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Realism / Anti-realism / Instrumentalism
Poster

Cancer biology features ascriptions of normal function to cancer. Normal functions are activities that parts of systems, in some minimal sense, should perform. Cancer biologists’ ascriptions pose difficulties for two main approaches to normal function, leaving a gap in the literature. One approach...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Contributed Papers

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Poster

Elselijn Kingma (2018, 2019) argues that the popular view that the foetus is merely contained by the mother is inconsistent with the biology of pregnancy. Instead, she argues that the foetus is a part of the mother based on various physiological criteria. I argue that immune tolerance, a criterion o...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Contributed Papers

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Poster

The central aim of the nutrition sciences is to understand how nutrition impacts health. One problem supposedly plaguing this endeavor is nutritionism—a ‘reductive’ focus on the role of nutrient composition or isolated nutrients (e.g., macronutrients or vitamins) for explaining a food’s effe...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium

Morgan’s original canon (1894) was intended as a prophylactic against an anthropomorphic bias that he thought stemmed from the double inductive method, which explains seemingly identical behavior in animals and humans in terms of the same underlying causes. However, his defense of the method of va...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium

While philosophers have raised many interesting questions concerning the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of food, philosophy of science has paid little attention to the nutrition sciences. In this symposium we bring together philosophers and a scientist to explore conceptual and empirical challenge...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium

Nutrition science has traditionally relied on population-level evidence, especially evidence from observational studies. However, it is facing what could be called a ‘credibility crisis’ (Penders et al. 2017; Jukola 2021). Critics have questioned the reliability of the evidence originating from ...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium

Immunology is a notoriously complex field with a distinct vocabulary and concepts. Yet immunologists regularly and effectively collaborate with other researchers, notably clinicians and experts in population health. How does this work? This paper proposes a multifaceted answer. Immunology exhibits t...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Contributed Papers

Minimal Agencies

PSA2022582

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Poster

Morgan’s canon is one of the most influential methodological principles in comparative psychology. It states that one should always abstain from explaining animal behavior with reference to any “higher” psychological faculties than absolutely necessary. In the contemporary literature, this pri...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium

The scientific status of folk psychology (FP) is a topic of ongoing debate (Hochstein 2017). One common criticism of the use of FP in the sciences is that FP accounts produce feelings of understanding when in fact they are poor guides to truth. For example, in the context of comparative psychology, ...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium

In From Signal to Symbol (2021, p. x) Ron Planer and Kim Sterelny argue that any “adequate” theory of language evolution “must identify a plausible trajectory from great-apelike communicative abilities to those of modern humans where each step along the way is small, cumulative and adaptive (o...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium

The mental continuity thesis is an assumption shared by many philosophers and scientists who study mind in nature. It states that the difference in mind between different creatures is one of degree not kind. It is an attractive thesis, as it can serve as a basis for the application of evolutionary r...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium

Natural Kinds / Classification
Poster

Sex Eliminativism

PSA2022588

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Poster

Philosophers have the impression that evolutionary medicine is plagued by naive adaptationism (e.g., Murphy 2005, Valles 2011, Méthot 2012), leading to poor science through the proliferation of untestable ‘just-so stories’ and to poor medicine through not considering alternative explanations wi...

Philosophy of Biology - general / other
Symposium