Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques

Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories give approximately true descriptions of both observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world. In this book, the author traces the contemporary evolution of realism by examining the most promising recent strategies adopted by its proponents.

PURPOSE: The definition and aims of rehabilitation are both topics of frequent debate. Recently several authors have suggested defining rehabilitation and its goals in terms of 'person-centredness'. However such attempts to define rehabilitation in this way have not occurred without running into their own difficulties and criticisms. Consequently, one may question whether person-centredness is a good candidate to characterize and define rehabilitation. The purpose of this article is to reflect upon the historical background and conceptual underpinnings of this term and their relevance for understanding contemporary person-centred rehabilitation. METHOD: We conducted a conceptual and historical analysis of the notion of person-centredness in relation to rehabilitation. We ask first whether person-centredness has a consistent and fixed definition and meaning? Secondly, where does person-centredness come from, what is its conceptual history and does an historical approach enable us to identify a unique source for person-centredness? RESULTS: In the context of rehabilitation, we have identified four main understandings or interpretations of the term person-centredness, each of which denotes several ideas that can be, in turn, interpreted in quite different ways. Thus the concept of person-centredness in rehabilitation has multiple meanings. The conceptual history indicates that person-centredness has diverse meanings and that it has been used in a variety of contexts somewhat unrelated to disability and rehabilitation. Moreover, there does not seem to be any strict relationship between person-centredness as it is used in the context of rehabilitation and these prior uses and meanings. CONCLUSION: Person-centredness has an ancient pedigree, but its application in the field of rehabilitation raises both practical and theoretical difficulties. It may be that rehabilitation might get a better sense of what it should be and should do by focusing less on the rhetoric of person-centredness and by putting more emphasis on the investigation and operationalization of its key conceptual components.

In this paper, we develop an organizational account that defines biological functions as causal relations subject to closure in living systems, interpreted as the most typical example of organizationally closed and differentiated self-maintaining systems. We argue that this account adequately grounds the teleological and normative dimensions of functions in the current organization of a system, insofar as it provides an explanation for the existence of the function bearer and, at the same time, identifies in a non-arbitrary way the norms that functions are supposed to obey. Accordingly, we suggest that the organizational account combines the etiological and dispositional perspectives in an integrated theoretical framework. 1. Introduction 2. Dispositional Approaches 3. Etiological Theories 4. Biological Self-maintenance 4.1. Closure, teleology, and normativity 4.2. Organizational differentiation 5. Functions 5.1. C1: Contributing to the maintenance of the organization 5.2. C2: Producing the functional trait 6. Implications and Objections 6.1. Functional versus useful 6.2. Dysfunctions, side effects, and accidental contributions 6.3. Proper functions and selected effects 6.4. Reproduction 6.5. Relation with other ‘unitarian’ approaches 7. Conclusions

This title offers philosophical analyses of important characteristics of contemporary mathematics and of many aspects of mathematical activity which escape purely formal logical treatment.

A generation ago scientific ideas floated free in the air, as historians gazed up at them in wonder and admiration. From time to time, historians agreed, the ideas that made up the body of scientific truth became incarnate: they were embedded into the fleshly forms of human culture and attached to particular times and places. How this incarnation occurred was a great mystery. How could spirit be made flesh? How did the transcendent and the timeless enter the forms of the mundane and the contingent? Platonist and providentialist perspectives offered ways of speaking about the mystery, but, in general, it remained unresolved at the core of orthodox idealist historiography.1

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects. By Crispin Wright. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983. Pp. xxi + 193. Price £12.50, paper £8.50.) Ian Hacking Ian Hacking Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 34, Issue 136, July 1984, Pages 415–420, https://doi.org/10.2307/2218770 Published: 01 July 1984

Summary In a rapidly changing world, ecology has the potential to move from empirical and conceptual stages to application and management issues. It is now possible to make large‐scale predictions up to continental or global scales, ranging from the future distribution of biological diversity to changes in ecosystem functioning and services. With these recent developments, ecology has a historical opportunity to become a major actor in the development of a sustainable human society. With this opportunity, however, also comes an important responsibility in developing appropriate predictive models, correctly interpreting their outcomes and communicating their limitations. There is also a danger that predictions grow faster than our understanding of ecological systems, resulting in a gap between the scientists generating the predictions and stakeholders using them (conservation biologists, environmental managers, journalists, policymakers). Here, we use the context provided by the current surge of ecological predictions on the future of biodiversity to clarify what prediction means, and to pinpoint the challenges that should be addressed in order to improve predictive ecological models and the way they are understood and used. Synthesis and applications. Ecologists face several challenges to ensure the healthy development of an operational predictive ecological science: (i) clarity on the distinction between explanatory and anticipatory predictions; (ii) developing new theories at the interface between explanatory and anticipatory predictions; (iii) open data to test and validate predictions; (iv) making predictions operational; and (v) developing a genuine ethics of prediction.

