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Measuring and Conceptualizing Sex
Get PDFScientists measure sex in many ways. Scholars disagree about how to characterize these measurements in relation to each other and to the concept of sex. We draw from the philosophy of measurement to propose a taxonomy of metrological commitments that may undergird these arguments. We anticipate and endorse a future for sex research that explicitly acknowledges the iterative, reciprocal relationship between concepts and measurements and the possibility for different sex concepts being retained, precisified, or eliminated from different measurement contexts. The possibility of such change motivates further attention and intervention by philosophers of science and scientists alike
Against Spacetime Substance: A Relational Interpretation of General Relativity
Get PDFGeneral relativity is often interpreted as describing a four-dimensional spacetime ``substance'' whose metric curvature constitutes the gravitational field. This substantivalist reading underlies familiar conceptual pictures: spacetime as a container for matter, curvature as deformation of a medium, gravitational waves as ripples propagating through a fabric, and the cosmological constant as energy stored in empty space. Yet these interpretations conflict with the mathematical structure of the theory itself. Diffeomorphism invariance, background independence, the absence of local gravitational energy, the nature of singularities, the behavior of radiation in vacuum, the alignment of inertial and gravitational mass, the origin of temporal asymmetry, and the persistent failure to quantize the metric all suggest a different ontology. In this paper I articulate a coherent relational interpretation of general relativity. On this view, the manifold is a representational scaffold, the metric encodes relational structure rather than properties of a substance, curvature expresses relational dynamics, and the Einstein equation is a global consistency condition on that structure. I argue that many of general relativity's celebrated ``paradoxes'' arise only under a substantivalist ontology, and that a relational reading dissolves them without altering the mathematics. The resulting framework presents spacetime not as a thing but as an evolving order of relations---a perspective that clarifies the conceptual foundations of gravitation and opens a path toward a relational understanding of quantum gravity
SCIENCE AS COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION: A CLOSED-LOOP FRAMEWORK FOR THE DYNAMICS OF KNOWLEDGE
Get PDFThis paper proposes that science functions as a form of collective perception, extending the closed-loop processes that govern individual cognition to the scale of research communities. Perception and scientific inquiry share the same architecture: both generate predictions, act upon the environment, and correct error until provisional convergence is achieved. Objectivity, in this view, is operational, defined by the reliability of reproducible coherence across many partially independent perceivers rather than by direct access to a mind-independent reality. Grounded in neuroscience and control theory, the framework identifies brain–world (BW) and brain–brain (BB) loops as basic architectures of perception: BW loops are embodied and analog, BB loops symbolic and linguistic. Scaling upward, these loops become the experimental and communicative networks of science. Within this structure, idealization is understood as an internal operation that simplifies feedback to isolate causal relations before re-coupling to observation. The model explains replication crises, paradigm shifts, and interdisciplinary friction as natural outcomes of feedback mismatches within communal loops. It also yields empirical predictions linking community size, communication latency, and feedback delay to consensus formation and stability. Philosophically, the framework aligns with social epistemology, scientific pluralism, and structural realism, describing progress as the dynamic stabilization of relational structures rather than the accumulation of absolute truths. By situating science within the broader family of biological perception, the paper offers a unified, testable account of objectivity and the evolving dynamics of knowledge
From Autopoiesis to Symbiotic Entanglement: Rethinking Enactivism Through Metabolism and Microbes
Get PDFEnactivism has recently faced criticism for either leaning too heavily on philosophical speculation without clear scientific grounding, or relying on quite old empirical work in cognitive science, especially concerning sensorimotor actions. While one can push back against such charges, in this paper we take a different approach. We will use metabolic and microbiome research as a case study to help make this problem vivid, and to outline a path forward. First, we contend that a closer look at metabolism and microbiota-host interactions places pressure upon some of the core ‘autopoietic’ concepts of enactivism, including self-production, autonomy, and operational closure. This research instead appears to emphasise heteronomy and symbiosis in cognitive, developmental, and evolutionary processes, posing in effect an ontological challenge. Second, it also raises some questions about enactivism’s traditional avoidance of reductionist explanations, suggesting that there is an epistemic need for a philosophy of science that clarifies how to integrate more reductive biological programs within holistic enactivist frameworks. To meet these challenges, we argue that enactivism needs to moderate its commitments to autopoietic theory
Performative Power in Science
