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181A Priori Causal Models of Natural SelectionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4). 2011.To evaluate Hume's thesis that causal claims are always empirical, I consider three kinds of causal statement: ?e1 caused e2 ?, ?e1 promoted e2 ?, and ?e1 would promote e2 ?. Restricting my attention to cases in which ?e1 occurred? and ?e2 occurred? are both empirical, I argue that Hume was right about the first two, but wrong about the third. Standard causal models of natural selection that have this third form are a priori mathematical truths. Some are obvious, others less so. Empirical work o…Read more
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887What is wrong with intelligent design?Quarterly Review of Biology 82 (1): 3-8. 2007.This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifiable, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.
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42A Modest Proposal – a Review of John Earman’s Hume’s Abject Failure – the Miracles Argument (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2). 2004.What thesis is Hume trying to establish in his essay “On Miracles” and does he succeed? John Earman’s answer to the latter question is clearly conveyed by the title of his new book. Earman uses a Bayesian representation of the problem to make his case. For Earman, this mode of analysis is both perspicuous and nonanachronistic, in that probability reasoning was central to the 18th century debate about miracles in particular and testimony in general. Indeed, one of Hume’s most interesting antagoni…Read more
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35Extremum descriptions, process laws and minimality heuristicsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2): 232-233. 1991.The examples and concepts that Shoemaker cites are rather heterogeneous. Some distinctions need to be drawn. An optimality thesis involves not just an ordering of options, but a value judgment about them. So let us begin by distinguishing minimality from optimality. And the concept of minimality can play a variety of roles, among which I distinguish between extremum descriptions, statements hypothesizing an optimizing process, and methodological recommendations. Finally, I consider how the three…Read more
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58A Reply to Paul Nolan's 'What's Darwinian About Historical Materialism? A Critique of Levine and Sober'Historical Materialism 11 (3): 177-181. 2003.In our essay ‘What’s Historical About Historical Materialism?’, we drew two contrasts between the Darwinian theory of evolution (ET) and the Marxist theory of historical materialism (HM).1 We described the former as a ‘micro-theory’ and the latter as a ‘macro-theory’. We also argued that, in Darwinian theory, evolution is driven by exogenous forces, specifically, by natural selection induced by environmental factors; whereas historical materialism sees the transformation of a society from feudal…Read more
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175Artifact, cause and genic selectionPhilosophy of Science 49 (2): 157-180. 1982.Several evolutionary biologists have used a parsimony argument to argue that the single gene is the unit of selection. Since all evolution by natural selection can be represented in terms of selection coefficients attaching to single genes, it is, they say, "more parsimonious" to think that all selection is selection for or against single genes. We examine the limitations of this genic point of view, and then relate our criticisms to a broader view of the role of causal concepts and the dangers …Read more
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119Two Uses of UnificationVienna Circle Institute Yearbook 10 205-216. 2003.Carl Hempel1 set the tone for subsequent philosophical work on scientific explanation by resolutely locating the problem he wanted to address outside of epistemology. “Hempel’s problem,” as I will call it, was not to say what counts as evidence that X is the explanation of Y. Rather, the question was what it means for X to explain Y. Hempel’s theory of explanation and its successors don’t tell you what to believe; instead, they tell you which of your beliefs (if any) can be said to explain a giv…Read more
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297Putting the function back into functionalismIn William G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and cognition: a reader, Blackwell. 1990.This paper describes how functionalism as a view of the mind/body problem changes, if the concept of Turing machine functionalism is replaced by teleological functionalism. The latter is evaluated in light of the on0going debate about adaptationism in evolutoinary biology.
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111In S. Psillos and M. Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming.
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33Instrumentalism, Parsimony, and the Akaike FrameworkPhilosophy of Science 69 (S3). 2002.Akaike's framework for thinking about model selection in terms of the goal of predictive accuracy and his criterion for model selection have important philosophical implications. Scientists often test models whose truth values they already know, and they often decline to reject models that they know full well are false. Instrumentalism helps explain this pervasive feature of scientific practice, and Akaike's framework helps provide instrumentalism with the epistemology it needs. Akaike's criteri…Read more
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38Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of HistoryPhilosophical Review 103 (1): 199. 1994.