Blood flow produces mechanical frictional forces, parallel to the blood flow exerted on the endothelial wall of the vessel, the so-called wall shear stress (WSS). WSS sensing is associated with several vascular pathologies, but it is first a physiological phenomenon. Endothelial cell sensitivity to WSS is involved in several developmental and physiological vascular processes such as angiogenesis and vascular morphogenesis, vascular remodeling, and vascular tone. Local conditions of blood flow determine the characteristics of WSS, i.e., intensity, direction, pulsatility, sensed by the endothelial cells that, through their effect of the vascular network, impact WSS. All these processes generate a local-global retroactive loop that determines the ability of the vascular system to ensure the perfusion of the tissues. In order to account for the physiological role of WSS, the so-called shear stress set point theory has been proposed, according to which WSS sensing acts locally on vessel remodeling so that WSS is maintained close to a set point value, with local and distant effects of vascular blood flow. The aim of this article is (1) to review the existing literature on WSS sensing involvement on the behavior of endothelial cells and its short-term (vasoreactivity) and long-term (vascular morphogenesis and remodeling) effects on vascular functioning in physiological condition; (2) to present the various hypotheses about WSS sensors and analyze the conceptual background of these representations, in particular the concept of tensional prestress or biotensegrity; and (3) to analyze the relevance, explanatory value, and limitations of the WSS set point theory, that should be viewed as dynamical, and not algorithmic, processes, acting in a self-organized way. We conclude that this dynamic set point theory and the biotensegrity concept provide a relevant explanatory framework to analyze the physiological mechanisms of WSS sensing and their possible shift toward pathological situations.

Abstract objects have been a central topic in philosophy since antiquity. Philosophers have defended various views about abstract objects by appealing to metaphysical considerations, considerations regarding mathematics or science, and, not infrequently, intuitions about natural language. This book pursues the question of how and whether natural language allows for reference to abstract objects in a fully systematic way. By making full use of contemporary linguistic semantics, it presents a much greater range of linguistic generalizations than has previously been taken into consideration in philosophical discussions, and it argues for an ontological picture is very different from that generally taken for granted by philosophers and semanticists alike. Reference to abstract objects such as properties, numbers, propositions, and degrees is considerably more marginal than generally held. Instead, natural language is rather generous in allowing reference to particularized properties (tropes), the use of nonreferential expressions in apparent referential position, and the use of 'nominalizing expressions', such as quantifiers like 'something'. Reference to abstract objects is achieved generally only by the use of 'reifying terms', such as 'the number eight'.

The self-non-self theory has dominated immunology since the 1950s. In the 1990s, Matzinger and her colleagues suggested a new, competing theory, called the "danger theory." This theory has provoked mixed acclaim: enthusiasm and criticism. Here we assess the danger theory vis-à-vis recent experimental data on innate immunity, transplantation, cancers and tolerance to foreign entities, and try to elucidate more clearly whether danger is well defined.

Immunology asserts that an individual can be defined through self and nonself. Thomas Pradeu argues that this theory is inadequate, because immune responses to self constituents and immune tolerance of foreign entities are the rule, not the exception.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.

The essentialism story is a version of the history of biological classification that was fabricated between 1953 and 1968 by Ernst Mayr, who combined contributions from Arthur Cain and David Hull with his own grudge against Plato. It portrays pre-Darwinian taxonomists as caught in the grip of an ancient philosophy called essentialism, from which they were not released until Charles Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species. Mayr's motive was to promote the Modern Synthesis in opposition to the typology of idealist morphologists; demonizing Plato served this end. Arthur Cain's picture of Linnaeus as a follower of 'Aristotelian' (scholastic) logic was woven into the story, along with David Hull's application of Karl Popper's term, 'essentialism', which Mayr accepted in 1968 as a synonym for what he had called 'typological thinking'. Although Mayr also pointed out the importance of empiricism in the history of taxonomy, the essentialism story still dominates the secondary literature. The history of the first telling of the essentialism story exposes its scant basis in fact.

