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193A Plea for Pseudo‐Processes†Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (3-4): 303-309. 2017.Is all explanations causal explanation? Puzzles about barometer readings "explain" storms and shadow lengths "explaining" flagpole heights make it attractive to think so. Wesley Salmon (1984) has endorsed this causal thesis. One way to test this thesis is to assess the explanatory import of pseudo-processes. I do so by discussing the concept of heritability, which measures a pseudo-process, and one role it played in the theory of natural selection: explaining response to selection. This will sh…Read more
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44Revisability, a priori truth, and evolutionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 59 (1). 1981.The positivists suggest that some truths may be immune from empirical refutation and yet lacking in rational justification. Quine holds that every proposition is in principle empirically refutable so there are no a priori truths. I’ll provide a working characterization of the idea of “rational revisability” and argue it’s impossible for us to take a chain of rational revision and end up revising everything which we now believe. Quine's position on revisability is also in tension with certain the…Read more
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82Explanation and causation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2): 243-257. 1987.
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371Instrumentalism RevisitedCritica 31 (91): 3-39. 1999.The logical empiricists said some good things about epistemology and scientific method. However, they associated those epistemological ideas with some rather less good ideas about philosophy of language. There is something epistemologically suspect about statements that cannot be tested. But to say that those statements are meaningless is to go too far. And there is something impossible about trying to figure out which of two empirically equivalent theories is true. But to say that those theorie…Read more
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48Two Concepts of CausePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.A distinction is drawn between property causation and token causation. According to the former, a positive causal factor in a population raises the probability of its effects within "background contexts". The latter, which concerns "actual physical connections" between token events, is not explicated here although its distinctness from the first concept and its importance are discussed. The applicability of both is illustrated by two currently controversial issues in evolutionary theory -- the u…Read more
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419A critical review of philosophical work on the units of selection problemPhilosophy of Science 61 (4): 534-555. 1994.The evolutionary problem of the units of selection has elicited a good deal of conceptual work from philosophers. We review this work to determine where the issues now stand
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55Multilevel selection and the return of group-level functionalismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (2): 305-306. 1998.We reinforce Thompson's points by providing a second example of the paradox that makes group selection appear counterintuitive and by discussing the wider implications of multilevel selection theory.
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