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102Temporally oriented lawsSynthese 94 (2). 1993.A system whose expected state changes with time cannot have both a forward-directed translationally invariant probabilistic law and a backward-directed translationally invariant law. When faced with this choice, science seems to favor the former. An asymmetry between cause and effect may help to explain why temporally oriented laws are usually forward-directed.
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10Problems for environmentalismIn Christopher Stephens & Mohan Matthen (eds.), Elsevier Handbook in Philosophy of Biology, Elsevier. pp. 144--365. 2004.
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"Comments on Maynard Smith's" How to model evolutionIn John Dupré (ed.), The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality : Conference on Evolution and Information : Papers, Mit Press. pp. 133--145. 1987.
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249Summary of: ‘Unto Others. The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior'Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (1-2): 185-206. 2000.The hypothesis of group selection fell victim to a seemingly devastating critique in 1960s evolutionary biology. In Unto Others (1998), we argue to the contrary, that group selection is a conceptually coherent and empirically well documented cause of evolution. We suggest, in addition, that it has been especially important in human evolution. In the second part of Unto Others, we consider the issue of psychological egoism and altruism -- do human beings have ultimate motives concerning the well-…Read more
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442Holism, Individualism, and the Units of SelectionPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980. 1980.Developing a definition of group selection, and applying that definition to the dispute in the social sciences between methodological holists and methodological individualists, are the two goals of this paper. The definition proposed distinguishes between changes in groups that are due to group selection and changes in groups that are artefacts of selection processes occurring at lower levels of organization. It also explains why the existence of group selection is not implied by the mere fact t…Read more
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1Three differences between deliberation and evolutionIn Peter Danielson (ed.), Modeling rationality, morality, and evolution, Oxford University Press. 1998.In this paper, I'll explore three contexts in which the heuristic of personification yields the wrong answer. They all come from game theoretic discussion of altruism and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Whether it is applied to evolution or to rational deliberation, game theory models situations that involve frequency dependence. In the evolutionary case, how fit a trait is, and whether it is more or less fit than the alternatives, depends on the composition of the population (Maynard Smith 1982). In th…Read more
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160Parsimony Arguments in Science and Philosophy—A Test Case for Naturalism PProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 83 (2). 2009.Parsimony arguments are advanced in both science and philosophy. How are they related? This question is a test case for Naturalismp, which is the thesis that philosophical theories and scientific theories should be evaluated by the same criteria. In this paper, I describe the justifications that attach to two types of parsimony argument in science. In the first, parsimony is a surrogate for likelihood. In the second, parsimony is relevant to estimating how accurately a model will predict new dat…Read more
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97Common cause explanationPhilosophy of Science 51 (2): 212-241. 1984.Russell (1948), Reichenbach (1956), and Salmon (1975, 1979) have argued that a fundamental principle of science and common sense is that "matching" events should not be chalked up to coincidence, but should be explained by postulating a common cause. Reichenbach and Salmon provided this intuitive idea with a probabilistic formulation, which Salmon used to argue for a version of scientific realism. Van Fraassen (1980, 1982) showed that the principle, so construed, runs afoul of certain results in…Read more
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13Précis of Unto OthersPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 681-684. 2002.The substance of the commentaries, however, reveals considerable disagreement about how UO conceptualizes the idea of group selection. Dennett describes the issues as “mind-twistingly elusive and slippery” and hints that it is mere hype to say that group selection has been revived. Barrett and Godfrey-Smith discuss the problem of multiple perspectives at length and claim that we are too liberal in our definition of groups. We believe that these criticisms obscure the simplicity of the basic ques…Read more
