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27Reactivity in the human sciencesEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (1): 1-24. 2024.The reactions that science triggers on the people it studies, describes, or theorises about, can affect the science itself and its claims to knowledge. This phenomenon, which we call reactivity, has been discussed in many different areas of the social sciences and the philosophy of science, falling under different rubrics such as the Hawthorne effect, self-fulfilling prophecies, the looping effects of human kinds, the performativity of models, observer effects, experimenter effects and experimen…Read more
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18What should scientists do about (harmful) interactive effects?European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (4): 1-16. 2022.The phenomenon of interactive human kinds, namely kinds of people that undergo change in reaction to being studied or theorised about, matters not only for the reliability of scientific claims, but also for its wider, sometimes harmful effects at the group or societal level, such as contributing to negative stigmas or reinforcing existing inequalities. This paper focuses on the latter aspect of interactivity and argues that scientists studying interactive human kinds are responsible for foreseei…Read more
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4Eyeing up life’s social instinctsPhilosophical Psychology 35 (8): 1264-1266. 2022.”But the individual body, so familiar to us on our planet, did not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal gen...
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3European public advice on nanobiotechnology—four convergence seminarsNanoEthics 3 (1): 43-59. 2009.In order to explore public views on nanobiotechnology (NBT), convergence seminars were held in four places in Europe; namely in Visby (Sweden), Sheffield (UK), Lublin (Poland), and Porto (Portugal). A convergence seminar is a new form of public participatory activity that can be used to deal systematically with the uncertainty associated for instance with the development of an emerging technology like nanobiotechnology. In its first phase, the participants are divided into three “scenario groups…Read more
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10Alzheimer's disease and relationships of valueThink 20 (57): 39-51. 2021.In this article, I consider my relationship with my father who developed Alzheimer's disease and criticize dominant models of social interactions and relationships. I argue that the point of a relationship is not what we exchange or achieve within it. The point is not even that we depend on others for our vital needs. The point is simply that a relationship is valuable in and of itself.
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10The Epistemology and Morality of Human KindsRoutledge. 2020.Natural kinds is a widely used and pivotal concept in philosophy – the idea being that the classifications and taxonomies employed by science correspond to the real kinds in nature. Natural kinds are often opposed to the idea of kinds in the human and social sciences, which are typically seen as social constructions, characterised by changing norms and resisting scientific reduction. Yet human beings are also a subject of scientific study.Does this mean humans fall into corresponding kinds of th…Read more
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149Essential Properties are Super-Explanatory: Taming Metaphysical ModalityJournal of the American Philosophical Association (3): 1-19. 2020.This paper aims to build a bridge between two areas of philosophical research, the structure of kinds and metaphysical modality. Our central thesis is that kinds typically involve super-explanatory properties, and that these properties are therefore metaphysically essential to natural kinds. Philosophers of science who work on kinds tend to emphasize their complexity, and are generally resistant to any suggestion that they have “essences”. The complexities are real enough, but they should not be…Read more
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100Scientific realism with historical essences: the case of speciesSynthese 198 (Suppl 12): 3041-3057. 2018.Natural kinds, real kinds, or, following J.S Mill simply, Kinds, are thought to be an important asset for scientific realists in the non-fundamental (or “special”) sciences. Essential natures are less in vogue. I show that the realist would do well to couple her Kinds with essential natures in order to strengthen their epistemic and ontological credentials. I argue that these essential natures need not however be intrinsic to the Kind’s members; they may be historical. I concentrate on assessing…Read more
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11The Social Motivation Hypothesis for Prosocial BehaviorPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (5): 563-587. 2014.Existing economic models of prosociality have been rather silent in terms of proximate psychological mechanisms. We nevertheless identify the psychologically most informed accounts and offer a critical discussion of their hypotheses for the proximate psychological explanations. Based on convergent evidence from several fields of research, we argue that there nevertheless is a more plausible alternative proximate account available: the social motivation hypothesis. The hypothesis represents a mor…Read more
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5Review of Thomas W. Polger and Lawrence A. Shapiro: The Multiple Realization Book (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Book Reviews. 2017.
