The circumstances surrounding Gordon’s care are complex. Although his acute septicemia has been managed, there remain concerns regarding the need for ongoing care to ameliorate his current pressure...

Geologists, Paleontologists and other historical scientists are frequently concerned with narrative explanations targeting single cases. I show that two distinct explanatory strategies are employed in narratives, simple and complex. A simple narrative has minimal causal detail and is embedded in a regularity, whereas a complex narrative is more detailed and not embedded. The distinction is illustrated through two case studies: the ‘snowball earth’ explanation of Neoproterozoic glaciation and recent attempts to explain gigantism in Sauropods. This distinction is revelatory of historical (...) science. I argue that at least sometimes which strategy is appropriate is not a pragmatic issue, but turns on the nature of the target. Moreover, the distinction reveals a counterintuitive pattern of progress in some historical explanation: shifting from simple to complex. Sometimes, historical scientists rightly abandon simple, unified explanations in favour of disunified, complex narratives. Finally I compare narrative and mechanistic explanation, arguing that mechanistic approaches are inappropriate for complex narrative explanations. (shrink)

Abstract‘Behavioural modernity’ isn’t what it used to be. Once conceived as an integrated package of traits demarcated by a clear archaeological signal in a specific time and place, it is now disparate, archaeologically equivocal, and temporally and spatially spread. In this paper we trace behavioural modernity’s empirical and theoretical developments over the last three decades, as surprising discoveries in the material record, as well the reappraisal of old evidence, drove increasingly sophisticated demographic, social and cultural models of behavioural modernity. We (...) argue, however, that some approaches to identifying and categorizing modernity have not kept up with this new picture. This is due to what we term ‘Rubicon expectations’: classificatory and interpretive practices which look for or assume clear demarcations in behavioural and cultural processes. We develop a philosophical account of ‘investigative disintegration’ to capture how our understanding of behavioural modernity has changed, and how Rubicon-based practices have become inadequate. Disintegration, in the form we analyse, occurs when scientists’ conception of a phenomenon shifts sufficiently to reshape an investigation’s epistemic structure. For behavioural modernity, the explanatory weight which once lay on identifying ‘switch-points’ in the innate suite of hominin cognitive capacities, lies now in understanding the social and demographic environments that were capable of sustaining and nourishing more complex material cultures. Finally, we argue that the phenomenon itself has not disintegrated to the point that we are left with no interesting explanandum: for all its mosaic, disparate nature, there are still good reasons for behavioural modernity to retain its central place in investigation of our species' origins. (shrink)

Our epistemic access to the past is infamously patchy: historical information degrades and disappears and bygone eras are often beyond the reach of repeatable experiments. However, historical scientists have been remarkably successful at uncovering and explaining the past. I argue that part of this success is explained by the exploitation of dependencies between historical events, entities, and processes. For instance, if sauropod dinosaurs were hot blooded, they must have been gluttons; the high-energy demands of endothermy restrict sauropod grazing strategies. Understanding (...) such dependencies extends our reach into the past in spite of incomplete data. In addition, this serves as a counterexample to two accounts of method in the historical sciences. By one, historical science proceeds by identifying ‘smoking guns’: traces that discriminate between live hypotheses. By the other, historical hypotheses are supported by consilience: the convergence of independent lines of evidence. However, testing for ‘coherency’ between past hypotheses also plays a critical role in historical confirmation. Just as historical scientists exploit dependencies between past entities and present entities to infer what the past was like, they also exploit dependencies between past entities themselves. I do not suggest that archetypical historical science proceeds in this manner. Rather, the lesson I draw is that historical methodology cannot be characterized as archetypically relying on one method or another. Historical science is at base opportunistic, and is resistant to unitary analyses. 1 Introduction2 Snowballs and Explosions: The Basic Idea3 Were Sauropods Endothermic?4 Dependent Entities and Interdependent Explanations5 Smoking Guns and Consilience. (shrink)

. Philosophers and scientists often cite ontic factors when explaining the methods and success of scientific inquiry. That is, the adoption of a method or approach is explained in reference to the kind of system in which the scientist is interested: these are explanations of why scientists do what they do, that appeal to properties of their target systems. We present a framework for understanding such “Opticks to his Principia. Newton’s optical work is largely experiment-driven, while the Principia is primarily (...) mathematical, so usually, each work is taken to exemplify a different kind of science. However, Newton himself often presented them in terms of a largely consistent method. We use our framework to articulate an original and plausible position: that the differences between the Opticks and the Principia are due to the kinds of systems targeted. That is, we provide an ontic-driven explanation of methodological differences. We suspect that ontic factors should have a more prominent role in historical explanations of scientific method and development. (shrink)

