Robert Brandom defends the intelligibility of the notion of a fully discursive practice that does not include any kind of logical vocabulary. Logical vocabulary, according to his account, should be understood as an optional extra to discursive practice, not as a necessary ingredient. Call this the Layer Cake Picture of the relation of logical to non-logical discursive practices. The aim pursued in this paper is to show, by way of an internal critique, that the Layer (...) class='Hi'>Cake Picture is in fact incompatible with the most central claims of Brandom’s philosophy. A way is sketched how to give up the Layer Cake Picture and still hold on to a position that is central to Brandom’s philosophical outlook, namely his expressivism about logic. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Lange’s argument in support of Sellars’ scientific realism, which, if successful, surprisingly, undermines Sellars’ scientia mensura principle and justifies the anti-Sellarsian view to the effect that certain domains of discourse which use irreducibly normative descriptions and explanations are explanatorily autonomous. It will be argued that Lange’s argument against the layer-cake view is not strictly speaking Sellarsian, since Lange interprets Sellars’ argument in an overly abstract or formal manner. Moreover, I will (...) suggest that, within a properly Sellarsian context, Lange’s argument against the layer-cake picture can actually be used for quite un- Langean purposes, namely in order to show that folk- psychological descriptions and explanations are not if fact autonomous. However, Lange could insist that his reconstruction of Sellars’ argument is substantially correct and he does have the resources to do so. I will propose that the substantial issue between Lange and Sellars turns on their different views on the function of ceteris-paribus clauses, and ultimately, on issues about the unity of science. Finally, it will be suggested that the Sellarsian framework for tackling these issues constitutes a viable alternative to Lange’s picture of theoretical explanation, while at the same time incorporating be the sound insights of the latter. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that non-reductive physicalism (NRP) continues to rely on the ontological aspect of the layer cake model of the world (LCM). NRP is a post-unity account of the relationship between phenomena in the world in the sense that it has been developed in response to the perceived failure of the unity of science thesis. The LCM constitutes a framework for the organisation of phenomena in the world. It articulates the idea that phenomena in the (...) world are organised into levels. Specifically, that phenomena are layered into distinct, hierarchical levels of organisation. Historically, the unity of science thesis and the LCM have been intertwined; the LCM being the framework within which a unity of science might be possible. My argument will demonstrate that, despite a move away from unity of science positions, the LCM persists in post-unity accounts. In order to argue for this thesis, I present a close analysis of Oppenheim & Putnam’s classic presentation of the LCM; picking out the principle of hierarchic compositionality which, I argue, captures the ontological aspect of the LCM. I then demonstrate how NRP continues to rely upon the principle and, as a result, continues to support the ontological aspect of the LCM. This result is significant. It shows that whilst the rejection of the reductionist aspect of the thesis has served as the basis for post-unity positions these positions do not engage directly with the framework within which reduction might be facilitated – the LCM. Furthermore, it demonstrates that pluralist or disunity accounts of the relationship between phenomena in the world will also have to engage directly with the framework of the LCM in order to avoid being merely anti-reductionist. (shrink)

Besides mechanistic explanations of phenomena, which have been seriously investigated in the last decade, biology and ecology also include explanations that pinpoint specific mathematical properties as explanatory of the explanandum under focus. Among these structural explanations, one finds topological explanations, and recent science pervasively relies on them. This reliance is especially due to the necessity to model large sets of data with no practical possibility to track the proper activities of all the numerous entities. The paper first defines topological explanations (...) and then explains why topological explanations and mechanisms are different in principle. Then it shows that they are pervasive both in the study of networks—whose importance has been increasingly acknowledged at each level of the biological hierarchy—and in contexts where the notion of selective neutrality is crucial; this allows me to capture the difference between mechanisms and topological explanations in terms of practical modelling practices. The rest of the paper investigates how in practice mechanisms and topologies are combined. They may be articulated in theoretical structures and explanatory strategies, first through a relation of constraint, second in interlevel theories, or they may condition each other. Finally, I explore how a particular model can integrate mechanistic informations, by focusing on the recent practice of merging networks in ecology and its consequences upon multiscale modelling. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of “levels of organization” in the scientific literature, a nascent “levels skepticism” now claims that the concept of levels is an inherently flawed, misleading, or otherwise inadequate notion for understanding how life scientists produce knowledge about the natural world. However, levels skeptics rely on the maligned “layer-cake” account of levels stemming from Oppenheim and Putnam’s defense of the unity of science for their critical commentary. Recourse to layer-cake levels is understandable, as it is (...) arguably the default conception of levels in philosophy. However, relying on this conception of levels undermines the initial plausibility of general dismissals of the concept, because the problems skeptics identify within the “basic idea” of the concept “levels” are merely ones already widely acknowledged in this conception. I illustrate this “guilt by association” by looking at the embedded role of “levels” in articulating intertheoretical reductionism during the latter part of the 20th century. I conclude by suggesting a methodological framework focusing on local usage patterns as a promising means for future analysis of the levels concept. (shrink)

