Realism in Action is a selection of essays written by leading representatives in the fields of action theory and philosophy of mind, philosophy of the social sciences and especially the nature of social action, and of epistemology and philosophy of science. Practical reason, reasons and causes in action theory, intending and trying, and folk-psychological explanation are some of the topics discussed by these leading participants. A particular emphasis is laid on trust, commitments and social institutions, on the possibility of grounding (...) social notions in individual social attitudes, on the nature of social groups, institutions and collective intentionality, and on common belief and common knowledge. Applications to the social sciences include, e.g., a look at the Erklären-Verstehen controversy in economics, and at constructivist and realist views on archeological reconstructions of the past. (shrink)

Is the tendency to morally prioritize humans over animals weaker in children than adults? In two pre-registered studies (N = 622), 5- to 9-year-old children and adults were presented with moral dilemmas pitting varying numbers of humans against varying numbers of either dogs or pigs and were asked who should be saved. In both studies, children had a weaker tendency to prioritize humans over animals than adults. They often chose to save multiple dogs over one human, and many valued the (...) life of a dog as much as the life of a human. While they valued pigs less, the majority still prioritized ten pigs over one human. By contrast, almost all adults chose to save one human over even one hundred dogs or pigs. Our findings suggest that the common view that humans are far more morally important than animals appears late in development and is likely socially acquired. (shrink)

The concept of mutual responsiveness is currently based on little empirical data in the literature of Responsible Research and Innovation. This paper explores RRI’s idea of mutual responsiveness in the light of recent RRI case studies on private sector research and development. In RRI, responsible innovation is understood as a joint endeavour of innovators and societal stakeholders, who become mutually responsive to each other in defining the ‘right impacts’ of the innovation in society, and in steering the innovation towards realising (...) those impacts. Yet, the case studies identified several reasons for why the idea of mutual responsiveness does not always appear feasible or desirable in actual R&D situations. Inspired by the discrepancies between theory and practice, we suggest three further elaborations for the concept of responsiveness in RRI. Process-responsiveness is suggested for identifying situations that require stakeholder involvement specifically during R&D. Product-responsiveness is suggested for mobilising the potential of innovation products to be adaptable according to diverse stakeholder needs. Presponsiveness is suggested as responsiveness towards stakeholders that are not reachable at a given time of R&D. Our aim is to contribute to a more tangible understanding of responsiveness in RRI, and suggest directions for further analysis in upcoming RRI case studies. (shrink)

Antinatalism is an emerging philosophy and practice that challenges pronatalism, the prevailing philosophy and practice in reproductive matters. We explore justifications of antinatalism—the arguments from the quality of life, the risk of an intolerable life, the lack of consent, and the asymmetry of good and bad—and argue that none of them supports a concrete, understandable, and convincing moral case for not having children. We identify concentration on possible future individuals who may or may not come to be as the main (...) culprit for the failure and suggest that the focus should be shifted to people who already exist. Pronatalism’s hegemonic status in contemporary societies imposes upon us a lifestyle that we have not chosen yet find almost impossible to abandon. We explicate the nature of this imposition and consider the implications of its exposure to different stakeholders with varying stands on the practice of antinatalism. Imposition as a term has figured in reproductive debates before, but the argument from postnatal, mental, and cultural imposition we launch is new. It is the hitherto overlooked and underdeveloped justification of antinatalism that should be solid and comprehensible enough to be used even by activists in support of their work. (shrink)

Comparisons of rival explanations or theories often involve vague appeals to explanatory power. In this paper, we dissect this metaphor by distinguishing between different dimensions of the goodness of an explanation: non-sensitivity, cognitive salience, precision, factual accuracy and degree of integration. These dimensions are partially independent and often come into conflict. Our main contribution is to go beyond simple stipulation or description by explicating why these factors are taken to be explanatory virtues. We accomplish this by using the contrastive-counterfactual approach (...) to explanation and the view of understanding as an inferential ability. By combining these perspectives, we show how the explanatory power of an explanation in a given dimension can be assessed by showing the range of answers it provides to what-if-things-had-been-different questions and the theoretical and pragmatic importance of these questions. Our account also explains intuitions linking explanation to unification or to exhibition of a mechanism. (shrink)

During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism- based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The second part focuses on how the idea (...) of mechanisms has been used in the social sciences. The final part discusses recent developments in analytical sociology, covering the nature of sociological explananda, the role of theory of action in mechanism-based explanations, Merton’s idea of middle-range theory, and the role of agent-based simulations in the development of mechanism-based explanations. (shrink)

Social scientists associate agent-based simulation (ABS) models with three ideas about explanation: they provide generative explanations, they are models of mechanisms, and they implement methodological individualism. In light of a philosophical account of explanation, we show that these ideas are not necessarily related and offer an account of the explanatory import of ABS models. We also argue that their bottom-up research strategy should be distinguished from methodological individualism.

