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Record W4287397571 · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-12604-8_3

On the Heuristic Value of Hans Driesch’s Vitalism

2023· book-chapter· en· W4287397571 on OpenAlexaff
Ghyslain Bolduc

Bibliographic record

VenueHistory, philosophy and theory of the life sciences · 2023
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicPhilosophy and History of Science
Canadian institutionsCegep Edouard Montpetit
Fundersnot available
KeywordsVitalismEpistemologyMetaphysicsPhilosophyValue (mathematics)OrganicismArgumentation theoryArgumentativeMathematics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract In the first half of the twentieth century the harshest critics of Hans Driesch’s vitalistic theory depicted it as an animistic view driven by metaphysical moods, while others merely saw it as a barren hypothesis. In the last decades the heuristic value of vitalistic principles was nevertheless suggested. In this chapter I examine the epistemic role of Driesch’s critical vitalism in the progress of embryology. I first show that it did not contribute to falsify mechanical explanations of development such as Wilhelm Roux’s mosaic theory and Driesch’s own embryonic induction model. However, Driesch’s argumentation for vitalism led to the final formulation of the most challenging developmental explanandum of the twentieth century: the harmonious-equipotential system (HES). I point out how major explanans like Charles M. Child’s metabolic gradients, Hans Spemann’s induction fields and Lewis Wolpert’s positional information were conceived as promising answers to Driesch’s problem.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.672
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.023
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.093
GPT teacher head0.209
Teacher spread0.116 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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