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29Over fifty years ago, H.M. was treated for chronic epilepsy by a bilateral hippocampectomy. Among the lasting side effects of this treatment was that H.M. could no longer form certain types of long term memories, although he could form others. One of the many morals philosophers and psychologists have sometimes drawn from this sad case (and others) is that information about the brain can be used to guide theorizing about the mind. More specifically, it has been claimed that differences in the wa…Read more
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45Nonreductive realization and nonreductive identity: What physicalism does not entailIn Sven Walter & Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action, Imprint Academic. pp. 31. 2003.
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349Levels, Individual Variation and Massive Multiple Realization in NeurobiologyIn John Bickle (ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and neuroscience, Oxford University Press. pp. 539--582. 2009.Biologists seems to hold two fundamental beliefs: Organisms are organized into levels and the individuals at these levels differ in their properties. Together these suggest that there will be massive multiple realization, i.e. that many human psychological properties are multiply realized at many neurobiological levels. This paper provides some documentation in support of this suggestion.
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514The metaphysics of realization, multiple realizability, and the special sciencesJournal of Philosophy 100 (11): 591-603. 2003.
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458Understanding the new reductionism: The metaphysics of science and compositional reductionJournal of Philosophy 104 (4): 193-216. 2007.
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180An electron clearly has the property of having a charge of þ1.6 10 19 coulombs, but does it also have the property of being charged ? Philosophers have worried whether so-called ‘determinable’ predicates, such as ‘is charged’, actually refer to determinable properties in the way they are happy to say that determinate predicates, such as ‘has a charge of þ1.6 10 19 coulombs’, refer to determinate properties. The distinction between determinates and determinables is itself fairly new, dating only …Read more
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109Symposium on Mechanisms in MindJournal of Philosophical Research 32 1-2. 2007.One of the main early forms of “functionalism,” developed by writers like Jerry Fodor and William Lycan, focused on “mechanistic” explanation in the special sciences and argued that “functional properties” in psychology were continuous in nature with the special science properties posited in such mechanistic explanations. I dub the latter position“Continuity Functionalism” and use it to critically examine the “Standard Picture” of the metaphysics of functionalism which takes “functional” propert…Read more
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20Symposium on Mechanisms in MindJournal of Philosophical Research 32 1-2. 2007.One of the main early forms of “functionalism,” developed by writers like Jerry Fodor and William Lycan, focused on “mechanistic” explanation in the special sciences and argued that “functional properties” in psychology were continuous in nature with the special science properties posited in such mechanistic explanations. I dub the latter position“Continuity Functionalism” and use it to critically examine the “Standard Picture” of the metaphysics of functionalism which takes “functional” propert…Read more
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901The (multiple) realization of psychological and other properties in the sciencesMind and Language 24 (2): 181-208. 2009.Abstract: There has recently been controversy over the existence of 'multiple realization' in addition to some confusion between different conceptions of its nature. To resolve these problems, we focus on concrete examples from the sciences to provide precise accounts of the scientific concepts of 'realization' and 'multiple realization' that have played key roles in recent debates in the philosophy of science and philosophy of psychology. We illustrate the advantages of our view over a prominen…Read more
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106Defending pluralism about compositional explanationsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 78 101-202. 2019.In the New Mechanist literature, most attention has focused on the compositional explanation of processes/activities of wholes by processes/activities of their parts. These are sometimes called “constitutive mechanistic explanations.” In this paper, we defend moving beyond this focus to a Pluralism about compositional explanation by highlighting two additional species of such explanations. We illuminate both Analytic compositional explanations that explain a whole using a compositional relatio…Read more
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20Why Constitutive Mechanistic Explanation Cannot Be CausalAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 57 (1): 31-50. 2020.In his “New Consensus” on explanation, Wesley Salmon (1989) famously argued that there are two kinds of scientific explanation: global, derivational, and unifying explanations, and then local, ontic explanations backed by causal relations. Following Salmon’s New Consensus, the dominant view in philosophy of science is what I term “neo-Causalism” which assumes that all ontic explanations of singular fact/event are causal explanations backed by causal relations, and that scientists only search for…Read more
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73Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2016.Part I -- Scientific Composition and the New Mechanism. - 1. Laura Franklin-Hall: New Mechanistic Explanation and the Need for Explanatory Constraints. - 2. Kenneth Aizawa: Compositional Explanation: Dimensioned Realization, New Mechanism, and Ground. - 3. Jens Harbecke: Is Mechanistic Constitution a Version of Material Constitution?. - 4. Derk Pereboom: Anti-Reductionism, Anti-Rationalism, and the Material Constitution of the Mental. Part II -- Grounding, Science, and Verticality in Nature. - 5…Read more
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33Engaging the Plural Parts of Science: Assessing Flat and Aspect Realization through an Integrative Pluralist LensJournal of Consciousness Studies 29 (7-8): 195-217. 2022.
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420An increasing number of writers (for example, Kim ((1992), (1999)), Bechtel and Mundale (1999), Keeley (2000), Bickle (2003), Polger (2004), and Shapiro ((2000), (2004))) have attacked the existence of multiple realization and wider views of the special sciences built upon it. We examine the two most important arguments against multiple realization and show that neither is successful. Furthermore, we also defend an alternative, positive view of the ontology, and methodology, of the special scien…Read more
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90Hyper-Extending the Mind?: Setting Boundaries in the Special SciencesPhilosophical Topics 35 (1-2): 161-188. 2007.
