In our first post we explained how we came to write The Multiple Realization Book, we articulated our general approach, and we set out our criteria for multiple realization. We also emphasized how our approach demands that we carefully examine scientific evidence for or against multiple realization. Is there good …
First, we’d like to thank John Schwenkler for giving us the opportunity to talk about The Multiple Realization Book (OUP 2016) on Brains. For about twenty years we’ve each been trying to understand the phenomenon of multiple realization and its importance in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. In …
We are grateful to Tom Polger and Larry Shapiro for blogging on The Multiple Realization Book (Oxford University Press, 2016) during the week of March 12-18. To see all their posts on a single page, click here.
Plants have minds because their activities disclose a world of things that have significance for them. Following Evan Thompson, we can call this an enactive approach to plant minds. What is it to disclose a world of things that have significance? Focus on the most familiar case of a thing …
Reading my two previous posts, you might complain that perceiving and remembering require concepts, ideas, or even thoughts, which are basically representations, and plants don’t have those, so they don’t perceive or remember. For the same reason, you might add, they don’t have minds. Do plants have representations? Phototropism can …
Plants eat animals—at least, some plants, and some animals. Well-known, but still fascinating, the trapping of the Venus flytrap is a case of thigmomorphism, a change of shape in response to touch. Since trapping is not affected by the direction of the stimulus, it is not a tropism, like phototropism …
In What a Plant Knows, Daniel Chamowitz reports what plant biologists apparently have known for a long time: although plants generally stay in one place (they’re sessile), they actively negotiate their environments. Not just their cells, like all living cells, constantly do things, but whole plants and their parts—their roots, …
