Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chapter One .Intuitive Appeal and Ubiquity of 'Levels' (2013; 2014) has recently published two insightful papers on the levels concept, and Alan Love (2012), along with Ingo Brigandt (Brigandt and Love 2012), also offer an interesting analysis of the scientific use of 'levels' in the context of questions about causation and pluralistic explanation, respectively.Other authors, including those mentioned above, mentioned above (Rueger and McGivern 2010;Potochnik and McGill 2012), also point out the lack of such sustained analysis of 'levels' as an impetus for their respective treatments of the concept.Nonetheless the character and significance of the levels concept remains largely an open question. Analyzing 'Levels of Organization' in Biological ScienceThe task taken up in this dissertation will not be to take a position in any one of the particular debates in which levels play a role (e.g., reduction, emergence, and causation).Instead, this dissertation will analyze the concept of levels as it is used in the biological sciences.More specifically, this endeavor will entail explicating 3 the character and significance of the concept of 'levels of organization' for explanation in the biological sciences.By 'character' is meant, very roughly, what scientists take to the term 'levels' to mean.The two terms 'character' and 'meaning' are not interchangeable, however.'Meaning' is a more specialized term in philosophy, and is traditionally used to express the semantic content of a word or mechanistic explanation, and even contrasting the levels concept with Marr's "levels of analysis" framework.Likewise, Carl Craver has in a new (2015) paper also revisited the levels concept, and builds on his (2007a, Ch.5) analysis of levels by clarifying further his 'defining questions' approach to understanding levels (ibid.; see Chapter 2 for more details), and contextualizing his own mechanistic conception of levels among the many cognates of the levels concept.These two papers come as a particular surprise, given the lack of such papers during the duration of this dissertation's writing, and indeed given the silence on the issue of the levels concept in philosophy generally.Another area of philosophy where the levels concept has continued to 'run rampant' since the submission of this dissertation is the discussion of issues pertaining to non-fundamental causation (particularly top-down causation, higher-level causation, and causation in biology generally).Here, two recent papers (i.e.Hoffmann-Kolss 2014; Franklin-Hall 2014) have thematized levels of organization, albeit indirectly, in their arguments against attempts to articulate higher-level causation (especially in biology).The contributions offered in the analysis of this dissertation is proving to be, if nothing else, a timely choice in topic.'Levels of organization' are used additionally to endorse a pluralist approach to explaining
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".