This article adds to previous research, by connecting the concept of resistance to practices of self-making and the embodying of various gendered images. In this article, I advance that women politicians, activists and NGO workers in Cambodia, who seem to repeat and maintain established gender discourses, actually use these discourses and the existence of a multilayered figuration as a ‘hiding place’. This can be understood as various gendered discourses and figurations being utilised as resistance. In order to further explore this (...) pattern, the article introduces the concepts of hide-and-show resistance and layer-cake figurations. The notion of figurations, as situated and culturally differentiated, becomes an important starting point, displaying resistance that originates from the way we are constituted in a local–transnational, material and fast-changing world. (shrink)

Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA led to developments that transformed many biological sciences. But what were the relevant developments and how did they transform biology? Much of the philosophical discussion concerning this question can be organized around two opposing views: theoretical reductionism and layer-cake antireductionism. Theoretical reductionist and their anti-reductionist foes hold two assumptions in common. First, both hold that biological knowledge is structured like a layer cake, with some biological sciences, such (...) as molecular biology cast at lower levels of organization, and others, such as classical genetics, cast at higher levels. Second, both assume that scientific knowledge is structured by theory and that the productivity of scientific research depends on whether the underlying theory identifies the fundamentals upon which the phenomena to be explained and investigated depend. In the first part of this paper, I challenge these assumptions. In the second part, I show how recasting the basic theory of classical genetics made it possible to retool the methodologies of genetics. It was the investigative power of these retooled methodologies, and not the explanatory power of a gene-based theory, that transformed biology. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Functional reduction follows two familiar steps: a definition of a higher-level or special science property in terms of a functional role, then a statement describing a physical property that plays or occupies that role. But Kim (2005) adds a third step, namely, an explanation regarding how the physical property occupies the functional role. I think Kim is correct. But how is the third step satisfied? An examination of the pertinent scientific explanations reveals that the third step is best satisfied (...) by a multiple-subject, part-whole explanation, which is to say, a decomposition of the occupier’s causal capacities or relations. This is true even in cases wherein role and occupant properties are identical, for an occupier’s causal capacities are always underwritten by a part-whole explanation. As a consequence, functional reduction is transformed into a larger picture that at bottom always contains multiple layers of distinct, nonidentical properties that divide between parts and their whole systems. I call it “Part-Based Functional Reduction.” My aim is to develop this larger picture of reduction. (shrink)

This article defends the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) from a simple and direct valid argument according to which PSR implies that there is a truth that explains every truth, namely an omni-explainer. Many proponents of PSR may be willing to bite the bullet and maintain that, if PSR is true, then there is an omni-explainer. I object to this strategy by defending the principle that explanation is irreflexive. Then I argue that proponents of PSR can resist the conclusion (...) that there is an omni-explainer by denying that explanation distributes over conjunction. In the final section, I consider a plausible revision of this assumption. I argue there that, given the revised assumption, PSR seems to yield a striking picture of the explanatory structure of the universe. I explain why the resulting model does not appear utterly implausible to me. (shrink)

