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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Mechanistic Abstraction, Worth Boone, Gualtiero Piccinini
Mechanistic Abstraction, Worth Boone, Gualtiero Piccinini
Philosophy Faculty Works
We provide an explicit taxonomy of legitimate kinds of abstraction within constitutive explanation. We argue that abstraction is an inherent aspect of adequate mechanistic explanation. Mechanistic explanations—even ideally complete ones—typically involve many kinds of abstraction and therefore do not require maximal detail. Some kinds of abstraction play the ontic role of identifying the specific complex components, subsets of causal powers, and organizational relations that produce a suitably general phenomenon. Therefore, abstract constitutive explanations are both legitimate and mechanistic.
Reference Magnetism As A Solution To The Moral Twin Earth Problem, William Dunaway
Reference Magnetism As A Solution To The Moral Twin Earth Problem, William Dunaway
Philosophy Faculty Works
‘Moral Twin Earth’ thought experiments constitute a central semantic challenge to naturalistic normative realism. This paper first outlines a general framework for understanding the challenge, according to which (i) central normative terms are semantically stable in ways that contrast with many other paradigmatic descriptive terms, and (ii) realists should expect to have a unified meta-semantic theory that explains the difference in stability between the normative and descriptive terms in question. The most attractive way of meeting this challenge, we argue, appeals to the idea of reference magnetism. According to this influential idea, some properties are reference magnets, which (roughly) means …