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73Strong Emergence as a Defense of Non-Reductive PhysicalismPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 6 (1). 2002.Jaegwon Kim, and others, have recently posed a powerful challenge to both emergentism and nom-reductive physicalism by providing arguments that these positions are committed to an untenable combination of both ‘upward’ and ‘dounward’ determination. In section 1, I illuminate how the nature of the realization relation underlies such skeptical arguments However, in section 2, I suggest that such conclusions involve a confusion between the implications of physicalism and those of a related thesis t…Read more
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51Does the Argument from Realization Generalize? Responses to KimSouthern Journal of Philosophy 39 (1): 79-98. 2001.By quantifying over properties we cannot create new properties any more than by quantifying over individuals we can create new individuals. Someone murdered Jones, and the murderer is either Smith or Jones or Wang. That “someone,” who murdered Jones, is not a person in addition to Smith, Jones, and Wang, and it would be absurd to posit a disjunctive person, Smith‐or‐Jones‐or‐Wang, with whom to identify the murderer. The same goes for second‐order properties and their realizers. (Kim 1997a, 201)
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Naturalization: Scientific Theory Appraisal and the Warrant of PhysicalismDissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 1997.My thesis addresses the status of 'naturalizations' of intentionality and the recent debate about their importance. After formulating an account of scientific theory appraisal I argue, contrary to recent critics of naturalization, that there is a place for the use of 'interlevel' properties in assessing scientific theories, but that this takes a more modest form than that assumed by the physicalist proponents of naturalization. Although I argue that we should be agnostic about the truth of the p…Read more
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168Infinitism redux? A response to KleinPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3). 2003.Foundationalist, Coherentist, Skeptic etc., have all been united in one respect--all accept epistemic justification cannot result from an unending, and non-repeating, chain of reasons. Peter Klein has recently challenged this minimal consensus with a defense of what he calls "Infinitism"--the position that justification can result from such a regress. Klein provides surprisingly convincing responses to most of the common objections to Infinitism, but I will argue that he fails to address a vener…Read more
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250Samuel Alexander’s Emergentism: Or, Higher Causation for PhysicalistsSynthese 153 (2): 261-296. 2006.Samuel Alexander was one of the foremost philosophical figures of his day and has been argued by John Passmore to be one of ‘fathers’ of Australian philosophy as well as a novel kind of physicalist. Yet Alexander is now relatively neglected, his role in the genesis of Australian philosophy if far from widely accepted and the standard interpretation takes him to be an anti-physicalist. In this paper, I carefully examine these issues and show that Alexander has been badly, although understandably,…Read more
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126Understanding the 'making-up' relations, to put things neutrally, posited in mechanistic explanations the sciences is finally an explicit topic of debate amongst philosophers of science. In particular, there is now lively debate over the nature of the so-called 'realization' relations between properties posited in such explanations. Despite criticism (Gillett, Analysis 62: 316-323, 2002a), the most common approach continues to be that of applying machinery developed in the philosophy of mind to …Read more
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71The hidden battles over emergenceIn Philip Clayton (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 801--819. 2006.By Carl Gillett, Illinois Wesleyan University. Ontological reductionism has long dominated the sciences and intellectual life more broadly. It holds that a ‘final theory’ in physics would, in principle, suffice to explain all natural phenomena and that, ultimately, the entities of such a theory, like quarks with their properties of spin, charm and charge, are all that actually exists. Recently, however, a mounting challenge to this hegemonic reductionism has been focused around ‘emergent’ entit…Read more
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106Physicalism and its Discontents (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2001.Physicalism, a topic that has been central to modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics, is the philosophical view that everything in the space-time world is ultimately physical. The physicalist will claim that all facts about the mind and the mental are physical facts and deny the existence of mental events and state insofar as these are thought of as independent of physical things, events and states. This collection of essays, first published in 2001, offers a series of perspectives on this im…Read more
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155Constitution, and Multiple Constitution, in the Sciences: Using the Neuron to Construct a Starting Framework (review)Minds and Machines 23 (3): 309-337. 2013.Inter-level mechanistic explanations in the sciences have long been a focus of philosophical interest, but attention has recently turned to the compositional character of these explanations which work by explaining higher level entities, whether processes, individuals or properties, using the lower level entities they take to compose them. However, we still have no theoretical account of the constitution or parthood relations between individuals deployed in such explanations, nor any accounts of…Read more
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72Strong emergence as a defense of non-reductive physicalism: A physicalist metaphysics for 'downward' determinationPrincipia 6 (1): 89-120. 2002.Iaegwon Kim, and others, have recently posed a powerful challen,ge to both emergentism cmd ncm-reductIve physicalism lyy providing arguments that these positums are cornmitted to an untenabie combmation of both `upwarcit and 'clouniwardi determmation. In secuon 1, I illuminate how the nature of the realiza:0n relatzon underlies such sicepucal arguments However, tn secuon 2, I suggest that such conclusicrns involve a confusion between the implications of physicahsm and those of a related thesis t…Read more
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98Multiply realizing scientific properties and their instancesPhilosophical Psychology 24 (6): 727-738. 2011.Thomas Polger and Lawrence Shapiro (or P&S) have recently (2008) criticized ?causal-mechanist? views of realization that dominate research in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics of science. P&S offer the internal criticism that any account of realization focusing upon property instances, as views of causal-mechanist realization routinely do, must lead to incoherence about multiple realization. P&S's argument highlights important issues about property instances that have recently been neglecte…Read more
DeKalb, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Psychology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Neuroscience |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |