Markus Ilkka Eronen

Thank you for inviting us! Very much looking forward to reading the other contributions, and seeing the book in print.

Forgot to tag @bringmannlaura.bsky.social and #PhilSci

(PDF) On worms, mirror neurons and explaining human behavior PDF | A key challenge for psychological theorizing is: At what level(s) should we look for the best explanations and predictions of human behavior? The... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

What is more useful for explaining human behavior, neuroscience or folk psychology? In this new book chapter, co-authored with Laura Bringmann, we argue for the latter. Featuring mirror neurons, tiny worms, and Steve buying a banana! www.researchgate.net/publication/...

ABSTRACT. The levels-of-selection debate is generally taken to be a debate about how natural selection can occur at the various levels of biological organization. In this article, we argue that questions about levels of selection should be analysed separately from questions about levels of organization. In the deflationary proposal we defend, all that is necessary for multilevel selection is that there are cases in which particles are nested in collectives, and that both the collectives and the particles that compose them each separately undergo natural selection. We argue that adopting this deflationary account helps to disentangle the levels of selection and the levels of organization, and thereby contributes to advancing the levels-of-selection debate.

From the new issue:

Markus Eronen & Grant Ramsey
‘What Are the "Levels" in Levels of Selection?'

Read it here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

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🚨Preprint alert! 🚨

In this one, @mieronen.bsky.social and I argue that using network psychometrics, DAGs or BNs to study predictions of the network theory of psychopathology (NT) is conceptually incoherent.

Why? NT either directly contradicts or cannot support causal sufficiency!

1/11

‘Dit is hét moment om als universiteit te stoppen met procentuele loonsverhogingen’ - ScienceGuide De universiteit kan daarmee voorleven dat de sterkste schouders de zwaarste klappen moeten opvangen, schrijft Laura Batstra.

Een pleidooi van Prof. Laura Batstra waar ik het hartgrondig mee eens ben.
"Procentuele verhogingen vergroten loonverschillen en bevoordelen vooral de top van een organisatie." 1/
www.scienceguide.nl/2025/01/dit-...

A researcher

Latest papers: Markus Ilkka Eronen presents a new causal perspective to psychological measurement and argues that psychological measurement is fundamentally different from measurement in the physical sciences in this open access article buff.ly/3HrrqtS

Workshop announcement: We organize a workshop on the interaction between conceptualization and measurement across all scientific disciplines for early-career researchers located in Europe. More info and application here ias.uva.nl/content/even... Thanks for sharing!

That is another possibility (I also refer to Uher in my paper). I decided to stick to the terminology of soft "measurement" because "measurement" is the established and deeply rooted term for what psychologists are doing. However, there is surely also a case to be made for calling it something else.

I am big fan of causal inference, and I would love to have causal psychological measurements! I just think we (mostly) can't have them, in practice.

Many thanks for the kind words and for posting the paper, happy that you liked it!

Thank you for the very helpful review, I don't know which was by you, but they were both very nice and constructive! 😄

Excellent new paper by @mieronen.bsky.social on whether psychologists actually measure anything at all. Lays out a minimal causal condition for measurement, argues that psych vars do not satisfy it & distinguishes between "hard" and "soft measurement.">
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

One of my all-time favorite papers. It IS vague, but also full of great ideas. I have probably read it at least 20 times over the years, but still keep discovering new things in it.

A thoroughly revised version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Levels of Organization in Biology, written by me and Dan Brooks, has now been published! Very happy to see this online, writing it was a nice but long process. plato.stanford.edu/entries/leve...

Supporters of the autonomy of higher-level causation (or explanation) often appeal to proportionality, arguing that higher-level causes are more proportional than their lower-level realizers. Recently, measures based on information theory and causal modelling have been proposed that allow one to shed new light on proportionality and the related notion of specificity. In this article we apply ideas from this literature to the issue of higher- versus lower-level causation (and explanation). Surprisingly, proportionality turns out to be irrelevant for the question of whether higher-level causes (or explanations) can be autonomous; specificity is a much more informative notion for this purpose.

More from the new issue (and open access!):

Quantifying Proportionality and the Limits of Higher-Level Causation and Explanation
—Alexander Gebharter & Markus Eronen

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

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BJPS, volume 74, issue 3 Table of Contents Peter Carruthers — On Valence Augustin Baas & Baptiste Le Bihan — What Does the World Look Like according to Superdeterminism? Alexander Gebharter & Markus I Eronen — Quantifying Proportionality and the Limits of Higher-Level Causation and Explanation Miloud Belkoniene — Grasping in Understanding Manolo Martínez & Marc Artiga — Neural Oscillations as Representations Alfonso García-Lapeña — Truthlikeness for Quantitative Deterministic Laws Cameron Buckner — Black Boxes, or Unflattering Mirrors? Uwe Peters — Science Communication and the Problematic Impact of Descriptive Norms Corey J Maley — Analogue Computation and Representation James DiFrisco — Toward a Theory of Homology Adam Bradley & Quinn Hiroshi Gibson — Monothematic Delusions and the Limits of Rationality

New issue out now, full to the brim of crunchy and nutritious* philosophy of science
www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/bjps/cur...

*Contains science communication & superdeterminism, machine behaviour & monothematic delusions, neural oscillations & analogue computation, & much more...
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