Discover the great wonder and wild freedom the fear of the Lord can bring. What does the Bible mean when it says we are to fear God' Is it difficult for you to reconcile the two sides of God's nature'His wrath and His love' Mattie Montgomery teaches that a right pursuit of the fear, fire, and fullness of God can lead you into the knowledge of a side of God you may never have imagined before. He notes that the fear (...) of God does not mean that we should be afraid of God; but rather, that we should be afraid to be against Him. And, if we abide in Christ, we can live in the continual awareness of the mighty Warrior King who calls us beloved. That realization is the glorious convergence of respect, awe, reverence, adoration, instruction, honor, worship, discipline, confidence, thanksgiving, love, and yes...'fear. The result'a joyful experience of God's grandeur and a grateful realization that only through Him do we receive His provisions and protection and are able to echo the words of the apostle Paul in Romans 8:31, "If God is for me, who can be against me'. (shrink)

This paper discusses the epistemic import of highly abstract and simplified theoretical models using Thomas Schelling’s checkerboard model as an example. We argue that the epistemic contribution of theoretical models can be better understood in the context of a cluster of models relevant to the explanatory task at hand. The central claim of the paper is that theoretical models make better sense in the context of a menu of possible explanations. In order to justify this claim, we introduce a distinction (...) between causal scenarios and causal mechanism schemes. These conceptual tools help us to articulate the basis for modelers’ intuitive confidence that their models make an important epistemic contribution. By focusing on the role of the menu of possible explanations in the evaluation of explanatory hypotheses, it is possible to understand how a causal mechanism scheme can improve our explanatory understanding even in cases where it does not describe the actual cause of a particular phenomenon. (shrink)

Metaontology – the study of the nature of ontological issues – has flourished in recent years. The focus of this summary will be on some views and arguments that are central to today’s debate. One theme will be that of how seriously to take ontology: whether there is reason to take a skeptical or deflationary attitude toward ontological claims, as theorists like Rudolf Carnap, Hilary Putnam, and Eli Hirsch in different ways have urged. The other theme will be that of (...) the viability of the Fregean and Quinean approaches to ontology that have been and still are central to analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This article compares causal and constitutive explanation. While scientific inquiry usually addresses both causal and constitutive questions, making the distinction is crucial for a detailed understanding of scientific questions and their interrelations. These explanations have different kinds of explananda and they track different sorts of dependencies. Constitutive explanations do not address events or behaviors, but causal capacities. While there are some interesting relations between building and causal manipulation, causation and constitution are not to be confused. Constitution is a synchronous and (...) asymmetric relation between relata that cannot be conceived as independent existences. However, despite their metaphysical differences, the same key ideas about explanation largely apply to both. Causal and constitutive explanations face similar challenges (such as the problems of relevance and explanatory regress) and both are in the business of mapping networks of counterfactual dependence—i.e. mechanisms—although the relevant counterfactuals are of a different sort. In the final section the issue of developmental explanation is discussed. It is argued that developmental explanations deserve their own place in taxonomy of explanations, although ultimately developmental dependencies can be analyzed as combinations of causal and constitutive dependencies. Hence, causal and constitutive explanation are distinct, but not always completely separate forms of explanation. (shrink)

I distinguish two kinds of contribution that have been made by recent minimalist accounts of joint action in philosophy and cognitive science relative to established philosophical accounts of shared intentional action. The “complementarists” seek to analyze a functionally different kind of joint action from the kind of joint action that is analyzed by established philosophical accounts of shared intentional action. The “constitutionalists” seek to expose mechanisms that make performing joint actions possible, without taking a definite stance on which functional characterization (...) of joint action is the appropriate one. I elucidate the contrasting methodological underpinnings of these minimalist research programs in accordance with Bechtel and Richardson’s account of the heuristics of decomposition and localization as a research strategy for the study of complex systems. (shrink)