This chapter explores an objection to explanatory universalism, the doctrine that the principle of sufficient reason is true or everything has an explanation. This objection is a direct argument to the conclusion that the PSR yields the existence of an omni-explainer, i.e. something that explains everything. The objection crucially relies on the assumption that explanation is dissective in its explanandum place, and its conclusion conflicts with the irreflexivity of explanation. So the chapter considers two responses to the (...) mentioned objection. The first response consisting in restricting the irreflexivity of explanation is criticised in connection with topics in the metaphysics of grounding. The second response consisting in denying that explanation is dissective is vindicated. Finally, the chapter argues that a plausible revised version of the principle that explanation is dissective, the PSR, and the irreflexivity of explanation together yield a striking picture of our universe. (shrink)

This paper depicts Ian Hacking’s ‘styles of reasoning’ as conditions of possibility. After distinguishing between possibilities and causes, it articulates the implicit stratigraphical metaphor used to describe the relationship between different conditions of possibility, with ‘lower’ layers being necessary for ‘higher’ ones. It notes the use of this stratigraphical metaphor in the work of multiple scholars in history and in science studies. The paper suggests three ways in which this model can be useful: clarifying the definition and use of ‘context’ (...) in history of science; redefining counterfactuals as ‘possible historical worlds’; and thinking up new forms of ‘big picture’ histories of science. (shrink)

The paper presents a suggestive interpretation of Lacan’s interest in the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, insofar as this relationship makes a certain common understanding of love in Plato and psychoanalysis emerge. The author contends that Lacan’s interpretation makes it possible to understand how, in the ancient text, desire is already understood as an unconscious motivation, not only in terms of its inexorable power to determine a person’s aims, but also in its ability to subsist between and beyond the rules (...) of conscious discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristotle on Pictures of Ignoble AnimalsDavid Socher (bio)The Poetics is a widely read, accessible classic. I think it has a minor flaw of some interest. In a well-known passage early in the Poetics, Aristotle is in error about pictures, or so I shall argue. He writes:And it is natural for all to delight in works of imitation. The truth of this second point is shown by experience: though the (...) objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies. The explanation is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason for the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning — gathering the meaning of things, e.g. that the man there is so-and-so; for if one has not seen the thing before, one's pleasure will not be in the picture as an imitation of itbutwill be due to the execution or colouring or some similar cause.1I set out Aristotle's position as follows:1. It is natural to delight in imitation.2. In spite of it being unpleasant to look at a low animal, we delight in looking at an imitation of one — a picture.3. The pleasure in appreciating a picture comes from gathering the meaning, that is, recognizing the subject.4. Therefore if I look at a portrait of someone I don't know, I can't enjoy the imitation as such, because I don't recognize the person.5. And therefore if I do take pleasure in such a picture, it is not pleasure in the imitation as such but perhaps in the color, line, form, etc.My dispute is with points 4 and 5. Points 1 through 3 take for granted something that points 4 and 5 overlook and, in effect, deny: that is, that imitation comes in two levels: imitation of a kind and imitation of an individual. Aristotle illicitly slips from the first level to the second. The beginning of the [End Page 27] passage concerns imitations of, and fidelity to, a kind; the end concerns imitations of, and fidelity to, an individual.Before pursuing this complaint, a general remark: Aristotle's slip is a small one, incidental to his point. He speaks to the old paradox that "we enjoy the distress of tragedy."2 In bringing up pictures, he does not intend to dwell on them but is merely demonstrating the general principle that the very thing we find painful in the flesh can be enjoyed in make-believe.3 Why then, if the error is so small, discuss it at all? Because its examination reveals a significant distinction between types of picture, and because a minor slip in a major and influential classic is worth pointing out on that count alone.Let us look at the opening subject: pictures of ignoble animals — of snakes and snails and puppy dog tails. Are these portraits of individuals, like a portrait of the family dog or of the great racehorse Seabiscuit? No. The scientific spirit in us enjoys the most realistic representations of a fly, spider, and slug as an accurate anatomical rendering of a specimen sample, which is not a particular actual individual. It is the fidelity to its kind that we admire here (especially in times before photography). Examine, for example, the goal and the achievement of John Audubon. In his quest for accuracy, Audubon killed a dozen or so birds for each painting so as to always have a fresh model. Would anyone be so foolish as to ask Audubon if such a painting were a portrait of the fifth or of the sixth now-dead red-breasted robin? No, he preserves and presents visual knowledge of kinds, of the looks of kinds of thing.At the close of the passage, Aristotle discusses recognizing an acquaintance in a portrait. Had I not known him, I could only take... (shrink)

