Ludger Jansen

Functional explanations apply not only in cases of normal functioning, but also in the case of malfunctioning. According to a straightforward analysis, a bearer of the function to F is malfunctioning if and only if it does not F although it should do so. This makes malfunctions and malfunctionings analogous to negative causation and thus peculiarly problematic, because they seem to involve absent dispositions and absent processes. This analysis seems also to require that the function to F cannot be identical with the disposition to F. Then we seem to be trapped in a dilemma: Either the realm of functions is separated from the realm of dispositions; then it seems that functions cannot be causally efficacious. Alternatively, functions are considered to be identical with dispositions; but then malfunctioning seems to be conceptually impossible. The paper defends and further develops the thesis of Röhl and Jansen that functions are not a special type of dispositions. For this purpose, it first reviews different varieties of malfunction and malfunctioning and suggests definitions of both malfunction and malfunctioning. It reviews how causal, etiological and intentional theories of functions can deal with these problems. In particular, the paper discusses the special-disposition account of the Basic Formal Ontology. Spear, Ceusters and Smith :103--128, 2016) have defended the special-disposition account of the Basic Formal Ontology by suggesting various strategies how a special-disposition account can deal with malfunctions. On the one side, the paper evaluates these strategies and indicates several problems arising from them. On the other hand, it describes how to account for the non-optionality and the causal efficacy of functions, if functions are not dispositions. While function types are not identical to disposition types, there are important interrelations between functions and dispositions, namely heuristically, from a design perspective for artefact functions, and from an evolutionary perspective for types of biological functions.

Introducing formal causation / Ludger Jansen and Petter Sandstad -- Form, intention, information : from scholastic logic to artificial intelligence / Gyula Klima -- Formal causation : accidental and substantial / David S. Oderberg -- A non-hylomorphic account of formal causation / Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen -- Formal causes for powers theorists / Giacomo Giannini and Stephen Mumford -- Away with dispositional essences in trope theory / Jani Hakkarainen and Markku Keinänen -- Functional powers / Michele Paolini Paoletti -- An Aristotelian approach to existential dependence / Benjamin Schnieder and Jonas Werner -- Finean feature dependence and the Aristotelian alternative / Wolfgang Sattler -- A problem for natural-kind essentialism and formal causes / José Tomás Alvarado and Matthew Tugby -- Form as cause and the formal cause : Aristotle's answer / James G. Lennox -- Form, cause, and explanation in biology : a neo-Aristotelian perspective / Christopher J. Austin -- Formal explanation and mechanisms of conceptual representation / Sandeep Prasada.

Currently, there is not yet a full-fledged philosophical sub-discipline devoted to artifacts. In order to establish such a general philosophical discourse on artifacts, two topics are of special importance: artifact functionality and artifact categorization. Both are central to the question of what artifacts are in general and in particular. This introduction first presents the current state of the art in the debates on functions, both in general and in the domain of artifacts in particular. It then unfolds the three debates relevant for artifact kinds, namely the ontological, epistemological and semantic debates on artifact categorization, and presents the most important theory options currently under scrutiny in these fields. It proceeds by introducing the contributions in this special issue on the functions and kinds of art works and other artifacts, and discusses possible perspectives for a general philosophy of artifacts.

This broad and insightful book presents current scholarship in important subfields of philosophy of science and addresses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary readership. It groups carefully selected contributions into the four fields of I) philosophy of physics, II) philosophy of life sciences, III) philosophy of social sciences and values in science, and IV) philosophy of mathematics and formal modeling. Readers will discover research papers by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Keizo Matsubara, Kian Salimkhani, Andrea Reichenberger, Anne Sophie Meincke, Javier Suárez, Roger Deulofeu, Ludger Jansen, Peter Hucklenbroich, Martin Carrier, Elizaveta Kostrova, Lara Huber, Jens Harbecke, Antonio Piccolomini d'Aragona and Axel Gelfert. This collection fosters dialogue between philosophers of science working in different subfields, and brings readers the finest and latest work across the breadth of the field,illustrating that contemporary philosophy of science has successfully broadened its scope of reflection. It will interest and inspire a wide audience of philosophers as well as scholars of the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The volume shares selected contributions from the prestigious second triennial conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science/ Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP.2016, March 8, 2016 - March 11, 2016).