We think of the world as consisting of objects, with properties and standing in relations. There are, to be sure, different views on what objects etc. there are, and on what their natures are. And some theorists want to subtract some elements from this picture. For example, the ontological nihilist says that there are no objects. But still, the view described is very much orthodoxy—so much orthodoxy that one may need to be reminded that the view that the world consists (...) of objects, with properties and standing in relations is, precisely, a view. I here investigate the possibility that this view is false: that there is what may be called alien structure. And I investigate the relationship between alien structure and some important themes from the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues for theoretical modeling and model-construction as central types of activities that philosophers of social ontology engage in. This claim is defended through a detailed case study and revisionary interpretation of Raimo Tuomela’s account of the we-perspective. My interpretation is grounded in Ronald Giere’s account of scientific models, and argued to be compatible with, but less demanding than Tuomela’s own description of his account as a philosophical theory of the social world. My approach is also suggested to be (...) applicable to many other methodologically naturalist accounts of collective intentionality and social ontology. (shrink)

This paper analyzes three contrasting strategies for modeling intentional agency in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and action, and draws parallels between them and similar strategies of scientific model-construction. Gricean modeling involves identifying primitive building blocks of intentional agency, and building up from such building blocks to prototypically agential behaviors. Analogical modeling is based on picking out an exemplary type of intentional agency, which is used as a model for other agential types. Theoretical modeling involves reasoning about intentional agency in (...) terms of some domain-general framework of lawlike regularities, which involves no detailed reference to particular building blocks or exemplars of intentional agency. Given the contrasting procedural approaches that they employ and the different types of knowledge that they embody, the three strategies are argued to provide mutually complementary perspectives on intentional agency. (shrink)

In this chapter I will employ a well-known scientific research heuristic that studies how something works by focusing on circumstances in which it does not work. Rather than trying to describe what scientific understanding would ideally look like, I will try to learn something about it by observing mundane cases where understanding is partly illusory. My main thesis is that scientists are prone to the illusion of depth of understanding (IDU), and as a consequence they sometimes overestimate the detail, coherence, (...) and depth of their understanding. I will analyze the notion of understanding and its relation to a sense of understanding. In order to make plausible the claim that these are often disconnected, I will describe an interesting series of psychological experiments by Frank Keil and his coauthors that suggests that ordinary people routinely overestimate the depth of their understanding. en I will argue that we should take seriously the possibility that scientific cognition is also aðected by IDU and spell out some possible causes of explanatory illusions in science. I will conclude this chapter by discussing how scientific explanatory practices could be improved and how the philosophy of science might be able to contribute to this process. (shrink)

The concepts we use to value and prescribe are historically contingent, and we could have found ourselves with others. But what does it mean to say that some concepts are better than others for purposes of action-guiding and deliberation? What is it to choose between different normative conceptual frameworks?

This article discusses agent-based simulation (ABS) as a tool of sociological understanding. I argue that agent-based simulations can play an important role in the expansion of explanatory understanding in the social sciences. The argument is based on an inferential account of understanding (Ylikoski 2009, Ylikoski & Kuorikoski 2010), according to which computer simulations increase our explanatory understanding by expanding our ability to make what-if inferences about social processes and by making these inferences more reliable. The inferential account also (...) suggests a number of ways in which the use of simulation methodology might give rise to illusory understanding. The structure of the article is as .. (shrink)

We compare Guala’s unified theory of institutions with that of Searle and Greif. We show that unification can be many things and it may be associated with diverse explanatory goals. We also highlight some of the important shortcomings of Guala’s account: it does not capture all social institutions, its ability to bridge social ontology and game theory is based on a problematic interpretation of the type-token distinction, and its ability to make social ontology useful for social sciences is hindered by (...) Guala’s interpretation of social institution types as social kinds akin to natural kinds. (shrink)

