Multiple realization
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Recent papers in Multiple realization
Unity of science was once a very popular idea among both philosophers and scientists. But it has fallen out of fashion, largely because of its association with reductionism and the challenge from multiple realisation. Pluralism and the... more
“Realization” is a technical term that is used by metaphysicians, philosophers of mind, and philosophers of science to denote some dependence relation that is thought to obtain between higher-level properties and lower-level properties.... more
Special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics) describe various regularities holding at some high macroscopic level. One of the central questions concerning these macroscopic regularities is how they are related to the laws of... more
The ‘Mind-Upload’ hypothesis (MU), a radical version of the Brain- in-a-Vat thought experiment, asserts that a whole mind can safely be transferred from a brain to a digital device, after being exactly encoded into substrate independent... more
The main purpose of this monograph is to respond to the reiterated criticisms that some reductionist philosophers, especially Jaegwon Kim and David Papineau, have developed of the non-reductive physicalist explanation of the causal power... more
I discuss whether there are some lessons for philosophical inquiry over the nature of simulation to be learnt from the practical methodology of reengineering. I will argue that reengineering serves a similar purpose as simulations in... more
Alethic functionalism, as propounded by Michael Lynch, is the view that there are different ways to be true, but that these differences nevertheless contain enough unity to forestall outright pluralism. This view has many virtues. Yet,... more
Individuality is an important concept in biology, yet there are many non-equivalent criteria of individuality expressed in different kinds of biological individuals. This paper evaluates these different kinds in terms of their capacity to... more
“Realization” and “emergence” are two concepts that are sometimes used to describe same or similar phenomena in philosophy of mind and the special sciences, where such phenomena involve the synchronic dependence of some higher-level... more
Token physicalism is often viewed as a modest and unproblematic physicalist commitment, as contrasted with type physicalism. This paper argues that the prevalence of functional individuation in biology creates serious problems for token... more
Nonreductive physicalism has its problems; in what follows, I solve them. Or, at least, I propose solutions to what I regard as three of the most serious challenges facing the view: those of causal exclusion, causal heterogeneity, and... more
In a number of individual and collaborative papers, Carl Gillett and I have championed a theory of realization that we take to characterize a many-one ontological determination relation between property instances found in the natural... more
The notion of realization made its first appearance in the late sixties in the philosophy of mind, where it was proposed that mental state-types, though not themselves physical state-types, are still functional state-types that are in... more
C. S. Peirce is often credited as a forerunner of the verificationist theory of meaning. In his early pragmatist papers, Peirce did say that if we want to make our ideas clear(er), then we should look downstream to their actual and future... more
The thesis that follows proffers a solution to the mind-matter problem, the problem as to how mind and matter relate. The proposed solution herein is a variant of panpsychism – the theory that all (pan) has minds (psyche) – that we name... more
ABSTRACT: Functionalists about truth employ Ramsification to produce an implicit definition of the theoretical term true, but doing so requires determining that the theory introducing that term is itself true. A variety of putative... more
Polger and Shapiro argue that their official recipe, a criterion for judging when the phenomenon of multiple realization (MR) exists, renders MR less widespread than its proponents have assumed. I argue that, although Polger and Shapiro’s... more
This paper focuses on the framework for the compositional relations of properties in the sciences, or “realization” relations, offered by Ken Aizawa and Carl Gillett (A&G) in a series of papers, and in particular on the analysis of... more
This paper introduces a new approach to the theory of truthmaking. According to this approach, there are multiple forms of truthmaking. Here, I characterize and motivate a specific version of this approach, which I call a ‘Pluralist... more
A prominent way of explaining how race is socially constructed appeals to social positions and social structures. On this view, the construction of a person's race is understood in terms of the person occupying a certain social position... more
This paper examines the multiple realizability thesis within a causal framework. The beginnings of this framework are found in an influential paper by Sober (1999), in which he argues that the multiple realizability thesis poses no... more
Multiple realizability (MR) is traditionally conceived of as the feature of computational systems, and has been used to argue for irreducibility of higher-level theories. I will show that there are several ways a computational system may... more
In this paper, I argue against the use of the notion of multiple realization to defend a unified account of life, as proposed by Krzysztof Chodasewicz. I show that the notion of multiple realization is itself highly problematic but, most... more
In this paper, I argue that the newly developed network approach in neuroscience and biology provides a basis for formulating a unique type of realization, which I call topological realization. Some of its features and its relation to one... more
In this book, Marcin Milkowski argues that the mind can be explained computationally because it is itself computational—whether it engages in mental arithmetic, parses natural language, or processes the auditory signals that allow us to... more
The supposed crucial argument that refutes reductionism once and for all is the idea of the multiple realizability (MR) of the higher or non-physical properties. Introducing and developing this notion, authors such as Putnam and Fodor... more
The goal of this paper is to make headway on a metaphysics of social construction. In recent work (forthcoming), I've argued that social construction should be understood in terms of metaphysical grounding. However, I agree with grounding... more
This article investigates several consequences of a recent trend in philosophy of mind to shift the relata of realization from mental state-physical state to function-mechanism. It is shown, by applying both frameworks to the... more
The contingency of biological regularities – and its implications for the existence of biological laws – has long puzzled biologists and philosophers. The best argument for the contingency of biological regularities is John Beatty’s... more
Polger and Shapiro (2016) claim that unlike human-made artifacts cases of multiple realization in naturally occurring systems are uncommon. Drawing on cases from systems biology, I argue that multiple realization in naturally occurring... more
If causalism is a complete theory of what it is to behave intentionally, it also has to account for intentional omissions. Carolina Sartorio (2009) has developed a powerful argument, the Causal Exclusion for Omissions, showing that... more
In earlier work, I proposed and defended a formulation of physicalism that was distinctive in appealing to a carefully-defined relation of physical realization (Melnyk 2003). Various philosophers (Robert Francescotti, Daniel Stoljar, Carl... more
Non-reductive physicalism is commonly understood as the view that mental properties are realized by physical properties. Here, I argue that the realization relation in question is a power inheritance relation: if a property P realizes a... more
A common view is that the truth of multiple realization, e.g., about psychological states, entails the truth of functionalism. This is supposed to follow because what is multiply realized is eo ipso realized. I argue that view is mistaken... more
The main idea of this thesis is multi-descriptional physicalism. According to it, only physical entities are elements of our ontology, and there are different ways to describe them. Higher-level vocabularies (e.g., mental, neurological,... more
The thesis that follows proffers a solution to the mind-matter problem, the problem as to how mind and matter relate. The proposed solution herein is a variant of panpsychism – the theory that all (pan) has minds (psyche) – that we name... more
Talk of properties and predicates are common, and some even used interchangeably, in the philosophy of the social sciences. In this presentation, however, I challenge the widespread "slide" from predicate-talk to talk of properties. I... more
In natural kind debates, Boyd's famous Homeostatic Property Cluster theory (HPC) is often misconstrued in two ways: Not only is it thought to make for a normative standard for natural kinds, but also to require the homeostatic mechanisms... more
Biochemical kinds such as proteins pose interesting problems for philosophers of science, as they can be studied from the points of view of both biology and chemistry. The relationship between the biological functions of biochemical kinds... more