Milagros Maribel Barroso Rojo

The use of dispositions has been put into question many times in the philosophical literature, especially with regards to how dispositional attributions can be justified. Yet, dispositions are an important part not only of our everyday talk but also of our scientific practices. In this paper, we develop an argument that infers the epistemic justification of dispositional talk from itsindispensability for carrying out basic epistemological projects, and we apply it to the use of dispositions in evolutionary biology. For doing this, we first advocate for a function-based strategy for the epistemic justification of dispositional attributions. We next review the functional role of some key dispositional notions in evolutionary biology, such as fitness and evolvability. Then, we show that alternative non-dispositional substitutes of these dispositions fail to fulfill their roles to the same degree. We conclude that the use of dispositions is justified in evolutionary biology.

I argue that there are different orders of mechanisms with different constitutive relevance and individuation conditions. In common first-order mechanistic explanations, constitutive relevance norms are captured by the matched-interlevel-experiments condition (Craver et al. (2021) Synthese 199:8807–8828). Regarding individuation, we say that any two mechanisms are of the same type when they have the same concrete components performing the same activities in the same arrangement. By contrast, in higher-order mechanistic explanations, we formulate the decompositions in terms of generalized basic components (GBCs). These GBCs (e.g., logic gates) possess causal properties that are common to a set of physical systems. Mechanistic explanations formulated in terms of GBCs embody the epistemic value of horizontal integration, which aims to explain as many phenomena as possible with a minimal amount of abstract components (Wajnerman Paz (2017a) Philos Psychol 30:213–234). Two higher-order mechanisms are of the same type when they share all the same GBCs, and they are organized as performing the same activities with the same interactions. I use this notion of mechanistic order to enhance the mechanistic account of computation (MAC) and provide an account of the epistemic norms of computational explanation and the nature of medium-independent functional properties and mechanisms. Finally, I use these new conceptual tools to address four criticisms of the MAC.