Tudor M Baetu

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of Bristol

It has been argued that intuition, perception and mechanistic rationales generate knowledge of singular causation unambiguously supporting the metaphysical view that causation is a local relationship between individual events. The analysis conducted in this paper contradicts this line of reasoning. Intuition, perception and mechanistic rationales r...

I argue that informational models of consciousness, including those proposed by the Integrated Information Theory, don’t presuppose or entail any particular view about the physical or metaphysical nature of consciousness. Such models only tell us how certain properties of consciousness can be mathematically described, thus providing a quantitative...

Rationale The GRADE system of clinical recommendations has deontic implications and can discriminate between mandatory, prohibited, and merely permitted medical decisions. Aims and Objectives The recommendation categories of the GRADE framework map onto deontological imperatives that can lead to a better understanding and management of allegations...

David Chalmers advocates the view that the phenomenon of consciousness is fundamentally different from all other phenomena studied in the life sciences, positing a uniquely hard problem that precludes the possibility of a mechanistic explanation. In this paper, I evaluate three demarcation criteria for dividing phenomena into hard and easy problems...

Causal pluralism can be defended not only in respect to causal concepts and methodological guidelines, but also at the finer-grained level of causal inference from a particular source of evidence for causation. An argument for this last variety of pluralism is made based on an analysis of causal inference from randomized experiments (RCTs). Here, t...

Donald Price and James Barrell, two eminent pain researchers, argue that every time an experiment demonstrates that a biological variable is causally relevant to a psychological outcome, we are entitled to further rule out a possible mind–brain identity or supervenience relationship. As experimental evidence for two-way causal links between biologi...

According to the hypothesis-generator account, valid extrapolations from a source to a target system are circular, since they rely on knowledge of relevant similarities and differences that can only be obtained by investigating the target, thus removing the need to extrapolate; hence, extrapolative reasoning can only be useful as a method for gener...

It has been argued that supervenience generates unavoidable confounding problems for interventionist accounts of causation, to the point that we must choose between interventionism and supervenience. According to one solution, the dilemma can be defused by excluding non-causal determinants of an outcome as potential confounders. I argue that this s...

Despite the consensus promoted by the evidence-based medicine framework, many authors continue to express doubts about the superiority of randomized controlled trials. This paper evaluates four objections targeting the legitimacy, feasibility, and extrapolation problems linked to the experimental practice of random allocation. I argue that random a...

Current debates surrounding the virtues and shortcomings of randomization are symptomatic of a lack of appreciation of the fact that causation can be inferred by two distinct inference methods, each requiring its own, specific experimental design. There is a non-statistical type of inference associated with controlled experiments in basic biomedica...

An important strategy in the discovery of biological mechanisms involves the piecing together of experimental results from interventions. However, if mechanisms are investigated by means of ideal interventions, as defined by James Woodward and others, then the kind of information revealed is insufficient to discriminate between modular and non-modu...

The paper discusses methodological guidelines for evaluating mechanistic explanations. According to current accounts, a satisfactory mechanistic explanation should include all of the relevant features of the mechanism, its component entities and activities, and their properties and organization, as well as exhibit productive continuity. It is not s...

Both clinical research and basic science rely on the epistemic practice of extrapolation from surrogate models, to the point that explanatory accounts presented in review papers and biology textbooks are in fact composite pictures reconstituted from data gathered in a variety of distinct experimental setups. This raises two new challenges to previo...

Mechanisms are organized systems of parts that operate in such a way as to produce phenomena. It would seem, however, that mechanistic explanations can be indefinitely detailed and expanded by bottoming out at lower levels of composition and by taking into consideration higher-level systems. Given the possibility of an indefinite descent to lower l...

Despite the philosophical clash between deductive-nomological and mechanistic accounts of explanation, in scientific practice, both approaches are required in order to achieve more complete explanations and guide the discovery process. I defend this thesis by discussing the case of mathematical models in systems biology. Not only such models comple...

A survey of models in immunology is conducted and distinct kinds of models are characterized based on whether models are material or conceptual, the distinctiveness of their epistemic purpose, and the criteria for evaluating the goodness of a model relative to its intended purpose. I argue that the diversity of models in interdisciplinary fields su...

Examples from the sciences showing that mechanisms do not always succeed in producing the phenomena for which they are responsible have led some authors to conclude that the regularity requirement can be eliminated from characterizations of mechanisms. In this article, I challenge this conclusion and argue that a minimal form of regularity is inext...

This paper provides an account of the experimental conditions required for establishing whether correlating or causally relevant factors are constitutive components of a mechanism connecting input (start) and output (finish) conditions. I argue that two-variable experiments, where both the initial conditions and a component postulated by the mechan...

In this article, I argue that genomic programs are not substitutes for multi-causal molecular mechanistic explanations of inheritance, but abstract representations of the same sort as mechanism schemas already described in the philosophical literature. On this account, the program analogy is not reductionistic and does not ignore or underestimate t...

Understanding the role mechanistic constraints play in shaping evolution can relieve the tension between the generally accepted intuition that there are no strict laws in biology and empirical findings showing that evolutionary processes are biased toward preferred outcomes. Mechanistic constraints explain why some evolutionary outcomes are more pr...

While the Human Genome Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) concept of the gene can accommodate a wide variety of genomic sequences contributing to phenotypic outcomes, it fails to specify how sequences should be grouped when dealing with complex loci consisting of adjacent/overlapping sequences contributing to the same phenotype, distant sequences shown...

Different concepts define species at the pattern-level grouping of organisms into discrete clusters, the level of the processes operating within and between populations leading to the formation and maintenance of these clusters, or the level of the inner-organismic genetic and molecular mechanisms that contribute to species cohesion or promote spec...

The purpose of this article is to update and defend syntax-based (conserved DNA-sequence motifs) gene concepts. I show how syntax-based concepts have been and can be extended to accommodate complex cases of genome expression, regulation, and processing. In response to difficult cases and causal parity objections, I argue that the syntax-based appro...

Emergent antireductionism in biological sciences states that even though all living cells and organisms are composed of molecules, molecular wholes are characterized by emergent properties that can only be understood from the perspective of cellular and organismal levels of composition. Thus, an emergence claim (molecular wholes are characterized b...

Current accounts of the relationship between classical genetics and molecular biology favour the 'explanatory extension' thesis, according to which molecular biology elucidates aspects of inheritance unexplained by classical genetics. The chapter identifies however an unresolved tension between the 'explanatory extension' account and examples of 'e...

Kenneth Waters and Marcel Weber argue that the joint use of distinct gene concepts and the transfer of knowledge between classical and molecular analyses in contemporary scientific practice is possible because classical and molecular concepts of the gene refer to overlapping chromosomal segments and the DNA sequences associated with these segments....

Apoptosis in mammalian cells can be initiated through two major interrelated pathways, one involving engagement of the TNF family of death receptors, the other involving the release of cytochrome c from mitochondria. Unlike other members of the TNF ligand family, TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) preferentially induces apoptosis in tumo...

The NF-kappaB family of transcription factors functions broadly in the host control of immunoregulatory gene expression, inflammation, and apoptosis. Using Jurkat T cells engineered to inducibly express a transdominant repressor of IkappaBalpha, we examined the role of NF-kappaB in the regulation of cytokine and apoptotic gene expression. In this T...

The NF-kappaB family of transcription factors is involved in immunoregulation, cellular differentiation and growth. Using Jurkat cells engineered to inducibly express a transdominant form of IkappaBalpha (TD-IkappaBalpha), we have found two novel genes regulated NF-kappaB transcription factor, interleukin 13 and TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligan...