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6EmotionsIn William Bechtel & George Graham (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science, Blackwell. 2017.Emotions are an extremely salient and important aspect of human mental life. However, until recently they have not attracted much attention in cognitive science. Despite this neglect by cognitive scientists, other investigators have been actively studying emotions and developing theoretical perspectives on them. These theoretical perspectives raise a number of important questions that cognitive scientists will have to address as they bring emotions into their purview: (1) Is it the physiological…Read more
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1EmotionsIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: Brute Feelings or Rational Judgments? Evolutionary Theories of Emotion The Universality of Emotion 12.4 The Emotions in Cognitive Science Is Emotion a Natural Kind? Conclusion.
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137 The Fearless Vampire Conservator: Philip Kitcher, Genetic Determinism, and the Informational GeneIn Eva M. Neumann-Held, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, Barbara Herrnstein Smith & E. Roy Weintraub (eds.), Genes in Development: Re-reading the Molecular Paradigm, Duke University Press. pp. 175-198. 2006.
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308Emotions as natural and normative kindsPhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 901-911. 2004.In earlier work I have claimed that emotion and some emotions are not `natural kinds'. Here I clarify what I mean by `natural kind', suggest a new and more accurate term, and discuss the objection that emotion and emotions are not descriptive categories at all, but fundamentally normative categories.
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52Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information: Millikan, Ruth Garrett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. iv + 240, £25.00 (hardback)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1): 205-208. 2020.Volume 98, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 205-208.
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30Modularity, and the Psychoevolutionary Theory of EmotionBiology and Philosophy 5 (2): 175. 1990.It is unreasonable to assume that our pre-scientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evoluations may c…Read more
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246Discussion: Three Ways to Misunderstand Developmental Systems TheoryBiology and Philosophy 20 (2-3): 417-425. 2005.Developmental systems theory (DST) is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology (EDB). The contributions to this literatu…Read more
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A developmental systems account of human natureIn Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (eds.), Why We Disagree About Human Nature, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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1Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of BiologyThe University of Chicago Press. 1999.Is the history of life a series of accidents or a drama scripted by selfish genes? Is there an “essential” human nature, determined at birth or in a distant evolutionary past? What should we conserve—species, ecosystems, or something else? Informed answers to questions like these, critical to our understanding of ourselves and the world around us, require both a knowledge of biology and a philosophical framework within which to make sense of its findings. In this accessible introduction to philo…Read more
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1601Biological sexes (male, female, hermaphrodite) are defined by different gametic strategies for reproduction. Sexes are regions of phenotypic space which implement those gametic reproductive strategies. Individual organisms pass in and out of these regions – sexes - one or more times during their lives. Importantly, sexes are life-history stages rather than applying to organisms over their entire lifespan. This fact has been obscured by concentrating on humans, and ignoring species which regularl…Read more
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373Are biological traits explained by their 'selected effect' functions?Australasian Philosophical Review. forthcoming.The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Pr…Read more
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89Folk, functional and neurochemical aspects of moodPhilosophical Psychology 2 (1): 17-32. 1989.It has been suggested that moods are higher order-dispositions. This proposal is considered, and various shortcomings uncovered. The notion of a higher-order disposition is replaced by the more general notion of a higher-order functional state. An account is given in which moods are higher-order functional states, and the overall system of moods is a higher-order functional description of the mind. This proposal is defended in two ways. First, it is shown to capture some central features of our …Read more
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94The degeneration of the cognitive theory of emotionsPhilosophical Psychology 2 (3): 297-313. 1989.The type of cognitive theory of emotion traditionally espoused by philosophers of mind makes two central claims. First, that the occurrence of propositional attitudes is essential to the occurrence of emotions. Second, that the identity of a particular emotional state depends upon the propositional attitudes that it involves. In this paper I try to show that there is little hope of developing a theory of emotion which makes these claims true. I examine the underlying defects of the programme, an…Read more
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Towards a 'Machiavellian' theory of emotional appraisalIn Dylan Evans & Pierre Cruse (eds.), Emotion, Evolution and Rationality, Oxford University Press. 2004.
