry and select work. In this article, we propose to approach the history of the philosophy of biology with a complementary (...)
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  5.  91
    Eight journals over eight decades: a computational topic-modeling approach to contemporary philosophy of science.Christophe Malaterre, Francis Lareau, Davide Pulizzotto & Jonathan St-Onge - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2883-2923.
    As a discipline of its own, the philosophy of science can be traced back to the founding of its academic journals, some of which go back to the first half of the twentieth century. While the discipline has been the object of many historical studies, notably focusing on specific schools or major figures of the field, little work has focused on the journals themselves. Here, we investigate contemporary philosophy of science by means of computational text-mining approaches: we apply topic-modeling algorithms (...)
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  6. (1 other version)Making Sense of Downward Causation in Manipulationism (with illustrations from cancer research).Christophe Malaterre - 2011 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (33):537-562.
    Many researchers consider cancer to have molecular causes, namely mutated genes that result in abnormal cell proliferation (e.g. Weinberg 1998). For others, the causes of cancer are to be found not at the molecular level but at the tissue level where carcinogenesis consists of disrupted tissue organization with downward causation effects on cells and cellular components (e.g. Sonnenschein and Soto 2008). In this contribution, I ponder how to make sense of such downward causation claims. Adopting a manipulationist account of causation (...)
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  7.  39
    Defining Life.Jean Gayon, Christophe Malaterre, Michel Morange, Florence Raulin-Cerceau & Stéphane Tirard - unknown
    This Special Issue of Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres contains papers based on the contributions presented at the Conference "Defining Life" held in Paris (France) on 4-5 February, 2008. The main objective of this Conference was to confront speakers from several disciplines--chemists, biochemists, biologists, exo/astrobiologists, computer scientists, philosophers and historians of science--on the topic of the definition of life. Different viewpoints of the problem approached from different perspectives have been expounded and, as a result, common grounds as well (...)
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  8. Microbial diversity and the “lower-limit” problem of biodiversity.Christophe Malaterre - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (2):219-239.
    Science is now studying biodiversity on a massive scale. These studies are occurring not just at the scale of larger plants and animals, but also at the scale of minute entities such as bacteria and viruses. This expansion has led to the development of a specific sub-field of “microbial diversity”. In this paper, I investigate how microbial diversity faces two of the classical issues encountered by the concept of “ biodiversity ”: the issues of defining the units of biodiversity and (...)
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  9. Lifeness signatures and the roots of the tree of life.Christophe Malaterre - 2010 - Biology and Philosophy 25 (4):643-658.
    Do trees of life have roots? What do these roots look like? In this contribution, I argue that research on the origins of life might offer glimpses on the topology of these very roots. More specifically, I argue (1) that the roots of the tree of life go well below the level of the commonly mentioned ‘ancestral organisms’ down into the level of much simpler, minimally living entities that might be referred to as ‘protoliving systems’, and (2) that further below, (...)
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  10. Organicism and reductionism in cancer research: Towards a systemic approach.Christophe Malaterre - 2007 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21 (1):57 – 73.
    In recent cancer research, strong and apparently conflicting epistemological stances have been advocated by different research teams in a mist of an ever-growing body of knowledge ignited by ever-more perplexing and non-conclusive experimental facts: in the past few years, an 'organicist' approach investigating cancer development at the tissue level has challenged the established and so-called 'reductionist' approach focusing on disentangling the genetic and molecular circuitry of carcinogenesis. This article reviews the ways in which 'organicism' and 'reductionism' are used and opposed (...)
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  11.  56
    A roadmap to explanatory pluralism: introduction to the topical collection The Biology of Behaviour.Eric Muszynski & Christophe Malaterre - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1777-1789.
    Pluralism is widely appealed to in many areas of philosophy of science, though what is meant by ‘pluralism’ may profoundly vary. Because explanations of behaviour have been a favoured target for pluralistic theses, the sciences of behaviour offer a rich context in which to further investigate pluralism. This is what the topical collection The Biology of Behaviour: Explanatory pluralism across the life sciences is about. In the present introduction, we briefly review major strands of pluralist theses and their motivations. We (...)
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  12.  32
    Best behaviour: A proposal for a non-binary conceptualization of behaviour in biology.Eric Muszynski & Christophe Malaterre - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 79:101222.
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  13. On what it is to fly can tell us something about what it is to live.Christophe Malaterre - 2010 - Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 40 (2):169-177.