We outline a theory of one puzzling aspect of human cognition: a tendency to exaggerate the degree to which agency is manifested in the world. We call this over‐coherent thinking. We use Pylyshyn's idea of cognitive penetrability to help characterize this notion. We argue that this kind of thinking is essentially narrative in form rather than theoretical. We develop a theory of the relation between the degree of narrativity in a representation and its aptness to represent, and to express, mind. (...) We review the prospects for several theories about how over‐coherent thinking gains a purchase on motivation. We argue that progress in this difficult area may require the abandonment of a categorical belief/imagination distinction in favour of vaguely specified clusterings in a many‐dimensional cognitive space. We conclude with the idea that an error‐prone system for the retention of ideas that are low in some of the characteristics generally thought desirable in belief might emerge as a result of an arms‐race between deceivers and deceiver‐detectors. (shrink)

‘Gouldian arguments’ appeal to the contingency of a scientific domain to establish that domain’s autonomy from some body of theory. For instance, pointing to evolutionary contingency, Stephen Jay Gould suggested that natural selection alone is insufficient to explain life on the macroevolutionary scale. In analysing contingency, philosophers have provided source-independent accounts, understanding how events and processes structure history without attending to the nature of those events and processes. But Gouldian Arguments require source-dependent notions of contingency. An account of contingency is (...) source-dependent when it is indexed to some pattern and some process. Positions like Gould’s do not turn on the mere fact of life’s contingency—that life’s shape could have been different due to its sensitivity to initial conditions, path-dependence or stochasticity. Rather, Gouldian arguments require that the contingency is due to particular kinds of processes: in this case, those which microevolutionary theory cannot account for. This source-dependent perspective clarifies both debates about the nature and importance of contingency, and empirical routes for testing Gould’s thesis. (shrink)

A trenchant and wide-ranging look at this alarming national trend, _Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline_ is unsparing in its account of the problem while pointing in the direction of meaningful and much-needed reforms. The “school-to-prison pipeline” has received much attention in the education world over the past few years. A fast-growing and disturbing development, it describes a range of circumstances whereby “children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.” Scholars, educators, parents, students, and organizers (...) across the country have pointed to this shocking trend, insisting that it be identified and understood—and that it be addressed as an urgent matter by the larger community. This new volume from the _Harvard Educational Review _features essays from scholars, educators, students, and community activists who are working to disrupt, reverse, and redirect the pipeline. Alongside these authors are contributions from the people most affected: youth and adults who have been incarcerated, or whose lives have been shaped by the school-to-prison pipeline. Through stories, essays, and poems, these individuals add to the book’s comprehensive portrait of how our education and justice systems function—and how they fail to serve the interests of many young people.". (shrink)

The past can be a stubborn subject: it is complex, heterogeneous and opaque. To understand it, one must decide which aspects of the past to emphasise and which to minimise. Enter frameworks. Frameworks foreground certain aspects of the historical record while backgrounding others. As such, they are both necessary for, and conducive to, good history as well as good philosophy. We examine the role of frameworks in the history and philosophy of science and argue that they are necessary for both (...) forms of enquiry. We then suggest that the right attitude towards frameworks is pluralism rather than monism: there is no single correct framework to be applied to a given scientific episode. Rather, a multitude of different frameworks are more or less appropriate given various contexts and aims. From this perspective, good frameworks generate and further, rather than frustrate, historical and philosophical enquiry. Our view sheds light on historical disagreement, and on the relationship between philosophy and history of science. (shrink)

Simulation Theory says we need not rely exclusively on prepositional knowledge of other minds in order to explain the actions of others. Seeking to know what you will do, I imagine myself in your situation, and see what decision I come up with. I argue that this conception of simulation naturally generalizes: various bits of our mental machine can be run‘off‐line’, fulfilling functions other than those they were made for. In particular, I suggest that visual imagery results when the visual (...) system is run off‐line. I briefly review the empirical evidence and consider the philosophical implications, particularly concerning the mode of mental representation in imagery. (shrink)

Creativity and PhilosophyBerys Gaut and Matthew Kieran Routledge. 2018. pp. 394. £30.99.

