This paper examines causal theories of reference with respect to how plausible an account they give of non-physical natural kind terms such as ‘gene’ as well as of the truth of the associated theoretical claims. I first show that reference fixism for ‘gene’ fails. By this, I mean the claim that the reference of ‘gene’ was stable over longer historical periods, for example, since the classical p...

Scientific practice involves two kinds of induction. In one, generalizations are drawn about the states of a particular system of variables. In the other, generalizations are drawn across systems in a class. We can discern two questions of correctness about both kinds of induction: (P1) what distinguishes those systems and classes of system that are ‘projectible’ in Nelson Goodman’s (1955) sens...

In this dissertation I study the properties of singleton kinds and singleton types. These are extremely precise classi ers for types and values, respectively: the kind of all types equal to [a given type], and the type of all values equal to [a given value]. Singletons are interesting because they provide a very general and modular form of de nition, allow ne-grained control of type computation...

In philosophy, there is an as yet unresolved discussion on whether there are different kinds of kinds and what those kinds are. In particular, there is a distinction between indifferent kinds, which are unaffected by observation and representation, and interactive kinds, which respond to being studied in ways that alter the very kinds under study. This is in essence a discussion on ontologies a...

The controversy among scientists on whether standards and regulations hamper or stimulate innovation contains too little specificity and provides too few clues for innovation managers to act upon. In this article, we underscore the importance of timing and start by focusing on the effect of pre-existing standards and regulations on the subsequent development and diffusion of product innovations...

We describe a number of alternative implementations for the heap functions, which are part of the C++ standard library, and provide a through experimental evaluation of their performance. In our benchmarking framework the heap functions are implemented using the same set of utility functions, the utility functions using the same set of policy functions, and for each implementation alternative o...