What’s the relation between values and reasons for action ? According to some all reasons are grounded in values. If one adds to this the thought that values themselves depend on non-evaluative or factual features of things, one gets what one can call after Jonathan Dancy the “layer-cake conception”. According to others, we should replace the layer-cake picture by what he calls the “buck-passing account of values” (Scanlon 1998). The main characteristic of this conception is (...) that it denies that reasons are grounded in values. This is not because some reasons would not be grounded in values. Rather, Scanlon’s claim is that values cannot ground reasons. I shall argue that Scanlon’s conception does not get things right: his account of values amounts in fact to a normative or deontic definition of the evaluative. (shrink)

Commentators standardly ascribe to Spinoza a belief in an exceptionless conceptual closure of mental and physical realms: no intention can allow us to understand a bodily movement, no bodily injury can make intelligible a sensation of pain. This counterintuitive doctrine, most often now referred to as Spinoza's 'attribute barrier', has weighty repercussions for his views on intelligibility, nature of the mind, identity, and causality. I argue against the standard reading of the doctrine, by showing that it produces an inconsistent epistemological (...) picture, contradicting Spinoza's theory of mind and his commitment to universal intelligibility. The alternative account I propose is also philosophically more compelling and plausible as an account of thought in its essential intentionality. (shrink)

This paper offers a new account of metaphysical explanation. The account is modelled on Kitcher’s unificationist approach to scientific explanation. We begin, in Sect. 2, by briefly introducing the notion of metaphysical explanation and outlining the target of analysis. After that, we introduce a unificationist account of metaphysical explanation before arguing that such an account is capable of capturing four core features of metaphysical explanations: irreflexivity, non-monotonicity, asymmetry and relevance. Since the unificationist theory of metaphysical (...) class='Hi'>explanation inherits irreflexivity and non-monotonicity directly from the unificationist theory of scientific explanation that underwrites it, we focus on demonstrating how the account can secure asymmetry and relevance. (shrink)

Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphysical (...) class='Hi'>picture suggested by Humeanism. -/- I suggest that the Humean can respond to these objections not by rejecting this divergence, but by arguing that is appropriate. In particular the Humean can, in the spirit of Loewer (2012), distinguish between scientific and metaphysical explanation — this is motivated by differing aims of explanation in science and metaphysics. And they can further leverage this into distinctions between scientific and metaphysical fundamentality and scientific and metaphysical possibility. We can use these distinctions to respond to the objections that the Humean faces. (shrink)

