Existential Quantifiers and Guiding Principles in Physical Theories

Moulines, C. Ulises

doi:10.1007/978-94-009-6375-7_10

Cited by 11 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Its quasi-vacuous character. This means that they are highly abstract, schematic, and contain essential occurrences of T-theoretical terms, which in a structuralist sense are terms whose extension can only be determined through the application of a theory's fundamental law(s) 11 so that they can resist possible refutations, but which nevertheless acquire specific empirical content through a non-deductive process known as "specialization" (Moulines 1984). 4.…”

Section: The Concept Of Law From the Point Of View Of Metatheoreticalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Its systematizing or unifying role. Fundamental laws allow including diverse applications within the same theory since they provide a guide to and a conceptual framework for the formulation of other laws (the so-called "special laws"), which are introduced to impose restrictions on the fundamental laws and thus apply to particular empirical systems (Moulines 1984). 12 It is clear that the distinction between fundamental and special laws is relative to the considered theory.…”

Section: The Concept Of Law From the Point Of View Of Metatheoreticalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But to the extent that they work with PD, they accept as valid, even though just implicitly, PD fundamental law/guiding principle. Third, PD fundamental law/guiding principle is highly schematic and general and it possesses very little empirical content that it is, when considered in isolation, irrefutable or "empirically non-restrict" (Moulines 1984) (i.e., it has a "quasi-vacuous" character). Because to examine the empirically determined (or estimated) change of population size and the theoretically postulated population factors and the rate of population change, and to set out to test what the law claims-namely, that the observed (or estimated) change in the size of the population in a certain period of time corresponds to the product of the rate of population change multiplied by the size of the population at the beginning of the time interval-without introducing any kind of further restrictions, amounts to a "pencil and paper" exercise that does not involve any empirical work.…”

Section: On Claim (A) That There Are "Laws" In Biological Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Laws, Models, and Theories in Biology: A Unifying Interpretation

Lorenzano

Díaz

2020

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

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Author's personal copy 164 scientific practice (Achinstein 1968; Hesse 1966; Harré 1970), as well as investigating what role analogies and metaphors play in the construction of models (Black 1962; Hesse 1966) or of other components, linked to these, raised by historicist philosophers, such as exemplars (Kuhn 1970). At the present time, the importance of models in scientific practice is being emphasized. The semantic view-which deals with the subject matter of models within the framework of a general conception of scientific theories-is being imposed as an alternative to the classical and historicist views of scientific theories, 1 and model views of science are being developed-which deal with questions of the relationship between models and experience and between models and general theories independently of a general metatheory of science (

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Section: The Concept Of Law From the Point Of View Of Metatheoreticalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Concept Of Law From the Point Of View Of Metatheoreticalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: On Claim (A) That There Are "Laws" In Biological Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Laws, Models, and Theories in Biology: A Unifying Interpretation

Lorenzano

Díaz

2020

History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences

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“…The information obtained from these kinetic models is incorporated 9 A similar conception arguably underlies Durham (1991) and Mesoudi (2011) as well. 10 That is, it is something akin to what metatheoretical structuralists call a "guiding-principle" (Moulines 1984). into dynamical models that, by taking into account other forces instantiated by nonaggregative factors (see section 4), allow to formulate distribution explanations of cultural change and specific source laws. From this point of view, the causal decomposition that the kinetic approach promotes is nothing more than an attempt to open the black box of a subset of the forces of cultural evolution.…”

Section: The Foundational Role Of the Dynamical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolutionary theory as a theory of forces

Baravalle

2019

Synthese

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Cultural evolutionary theory has been alternatively compared to a theory of forces, such as Newtonian mechanics, or the kinetic theory of gases. In this article, I clarify the scope and significance of these metatheoretical characterisations. First, I discuss the kinetic analogy, which has been recently put forward by Tim Lewens. According to it, cultural evolutionary theory is grounded on a bottom-up methodology, which highlights the additive effects of social learning biases on the emergence of large-scale cultural phenomena. Lewens supports this claim by arguing that it is a consequence of cultural evolutionists' widespread commitment to population thinking. While I concur with Lewens that cultural evolutionists often actually conceive cultural change in aggregative terms, I think that the kinetic framework does not properly account for the explanatory import of populationlevel descriptions in cultural evolutionary theory. Starting from a criticism of Lewens' interpretation of population thinking, I argue that the explanatory role of such descriptions is best understood within a dynamical framework -that is, a framework according to which cultural evolutionary theory is a theory of forces. After having spelled out the main features of this alternative interpretation, I elucidate in which respects it helps to outline a more accurate characterisation of the overarching structure of cultural evolutionary theory.

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“…Tomados de manera aislada, sin sus especializaciones, los principios-guía dicen muy poco empíricamente. Pueden ser considerados, si se los toma de manera aislada, como "empíricamente irrestrictos" (Moulines 1984). Dado su carácter esquemático, con parámetros que se dejan abiertos, no pueden ser contrastados incluso con supuestos auxiliares, necesitan una especificación concreta de los parámetros, i.e.…”

Section: ¿Difieren Pgsn Y Pgmc Respecto De La Aprioricidad?unclassified

¿Son a priori los modelos explicativos de la selección natural?

Díez

Lorenzano

2017

Metatheo

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El estatus epistémico de la Selección Natural ha intrigado a biólogos y filósofos por igual, desde sus inicios hasta nuestros días. Un ejemplo contemporáneo prominente es Elliot Sober, quien afirma que la Selección Natural y otras teorías biológicas –y quizás económicas– son peculiares por incluir modelos explicativos/condicionales que son a priori en un sentido en el que los modelos explicativos/condicionales de la Mecánica Clásica y la mayoría de las demás teorías estándar no lo son.En este artículo, analizando lo que creemos ser las cuatro posibles interpretaciones de la tesis de Sober, argumentamos que, dejando de lado las preferencias terminológicas, los posibles sentidos en los que los modelos explicativos de la Selección Natural pueden contar, o incluyen elementos que pueden contar, como a priori, también se aplican a la Mecánica Clásica y a otras teorías estándar, altamente unificadas.

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Existential Quantifiers and Guiding Principles in Physical Theories

Cited by 11 publications

References 2 publications

Laws, Models, and Theories in Biology: A Unifying Interpretation

Laws, Models, and Theories in Biology: A Unifying Interpretation

Cultural evolutionary theory as a theory of forces

¿Son a priori los modelos explicativos de la selección natural?

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