Die Zeiten, in denen der Leib-Seele-Dualismus als Ansatz der Philosophie des Geistes durch ein herrschendes Dogma als diskussionsunwürdig galt, sind vorbei. Der Dualismus darf wieder diskutiert werden. Er muß diskutiert werden, wenn in diskussionswürdiger Strenge für ihn argumentiert wird – auch wenn das, wie sich zeigen wird, manchmal ein ziemlich technisches Geschäft ist. In diesem Sinne soll im folgenden Richard Swinburnes Versuch behandelt werden, die Existenz einer Seele und damit die Wahrheit des Substanzdualismus aus einigen zunächst recht unspektakulär aussehenden Prämissen mit Hilfe der modernen Modallogik formal zu beweisen. Zugleich sei damit auf eine kleine Debatte aufmerksam gemacht, die sich inzwischen um Swinburnes Argument entwickelt hat. Die Untersuchung führt zu einem doppelten negativen Ergebnis: Zum einen sind Swinburnes Prämissen nicht plausibel, zum anderen ist ein wichtiger Teil seines Beweisversuches formal nicht in Ordnung. Swinburnes Argument ist also weder überzeugend noch gültig . Allerdings ist das nicht auf den ersten Blick ersichtlich, denn Swinburnes Argument ist alles andere als trivial. Eine eingehende Kritik dieses Arguments soll zeigen, daß, selbst wenn der Dualismus wahr sein sollte, er nicht ganz so einleuchtend ist, wie Swinburne meint

In "On Social Facts" (1989) and subsequent works, Margaret Gilbert has suggested a plural subject account of the semantics of ‘we’ that claims that a central or standard use of ‘we’ is to refer to an existing or anticipated plural subject. This contrasts with the more general approach to treat plural pronouns as expressions referring to certain pluralities. I argue that (i) the plural subject approach cannot account for certain syntactic phenomena and that (ii) the sense of intimacy, which Gilbert cites as evidence for her plural subject account, has a different source than the existence of joint commitments constituting a respective plural subject. Moreover, (iii) there is a wide varie-ty of phenomena in the linguistic record, which, while not constituting conclusive evidence against the plural subject account, nevertheless, are dealt with better by the plurality account. ‘We’ thus refers to pluralities, which may or may not be plural subjects. The precise analysis of ‘we’ thus reveals a multi-layered ontology of groups.

The 2013 Rostock Symposium on Systems Biology and Bioinformatics in Aging Research was again dedicated to dissecting the aging process using in silico means. A particular focus was on ontologies, as these are a key technology to systematically integrate heterogeneous information about the aging process. Related topics were databases and data integration. Other talks tackled modeling issues and applications, the latter including talks focussed on marker development and cellular stress as well as on diseases, in particular on diseases of kidney and skin.

This book discusses the philosophy of influential contemporary philosopher Peter van Inwagen. Looking at perennial philosophical problems from a modern point of view, Peter van Inwagen’s philosophy masterfully combines positions that have been considered irreconcilable: incompatibilism concerning free will, materialism, organicism, theism and realism concerning fictional entities. As readers will discover, his arguments are witty, surprising and deep. The book includes Peter van Inwagen’s Münster Lecture of 2015 on free will, as well as eleven papers from the Münster colloquium discussing central themes of his philosophy, and a reply to each paper by Peter van Inwagen himself. Introducing his philosophy and relating his work to other contemporary views, this book is of interest to graduate students and professionals in philosophy alike.

Given the assertion of a relation between two types, like: “Epidermis has part some Keratinocyte”, we define silent change as any kind of change of the instance-relata of the relation in question that does not change the truth-value of the respective type-level assertion. Such assertions are notoriously difficult to model in OWL 2. To address this problem, we distinguish different modes of type-level relatedness giving rise to this problem and describe a conservative extension to the BFO top-level ontology that allows expressing these modes.