I postulate that the extension of a degree adjective is fixed by implicitly accepted non-analytic reference-fixing principles (“preconceptions”) that combine appeals to paradigmatic cases with generic principles designed to expand the extension of the adjective beyond the paradigmatic range. In regular occasions of use, the paradigm and generic preconceptions are jointly satisfied and determine the existence of an extension/anti-extension pair dividing the adjective’s comparison class into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subclasses. Sorites paradoxical occasions of use are irregular occasions (...) of use in which the paradigm and generic preconceptions are not jointly satisfied. In them, the relevant degree adjective lacks an extension, and utterances of sentences containing it appearing in sorites arguments do not have truth conditions. I also postulate a probable psychology of paradigm intuitions, used in a psychological explanation of the preference for solutions of the sorites paradox on which paradigm preconceptions retain their intuitive truth-values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian GrayJoseph CarrollSince the advent of the poststructuralist revolution some thirty years ago, interpretive literary criticism has suppressed two concepts that had informed virtually all previous literary thinking: (1) the idea of the author as an individual person and an originating source for literary meaning, and (2) the idea of "human nature" as the represented subject and common frame (...) of reference for literary depictions. Under the tutelage of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, literary critics learned to speak of authors, characters, settings, and plots not as individuals situated in a natural world but as discursive formations constituted by the circulation of linguistic, cultural, and ideological energies. In the three decades during which poststructuralism has dominated academic literary study, a different kind of revolution—evolutionary, Darwinian, and naturalistic—has been transforming the social sciences. Sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology, behavioral ecology, cognitive archaeology, and behavioral genetics do not all agree with one another in every respect, but they are all nonetheless aspects or phases of a common research program. The central working hypothesis in this program is that the human species, like all other species, has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment and that as a consequence it has a distinct, genetically transmitted, species-typical set of characteristics—anatomical, physiological, hormonal, neurological, and behavioral. That set of characteristics is what in common language is meant by "human nature." Literature has always given us subjectively evocative depictions of human nature, and Darwinian social science is now giving us a more comprehensive and scientifically precise account of it. The sense of [End Page 286] individual agency is one crucial aspect of human nature, and that aspect is now being explored in complementary ways by personality psychology and by cognitive neuroscience.1Over the past decade or so, a scattered handful of literary scholars has broken away from the dominant poststructuralist paradigm and has sought to make use of the new scientific information on human nature.2 The simplest and most obvious way to use this information is to examine the behavior depicted in literary texts and to correlate that behavior with "human universals," that is, with forms of behavior that appear in every known culture and that thus appear to be embedded in the nature of the species. Seeking depictions of universals has produced valuable results for literary study, but this first move in Darwinian criticism does not exhaust the range of possibility in the analysis of literary meaning. Human nature is complex and sometimes divided against itself; individuals vary, and some variations depart from species-typical patterns, even in the most adaptively crucial aspects of survival and reproduction. Moreover, literary meaning involves more than the represented subject matter. Authors imbue texts with meanings and affects peculiar to themselves; authors engage in communicative transactions with audiences; and texts have formal and aesthetic properties that are not reducible to represented subject matter. All of these aspects of the total literary situation are part of literary meaning, and all of them can and should fall within the range of analysis available to Darwinian literary study.3Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to reproductive success. Second, the central conflicts in the novel involve two competing visions of human nature, and in their conceptual structure neither of those visions corresponds very closely to the quasi-Darwinian conceptual structure implicit in most realist and naturalist fiction. One vision derives from the aestheticist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the other from a traditional Christian conception of the soul. Pater's ideas about human motives and the human moral character are at variance both with Christianity and with Darwinism. Christianity and Darwinism share certain concepts of the human moral and social character, but they couch those concepts in different idioms, and they would invoke wholly different causal explanations for how human nature came to be the way it is. Wilde does not develop his themes in Darwinian terms, but the novel can still be read [End Page... (shrink)

The role of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) in neurotransmission is well known. But long before synapses are formed in vertebrates, AChE is expressed in young postmitotic neuroblasts that are about to extend the first long tracts. AChE histochemistry can thus be used to map primary steps of brain differentiation. Preceding an possibly inducing AChE in avian brains, the closely related butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) spatially fore-shadows AChE-positive cell areas and the course of their axons. In particular, before spinal motor axons grow, their corresponding rostral (...) sclerotomes and myotomes express BChE, and both their neuronal source and myotomal target cells express AChE. Since axon growth has been found inhibited by acetylcholine, it is postulated that both cholinetsreases can attract neurite growth cones by neutralizing the inhibitor. Thus, the early expression of both cholinesterases that is at least partially independent from classical cholinergic synaptogenesis, sheds new light on the developmental and medical significance of these enzymes. (shrink)

