Explaining individual differences.

Most psychological research aims to uncover generalizations about the mind that hold across subjects. Philosophical discussions of scientific explanation have focused on such generalizations, but in doing so, have often overlooked an important phenomenon: variation. Variation is ubiquitous in psychology and many other domains, and an important target of explanation in its own right. Here I characterize explananda that concern individual differences and formulate an account of what it takes to explain them. I argue that the notion of actual difference making, the only causal concept in the literature that explicitly addresses variation, cannot be used to ground such an account. Instead, I propose a view on which explaining individual differences involves identifying causes that could be intervened on to reduce the variability in the population. This account provides criteria of success for explaining variation and deepens our understanding of causal explanation.

Physiological constraints and cognitive chunking: Sequence organization in the songs of zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata).

Learned bird songs often have a hierarchical organization. In the case of zebra finches, each bird's song is made up of a string of notes delivered in a stereotyped sequence to form a "motif," and motifs are repeated to form a song bout. During song learning, young males copy "chunks" of two or more consecutive notes from their tutors' songs. These chunks are represented as distinct units within memory (during learning) and within motor systems (during song production). During song performance, motifs may deviate from the learned sequence by stopping short, starting late, or by skipping, inserting, or repeating notes. We measured acoustic and temporal variables related to the respiratory and vocal physiology of song production and asked how they related to deviations from each bird's "canonical" sequence. The best predictor of deviations from that sequence was the duration of the silent interval between notes, when inspiration normally occurs. Deviations from the canonical motif occurred less often after higher-pitched notes, perhaps because a high-low sequence forms a prosodic unit. Premature stops often followed louder and longer notes, suggesting that respiratory and muscular physiology influence the location of such stops. Boundaries between the learned chunks of a male's motif predicted where and how often noncanonical starts occurred. Physiological and cognitive elements also interacted to define the segmentation of zebra finch song sequences. Long silent intervals between notes were associated both with physiology (inspirations) and with the cognitive boundaries of learned chunks-and hence with deviations from the canonical motif. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Muscles or Movements? Representation in the Nascent Brain Sciences.

The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the "muscles versus movements" debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington and neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in favor of movement components. This essay examines these and other brain scientists' evolving notions of representation during the first eighty years of the muscles versus movements debate (c. 1873-1954). Although participants agreed about many of the superficial features of representation, their inferences reveal deep-seated disagreements about its inferential role. Divergent epistemological commitments stoked conflicting conceptions of what representational attributions imply and what evidence supports them.

On value-laden science.

Philosophical work on values in science is held back by widespread ambiguity about how values bear on scientific choices. Here, I disambiguate several ways in which a choice can be value-laden and show that this disambiguation has the potential to solve and dissolve philosophical problems about values in science. First, I characterize four ways in which values relate to choices: values can motivate, justify, cause, or be impacted by the choices we make. Next, I put my proposed taxonomy to work, using it to clarify one version of the argument from inductive risk. The claim that non-epistemic values must play a role in scientific choices that run inductive risk makes most sense as a claim about values being needed to justify such choices. The argument from inductive risk is not unique: many philosophical arguments about values in science can be more clearly understood and assessed by paying close attention to how values and choices are related.

"Defeaters" don't matter.

We argue that the exercise of agency is compatible with the presence of what Doris calls "defeaters." In order to undermine reflectivist theories of agency and support his valuational alternative, Doris must not simply show that defeaters exist but rather establish that some agentive behaviors do express a person's values without involving reflection.