Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan Recent documents in Stuart Glennan en-us Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:25:07 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/16 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/16 Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:20:02 PST While much of the recent literature on mechanisms has emphasized the superiority of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation over laws and nomological explanation, paradigmatic mechanisms--e.g., clocks or synapses - actually exhibit a great deal of stability in their behavior. And while mechanisms of this kind are certainly of great importance, there are many events that do not occur as a consequence of the operation of stable mechanisms. Events of natural and human history are often the consequence of causal processes that are ephemeral and capricious. In this paper I shall argue that, notwithstanding their ephemeral nature, these processes deserve to be called mechanisms. Ephemeral mechanisms share important characteristics with their more stable cousins, and these shared characteristics will help us to understand connections between scientific and historical explanation. Stuart Glennan http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/15 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/15 Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:29:11 PDT Most philosophical accounts of causation take causal relations to obtain between individuals and events in virtue of nomological relations between properties of these individuals and events. Such views fail to take into account the consequences of the fact that in general the properties of individuals and events will depend upon mechanisms that realize those properties. In this paper I attempt to rectify this failure, and in so doing to provide an account of the causal relevance of higher-level properties. I do this by critiquing one prominent model of higher-level properties - Kim's functional model of reduction - and contrasting it with a mechanistic approach to higher-level properties and causation. Note: Link is to a preprint of the article which has been accepted for publication. Stuart Glennan http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/14 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/14 Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:01:51 PDT Arguments about the relationship between science and religion often proceed by identifying a set of essential characteristics of scientific and religious worldviews and arguing on the basis of these characteristics for claims about a relationship of conflict or compatibility between them. Such a strategy is doomed to failure because science, to some extent, and religion, to a much larger extent, are cultural phenomena that are too diverse in their expressions to be characterized in terms of a unified worldview. In this paper I follow a different strategy. Having offered a loose characterization of the nature of science, I pose five questions about specific areas where religious and scientific worldviews may conflict - questions about the nature of faith, the belief in a God or Gods, the authority of sacred texts, the relationship between scientific and religious conceptions of the mind/soul, and the relationship between scientific and religious understandings of moral behavior. My review of these questions will show that they cannot be answered unequivocally because there is no agreement amongst religious believers as to the meaning of important religious concepts. Thus, whether scientific and religious worldviews conflict depends essentially upon whose science and whose religion one is considering. In closing, I consider the implications of this conundrum for science education. Stuart Glennan http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/13 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/13 Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:04:17 PDT In this paper I offer an analysis of causation based upon a theory of mechanisms - complex systems whose "internal" parts interact to produce a system's "external" behavior. I argue that all but the fundamental laws of physics can be explained by reference to mechanisms. Mechanisms provide an epistemologically unproblematic way to explain the necessity which is often taken to distinguish laws from other generalizations. This account of necessity leads to a theory of causation according to which events are causally related when there is a mechanism that connects them. I present reasons why the lack of an account of fundamental physical causation does not undermine the mechanical account. Stuart Glennan http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/12 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/12 Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:03:54 PDT Recent papers by a number of philosophers have been concerned with the question of whether natural selection is a causal process, and if it is, whether the causes of selection are properties of individuals or properties of populations. I shall argue that much confusion in this debate arises because of a failure to distinguish between causal productivity and causal relevance. Causal productivity is a relation that holds between events connected via continuous causal processes, while causal relevance is a relationship that can hold between a variety of different kinds of facts and the events that counterfactually depend upon them. I shall argue that the productive character of natural selection derives from the aggregation of individual processes in which organisms live, reproduce and die. At the same time, a causal explanation of the distribution of traits will necessarily appeal both to causally relevant properties of individuals and to causally relevant properties that exist only at the level of the population. Stuart Glennan http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/11 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/11 Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:31:03 PST A central goal of elementary and secondary science education is to go beyond the facts and theories associated with particular sciences and to give students an understanding of the nature of science (NOS) in general. Educational researchers have developed a variety of test instruments to assess student comprehension of NOS, but a lack of consensus among educators about how to characterize NOS raises questions about the validity of these instruments. Brian Alters (Professor of Science Education, McGill University) has sought to clarify the various possible positions on the nature of science by conducting a survey of philosophers of science. In this paper, we discuss the results of Alters' efforts, arguing that the techniques of data collection and statistical analysis used by Alters give a confused and misleading picture of philosophical positions on the nature of science. We also discuss ways in which we think that research in the philosophy of science might be more fruitfully brought to bear on the teaching of NOS. Note: Link is to the article on the publisher's web site, which is available in full text for a fee. Judy T. Eflin http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/10 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/10 Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:26:36 PST This book chapter contains an overview of recent work on mechanisms -- especially the work of myself, Bechtel, Craver, Darden and Machamer. The essay discusses the competing analyses of the concept of mechanism and applications of this work to other areas of research in the philosophy of science, including laws, causation, reduction, explanation, and discovery. Note: Link is to the catalog entry in WorldCat's catalog. Please see your local librarian for assistance in borrowing this item via interlibrary loan. Stuart Glennan http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/9 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/9 Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:23:55 PST This encyclopedia article provides an overview of developments in the theory of explanation from Hempel to the present. Note: Link is to the catalog entry in Butler University's catalog. Users not affiliated with Butler University should check WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org) for this item in local libraries. Stuart Glennan http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/8 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/8 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:00:56 PST Elements of Deductive Inference is a introductory textbook in symbolic logic. Joe and I wrote this book because we could not find a logic text that appropriately balanced the need for a treatment of logic that is philosophically and formally sophisticated with a sensitivity to the fact that many of the students who take symbolic logic will enter their first course with only modest mathematical background and aptitude. The text covers statement logic and predicate logic with identity and functions. It allows the instructor a choice between natural deduction and truth-tree proof systems. It discusses basic metatheoretical issues, though it omits real proofs. Finally, it provides short introductions to extensions of predicate logic -- including modal logic, higher order logic, and free logic. For more information, visit the Elements of Deductive Inference web site (http://blue.butler.edu/~sglennan/InferenceEngine.html). Note: Link is to the catalog entry in WorldCat's catalog. Please see your local librarian for assistance in borrowing this item via interlibrary loan. Joseph Bessie http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/7 http://works.bepress.com/stuart_glennan/7 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:52:18 PST In this paper I discuss Searle's claim that the computational properties of a system could never cause a system to be conscious. In the first section of the paper I argue that Searle is correct that, even if a system both behaves in a way that is characteristic of conscious agents (like ourselves) and has a computational structure similar to those agents , one cannot be certain that that system is conscious. On the other hand, I suggest that Searle's intuition that it is "empirically absurd" that such a system could be conscious is unfounded. In the second section I show that Searle's attempt to show that a system's computational states could not possibly cause it to be conscious is based upon an erroneous distinction between computational and physical properties. On the basis of these two arguments, I conclude that, supposing that the behavior of conscious agents can be explained in terms of their computational properties, we have good reason to suppose that a system having computational properties similar to such agents is also conscious. Note: Link is to the article in a subscription database available to users affiliated with Butler University. Appropriate login information will be required for access. Users not affiliated with Butler University should contact their local librarian for assistance in locating a copy of this article. Stuart S. Glennan