The complex activity of the human brain makes it difficult to get a big picture of how the brain works and functions as the mind. We examine pertinent studies, as well as evolutionary and embryologic evidence to support our theoretical model consisting of separate but interactive layers of human neural activity. The most basic layer involves default mode network (DMN)activity and cardiorespiratory oscillations. We propose that these oscillations support other neural activity and cognitive processes. The second layer (...) involves limbic system activity accompanied by corresponding changes in cardiorespiratory oscillations. The third layer consists of corticothalamic processing and involves higher cortical functions including awareness, cognition,and consciousness. These layers interact to form the complex neural activity of the human brain. Examining the origins and relationships of various neural and physiologic oscillations may provide better understanding of human neurophysiology and consciousness. (shrink)

In books such as The World Within the World and The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, astronomer John Barrow has emerged as a leading writer on our efforts to understand the universe. Timothy Ferris, writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London, described him as "a temperate and accomplished humanist, scientist, and philosopher of science--a man out to make a contribution, not a show." Now Barrow offers the general reader another fascinating look at modern physics, as he explores the quest for a (...) single, unifying theory that will unlock nature's secrets. Theories of Everything is more than a history of science, more than a popular report on recent research and discoveries. Barrow provides a reflective, intelligent commentary on what a true Theory of Everything would be--its ingredients, its limitations, and what it could tell us about the universe. Never before, he writes, have physicists been so confident and so eager in the hunt for this "cosmic Rosetta Stone," as he calls it: "a single all-embracing picture of all the laws of nature from which the inevitability of all things seen must follow with unimpeachable logic." He lays out eight essential ingredients for a Theory of Everything and then explores each in turn, tracing how our knowledge has developed and how scientific discovery relates to our changing philosophy and religious thought in each area. Some of these ingredients are obvious--the laws of nature must be explained, for example, as well as its organizing principles--but others may be surprising, such as broken symmetries and selection biases. A Theory of Everything must account for the fact that the universe is "messy and complicated," he tells us, and for the limitations imposed by the questions we ask and the information we can obtain. The key lies in the remarkable capacity of mathematics to express the fundamental workings of the physical world--a language that the human mind is uniquely equipped to understand and manipulate. Barrow examines what mathematics actually is and describes how it makes the universe intelligible and provides a path to the underlying coherence in nature--which has led, in fact, to arguments that the universe itself is a vast computer. Yet even the most complete theory, even the most comprehensive mathematical explanation, cannot account for the uncomputable varieties of human experience and thought. "No non-poetic account of reality," he writes, "can be complete." In a field where the authorities converse in equations and mathematical notations, John Barrow speaks with the voice of thoughtful and knowledgeable humanist. Written with eloquence and expertise, Theories of Everything establishes a new perspective on humanity's efforts to explain the universe. (shrink)

Game-theoretic explanations of behavior need supplementation to be descriptive; behavior has multiple causes, only some governed by traditional rationality. An evolutionarily informed theory of action countenances overlapping causal domains: neurobiological, psychological, and rational. Colman's discussion is insufficient because he neither evaluates learning models nor qualifies under what conditions his propositions hold. Still, inability to incorporate emotions in axiomatic models highlights the need for a comprehensive theory of functional rationality.

Husserl’s early picture of explanation in the sciences has never been completely provided. This lack represents an oversight, which we here redress. In contrast to currently accepted interpretations, we demonstrate that Husserl does not adhere to the much maligned deductive-nomological (DN) model of scientific explanation. Instead, via a close reading of early Husserlian texts, we reveal that he presents a unificationist account of scientific explanation. By doing so, we disclose that Husserl’s philosophy of scientific explanation (...) is no mere anachronism. It is, instead, tenable and relevant. We discuss how Husserl and other contemporary thinkers draw theoretical inspiration from the same source—namely, Bernard Bolzano. Husserl’s theory of scientific explanation shares a common language and discusses the same themes as, for example, Phillip Kitcher and Kit Fine. To advance our novel reading, we discuss Husserl’s investigations of grounding, inter-lawful explanation, intra-mathematical explanation, and scientific unification. (shrink)