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41Reconstructing The Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and InferenceMIT Press. 1988.Reconstructing the Past seeks to clarify and help resolve the vexing methodological issues that arise when biologists try to answer such questions as whether human beings are more closely related to chimps than they are to gorillas. It explores the case for considering the philosophical idea of simplicity/parsimony as a useful principle for evaluating taxonomic theories of evolutionary relationships. For the past two decades, evolutionists have been vigorously debating the appropriate methods th…Read more
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38From a Biological Point of View: Essays in Evolutionary PhilosophyCambridge University Press. 1994.Elliott Sober is one of the leading philosophers of science and is a former winner of the Lakatos Prize, the major award in the field. This new collection of essays will appeal to a readership that extends well beyond the frontiers of the philosophy of science. Sober shows how ideas in evolutionary biology bear in significant ways on traditional problems in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Amongst the topics addressed are psychological egoism, solipsism, and the in…Read more
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26Stable Cooperation in Iterated Prisoners' DilemmasEconomics and Philosophy 8 (1): 127. 1992.When does self-interest counsel cooperation? This question pertains both to the labile behaviors produced by rational deliberation and to the more instinctive and fixed behaviors produced by natural selection. In both cases, a standard starting point for the investigation is the one-shot prisoners' dilemma. In this game, each player has the option of producing one or the other of two behaviors. The pay-offs to the row player are as follows
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84Morality and ‘Unto Others': Response to commentary discussionJournal of Consciousness Studies 7 (1-2): 257-268. 2000.We address the following issues raised by the commentators of our target article and book: (1) the problem of multiple perspectives; (2) how to define group selection; (3) distinguishing between the concepts of altruism and organism; (4) genetic versus cultural group selection; (5) the dark side of group selection; (6) the relationship between psychological and evolutionary altruism; (7) the question of whether the psychological questions can be answered; (8) psychological experiments. We thank …Read more
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32What would happen if everyone did it? A reply to Collier and Giere on frequency dependent causationPhilosophy of Science 52 (1): 141-150. 1985.In a recent article (Sober 1982), I criticized an account of causation proposed by Giere (1979, 1980) by describing a series of examples concerning natural selection. Collier (1983) has criticized my criticisms, saying that I misapplied Giere's proposal and misconstrued the biology. More recently, Giere (1984) has defended his theory against my criticisms. Here I argue that my criticisms still stand
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32Reichenbach’s cubical universe and the problem of the external worldSynthese 181 (1): 3-21. 2011.This paper is a sympathetic critique of the argument that Reichenbach develops in Chap. 2 of Experience and Prediction for the thesis that sense experience justifies belief in the existence of an external world. After discussing his attack on the positivist theory of meaning, I describe the probability ideas that Reichenbach presents. I argue that Reichenbach begins with an argument grounded in the Law of Likelihood but that he then endorses a different argument that involves prior probabilities…Read more
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35Explanation in Biology: Let's Razor Ockham's RazorRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 27 73-93. 1990.When philosophers discuss the topic of explanation, they usually have in mind the following question: given the beliefs one has and some proposition that one wishes to explain, which subset of the beliefs constitutes an explanation of the target proposition? That is, the philosophical ‘problem of explanation’ typically has bracketed the issue of how one obtains the beliefs; they are taken as given. The problem of explanation has been the problem of understanding the relation ‘x explains y’. Sinc…Read more
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96Common causes and decision theoryPhilosophy of Science 53 (2): 223-245. 1986.One of us (Eells 1982) has defended traditional evidential decision theory against prima facie Newcomb counterexamples by assuming that a common cause forms a conjunctive fork with its joint effects. In this paper, the evidential theory is defended without this assumption. The suggested rationale shows that the theory's assumptions are not about the nature of causality, but about the nature of rational deliberation. These presuppositions are weak enough for the argument to count as a strong just…Read more
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55Is the mind an adaptation for coping with environmental complexity?Biology and Philosophy 12 (4): 539-550. 1997.
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