    The plurality of definitions of life is often perceived as an unsatisfying situation stemming from still incomplete knowledge about ‘what it is to live’ as well as from the existence of a variety of methods for reaching a definition. For many, such plurality is to be remedied and the search for a unique and fully satisfactory definition of life pursued. In this contribution on the contrary, it is argued that the existence of such a variety of definitions of life undermines (...)
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  14. Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Knowledge.Christophe Malaterre - 2013 - Biological Theory (8):346–356.
    Probably the most distinctive feature of synthetic biology is its being “synthetic” in some sense or another. For some, synthesis plays a unique role in the production of knowledge that is most distinct from that played by analysis: it is claimed to deliver knowledge that would otherwise not be attained. In this contribution, my aim is to explore how synthetic biology delivers knowledge via synthesis, and to assess the extent to which this knowledge is distinctly synthetic. On the basis of (...)
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  15. Functional diversity: An epistemic roadmap.Christophe Malaterre, Antoine C. Dussault, Sophia Rousseau-Mermans, Gillian Barker, Beatrix E. Beisner, Frédéric Bouchard, Eric Desjardins, Tanya I. Handa, Steven W. Kembel, Geneviève Lajoie, Virginie Maris, Alison D. Munson, Jay Odenbaugh, Timothée Poisot, B. Jesse Shapiro & Curtis A. Suttle - 2019 - BioScience 10 (69):800-811.
    Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...)
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  16. Life as an emergent phenomenon: From an alternative to vitalism to an alternative to reductionism.Christophe Malaterre - 2013 - In Wolfe S. Normandin & C. T. (ed.), Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010. Springer Science+Business Media. pp. 155-178.
  17.  28
    The history and philosophy of the Origin of Life.David Dunér, Christophe Malaterre & Wolf Geppert - 2016 - International Journal of Astrobiology 15 (S4).
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  18. Can synthetic biology shed light on the origin of life?Christophe Malaterre - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (4):357-367.
    It is a most commonly accepted hypothesis that life originated from inanimate matter, somehow being a synthetic product of organic aggregates, and as such, a result of some sort of prebiotic synthetic biology. In the past decades, the newly formed scientific discipline of synthetic biology has set ambitious goals by pursuing the complete design and production of genetic circuits, entire genomes or even whole organisms. In this paper, I argue that synthetic biology might also shed some novel and interesting perspectives (...)
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  19.  20
    Overdetermination, underdetermination, and epistemic granularity in the historical sciences.Christophe Malaterre - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (2):1-23.
    The optimism vs. pessimism debate about the historical sciences is often framed in terms of arguments about the relative importance of overdetermination vs. underdetermination of historical claims by available evidence. While the interplay between natural processes that create multiple traces of past events (thereby conducive of overdetermination) and processes that erase past information (whence underdetermination) cannot be ignored, I locate the root of the debate in the epistemic granularity, or intuitively the level of detail, that pervades any historical claim justification (...)
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  20.  59
    Misconceptions in Science.Christophe Malaterre, Emmanuelle J. Javaux & Purificación López-García - 2023 - Perspectives on Science 31 (6):717-743.
    Disagreement in science exists in a variety of strengths, from doubt-raising articles and issues of non-reproducibility up to raging disputes and major controversies. An often-latent form of disagreement consists of misconceptions whereby false ideas are held that run contrary to what is commonly accepted as knowledge. Misconceptions have been the focus of much research in education science and psychology. Here we draw attention to misconceptions that may arise in the very practice of science. We highlight formal features that can be (...)
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  21.  26
    Epistemic Markers in Science: Code and Datasets.Christophe Malaterre & Martin Léonard - unknown
    The central role of such epistemic concepts as theory, explanation, model, or mechanism is rarely questioned in philosophy of science. Yet, what is their actual use in the practice of science? In this philosophy of science project, we deploy text-mining methods to investigate the usage of 61 epistemic notions in a corpus of full-text articles from the biological and biomedical sciences (N=73,771). The influence of disciplinary context is also examined by splitting the corpus into sub-disciplinary clusters. The results reveal the (...)
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  22.  28
    Mapping the use of epistemic concepts in the biomedical sciences: Code and dataset.Christophe Malaterre & Martin Léonard - unknown
    This release includes the code and supplementary information mentioned in: Malaterre, Christophe & Martin Léonard. 2023. "Charting the Territories of Epistemic Concepts in the Practice of Science: A Text-Mining Approach", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
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  23.  25
    Inferring social networks from unstructured text data: Code and datasets.Christophe Malaterre & Francis Lareau - unknown
    This release includes the data and code used in: Malaterre, C., F. Lareau (2023) Inferring social networks from unstructured text data: A proof of concept detection of “hidden communities of interest”. Text and Data Analytics for Policy.