Constructivism as a distinct metaethical position has garnered significant interest in recent years due in part to Sharon Street’s theory, Humean metaethical constructivism. According to Street’s account, practical reasons are constructed by individual valuing entities. On this view, then, whether a particular reason applies to an individual is completely contingent upon what that individual actually values. In this article I argue for the recognition of multiple sources of practical reasons and values, including both individuals and communities. The resulting view, which (...) I call layered constructivism, strengthens the constructivist project and begins to resolve some of the common critiques leveled against Street’s Humean constructivism. To begin, layered constructivism retains many of the benefits of Street’s approach, such as providing a naturalistic picture of normativity and maintaining a close tie between practical reasons and individual motivation. Moreover, the inclusion of collective sources of normativity and the importance of the resulting values for individuals is supported by recent empirical research on norms. Layered constructivism can also respond to the common concerns that Humean constructivism fails to adequately account for the immense influence our social lives have on our normative reasons and values, and that it entails an objectionable level of contingency. Finally, acknowledging the existence of differently constructed reasons helps us make sense of the pervasive human experience of navigating a variety of seemingly incommensurable normative reasons. (shrink)

The Bhagavadgītā is often considered the holiest text of Hinduism. It was commented by a legion of commentators, and a number of philologists, starting with Wilhelm von Humboldt, tried to establish the layers of its text, which shows traces of several redactions. Some scholars noticed some seams in the text correctly, and some came close to a general picture of the text history. On the other hand, many scholars were discouraged by the uncertainties in the investigation of the text (...) history and preferred to interpret the Gītā as an indivisible whole. However, between the 1970s and 2009, it was possible to come to very precise results concerning the textual layers of the Bhagavadgītā, which were internationally largely accepted since ca. 2000. These results imply that, over time, views of several philosophical systems were incorporated into the poem, as well as polemics with different doctrines. The teachings and exhortations conveyed by the poem are very synthetic and innovative because they are derived from a very complex set of premises. These results of text analyses have been, on the one hand, accepted by a number of prominent scholars worldwide, but, on the other hand, fiercely contested by some Western post-modernist scholars of religion and by some scholars of Indian origin sensibilised negatively against Western scholarship. What they lack in their reading of the Bhagavadgītā can best be made clear by means of the comparison with a visitor to an artistic monument of a religious character, which underwent centuries of modifications, like the Split cathedral. If such a visitor considered that the sanctity and artistic credibility of a monument depended on its being completely constructed at one stroke by a single architect with a single conception, he would miss the complex, sometimes even polemical, rich and impressive way in which such a monument conveys its messages. This is the fruit of the long and complex history of the Split cathedral, that was first built as the mausoleum of a Roman emperor, and later turned into the church consecrated to his victims, passing thereafter through many subsequent modifications and ‘reinterpretations’. In the history of art, such prejudices are not as common as they are in the study of sacred texts. That is why a suitable example of a monument having religious character, like the Split cathedral of the Assumption of Virgin Mary, also consecrated to Diocletian’s victims Domnius and Anastasius, can best illustrate how we should understand a literary monument of a religious and philosophical character, like the Bhagavadgītā, which underwent a comparably complex history. (shrink)

In Economics Rules, Dani Rodrik (2015) argues that what makes economics powerful despite the limitations of each and every model is its diversity of models. Rodrik suggests that the diversity of models in economics improves its explanatory capacities, but he does not fully explain how. I offer a clearer picture of how models relate to explanations of particular economic facts or events, and suggest that the diversity of models is a means to better economic explanations.

This paper considers the account of the content of pictures provided by T.J. Clark. It concludes that Clark's account has many virtues, but is marred by an unjustified commitment to semiotics and to an untenable Marxist theory of explanation.

This book is intended to challenge Frege's Begriffsschrift as the foundation of philosophical work which either uses formal methods or is inspired by them s it attempts the synthesis of the antithetical ideas associated with Wittgenstein, the Picture-Theory, and the language-game conceived as the untimate level of explanation.

