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Parsimony and the units of selectionIn Nancy J. Nersessian (ed.), The Process of Science: Contemporary Philosophical Approaches to Understanding Scientific Practice, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1987.
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19Précis of Unto OthersPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 681-684. 2002.It is a challenge to explain how evolutionary altruism can evolve by the process of natural selection, since altruists in a group will be less fit than the selfish individuals in the same group who receive benefits but do not make donations of their own. Darwin proposed a theory of group selection to solve this puzzle. Very simply, even though altruists are less fit than selfish individuals within any single group, groups of altruists are more fit than groups of selfish individuals. If a populat…Read more
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51Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (edited book)The Mit Press. Bradford Books. 1994.Changes and additions in the new edition reflect the ways in which the subject has broadened and deepened on several fronts; more than half of the-chapters are ...
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79Screening-off and the units of selectionPhilosophy of Science 59 (1): 142-152. 1992.Brandon ([1982] 1984, 1990) has argued that Salmon's (1971) concept of screening-off can be used to characterize (i) the idea that natural selection acts directly on an organism's phenotype, only indirectly on its genotype, and (ii) the biological problem of the levels of selection. Brandon also suggests (iii) that screening-off events in a causal chain are better explanations than the events they screen off. This paper critically evaluates Brandon's proposals
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53Fact, fiction, and FitnessJournal of Philosophy 81 (7): 372-384. 1984.Alexander Rosenberg begins his recent article on the concept of fitness with the remark that "debates about the cognitive status of the Darwinian theory of natural selection should have ended long ago." I agree that this obsession needs to be overcome. But Rosenberg repeats some of the old mis- takes and invents epicycles on others. In this comment I will not be able to circumscribe fully the range of topics that an adequate treatment of this cluster of problems demands. A few critical re marks …Read more
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166Two Cornell realisms: moral and scientificPhilosophical Studies 172 (4): 905-924. 2015.Richard Boyd and Nicholas Sturgeon develop distinctive naturalistic arguments for scientific realism and moral realism. Each defends a realist position by an inference to the best explanation. In this paper, I suggest that these arguments for realism should be reformulated, with the law of likelihood replacing inference to the best explanation. The resulting arguments for realism do not work
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82Are human beings part of the rest of nature?Biology and Philosophy 17 (5): 661-671. 2002.Unified explanations seek to situate the traits of human beings in a causal framework that also explains the trait values found in nonhuman species. Disunified explanations claim that the traits of human beings are due to causal processes not at work in the rest of nature. This paper outlines a methodology for testing hypotheses of these two types. Implications are drawn concerning evolutionary psychology, adaptationism, and anti-adaptationism.
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517Natural selection, causality, and laws: What Fodor and piatelli-palmarini got wrongPhilosophy of Science 77 (4): 594-607. 2010.In their book What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini construct an a priori philosophical argument and an empirical biological argument. The biological argument aims to show that natural selection is much less important in the evolutionary process than many biologists maintain. The a priori argument begins with the claim that there cannot be selection for one but not the other of two traits that are perfectly correlated in a population; it concludes that there cannot b…Read more
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283Why not solipsism?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (3): 547-566. 1995.Solipsism poses a familiar epistemological problem. Each of us has beliefs about a world that allegedly exists outside our own minds. The problem is to justify these nonsolipsistic convictions. One standard approach is to argue that the existence of things outside our own sensations may reasonably be inferred from regularities that obtain within our sensations. Certain experiences, which I will call tiger sounds and tiger visual images, exhibit a striking correlation. We can explain the existenc…Read more
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116Coincidences and how to reason about themIn Henk W. De Regt, Stephan Hartmann & Samir Okasha (eds.), EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009, Springer. pp. 355-374. 2012.The naïve see causal connections everywhere. Consider the fact that Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice. The naïve find it irresistible to think that this cannot be a coincidence. Maybe the lottery was rigged or perhaps some uncanny higher power placed its hand upon her brow. Sophisticates respond with an indulgent smile and ask the naïve to view Adams’ double win within a larger perspective. Given all the lotteries there have been, it isn’t at all surprising that someone would w…Read more
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48Replies to commentators on Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?Philosophical Studies 172 (3): 829-840. 2015.Here I reply to Jean Gayon's, Tim Lewens's, and Samir Okasha's comments on Did Darwin write the Origin backwards? The topics addressed include: Darwin's thinking that common ancestry is "evidentially prior" to natural selection; how Darwin uses phylogenetic trees to test hypotheses concerning natural selection; how group and indivdiual selection should be defined, and how each is related to the concept of adaptation
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61Evolutionary theory and the ontological status of propertiesPhilosophical Studies 40 (2). 1981.Quine has developed two reasons for thinking that our ontology should not include the ontological category of properties. His first point is that the criterion for individuating properties is unclear, and the second is that postulating the existence of properties would not explain anything. In what follows I critically examine these two themes, which I will call the clarity argument and the parsimony argument. Although I will suggest that these two arguments are defective, I also will try to sho…Read more