Shaun Gallagher and Dan Hutto claim that those once bitter rivals, simulation theory and theory-theory, are now to be treated as partners in crime. It's true that the debate has become more nuanced, with detailed suggestions abroad as to how these two approaches might peaceably divide the field. And there is common ground between them, at least to the extent that they agree on what needs to be explained. But I see no fatal flaw in what they share. In particular, (...) I reject the idea that most interpersonal understanding can be accounted for without the postulation of mechanisms for inferring beliefs and desires. I also query the claim that simulation mechanisms have a very limited explanatory scope, and argue for the existence of such mechanisms at sub-personal levels. I suggest that Gallagher and Hutto's strictures against false belief tests are unwarranted, and their conclusions about the role of narrative in interpersonal understanding are unfounded. (shrink)

In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well (...) managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo. (shrink)

Motor imagery typically involves an experience as of moving a body part. Recent studies reveal close parallels between the constraints on motor imagery and those on actual motor performance. How are these parallels to be explained? We advance a simulative theory of motor imagery, modeled on the idea that we predict and explain the decisions of others by simulating their decision-making processes. By proposing that motor imagery is essentially off-line motor action, we explain the tendency of motor imagery to mimic (...) motor performance. We close by arguing that a simulative theory of motor imagery gives (modest) support to and illumination of the simulative theory of decision-prediction. (shrink)

I assess the claim that metarepresentation is a key notion in understanding the nature and development of our capacity to engage in pretence. I argue that the metarepresentational programme is unhelpful in explaining how pretence operates and, in particular, how agents distinguish pretence from belief. I sketch an alternative approach to the relations between pretending and believing. This depends on a distinction between pretending and pretence, and upon the claim that pretence stands to pretending as truth stands to belief.

Studie over het werk van de Duitse wijsgeer Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848-1925).

Some of us have suggested that what fiction makers do is offer us things to imagine, that this is what is distinctive of fiction and what distinguishes it from narrative-based but assertive activities such as journalism or history. Some of us hold, further, that it is the maker's intention which confers fictional status. Many, I think, feel the intuitive appeal of this idea at the same time as they sense looming problems for any proposal about fiction's nature based straightforwardly on (...) the identification of fiction with the to-be-imagined. I formulate a very weak version of the proposal which is not vulnerable to some objections recently presented. My formulation is in terms of supervenience. But while this version is weak, it is also quite precise, and its precision brings into view certain other problems which have not so far been attended to. To the extent that these problems are serious, the prospects for an intentional theory of fiction look, I am sorry to say, poor; the version susceptible to the objections is weak, and anything weaker still but not so susceptible could hardly be thought of as a theory of fiction, though it might supplement such a theory. (shrink)

Argues for an approach to the interpretation of text‐based works within which the idea of a communicative intention is central. The communicative approach, apart from providing detailed, illuminating, and testable theories, transposes very well from conversational exchange to the interpretation of text‐based works, and promises to illuminate aesthetic aspects of our engagement with works. Examines the consequences of this approach for the issue of pluralism about interpretation.

Both paleobiology and investigations of ‘major evolutionary transitions’ are intimately concerned with the macroevolutionary shape of life. It is surprising, then, how little studies of major transitions are informed by paleontological perspectives and. I argue that this disconnect is partially justified because paleobiological investigation is typically ‘phenomena-led’, while investigations of major transitions are ‘theory-led’. The distinction turns on evidential relevance: in the former case, evidence is relevant in virtue of its relationship to some phenomena or hypotheses concerning those phenomena; in (...) the latter, evidence is relevant in virtue of providing insights into, or tests of, an abstract body of theory. Because paleobiological data is by-and-large irrelevant to the theory which underwrites the traditional conception of major transitions, it is of limited use to that research program. I suggest that although the traditional conception of major transitions is neither ad-hoc or problematically incomplete, its promise of providing unificatory explanations of the transitions is unlikely to be kept. Further, examining paleobiological investigations of mass extinctions and organogenesis, I further argue that whether or not transitions in paleobiology count as ‘major’ turns on how we conceive of major transitions ; although major transitions potentially have a unified theoretical basis, recent developments suggest that investigations are becoming increasingly phenomena-led; adopting phenomena-led investigations maximizes the evidence available to paleobiologists. (shrink)

Re-analysis of the data provided in the target article reveals a lack of evidence for a strong, universal relationship between parasite stress and the variables relating to sociality. Furthermore, even if associations between these variables do exist, the analyses presented here do not provide evidence for Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) proposed causal mechanism.

Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ influential phenomenological analysis of skill acquisition proposes that expert performance is guided by non-cognitive responses which are fast, effortless and apparently intuitive in nature. Although this model has been criticised for over-emphasising the role that intuition plays in facilitating skilled performance, it does recognise that on occasions a form of ‘detached deliberative rationality’ may be used by experts to improve their performance. However, Dreyfus and Dreyfus see no role for calculative problem solving or deliberation when performance is (...) going well. In the current paper, we draw on empirical evidence, insights from athletes, and phenomenological description to argue that ‘continuous improvement’ among experts is mediated by cognitive control in three distinct sporting situations. We conclude by arguing that Sutton et al. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42, 78–103 ‘applying intelligence to the reflexes’ approach may help to elucidate the process by which expert performers achieve continuous improvement through analytical/mindful behaviour during training and competition. (shrink)