A popular argument goes thus: This is a construction, hence it is not real. Adding an appropriate adjective (social, mental, human, …) in front of “construction” or cognate terms like “(legal) fiction” yields a whole family of related arguments, all of which, or so I will argue, are fallacious. Contrary to popular opinion, these arguments fail both on the epistemic and the ontic sense of construction. Ontic constructions exist at least at one point in time, while epistemic constructions may well correspond to reality. The motivation behind these fallacious arguments can often be found in a misconceived conception of ontology and reality. A full theory of reality must take constructed entities into account because important domains of reality (mental life, social reality, technical artefacts, art and fiction) essentially depend on mental or social constructions.

Margaret Gilbert has defended the claim that her plural subject theory can give a reasonable account of retrospective (or backward-looking) collective responsibility. On one occasion, publishing in this periodical, she writes that she deliberately left out the discussion of prospective (or forward-looking) collective responsibility, or the “responsibilities” of a collective. In the present paper, I want to show that plural subject theory, in fact, also allows accounting for prospective responsibilities of groups and institutions. In order to do so, I will first sketch the social ontological background of my discussion which is, in fact, an amended version of Gilbert’s theory of plural subjects (§ 2). Based on the assumption that a prospective responsibility accrues from some kind of commissioning, I will then discuss a variety of possible sources of prospective collective responsibilities: self-commissioning, third-party commissioning and what I will call commissioning by unique capability (§ 3). Having done so, I will discuss some consequences of this account and defend it against objections (§ 4).

In order to develop the ontology of tendencies for use in the representation of medical knowledge, tendencies are compared with other kinds of entities possessing the realizable-realization structure, specifically: dispositions, propensities, abilities and virtues. The peculiarities of tendencies are discussed and a standard schema of tendency ascription is developed in order to represent the relations between the ascriptions of tendency tokens to particulars and the ascriptions of tendency types to universals. Two nonstandard cases and their epistemic variants are discussed.

Dispositions and tendencies feature significantly in the biomedical domain and therefore in representations of knowledge of that domain. They are not only important for specific applications like an infectious disease ontology, but also as part of a general strategy for modelling knowledge about molecular interactions. But the task of representing dispositions in some formal ontological systems is fraught with several problems, which are partly due to the fact that Description Logics can only deal well with binary relations. The paper will discuss some of the results of the philosophical debate about dispositions, in order to see whether the formal relations needed to represent dispositions can be broken down to binary relations. Finally, we will discuss problems arising from the possibility of the absence of realizations, of multi-track or multi-trigger dispositions and offer suggestions on how to deal with them.

Objectives: Medical decision support and other intelligent applications in the life sciences depend on increasing amounts of digital information. Knowledge bases as well as formal ontologies are being used to organize biomedical knowledge and data. However, these two kinds of artefacts are not always clearly distinguished. Whereas the popular RDF(S) standard provides an intuitive triple-based representation, it is semantically weak. Description logics based ontology languages like OWL-DL carry a clear-cut semantics, but they are computationally expensive, and they are often misinterpreted to encode all kinds of statements, including those which are not ontological. Method: We distinguish four kinds of statements needed to comprehensively represent domain knowledge: universal statements, terminological statements, statements about particulars and contingent statements. We argue that the task of formal ontologies is solely to represent universal statements, while the non-ontological kinds of statements can nevertheless be connected with ontological representations. To illustrate these four types of representations, we use a running example from parasitology. Results: We finally formulate recommendations for semantically adequate ontologies that can efficiently be used as a stable framework for more context-dependent biomedical knowledge representation and reasoning applications like clinical decision support systems.

There are group-actions, and if actions are intentional, there should also be group-intentions. Who has got these intentions? The groups? This seems to be the natural answer. But then: Groups do not have a mind or brain of there own to form any mental attitude. Different kinds of individualistic analyses of group-intentions have been suggested in the literature. On the one hand there are suggestions to reduce group intentions to a complex of different Iattitudes. John Searle, on the other hand, suggests a special social kind of attitudes, namely we-intentions. We-intentions are being had by individual persons, though they have the form “We intend to do such-and-such”. However, because of the fallibility of Searlian we-intentions and the possibility of ignorance this concept is of no help: We-intentions are neither necessary nor sufficient for group-intentions. In this respect, Margaret Gilbert’s approach is much more successful, though it covers only a special case, namely small-scale informal groups. I suggest a generalised solution in order to cover also large-scale and formal groups.