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237Cartwright on explanation and idealizationErkenntnis 57 (3). 2002.Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999) argues that (1) the fundamental laws of physics are true when and only when appropriate ceteris paribus modifiers are attached and that (2) ceteris paribus modifiers describe conditions that are almost never satisfied. She concludes that when the fundamental laws of physics are true, they don't apply in the real world, but only in highly idealized counterfactual situations. In this paper, we argue that (1) and (2) together with an assumption about contraposition ent…Read more
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102Venetian sea levels, british bread prices, and the principle of the common causeBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (2): 331-346. 2001.When two causally independent processes each have a quantity that increases monotonically (either deterministically or in probabilistic expectation), the two quantities will be correlated, thus providing a counterexample to Reichenbach's principle of the common cause. Several philosophers have denied this, but I argue that their efforts to save the principle are unsuccessful. Still, one salvage attempt does suggest a weaker principle that avoids the initial counterexample. However, even this wea…Read more
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186A 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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94Is entropy relevant to the asymmetry between retrodiction and prediction?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (2): 141-160. 1992.The idea that the changing entropy of a system is relevant to explaining why we know more about the system's past than about its future has been criticized on several fronts. This paper assesses the criticisms and clarifies the epistemology of the inference problem. It deploys a Markov process model to investigate the relationship between entropy and temporally asymmetric inference
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54Likelihood, Model Selection, and the Duhem-Quine ProblemJournal of Philosophy 101 (5): 221-241. 2004.In what follows I will discuss an example of the Duhem-Quine problem in which Pr(H A), Pr(A H), and Pr(OI +H& ?A) (where H is the hypothesis, A the auxiliary assumptions, and O the observational prediction) can be construed objectively; however, only some of those quantities are relevant to the analysis that I provide. The example involves medical diagnosis. The goal is to test the hypothesis that someone has tuberculosis; the auxiliary assumptions describe the er- ror characteristics of the tes…Read more
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61The principle of conservatism in cognitive ethologyIn D. Walsh (ed.), Evolution, Naturalism and Mind, Cambridge University Press. pp. 225-238. 2001.Philosophy of mind is, and for a long while has been, 99% metaphysics and 1% epistemology. But the fundamental question cognitive ethologists face is epistemological: what count as evidence that a creature has a mind, and if the creature does have a mind, what evidence is relevant to deciding which mental state should be attributed to it? The usual answer that cognitive ethologists give is that one’s explanation should be “conservative”. It recommends a two-part plausibility ordering: mindless i…Read more
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418A 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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82Explanation and causation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2): 243-257. 1987.
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367Instrumentalism 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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73Parsimony, likelihood, and the principle of the common causePhilosophy of Science 54 (3): 465-469. 1987.The likelihood justification of cladistic parsimony suggested in Sober (1984) is here shown to be incomplete. Even so, cladistic parsimony remains a counter-example to the principle of the common cause formulated by Reichenbach (1956) and Salmon (1975, 1979, 1984)
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54Précis of Unto OthersPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 681-684. 2002.It is a challenge to explain how evolutionary altruism can evolve by the process of natural selection, since altruists in a group will be less fit than the selfish individuals in the same group who receive benefits but do not make donations of their own. Darwin proposed a theory of group selection to solve this puzzle. Very simply, even though altruists are less fit than selfish individuals within any single group, groups of altruists are more fit than groups of selfish individuals. If a populat…Read more
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119Core Questions in Philosophy: A Text with ReadingsPrentice-Hall. 2001.Presented in an engaging lecture-style format, this anthology leads readers through a series of discussions on the basic issues and ideas in philosophy, with lectures supported by related readings from historically important sources. The discussions emphasize the logic of philosophical arguments—and in particular, how they relate to the content of scientific theories such as evolution. This five-part book, made up of “lectures” and readings, covers an introduction to philosophy; the philosophy o…Read more
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58Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth-Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary BiologyIn Jessica Riskin (ed.), Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, University of Chicago Press. pp. 131--62. 2007.The design argument for the existence of God took a probabilistic turn in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. Earlier versions, such as Thomas Aquinas' 5 th way, usually embraced the premise that goal-directed systems (things that "act for an end" or have a function) must have been created by an intelligent designer. This idea – which we might express by the slogan "no design without a designer" – survived into the 17 th and 18 th centuries, 1 and it is with us still in the writings of many creationi…Read more
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343Intelligent design and probability reasoningInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 52 (2): 65-80. 2002.This paper defends two theses about probabilistic reasoning. First, although modus ponens has a probabilistic analog, modus tollens does not – the fact that a hypothesis says that an observation is very improbable does not entail that the hypothesis is improbable. Second, the evidence relation is essentially comparative; with respect to hypotheses that confer probabilities on observation statements but do not entail them, an observation O may favor one hypothesis H1 over another hypothesis H2 , …Read more
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178The evolution of altruism: Correlation, cost, and benefit (review)Biology and Philosophy 7 (2): 177-187. 1992.A simple and general criterion is derived for the evolution of altruism when individuals interact in pairs. It is argued that the treatment of this problem in kin selection theory and in game theory are special cases of this general criterion.
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