Consideration of evidence and data in historical science is dominated by textual metaphor: we reconstruct the past on the basis of various incomplete records. I suggest that although textual metaphors are often apt, they also lead philosophers and scientists to think about historical evidence in particular ways, and that other perspectives might be fruitful. Towards this, I explore the notion of natural historical evidence being thought of as ‘ruins’. This has several potential benefits. First, the architectural aspect of the metaphor (...) emphasizes the contingency of historical subjects and the coherency of design-based reconstruction. Second, historical data, like ruins, are co-constructed, involving intimate interaction with materials. (shrink)

There is increasing attention given to academic integrity across university education and dental schools are not immune to this problem (Andrews et al. J Dent Educ 71; 1027–1039, 2007; Ford & Hughes Eur J Dent Educ 16(1):e180–e186, 2012). While there has been an increasing concern about academic dishonesty in written exams and assignments, there appears to be a false sense of security in the integrity of practical assessments, involving dental procedures on simulated patients.This paper will present a situational analysis of (...) two unusual cases of academic dishonesty in preclinical dental practical assessments. The first case involved a student bringing a previously prepared plastic tooth into the examination room and substituting it for the assessment tooth. The second case involved a student removing key teeth during the exam to enable them to have better access and advantage over others to complete the assessment task. These two cases resulted in a complete review of practical assessment procedures and the application of new processes to maintain academic integrity. (shrink)

Here’s something I’m willing to claim we know: Homo sapiens, in particular the Polynesian settlers who first arrived in Aotearoa around the twelfth century, take the lion’s share of causal blame for the extinction of a lineage of enormous flightless birds: the moa. Stretching to three metres at their tallest, moa were a distinctive and remarkable feature of Aotearoa’s primeval forests, playing the main browser and grazer role in this unique bird-based ecosystem. Once humans turned up forests were burned, moa (...) were stalked, and human-0introduced arrivals such as kiore had dramatic ecological repercussions. Within a few centuries, the moa were gone. (shrink)

How far should philosophical accounts of the value and interpretation of art be sensitive to the scientific approaches used by psychologists, sociologists, and evolutionary thinkers? A team of experts urge different answers to this question, and explore how empirical inquiry can shed light on problems traditionally regarded as philosophical.

We need to distinguish between the claim that engagement with a fiction requires imagination, and the claim that such engagement requires empathetic identification with characters. Argues that the first claim is certainly true. What of the second? Some criticism of it is valid; there are occasions on which we engage with a fiction perfectly well without empathising. Still, empathy is important for engaging with some parts of some fictions; The author illustrates this with Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Windfell Hall.

David Sepkoski and Michael Ruse’s edited collection The Peolobiological Revolution covers the changes in paleontological science in the last half-century. The collection should be of interest to philosophers of science (particularly those interested in non-reductive unity) as well as historians. I give an overview of the content and major themes of the volume and draw some lessons for the philosophy of science along the way. In particular, I argue that the history of paleontology demands a new approach to philosophical delineation (...) of sciences. (shrink)

Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science defends an ambitious and systematic account of scientific knowledge: ultimately science pursues human understanding rather than truth. Potochnik argues that idealization is rampant and unchecked in science. Further, given that idealizations involve departures from truth, this suggests science is not primarily about truth. I explore the relationship between truths about causal patterns and scientific understanding in light of this, and suggest that Potochnik underestimates the importance and power of highly particular narrative explanations.

Human aesthetic practices show a sensitivity to the ways that the appearance of an artefact manifests skills and other qualities of the maker. We investigate a possible origin for this kind of sensibility, locating it in the need for co-ordination of skill-transmission in the Acheulean stone tool culture. We argue that our narrative supports the idea that Acheulean agents were aesthetic agents. In line with this we offer what may seem an absurd comparison: between the Acheulean and the Quattrocento. In (...) making it we display some hidden complexity in human aesthetic responses to an artefact. We conclude with a brief review of rival explanations—biological and/or cultural—of how this skills-based sensibility became a regular feature of human aesthetic practices. (shrink)

To a large extent, the evidential base of claims in the philosophy of science has switched from thought experiments to case studies. We argue that abandoning thought experiments was a wrong turn, since they can effectively complement case studies. We make our argument via an analogy with the relationship between experiments and observations within science. Just as experiments and ‘natural’ observations can together evidence claims in science, each mitigating the downsides of the other, so too can thought experiments and case (...) studies be mutually supporting. After presenting the main argument, we look at potential concerns about thought experiments, suggesting that a judiciously applied mixed-methods approach can overcome them. (shrink)

In this note the claim is defended that Frege was a realist in the sense that he attributed causal efficacy to certain abstract objects. The arguments of Dummett and Sluga (cf. Inquiry, Vols. 18, 19, and 20 [1975–77]) to the contrary are criticized.