Prominent research programs dealing with the nature and mechanisms of interpersonal social coordination have emerged in cognitive science, developmental psychology and evolutionary anthropology. I argue that the mechanistic approach to explanation in contemporary philosophy of science can facilitate interdisciplinary integration and division of labor between these different disciplinary research programs. By distinguishing phenomenal models from mechanistic models and structural decomposition from functional decomposition in the process of mechanism discovery, I argue that behavioral and cognitive scientists can make interlocking contributions to (...) families of mechanism models representing a) what central forms of interpersonal social coordination consist in, b) what types of agents engage in such forms of coordination, c) what types of cognitive mechanisms give rise to such forms of coordination, d) how the operation of such mechanisms is modulated by the natural and social environments that the agents populate. Thus mechanistic philosophy of science can play a heuristic role in guiding the research strategies of scientists in different scientific disciplines in a manner that is complementary to the research strategies of scientists in other disciplines and thereby efficient from the point of view of the division of epistemic labor. (shrink)

This work consists of two parts. Part I will be a contribution to a philo- sophical discussion of the nature of causal explanation. It will present my contrastive counterfactual theory of causal explanation and show how it can be used to deal with a number of problems facing theories of causal explanation. Part II is a contribution to a discussion of the na- ture of interest explanation in social studies of science. The aim is to help to resolve some controversies (...) concerning interest explanation by explicating the concept of interest and its explanatory uses by using the account of explanation developed in Part I. (shrink)

This paper provides an inferentialist account of model-based understanding by combining a counterfactual account of explanation and an inferentialist account of representation with a view of modeling as extended cognition. This account makes it understandable how the manipulation of surrogate systems like models can provide genuinely new empirical understanding about the world. Similarly, the account provides an answer to the question how models, that always incorporate assumptions that are literally untrue of the model target, can still provide factive explanations. Finally, (...) the paper shows how the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation can provide tools for assessing the explanatory power of models. (shrink)

Consciousness seems to be an enigmatic phenomenon: it is difficult to imagine how our perceptions of the world and our inner thoughts, sensations and feelings could be related to the immensely complicated biological organ we call the brain. This volume presents the thoughts of some of the leading philosophers and cognitive scientists who have recently participated in the discussion of the status of consciousness in science. The focus of inquiry is the question: "Is it possible to incorporate consciousness into science?" (...) Philosophers have suggested different alternatives -- some think that consciousness should be altogether eliminated from science because it is not a real phenomenon, others that consciousness is a real, higher-level physical or neurobiological phenomenon, and still others that consciousness is fundamentally mysterious and beyond the reach of science. At the same time, however, several models or theories of the role of conscious processing in the brain have been developed in the more empirical cognitive sciences. It has been suggested that non-conscious processes must be sharply separated from conscious ones, and that the necessity of this distinction is manifested in the curious behavior of certain brain-damaged patients. This book demonstrates the dialogue between philosophical and empirical points of view. The writers present alternative solutions to the brain-consciousness problem and they discuss how the unification of biological and psychological sciences could thus become feasible. Covering a large ground, this book shows how the philosophical and empirical problems are closely interconnected. From this interdisciplinary exploration emerges the conviction that consciousness can and should be a natural part of our scientific world view. (shrink)

This article presents a revised version of negative utilitarianism. Previous versions have relied on a hedonistic theory of value and stated that suffering should be minimized. The traditional rebuttal is that the doctrine in this form morally requires us to end all sentient life. To avoid this, a need-based theory of value is introduced. The frustration of the needs not to suffer and not to have one’s autonomy dwarfed should, prima facie, be decreased. When decreasing the need frustration of some (...) would increase the need frustration of others, the case is deferred and a fuller ethical analysis is conducted. The author’s perceptions on murder, extinction, the right to die, antinatalism, veganism, and abortion are used to reach a reflective equilibrium. The new theory is then applied to consumerism, material growth, and power relations. The main finding is that the burden of proof should be on those who promote the status quo. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Can philosophers come up with persuasive reasons to allow or to ban human reproductive cloning? Yes. Can philosophers agree, locally and temporarily, which practices related to cloning should be condoned and which should be rejected? Some of them can. Can philosophers produce universally convincing arguments for or against different kinds of human cloning? No. This paper analyses some of the main arguments presented by philosophers in the cloning debate, and some of the most important objections against them. The clashes (...) between the schools of thought suggest that philosophers cannot be trusted to provide the public authorities, or the general public, a unified, universally applicable view of the morality of human reproductive cloning. (shrink)