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401The idea of mismatch in evolutionary medicineBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.Mismatch is a prominent concept in evolutionary medicine and a number of philosophers have published analyses of this concept. The word ‘mismatch’ has been used in a diversity of ways across a range of sciences, leading these authors to regard it as a vague concept in need of philosophical clarification. Here, in contrast, we concentrate on the use of mismatch in modelling and experimentation in evolutionary medicine. This reveals a rigorous theory of mismatch within which the term ‘mismatch’ is…Read more
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165Measuring Causal SpecificityPhilosophy of Science 82 (4): 529-555. 2015.Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well-defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate the tractability and interest of our proposed mea…Read more
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69Multispecies individualsHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (2): 33. 2018.We assess the arguments for recognising functionally integrated multispecies consortia as genuine biological individuals, including cases of so-called ‘holobionts’. We provide two examples in which the same core biochemical processes that sustain life are distributed across a consortium of individuals of different species. Although the same chemistry features in both examples, proponents of the holobiont as unit of evolution would recognize one of the two cases as a multispecies individual whils…Read more
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33Comparing Causes - an Information-Theoretic Approach to Specificity, Proportionality and StabilityProceedings of the 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. 2017.The interventionist account of causation offers a criterion to distinguish causes from non-causes. It also aims at defining various desirable properties of causal relationships, such as specificity, proportionality and stability. Here we apply an information-theoretic approach to these properties. We show that the interventionist criterion of causation is formally equivalent to non-zero specificity, and that there are natural, information-theoretic ways to explicate the distinction between poten…Read more
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7The Case for Basic Biological ResearchTrends in Molecular Medicine 25 (2). 2019.The majority of biomedical and biological research relies on a few molecular biology techniques. Here we show that eight key molecular biology techniques would not exist without basic biological research.We also find that the scientific reward system does not sufficiently value basic biological research into molecular mechanisms.
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451Genetic information: A metaphor in search of a theoryPhilosophy of Science 68 (3): 394-412. 2001.John Maynard Smith has defended against philosophical criticism the view that developmental biology is the study of the expression of information encoded in the genes by natural selection. However, like other naturalistic concepts of information, this ‘teleosemantic’ information applies to many non-genetic factors in development. Maynard Smith also fails to show that developmental biology is concerned with teleosemantic information. Some other ways to support Maynard Smith’s conclusion are consi…Read more
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68Diseases are Not Adaptations and Neither are Their CausesBiological Theory 15 (3): 136-142. 2020.In a recent article in this journal, Zachary Ardern criticizes our view that the most promising candidate for a naturalized criterion of disease is the "selected effects" account of biological function and dysfunction. Here we reply to Ardern’s criticisms and, more generally, clarify the relationship between adaptation and dysfunction in the evolution of health and disease.
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20Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information: Millikan, Ruth Garrett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. iv + 240, £25.00 (hardback) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1): 205-208. 2020.Volume 98, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 205-208.
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41Signals That Make a DifferenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (1): 233-258. 2020.Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks—from the way monkeys in a troop communicate to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this article, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his formal measure of information. Although Sk…Read more
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110Biological Criteria of Disease: Four Ways of Going WrongJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 1 (4). 2017.We defend a view of the distinction between the normal and the pathological according to which that distinction has an objective, biological component. We accept that there is a normative component to the concept of disease, especially as applied to human beings. Nevertheless, an organism cannot be in a pathological state unless something has gone wrong for that organism from a purely biological point of view. Biology, we argue, recognises two sources of biological normativity, which jointly gen…Read more
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147Toward a "machiavellian" theory of emotional appraisalIn Dylan Evans & Pierre Cruse (eds.), Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, Oxford University Press. 2002.The aim of appraisal theory in the psychology of emotion is to identify the features of the emotion-eliciting situation that lead to the production of one emotion rather than another2. A model of emotional appraisal takes the form of a set of dimensions against which potentially emotion-eliciting situations are assessed. The dimensions of the emotion hyperspace might include, for example, whether the eliciting situation fulfills or frustrates the subject’s goals or whether an actor in the elicit…Read more
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200Don’t Give Up on Basic EmotionsEmotion Review 3 (4): 444-454. 2011.We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for the…Read more
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66Causal reasoning about genetics: synthesis and future directionsBehavior Genetics 2 (49): 221-234. 2019.When explaining the causes of human behavior, genes are often given a special status. They are thought to relate to an intrinsic human 'essence', and essentialist biases have been shown to skew the way in which causation is assessed. Causal reasoning in general is subject to other pre-existing biases, including beliefs about normativity and morality. In this synthesis we show how factors which influence causal reasoning can be mapped to a framework of genetic essentialism, which reveals both the…Read more
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24Discussion: Three ways to misunderstand developmental systems theoryBiology and Philosophy 20 (2-3): 417-425. 2005.Developmental systems theory is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology. The contributions to this literature by evolut…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Medicine |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |