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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Vol 75, No 2British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4): 1385-1409. 2018.
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153Some recent discussions of mechanistic explanation have focused on control operations. But control is often associated with teleological or normative-sounding concepts like goals and set-points, prompting the question: Does an explanation that refers to parts or mechanisms “controlling” each other thereby fail to be mechanistic? In this paper I introduce and explain a distinction between what I call open-ended and closed-ended control operations. I then argue that explanations that enlist contro…Read more
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505The Mechanistic and Normative Structure of AgencyDissertation, University of California San Diego. 2019.I develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature of agents and agency that is compatible with recent developments in the metaphysics of science and that also does justice to the mechanistic and normative characteristics of agents and agency as they are understood in moral philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and economics. The framework I develop is internal perspectivalist. That is to say, it counts agents as real in a perspective-dependent way, but not in…Read more
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604Internal Perspectivalism: The Solution to Generality Problems About Proper Function and Natural NormsBiology and Philosophy 35 (33): 1-22. 2020.In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism, internal perspectivalism can provide a fully naturalistic, mind-independent grounding of proper function and natural norms. The attribution of perspec…Read more
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217Is it time for a Nietzschean genealogy of laws of nature?: Walter Ott, Lydia Patton : Laws of nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, x+264pp, $65 HB (review)Metascience 28 (2): 269-271. 2019.
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872Being Emergence vs. Pattern Emergence: Complexity, Control, and Goal-Directedness in Biological SystemsIn Sophie Gibb, Robin Findlay Hendry & Tom Lancaster (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Emergence, Routledge. pp. 134-144. 2018.Emergence is much discussed by both philosophers and scientists. But, as noted by Mitchell (2012), there is a significant gulf; philosophers and scientists talk past each other. We contend that this is because philosophers and scientists typically mean different things by emergence, leading us to distinguish being emergence and pattern emergence. While related to distinctions offered by others between, for example, strong/weak emergence or epistemic/ontological emergence (Clayton, 2004, pp. 9–11…Read more
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48Corrigendum to: Mechanistic Causation and Constraints: Perspectival Parts and Powers, Non-perspectival Modal PatternsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1): 357-357. 2021.The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, axy042
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170Mechanistic Causation and Constraints: Perspectival Parts and Powers, Non-perspectival Modal PatternsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4): 1385-1409. 2020.Any successful account of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation must satisfy at least five key desiderata. In this article, I lay out these five desiderata and explain why existing accounts of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation fail to satisfy them. I then present an alternative account that does satisfy the five desiderata. According to this alternative account, we must resort to a type of ontological entity that is new to metaphysics, but not to science: constraints. In this article, …Read more
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126Rethinking Causality in Biological and Neural Mechanisms: Constraints and ControlMinds and Machines 28 (2). 2018.Existing accounts of mechanistic causation are not suited for understanding causation in biological and neural mechanisms because they do not have the resources to capture the unique causal structure of control heterarchies. In this paper, we provide a new account on which the causal powers of mechanisms are grounded by time-dependent, variable constraints. Constraints can also serve as a key bridge concept between the mechanistic approach to explanation and underappreciated work in theoretical …Read more
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740Information-Theoretic Philosophy of MindIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information, Routledge. pp. 347-360. 2016.
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315Review of Biological Autonomy by Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio (review)Philosophy of Science 83 (3): 446-452. 2016.
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University of Toronto, St. George CampusDepartment of Philosophy
Institute for the History and Philosophy of SciencePost-doctoral Fellow
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Agency |