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  24. Are self-organizing biochemical networks emergent?Christophe Malaterre - 2009 - In Maryvonne Gérin & Marie-Christine Maurel (eds.), Origins of Life: Self-Organization and/or Biological Evolution? EDP Sciences. pp. 117--123.
    Biochemical networks are often called upon to illustrate emergent properties of living systems. In this contribution, I question such emergentist claims by means of theoretical work on genetic regulatory models and random Boolean networks. If the existence of a critical connectivity Kc of such networks has often been coined “emergent” or “irreducible”, I propose on the contrary that the existence of a critical connectivity Kc is indeed mathematically explainable in network theory. This conclusion also applies to many other types of (...)
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  25.  53
    Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report.Sylvain Charlat, André Ariew, Pierrick Bourrat, María Ferreira Ruiz, Thomas Heams, Philippe Huneman, Sandeep Krishna, Michael Lachmann, Nicolas Lartillot, Louis Le Sergeant D'Hendecourt, Christophe Malaterre, Philippe Nghe, Etienne Rajon, Olivier Rivoire, Matteo Smerlak & Zorana Zeravcic - 2021 - Life 11 (10):1051.
    Natural selection is commonly seen not just as an explanation for adaptive evolution, but as the inevitable consequence of “heritable variation in fitness among individuals”. Although it remains embedded in biological concepts, such a formalisation makes it tempting to explore whether this precondition may be met not only in life as we know it, but also in other physical systems. This would imply that these systems are subject to natural selection and may perhaps be investigated in a biological framework, where (...)
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  26.  3
    On biosignatures and tracers of life.Inge Loes ten Kate, Christophe Malaterre, Bacqué Mickael, Vinciane Debaille, Grenfell John Lee, Emmanuelle Javaux, Klenner Fabian, Yannick Lara, McMahon Sean, Keavin Moore, Noack Lena, Khawaja Nozair, Patty Lucas & Potsberg Frank - 2024 - In EANA.
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  27.  34
    The early days of contemporary philosophy of science: novel insights from machine translation and topic-modeling of non-parallel multilingual corpora.Christophe Malaterre & Francis Lareau - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-33.
    Topic model is a well proven tool to investigate the semantic content of textual corpora. Yet corpora sometimes include texts in several languages, making it impossible to apply language-specific computational approaches over their entire content. This is the problem we encountered when setting to analyze a philosophy of science corpus spanning over eight decades and including original articles in Dutch, German and French, on top of a large majority of articles in English. To circumvent this multilingual problem, we use machine-translation (...)
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  28. Is There Such a Thing as a Biosignature?Christophe Malaterre, Inge Loes Ten Kate, Mickael Baqué, Vinciane Debaille, John Lee Grenfell, Emmanuelle Javaux, Nozair Khawaja, Fabian Klenner, Yannick Lara, Sean McMahon, Keavin Moore, Lena Noack, C. H. Lucas Patty & Frank Postberg - unknown
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  29.  22
    On the many processes of chemical evolution.Christophe Malaterre - unknown
    The notion of chemical evolution is controversially defined in reference to Darwinian evolution: for some, it is nothing but natural selection applied to chemical systems; yet, for others, it is precisely what happened before natural selection, the latter being the birthmark of life. Taking into account a plurality of evolutionary processes, I propose to construe chemical evolution as a composite theory within which natural selection might only be one of several evolutionary processes.
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  30.  20
    Physicalism.Christophe Malaterre - unknown
    Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything is physical. According to this thesis, everything in the world, including chemical, biological, mental, and social entities and processes, is constituted by or results from physical entities and processes. In analytic philosophy, one might say that physicalism is the claim that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical.
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  31.  39
    When does chemical evolution becomes biological.Christophe Malaterre - unknown
  32.  24
    Identifying Hidden Communities of Interest with Topic-based Networks: A Case Study of the Community of Philosophers of Science (1930-2017). [REVIEW]Christophe Malaterre & Francis Lareau - unknown
    Scientific networks are often investigated by means of citation analyses. Yet, interpretation of such networks in terms of semantic (and often disciplinary) content heavily depends on supplementary knowledge, notably about author research specialties. Similar situations arise more generally in many types of social networks whose semantic interpretation relies on supplementary information. Here, author community net-works are inferred from a topic model which provides direct insights into the semantic specificity of the identified “hidden communities of interest” (HCoI). Using a philosophy of (...)
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  33.  41
    (Book review) What Is Life? The Intellectual Pertinence of Erwin Schrödinger. [REVIEW]Christophe Malaterre - 2012 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (2):229-231.