Philosophy of Science

The biological and social sciences often generalize causal conclusions from one context to others that may differ in some relevant respects, as is illustrated by inferences from animal models to humans or from a pilot study to a broader population. Inferences like these are known as extrapolations. How and when extrapolation can be legitimate is a fundamental question for the biological and social sciences that has not received the attention it deserves. This book argues that previous accounts of extrapolation are inadequate and proposes a better approach that is able to answer methodological critiques of extrapolation from animal models to humans.

This book explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature. Our humanoid forerunners displayed aesthetic sensibilities hundreds of thousands of years ago and the art standing of prehistoric cave paintings is virtually uncontested. After introducing the topic, Part I analyzes the key concepts of the aesthetic, art, evolution, and how they might be related. Among other issues, there is consideration of whether animals have aesthetic tastes and whether art is not only universal but cross-culturally comprehensible. Part II is on aesthetics. The many aesthetic interests that humans take in animals and how these reflect our biological interests are examined, as is the idea that our environmental and landscape preferences are rooted in the experiences of our distant ancestors. In considering the controversial subject of human beauty, evolutionary psychologists focus on female physical attractiveness in the context of mate selection, but here a broader view decouples human beauty from mate choice and explains why it goes more with social performance and self-presentation. Part III asks if the arts, together or singly, are biological adaptations, incidental by-products of nonart adaptations, or so removed from biology that they rate as purely cultural technologies. None of the many positions examined is conclusively supported, but there are grounds, nevertheless, for seeing art as part of human nature. It serves as a powerful and complex signal of human fitness, and so cannot be incidental to biology. Indeed, such behaviors are the touchstones of our humanity.

This book deals with questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind from the vantage point of physics. Combining general philosophy with physics, it covers such topics as the definition of matter, the nature of space, motion, gravity, electromagnetic fields, the character of physical knowledge, and consciousness and meaning. Throughout, the book maintains an historical perspective and seeks to determine how much we really know of the world described by physics. It defends a version of “structuralism”: the thesis that our knowledge is partial and merely abstract, leaving a large epistemological gap at the center of physics. The book then connects this element of mystery to parallel mysteries in relation to the mind. Consciousness emerges as just one more mystery of physics. A theory of matter and space is developed, according to which the impenetrability of matter is explained as the deletion of volumes of space. The book proposes a philosophy of science that distinguishes physics from both psychology and biology, explores the ontology of energy, and considers the relevance of physics to seemingly remote fields such as the theory of meaning. In the form of a series of aphorisms, this book presents a metaphysical system that takes laws of nature as fundamental.

There are few more unsettling philosophical questions than this: ‘what happens in attempts to reduce some properties to some other more fundamental properties?’ Reflection on this question inevitably touches on very deep issues about ourselves, our own interactions with the world and each other, and our very understanding of what there is and what goes on around us. If we cannot command a clear view of these deep issues, then very many other debates in contemporary philosophy seem to lose traction — think of causation, laws of nature, explanation, consciousness, personal identity, intentionality, normativity, freedom, responsibility, justice, and so on. Reduction can easily seem to unravel our world. This book aims to answer this question. Its chapters span a number of current debates in philosophy and cognitive science: what is the nature of reduction, of reductive explanation, of mental causation? The chapters range from approaches in analytical metaphysics, over philosophy of the special sciences and physics, to interdisciplinary studies in psychiatry and neurobiology. The chapters connect strands in contemporary philosophy that are often treated separately, and in combination they show how issues of reduction, explanation, and causation mutually constrain each other.

The theory of evolution may be successful in explaining natural history, but it is of limited value when applied to the human world. Because of our reflectiveness and rationality, as embodied in language, we give ourselves ideals that cannot be justified in terms of survival‐promotion or reproductive advantage. Evolutionary theory is unable to give satisfactory accounts of such distinctive features of human life as the quest for knowledge, our moral sense, and the appreciation of beauty. At most, it can account for their prefiguration at some earlier stage of development than the human. In all these areas we transcend our biological origins, and such mechanisms as genetic survival, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and sexual selection. But because of our rationality we can also transcend our cultural inheritance explanation of which in terms of memes is both hollow and misleading. We are rooted both in our biology and in our cultural inheritance; but, sociobiology and sociology notwithstanding, we are prisoners neither of our genes nor of the ideas we encounter as we each make our personal journey through life.

Some philosophers think physical explanations stand on their own: what happens, happens because things have the properties they do. Others think that any such explanation is incomplete: what happens in the physical world must be partly due to the laws of nature. This book follows the debate between these views from Descartes to Hume. The book argues that the competing models of causation in the period grow out of the scholastic notion of power. On this Aristotelian view, the connection between cause and effect is logically necessary. Causes are “intrinsically directed” at what they produce. But when the Aristotelian view is faced with the challenge of mechanism, the core notion of a power splits into two distinct models, each of which persists throughout the early modern period. It is only when seen in this light that the key arguments of the period can reveal their true virtues and flaws. To make this case, the book explores such central topics as intentionality, the varieties of necessity, and the nature of relations. Arguing for controversial readings of many of the canonical figures, the book also focuses on lesser‐known writers such as Pierre‐Sylvain Régis, Nicolas Malebranche, and Robert Boyle.

Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture—one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones—is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted in understanding our own culture. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, which shapes our understanding of what it can achieve. The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then that we witness the emergence of the idea that scientific values form a model for all cognitive claims. It is also at this time that science explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and begins to articulate a world‐view designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. However, what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdetermined fashion, and the outcome in the mid‐eighteenth century was not the triumph of ‘reason’, as has commonly been supposed, but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of science and the beginnings of a serious questioning of whether science offers a comprehensive form of understanding.