The origins of genetics are to be found in Gregor Mendel's memoir on plant hybridization (1865). However, the word 'genetics' was only coined in 1906, to designate the new science of heredity. Founded upon the Mendelian method for analyzing the products of crosses, this science is distinguished by its explicit purpose of being a general 'science of heredity', and by the introduction of totally new biological concepts (in particular those of gene, genotype, and phenotype). In the 1910s, Mendelian genetics fused with the chromosomal theory of inheritance, giving rise to what is still called 'classical genetics'. Within this framework, the gene is simultaneously a unit of function and transmission, a unit of recombination, and of mutation. Until the early 1950s, these concepts of the gene coincided. But when DNA was found to be the material basis of inheritance, this congruence dissolved. Then began the venture of molecular biology, which has never stopped revealing the complexity of the way in which hereditary material functions.

In contrast to the once dominant tumour-centric view of cancer, increasing attention is now being paid to the tumour microenvironment (TME), generally understood as the elements spatially located in the vicinity of the tumour. Thinking in terms of TME has proven extremely useful, in particular because it has helped identify and comprehend the role of nongenetic and noncell-intrinsic factors in cancer development. Yet some current approaches have led to a TME-centric view, which is no less problematic than the former tumour-centric vision of cancer, insofar as it tends to overlook the role of components located beyond the TME, in the 'tumour organismal environment' (TOE). In this minireview, we highlight the explanatory and therapeutic shortcomings of the TME-centric view and insist on the crucial importance of the TOE in cancer progression.

Abstract This paper deals with the problem of giving a principled characterization of the class of logical constants. According to the so-called Tarski–Sher thesis, an operation is logical iff it is invariant under permutation. In the model-theoretic tradition, this criterion has been widely accepted as giving a necessary condition for an operation to be logical. But it has been also widely criticized on the account that it counts too many operations as logical, failing thus to provide a sufficient condition. Our aim is to solve this problem of overgeneration by modifying the invariance criterion. We introduce a general notion of invariance under a similarity relation and present the connection between similarity relations and classes of invariant operations. The next task is to isolate a similarity relation well-suited for a definition of logicality. We argue that the standard arguments in favor of invariance under permutation, which rely on the generality and the formality of logic, should be modified. The revised arguments are shown to support an alternative to Tarski's criterion, according to which an operation is logical iff it is invariant under potential isomorphism.

The main objective of immunology is to establish why and when an immune response occurs, that is, to determine a criterion of immunogenicity. According to the consensus view, the proper criterion of immunogenicity lies in the discrimination between self and nonself. Here we challenge this consensus by suggesting a simpler and more comprehensive criterion, the criterion of continuity. Moreover, we show that this criterion may be considered as an interpretation of the immune "self." We conclude that immunologists can continue to speak of the self, provided that they admit that the self/nonself discrimination is not an adequate criterion of immunogenicity.

The working group summarized the conclusions of the workshop with the intention of providing a guide for the preparation of national plans for tuberculosis elimination. The basic strategies that appear consistently effective are: 1. Direct government responsibility for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of tuberculosis (the government is responsible by law for assuring that tuberculosis is identified early, and that cure of the patients is achieved). 2. Maintenance (or development) of properly designed disease surveillance and a programme monitoring system. 3. Availability of specialized tuberculosis personnel at regional and provincial level, responsible for close monitoring of the diagnostic skills and patient prioritization in general health institutions. Regarding research it was felt that no immediate practical applications of new techniques in the diagnosis of mycobacterial diseases, in treatment, or in vaccination can be recommended, but that further basic research in the field of mycobacteria should be pursued and supported.

The book consists of a series of chapters on Carnap's ideal of explication as an alternative to the naturalistic conceptions of science, setting it in its historical context, discussing specific cases

My Representing and Intervening (1983) concludes with what it calls an experimental argument for scientific realism about entities. The argument is evidently inapplicable to extragalactic astrophysics, but leaves open the possibility that there might be other grounds for scientific realism in that domain. Here I argue for antirealism in astrophysics, although not for any particular kind of antirealism. The argument is conducted by a detailed examination of some current research. It parallels the last chapter of (1983). Both represent the methodological opinion that abstract or semantic realism/antirealism debates are empty, and typically lead to confused or wrong conclusions because they pay so little attention to the details of a science.