After a concise description of issues concerning the causal and the deductive-nomological models of explanation, the flaws in the alternative view centred on relevance-to-context are examined. The paper argues for the need of a wider spectrum of options which takes into account both the Local/Global and the Internal/External aspects in order to determine the sense and the adequacy of any explanation. As a test for this argument, some specific problems are considered about the range of causal bonds, the (...) admission of top-down causation, the appeal to emergence, the shift from explanation to explainability, the equivalence classes referred to as “cause” and “effect”. Finally, the paper deals with the comparison between inequivalent explanations and lists three remaining issues to complete the picture. (shrink)

We have reached the peculiar situation where the advance of mainstream science has required us to dismiss as unreal our own existence as free, creative agents, the very condition of there being science at all. Efforts to free science from this dead-end and to give a place to creative becoming in the world have been hampered by unexamined assumptions about what science should be, assumptions which presuppose that if creative becoming is explained, it will be explained away as an illusion. (...) In this paper it is shown that this problem has permeated the whole of European civilization from the Ancient Greeks onwards, leading to a radical disjunction between cosmology which aims at a grasp of the universe through mathematics and history which aims to comprehend human action through stories. By going back to the Ancient Greeks and tracing the evolution of the denial of creative becoming, I trace the layers of assumptions that must in some way be transcended if we are to develop a truly post-Egyptian science consistent with the forms of understanding and explanation that have evolved within history. (shrink)

The question of the dimensionality of space has informed the development of physics since the beginning of the twentieth century in the quest for a unified picture of quantum processes and gravitation. Scientists have worked within various approaches to explain why the universe appears to have a certain number of spatial dimensions. The question of why space has three dimensions has a genuinely philosophical nature that can be shaped as a problem of justifying a contingent necessity of the world. (...) In contrast to explanations of three-dimensionality based on anthropic arguments, we support the search for a theory that provides a justification for the dimensionality of space based on a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning applied to science. In doing so, we argue that Kant correctly approached the question in “Thoughts on the true estimation of living forces” by connecting space dimensionality and the inverse square law. In expounding the strategy of Kant’s argument, we describe the main features of a general Kantian explanation of the dimensionality of space and discuss them with respect to current accounts of explanation in the philosophy of science, such as inference to the best explanation and the deductive-nomological model. (shrink)

Hume’s Science of Human Nature is an investigation of the philosophical commitments underlying Hume's methodology in pursuing what he calls ‘the science of human nature’. It argues that Hume understands scientific explanation as aiming at explaining the inductively-established universal regularities discovered in experience via an appeal to the nature of the substance underlying manifest phenomena. For years, scholars have taken Hume to employ a deliberately shallow and demonstrably untenable notion of scientific explanation. By contrast, Hume’s Science of Human (...) Nature sets out to update our understanding of Hume’s methodology by using a more sophisticated picture of science as a model. (shrink)

1. Introduction: Naturalism and Psychological Explanations To a large extent, contemporary philosophical debate takes place within a framework of naturalistic assumptions. From the perspective of the history of philosophy, naturalism is the legacy of positivism without its empiricist epistemology and empiricist conception of meaning and cognitive significance. Systematically, it is best to characterize naturalism as the philosophical articulation of the underlying presuppositions of a reductive scientific research program that was rather successful in the last few centuries and, equally important, promises (...) to be so in the future particularly in the biological sciences and the neurosciences. It seems as if the secrets of human life and behavior and the mysteries of the mind will be cracked on the molecular level of the genes or the brain, or at least so we are told. Viewed in this manner it is understandable why philosophical naturalism tends to be committed to monism, both as a metaphysical or ontological claim and as a methodological position in the philosophy of social science. Naturalists are inclined to adopt a physicalist ontology that rejects free floating Cartesian substances and they view higher order macroscopic facts and properties as being dependent or supervenient on basic micro-physical facts. Naturalists, furthermore, expect that any scientific explanation of higher order properties has to provide an account of why and how these lower order facts give rise to higher order ones. These ontological and epistemic commitments also underpin a position of methodological monism in regard to the social sciences and the explanation of human agency. If the above ontological picture is correct then there is no reason to expect that the structure of the sciences dealing with higher order properties on the social level should fundamentally differ in their methodology from the natural sciences. In both domains of investigation, scientists will develop and make explanatory use of comprehensive and empirically well supported theories with adequate predictive powers that describe.... (shrink)