Philosophical Accounts of Biological Functions

Machine Translation and its Philosophical Accounts

This paper attempts to explore the interrelation between philosophical accounts of language and respective technological developments in the field of human language technologies. In doing so, it focuses on the interaction between analytical philosophy and machine translation development, trying to draw the emerging methodological analogies.

Functions in Biological and Artificial Worlds: Comparative Philosophical Perspectives (Preface)

Functions in Biological and Artificial Worlds: Comparative Philosophical Perspectives (Introduction)

Philosophical Accounts of Causal Explanation and the Scientific Practice of Psychophysics

Philosophical accounts of causality and causal explanation can provide important guidelines for the experimental sciences and valid experimental setups. In addition to the obvious requirement of logic validity, however, the approaches must account for the generally accepted experimental practice to be truly useful. To investigate this important interconnection, the current paper evaluates diffe...

Evolutionary Developmental Biology and the Limits of Philosophical Accounts of Mechanistic Explanation

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) is considered a ‘mechanistic science,’ in that it causally explains morphological evolution in terms of changes in developmental mechanisms. Evo-devo is also an interdisciplinary and integrative approach, as its explanations use contributions from many fields and pertain to different levels of organismal organization. Philosophical accounts of mecha...