The silent hexagon: explaining comb structures.

The paper presents, and discusses, four candidate explanations of the structure, and construction, of the bees' honeycomb. So far, philosophers have used one of these four explanations, based on the mathematical Honeycomb Conjecture, while the other three candidate explanations have been ignored. I...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Synthese Vol. 194; no. 5; pp. 1703 - 1725
Autor principal: Räz, Tim
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature May2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        au: Räz, Tim
        affil: FB Philosophie , Universität Konstanz , 78457 Konstanz Germany
      su:
        Mathematical ability
        Mechanism (Philosophy)
        Reasoning
        Mathematical optimization
        Structural optimization
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          Mathematical ability
          Mechanism (Philosophy)
          Reasoning
          Mathematical optimization
          Structural optimization
      keyword:
        Honeycomb
        Mathematical explanation
        Mechanistic explanation
        Optimization
      ab: The paper presents, and discusses, four candidate explanations of the structure, and construction, of the bees' honeycomb. So far, philosophers have used one of these four explanations, based on the mathematical Honeycomb Conjecture, while the other three candidate explanations have been ignored. I use the four cases to resolve a dispute between Pincock (Mathematics and Scientific Representation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012) and Baker (Synthese, 2015) about the Honeycomb Conjecture explanation. Finally, I find that the two explanations focusing on the construction mechanism are more promising than those focusing exclusively on the resulting, optimal structure. The main reason for this is that optimal structures do not uniquely determine the relevant optimization leading to the optimal structure.
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    language: English
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