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99Gender as a historical kind: a tale of two genders?Biology and Philosophy 33 (3-4): 21. 2018.Is there anything that members of each binary category of gender have in common? Even many non-essentialists find the lack of unity within a gender worrying as it undermines the basis for a common political agenda for women. One promising proposal for achieving unity is by means of a shared historical lineage of cultural reproduction with past binary models of gender. I demonstrate how such an account is likely to take on board different binary and also non-binary systems of gender. This implies…Read more
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22On Blaming and Punishing PsychopathsCriminal Law and Philosophy 11 (1): 127-142. 2017.Current legal practice holds that a diagnosis of psychopathy does not remove criminal responsibility. In contrast, many philosophers and legal experts are increasingly persuaded by evidence from experimental psychology and neuroscience indicating moral and cognitive deficits in psychopaths and have argued that they should be excused from moral responsibility. However, having opposite views concerning psychopaths’ moral responsibility, on the one hand, and criminal responsibility, on the other, s…Read more
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84Cultural syndromes: Socially learned but realFilosofia Unisinos 17 (2). 2016.While some of mental disorders due to emotional distress occur cross-culturally, others seem to be much more bound to particular cultures. In this paper, I propose that many of these “cultural syndromes” are culturally sanctioned responses to overwhelming negative emotions. I show how tools from cultural evolution theory can be employed for understanding how the syndromes are relatively confined to and retained within particular cultures. Finally, I argue that such an account allows for some cul…Read more
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11Scientific Enquiry and Natural Kinds: From Planets to Mallards (review)International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 28 (3): 343-346. 2014.
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6But is it unique to nanotechnology?Science and Engineering Ethics 14 (3): 391-403. 2008.Attempts have been made to establish nanoethics as a new sub-discipline of applied ethics. The nature of this sub-discipline is discussed and some issues that should be subsumed under nanoethics are proposed. A distinction is made between those issue that may ensue once nanotechnology applications become available and procedural issues that should be integrated into the decision structure of the development. A second distinction relates to the central value of the ethical issue. The conditions f…Read more
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22The Special Science Dilemma and How Culture Solves ItAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3): 1-18. 2015.I argue that there is a tension between the claim that at least some kinds in the special sciences are multiply realized and the claim that the reason why kinds are prized by science is that they enter into a variety of different empirical generalizations. Nevertheless, I show that this tension ceases in the case of ‘cultural homologues’—such as specific ideologies, religions, and folk wisdom. I argue that the instances of such special science kinds do have several projectable properties in comm…Read more
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119Interdisciplinary Workshop in the Philosophy of Medicine: Minds and Bodies in MedicineJournal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 19 (3): 564-571. 2013.
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11Why we do things together: The social motivation for joint actionPhilosophical Psychology 26 (4): 588-603. 2013.Joint action is a growing field of research, spanning across the cognitive, behavioral, and brain sciences as well as receiving considerable attention amongst philosophers. I argue that there has been a significant oversight within this field concerning the possibility that many joint actions are driven, at least in part, by agents' social motivations rather than merely by their shared intentions. Social motivations are not directly related to the (joint) target goal of the action. Instead, when…Read more
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18Psychiatric Disorders qua Natural Kinds: The Case of the “Apathetic Children”Biological Theory 7 (2): 144-152. 2013.In this article I examine some of the issues involved in taking psychiatric disorders as natural kinds. I begin by introducing a permissive model of natural kind-hood that at least prima facie seems to allow psychiatric disorders to be natural kinds. The model, however, hinges on there in principle being some grounding that is shared by all members of a kind, which explain all or most of the additional shared projectible properties. This leads us to the following question: what grounding do psyc…Read more
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |