Paul E Griffiths
Biographic Data
| ID | 225124 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul E Griffiths |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul E |
| FAMILY NAME | Griffiths |
| SIGNATURE | GRIFFITHS P E |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8657-6873 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 231 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
In Praise of Mary Hesse: Pietro Gori (ed.): Mary B. Hesse (1924–2016): metaphors, models and the growth of scientific knowledge. Cham: Springer Nature, 2025, 260 + xiii pp, 119.99€ HB
Classifying Genetic Essentialist Biases using Large Language Models
The rapid rise of generative AI, including LLMs, has prompted a great deal of concern, both within and beyond academia. One of these concerns is that generative models embed, reproduce, and therein potentially perpetuate all manner of bias. The present study offers an alternative perspective: exploring the potential of LLMs to detect bias in human generated text. Our target is genetic essentialism in obesity discourse in Australian print media. W…
Ligeti's Autobiographies
Like his fellow members of the Western European musical avantgarde of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Ligeti often expressed himself in articles or lectures on theoretical and analytical topics. Unlike his contemporaries, however, he also wrote on matters autobiographical. Though his first self-examination, dating from 1971, is still concerned overwhelmingly with compositional theory, from the end of that decade he returned several times to personal exp…
The Idea of Mismatch in Evolutionary Medicine
Mismatch is a prominent concept in evolutionary medicine and a number of philosophers have published analyses of this concept. The word ‘mismatch’ has been used in a diversity of ways across a range of sciences, leading these authors to regard it as a vague concept in need of philosophical clarification. Here, in contrast, we concentrate on the use of mismatch in modelling and experimentation in evolutionary medicine. This reveals a rigorous theo…
Signals That Make a Difference
Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks—from the way monkeys in a troop communicate to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this article, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks …
Multispecies individuals
Evolution, Dysfunction, and Disease: A Reappraisal
Some ‘naturalist’ accounts of disease employ a biostatistical account of dysfunction, whilst others use a ‘selected effect’ account. Several recent authors have argued that the biostatistical account offers the best hope for a naturalist account of disease. We show that the selected effect account survives the criticisms levelled by these authors relatively unscathed, and has significant advantages over the BST. Moreover, unlike the BST, it has a…
Epigenetics: Ambiguities and implications
Emotion and Expression
Emotion, Evolution of
Dissecting developmental biology
Measuring Causal Specificity
Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate…
Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction
In the past century, nearly all of the biological sciences have been directly affected by discoveries and developments in genetics, a fast-evolving subject with important theoretical dimensions. In this rich and accessible book, Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz show how the concept of the gene has evolved and diversified across the many fields that make up modern biology. By examining the molecular biology of the 'environment', they situate geneti…
God, Genesis and Germlines
Philosophical Issues in Ecology: Recent Trends and Future Directions
Colyvan, M., S. Linquist, W. Grey, P. Griffiths, J. Odenbaugh, and H. P. Possingham. 2009. Philosophical issues in ecology: recent trends and future directions. Ecology and Society 14(2): 22. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03020-140222
Generating Thoughts on Genetics
Jesse Prinz Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion
Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewJesse Prinz Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, £21.50 (hardback) ISBN: 0195151453Paul E. GriffithsPaul E. Griffiths[email protected]Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, NSW 2006Australia & ESRC Center for Genomics in Society, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon EX4 4QJ, UK Search for more articles by this author Department of Philosophy, Unive…
Experimental Philosophy of Science
Experimental philosophy of science gathers empirical data on how key scientific concepts are understood by particular scientific communities. In this paper we briefly describe two recent studies in experimental philosophy of biology, one investigating the concept of the gene, the other the concept of innateness. The use of experimental methods reveals facts about these concepts that would not be accessible using the traditional method of intuitio…
Precision, stability and scientific progress
Recent Work on the Evolution of Culture
The Fearless Vampire Conservator: Philip Kitcher, Genetic Determinism, and the Informational Gene
Function, Homology, and Character Individuation
I defend the view that many biological categories are defined by homology against a series of arguments designed to show that all biological categories are defined, at least in part, by selected function. I show that categories of homology are ‘abnormality inclusive’—something often alleged to be unique to selected function categories. I show that classifications by selected function are logically dependent on classifications by homology, but not…
Liberals Ate My Genes?
