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40Language and psychological reality: Some reflections on Chomsky's rules and representations (review)Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (3). 1979.
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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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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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462The design argumentIn William Mann (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion, Wiley-blackwell. 2004.
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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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22Why 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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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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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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298Putting 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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44What Is Evolutionary Altruism?Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18 (sup1): 75-99. 1988.In this paper I want to clarify what biologists are talking about when they talk about the evolution of altruism. I’ll begin by saying something about the common sense concept. This familiar idea I’ll call ‘vernacular altruism.’ One point of doing this is to make it devastatingly obvious that the common sense concept is very different from the concept as it’s used in evolutionary theory. After that preliminary, I’ll describe some features of the evolutionary concept. Then I’ll conclude by briefl…Read more
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446Holism, 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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39Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of HistoryPhilosophical Review 103 (1): 199. 1994.
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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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26The Principle of Conservatism in Cognitive EthologyRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 49 225-238. 2001.Philosophy of mind is, and for a long while has been, 99% metaphysics and 1% epistemology. Attention is lavished on the question of the nature of mind, but questions concerning how we know about minds are discussed much less thoroughly. University courses in philosophy of mind routinely devote a lot of time to dualism, logical behaviourism, the mind/brain identity theory, and functionalism. But what gets said about the kinds of evidence that help one determine what mental states, if any, an indi…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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23Stable 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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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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43Reconstructing 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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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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369Marxism and methodological individualismIn Derek Matravers & Jonathan E. Pike (eds.), Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, Routledge. 2002.
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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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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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95Trait fitness is not a propensity, but fitness variation isStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3): 336-341. 2013.The propensity interpretation of fitness draws on the propensity interpretation of probability, but advocates of the former have not attended sufficiently to problems with the latter. The causal power of C to bring about E is not well-represented by the conditional probability Pr. Since the viability fitness of trait T is the conditional probability Pr, the viability fitness of the trait does not represent the degree to which having the trait causally promotes surviving. The same point holds for…Read more
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36Explanation 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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81Group selection: The theory replaces the bogey manBehavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4): 639-654. 1994.In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s a…Read more
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