Information

The Issues

There is a broad and exciting range of issues that arise in the metaphysics of science, including the following illustrative, and by no means exhaustive, list (where many issues recur in various areas).

General Philosophy of Science

Debates over reduction, emergence, levels, multiple or univocal realization, identity theories, higher level causation, and the nature of so-called ‘special sciences’; questions over the nature of scientific properties, individuals and processes and their ‘essences’ or individuation; the nature of mechanistic and functional explanation; the character of laws generally and specifically, for example ceteris paribus laws, special science laws etc.; the character of compositional relations between entities posited in the sciences, for example the realization of properties, constitution of individuals, and implementation of processes; evidence for physicalism vs dualism, vitalism and other alternatives; the formulation of physicalism and the definition of the ‘physical’.

Philosophy of Biology

The levels of selection; biological causation; concepts of the gene and genetic reductionism; the nature of biological entities; natural kinds in biology; biological functions; modeling techniques across the biological sciences; species and systematics; the homology concept; evo-devo and its implications; pluralism and realism.

Philosophy of Psychology

The nature of sensation, color, perception, emotion, language, cognition, mental causation, multiple or univocal realization, identity theories and materialism/physicalism; the problem of intentionality; consciousness and its place in nature; functionalism and functional explanation; the extended mind; the embodied mind, psychological universalism; models of rationality; evolutionary psychology; the existence and nature of innate knowledge; the modularity hypotheses; the existence, nature, and structure of mental representations; free will; eliminativism, intentional realism, the ‘intentional stance’, and alternative views of the psychological.

Philosophy of Neuroscience

The nature and status of levels, mechanisms, (ceteris paribus) laws, realization and identity in the neurosciences; principles about, and localization of, function and individuation generally; the material correlates of consciousness; neuroscientific findings and free-will.

Philosophy of Social Science

The nature of ‘kinds’ generally, and whether there are ‘kinds’ in the social sciences and how they differ, if at all, from kinds in other areas; issues over specific ‘kinds’, for example is ‘race’ a kind and of what variety; methodological individualism; experimental economics and game theory; philosophy of culture.

Further Applications

Extending work on the above issues grounds or informs answers to central questions in ‘core’ areas of traditional philosophy. To take but two areas as examples, relevant questions include (where again many issues appear in both areas):

Philosophy of Mind: The mind-body problem (i.e. the mind-body relation); the ‘Problem of Mental Causation’; the various ‘problems of consciousness’, hard or soft; ‘individualism’ versus ‘anti-individualism’, ‘internalism’ versus ‘externalism’, and, more recently, debates over the ‘extended mind’; cognitive architecture; the nature of mental content and concepts; the character and status of nativism; reductive versus anti-reductionist views of the mental; eliminativism; the ‘intentional stance’ and its implications.

Metaphysics: Debates over the nature of persons and personal identity, including the relations of psychological systems and states, animals, bodies, brains etc.; the possibility and character of free-will; the nature of ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’, and ‘constitution’ or ‘composition’ generally, in naturalistic philosophy; the existence of ‘fundamental’ entities or ‘simples’; the character and status of ‘physicalism’ versus alternatives; the formulation of physicalism and the definition of the ‘physical’.