The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Ontology of Complex Systems: Levels of Organization, Perspectives, and Causal Thickets
Abstract
Willard van Orman Quine once said that he had a preference for a desert ontology. This was in an earlier day when concerns with logical structure and ontological simplicity reigned supreme. Ontological genocide was practiced upon whole classes of upper-level or ‘derivative’ entities in the name of elegance, and we were secure in the belief that one strayed irremediably into the realm of conceptual confusion and possible error the further one got from ontic fundamentalism. In those days, one paid more attention to generic worries about possible errors (motivated by our common training in philosophical skepticism) than to actual errors derived from distancing oneself too far from the nitty-gritty details of actual theory, actual inferences from actual data, the actual conditions under which we posited and detected entities, calibrated and ‘burned in’ instruments, identified and rejected artifacts, debugged programs and procedures, explained the mechanisms behind regularities, judged correlations to be spurious, and in general, to the real complexities and richness of actual scientific practice.
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Cites
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Cited by
Rethinking Mechanistic Explanation
Glennan, S. (2002) · Philosophy of Science · doi:10.1086/341857 · Cited by 867
Embracing complexity: Organicism for the 21st century
Gilbert, S. F., & Sarkar, S. (2000) · Developmental Dynamics · doi:10.1002/1097-0177(2000)9999:9999<::aid-dvdy1036>3.0.co;2-a · Cited by 385
Choo, E. K., Ranney, M. L., Chan, T. M., Trueger, N. S., Walsh, A. E., Tegtmeyer, K., McNamara, S. O., Choi, R. Y., & Carroll, C. L. (2015) · Medical Teacher · doi:10.3109/0142159x.2014.993371 · Cited by 272
Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence
Wimsatt, W. C. (1997) · Philosophy of Science · doi:10.1086/392615 · Cited by 255
Self-citationOn emergence, agency, and organization
Kauffman, S., & Clayton, P. (2006) · Biology & Philosophy · doi:10.1007/s10539-005-9003-9 · Cited by 190
Metadata
- Authors
- Wimsatt, W. C.
- Venue
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1994
- Volume
- 20
- Pages
- 207-274
- ISSN
- 0229-7051 (ISSN-L)
- 2633-0490
- OpenAlex
- W1522541236
- Cited by
- 291
- References
- 40
- FWCI
- 10.10
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Wimsatt, W. C. (1994). The Ontology of Complex Systems: Levels of Organization, Perspectives, and Causal Thickets. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1994.10717400
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