Get PDFPerformativity is the capacity of scientific representations (such as models, theories, predictions, or classifications) to alter the phenomena they are supposed to represent. Because one and the same representation may alter its target a lot, a little, or not at all, I argue that we should conceptualize performativity as a function of a representation and its performative power, which depends on its reach, acceptance, and its relevance to people. Using this framework, I then argue for a re-evaluation of performativity. Because performative effects can impair scientists' ability to model, classify, explain, or predict (e.g. by steering outcomes away from those predicted) and they raise concerns about the legitimacy of science influencing the social world, performativity is often viewed as a threat to science. In contrast, I argue that we shouldn't be worried about performativity as such, but rather, about concentrated performative power, that is, that the representations issued by individual scientists, or groups of scientists with uniform views, gain a power that is not in line with their epistemic credentials. To eradicate such power concentrations and to secure science's proper role in a democratic society, we may sometimes hope for more, rather than fewer, performative effects
Kinematical Equivalence and Cosmic Conspiracies
Get PDFDiscussions of theoretical equivalence typically only concern a theory's dynamically possible models. Recently, however, March (2024) has shown that a theory's kinematically possible models are also relevant to questions of theoretical equivalence. We apply March's notion of kinematic equivalence to the difference between reduced and sophisticated theories introduced by Dewar (2019). Although Dewar claims that these are equivalent, Jacobs (2024) has argued that only sophisticated theories can explain what are otherwise 'cosmic conspiracies'. We show that this is a consequence of reduced and sophisticated theories' kinematical inequivalence. Furthermore, we use Caulton's (2024) 'downwards Hume's dictum' to show that kinematically inequivalent are also ontologically inequivalent
"the logical sequence of his Principles": Understanding Du Châtelet on Newton's law of gravitation in the Principia
Get PDFÉmilie Du Châtelet (1706-1749) is perhaps equally well-known for her magnum opus, the Institutions de Physique of 1740, and for her later French translation of and commentary to Newton's Principia (first published posthumously in 1756, with the corrected edition in 1759). One of the few topics which Du Châtelet addresses in detail in both the Institutions de Physique (chapter 15) and the commentary to her translation is Newton's arguments for his law of gravitation in the Principia. To date, however, no systematic comparison of the two has been undertaken (and very little has been said on either of them separately). I reconstruct and compare these two accounts. This offers a new perspective on Du Châtelet's developing thinking on the justification of Newton's law of gravitation within the Newtonian system
Not the Measurement Problem's Problem: Black Hole Information Loss with Schrödinger's Cat
Get PDFRecently, several philosophers and physicists have increasingly noticed the hegemony of unitarity in the black hole information loss discourse and are challenging its legitimacy in the face of the measurement problem. They proclaim that embracing non-unitarity solves two paradoxes for the price of one. Though I share their distaste over the philosophical bias, I disagree with their strategy of still privileging certain interpretations of quantum theory. I argue that information-restoring solutions can be interpretation-neutral because the manifestation of non-unitarity in Hawking's original derivation is unrelated to what's found in collapse theories or generalized stochastic approaches, thereby decoupling the two puzzles
The Indispensability of Relational, Adapted, and Derived Proper Functions
Get PDFSince the early debates on teleosemantics, there have been people objecting that teleosemantics cannot account for evolutionarily novel contents such as “democracy” (e.g., Peacocke 1992). Most recently, this objection was brought up by Garson (2019) and in a more moderate form by Garson & Papineau (2019). The underlying criticism is that the traditional selected effects theory of functions on which teleosemantics is built is unable to ascribe new functions to the products of ontogenetic processes and thus unable to ascribe functions to new traits that appear during the lifetime of an individual organism.
I will argue that this underlying thought rests on rather common misunderstandings of Millikan’s theory of proper functions, especially her notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions (Millikan 1984: Ch. 2). The notions of relational, adapted, and derived proper functions not only help us solve the problem of novel contents and can ascribe functions to the products of ontogenetic selection mechanisms but are indispensable parts of every selected effects theory
Formal Consistency of the Principal Principle Revisited
Get PDFWe rigorously describe the relation in which a credence function should stand to a set of chance functions in order for these to be compatible in the way mandated by the Principal Principle. This resolves an apparent contradiction in the literature, by means of providing a formal way of combining credences with modest chance functions so that the latter indeed serve as guides for the former.
Along the way we note some problematic consequences of taking admissibility to imply requirements involving probabilistic independence. We also argue, contra (Hawthorne et al., 2017), that the Principal Principle does not imply the Principal of Indifference