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151Causal depth, theoretical appropriateness, and individualism in psychologyPhilosophy of Science 61 (1): 55-75. 1994.Individualists claim that wide explanations in psychology are problematic. I argue that wide psychological explanations sometimes have greater explanatory power than individualistic explanations. The aspects of explanatory power I focus on are causal depth and theoretical appropriateness. Reflection on the depth and appropriateness of other wide explanations of behavior, such as evolutionary explanations, clarifies why wide psychological explanations sometimes have more causal depth and theoreti…Read more
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144When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural KindsPhilosophical Topics 35 (1-2): 189-215. 2007.Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has receiv…Read more
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100Some problems for alternative individualismPhilosophy of Science 67 (4): 671-679. 2000.This paper points to some problems for the position that D.M. Walsh calls "alternative individualism," and argues that in defending this view Walsh has omitted an important part of what separates individualists and externalists in psychology. Walsh's example of Hox gene complexes is discussed in detail to show why some sort of externalism about scientific taxonomy more generally is a more plausible view than any extant version of individualism
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277PsychologyEugenics Archive. 2014.Genetics and the biological sciences are the two contemporary scientific fields most readily called to mind in thinking about science and eugenics. Yet the history of another discipline, psychology, is enmeshed more intricately with eugenics than are the histories of either genetics or even the biological sciences more generally. This is true of the history of eugenics in Canada. Moreover, continuities in the roles that psychology plays in how we think about sorts of people and their ability and…Read more
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4Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations (review)Philosophical Books 37 (1): 53-56. 1996.This is a short review of Jeff Poland's Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations.
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