How biologists conceptualize genes: An empirical study
Genes: Philosophical analyses put to the test
Functional Analysis and Proper Functions
The etiological approach to ‘proper functions’ in biology can be strengthened by relating it to Robert Cummins' general treatment of function ascription. The proper functions of a biological trait are the functions it is assigned in a Cummins-style functional explanation of the fitness of ancestors. These functions figure in selective explanations of the trait. It is also argued that some recent etiological theories include inaccurate accounts of…
Genetic Information: A Metaphor In Search of a Theory
John Maynard Smith has defended against philosophical criticism the view that developmental biology is the study of the expression of information encoded in the genes by natural selection. However, like other naturalistic concepts of information, this “teleosemantic” concept is equally applicable to many non-genetic factors in development. Maynard Smith also fails to show that developmental biology is concerned with teleosemantic information. Som…
Emotions as Natural and Normative Kinds
In earlier work I have claimed that emotion and some emotions are not ‘natural kinds’. Here I clarify what I mean by ‘natural kind’, suggest a new and more accurate term, and discuss the objection that emotion and emotions are not descriptive categories at all, but fundamentally normative categories
How biologists conceptualize genes: An empirical study
Measuring Causal Specificity
Several authors have argued that causes differ in the degree to which they are ‘specific’ to their effects. Woodward has used this idea to enrich his influential interventionist theory of causal explanation. Here we propose a way to measure causal specificity using tools from information theory. We show that the specificity of a causal variable is not well defined without a probability distribution over the states of that variable. We demonstrate…
Function, Homology, and Character Individuation
I defend the view that many biological categories are defined by homology against a series of arguments designed to show that all biological categories are defined, at least in part, by selected function. I show that categories of homology are ‘abnormality inclusive’—something often alleged to be unique to selected function categories. I show that classifications by selected function are logically dependent on classifications by homology, but not…
Evolution, Dysfunction, and Disease: A Reappraisal
Some ‘naturalist’ accounts of disease employ a biostatistical account of dysfunction, whilst others use a ‘selected effect’ account. Several recent authors have argued that the biostatistical account offers the best hope for a naturalist account of disease. We show that the selected effect account survives the criticisms levelled by these authors relatively unscathed, and has significant advantages over the BST. Moreover, unlike the BST, it has a…
Genes: Philosophical analyses put to the test
The Historical Turn in the Study of Adaptation
A number of philosophers and ‘evolutionary psychologists’ have argued that attacks on adaptationism in contemporary biology are misguided. These thinkers identify anti-adaptationism with advocacy of non-adaptive modes of explanation. They overlook the influence of anti-adaptationism in the development of more rigorous forms of adaptive explanation. Many biologists who reject adaptationism do not reject Darwinism. Instead, they have pioneered the …
Cladistic Classification and Functional Explanation
I adopt a cladistic view of species, and explore the possibility that there exists an equally valuable cladistic view of organismic traits. This suggestion seems to run counter to the stress on functional views of biological traits in recent work in philosophy and psychology. I show how the tension between these two views can be defused with a multilevel view of biological explanation. Despite the attractions of this compromise, I conclude that w…
Experimental Philosophy of Science
Experimental philosophy of science gathers empirical data on how key scientific concepts are understood by particular scientific communities. In this paper we briefly describe two recent studies in experimental philosophy of biology, one investigating the concept of the gene, the other the concept of innateness. The use of experimental methods reveals facts about these concepts that would not be accessible using the traditional method of intuitio…
What is the Developmentalist Challenge
Kenneth C. Schaffner's paper is an important contribution to the literature on behavioral genetics and on genetics in general. Schaffner has a long record of injecting real molecular biology into philosophical discussions of genetics. His treatments of the reduction of Mendelian to molecular genetics (Schaffner 1967, 1969) first drew philosophical attention to the problems of detail that have fuelled both anti-reductionism (Hull 1974, Kitcher 198…
Multispecies individuals
How the Mind Grows: A Developmental Perspective on the Biology of Cognition
Epigenetics: Ambiguities and implications
Darwinism, Process Structuralism, and Natural Kinds
Darwinists classify biological traits either by their ancestry (homology) or by their adaptive role. Only the latter can provide traditional natural kinds, but only the former is practicable. Process structuralists exploit this embarrassment to argue for non-Darwinian classifications in terms of underlying developmental mechanisms. This new taxonomy will also explain phylogenetic inertia and developmental constraint. I argue that Darwinian homolo…
Signals That Make a Difference
Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks—from the way monkeys in a troop communicate to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this article, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks …
Philosophical Issues in Ecology: Recent Trends and Future Directions
Colyvan, M., S. Linquist, W. Grey, P. Griffiths, J. Odenbaugh, and H. P. Possingham. 2009. Philosophical issues in ecology: recent trends and future directions. Ecology and Society 14(2): 22. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03020-140222
What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories
Recital 1 (For Cathy)
Symphony; Anaklasis
Calendar
Eine Alpensinfonie
The Triumph of Time; Chronometer
Sonatas
A Child of Our Time
Oedipus Rex
Post-Boulez
Dramatic Music
Angled Schoenberg
Sonatas for String Quartet
24 sections courtes. - Dates de composition : aout (Vienne) - decembre (Londres) 1967. - 1re execution : 1969 par le Quatuor Gaudeamus (version reduite) ; festival de Royan, 23 mars 1975, par le Quatuor de Berne (version integrale) )
Libra; Gemini; Leo
Avant Garde
Turangalila Symphony
Transit
Modern Orchestral
Lear
Shostakovich Notes
Selfless Persons
Schoenbergian Dilemmas
Boulez's Milieu
Functional Analysis and Proper Functions
The etiological approach to ‘proper functions’ in biology can be strengthened by relating it to Robert Cummins' general treatment of function ascription. The proper functions of a biological trait are the functions it is assigned in a Cummins-style functional explanation of the fitness of ancestors. These functions figure in selective explanations of the trait. It is also argued that some recent etiological theories include inaccurate accounts of…
Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation
L'A. explique ce que sont les «systemes de developpement» en genetique, depassant le dualisme inne-acquis et ce, pour expliquer le developpement d'une personne
Cladistic Classification and Functional Explanation
I adopt a cladistic view of species, and explore the possibility that there exists an equally valuable cladistic view of organismic traits. This suggestion seems to run counter to the stress on functional views of biological traits in recent work in philosophy and psychology. I show how the tension between these two views can be defused with a multilevel view of biological explanation. Despite the attractions of this compromise, I conclude that w…
Philosophy (34 works) · Epistemology (30 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Art (19 works) · Biology (19 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (18 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Philosophy of science (16 works) · Philosophy of biology (12 works) · Musicology and Musical Analysis (11 works)