•  39
    Critical Commentary on Unto Others
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 697-701. 2002.
    Altruism has both an evolutionary and a psychological meaning. As the term is used in evolutionary theory, a trait is deemed altruistic if it reduces the fitness of the actor and enhances the fitness of someone else. In its psychological sense, the thesis that we have altruistic ultimate motives asserts that we care about the welfare of others, not just as a means of enhancing our own well-being, but as an end in itself. In Unto Others (hereafter UO), we consider both evolutionary altruism (Part…Read more
  •  336
    Instrumentalism, parsimony, and the akaike framework
    Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3). 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
  •  350
    Epiphenomenalism - the do's and the don 'ts'
    In G. Wolters & Peter K. Machamer (eds.), Thinking About Causes: From Greek Philosophy to Modern physics, University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 235-264. 2007.
    When philosophers defend epiphenomenalist doctrines, they often do so by way of a priori arguments. Here we suggest an empirical approach that is modeled on August Weismann’s experimental arguments against the inheritance of acquired characters. This conception of how epiphenomenalism ought to be developed helps clarify some mistakes in two recent epiphenomenalist positions – Jaegwon Kim’s (1993) arguments against mental causation, and the arguments developed by Walsh (2000), Walsh, Lewens, and …Read more
  •  215
    The evolution of rationality
    Synthese 46 (January): 95-120. 1981.
    How could the fundamental mental operations which facilitate scientific theorizing be the product of natural selection, since it appears that such theoretical methods were neither used nor useful "in the cave"-i.e., in the sequence of environments in which selection took place? And if these wired-in information processing techniques were not selected for, how can we view rationality as an adaptation? It will be the purpose of this paper to address such questions as these, and in the process to s…Read more
  •  42
    Précis of Unto Others
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3). 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
  •  1134
    Darwin y la selección de grupo
    Ludus Vitalis 17 (32): 101-143. 2009.
    Do traits evolve because they are good for the group, or do they evolve because they are good for the individual organisms that have them? The question is whether groups, rather than individual organisms, are ever “units of selection.” My exposition begins with the 1960’s, when the idea that traits evolve because they are good for the group was criticized, not just for being factually mistaken, but for embodying a kind of confused thinking that is fundamentally at odds with the logic that Darwin…Read more
  •  34
    Some comment's on Rosenberg's review
    Philosophy of Science 63 (3): 465-469. 1996.
    I am grateful to Philip Kitcher for inviting me to comment on Alexander Rosenberg's (1996) review of Philosophy of Biology (Sober 1993) and to Rosenberg for his kind words about my book at the very beginning and the very end of his review. However, I cannot help feeling that most of the material in Rosenberg's review describes a different book from the one I wrote. Of the four philosophical claims that he ascribes to me, only one of them is asserted or implied in Philosophy of Biology. Rosenberg…Read more
  •  152
    Hedonism and Butler's stone
    Ethics 103 (1): 97-103. 1992.
    As a species of egoism, Hedonism holds that our only ultimate pleasure is the self-directed desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Bishop Butler is widely regarded as having refuted hedonism. I argue that Butler's argument failed to undermine Hedonism, because his premises concern what people want, while Hedonism concerns why people have the wants they do. Even if the desires for external things were a prerequisite for obtaining pleasure, nothing would follow about why people desire exte…Read more
  •  27
    What's Historical About Historical Materialism?
    with Andrew Levine
    Journal of Philosophy 82 (6): 304. 1985.
    It is widely held that in the eighteenth and nineteenth and centuries history came into its own as a proper object of scientific scrutiny, and that the work of Darwin and Marx was decisive in this regard. We readily concede the revolutionary character of Darwinism and Marxism in relation to earlier accounts of natural and human history. And we agree too, as is widely supposed, that there are important conceptual affinities joining Darwin's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of history. Howeve…Read more
  •  113
    Physicalism from a Probabilistic Point of View
    Philosophical Studies 95 (1-2): 135-174. 1999.
    In what follows, I’ll discuss both the metaphysics and the epistemology of supervenience from a probabilistic point of view. The first half of this paper will explore how supervenience claims are related to other issues; these will include the thesis that physics is causally complete, the claim that there are emergent properties, the idea that mental properties are causally efficacious, and the notion that there are scientific laws about supervenient properties that generalize over systems that …Read more
  •  210
    Conway Morris argues against Stephen Jay Gould's argument that the history of life is radically contingent by describing the abundance of convergences, wherein different lineages starting in different states, arrive at the same adaptations. A standard example is the evolution of the camera eye. This review assesses the validity of Conway Morris' argument.
  •  82
    The philosophical significance of Stein’s paradox
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (3): 411-433. 2017.
    Charles Stein discovered a paradox in 1955 that many statisticians think is of fundamental importance. Here we explore its philosophical implications. We outline the nature of Stein’s result and of subsequent work on shrinkage estimators; then we describe how these results are related to Bayesianism and to model selection criteria like AIC. We also discuss their bearing on scientific realism and instrumentalism. We argue that results concerning shrinkage estimators underwrite a surprising form o…Read more
  •  30
    Evolution without naturalism
    In L. Kvanvig Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 187-221. 2013.
    God and numbers provide two challenges to metaphysical naturalism–the former if God exists and is a supernatural being, the latter if numbers exist and mathematical Platonism is true. Evolutionary theory is often described as having a commitment to naturalism, but this is doubly wrong. The theory is neutral on the question of whether God exists and mathematical evolutionary theory entails that numbers exist. The chapter develops the point about theistic neutrality by considering what evolutionar…Read more
  •  80
    Objective Probabilities in Number Theory
    with J. Ellenberg
    Philosophia Mathematica 19 (3): 308-322. 2011.
    Philosophers have explored objective interpretations of probability mainly by considering empirical probability statements. Because of this focus, it is widely believed that the logical interpretation and the actual-frequency interpretation are unsatisfactory and the hypothetical-frequency interpretation is not much better. Probabilistic assertions in pure mathematics present a new challenge. Mathematicians prove theorems in number theory that assign probabilities. The most natural interpretatio…Read more
  •  72
    Ockham’s Razors: A User’s Manual
    Cambridge University Press. 2015.
    Ockham's razor, the principle of parsimony, states that simpler theories are better than theories that are more complex. It has a history dating back to Aristotle and it plays an important role in current physics, biology, and psychology. The razor also gets used outside of science - in everyday life and in philosophy. This book evaluates the principle and discusses its many applications. Fascinating examples from different domains provide a rich basis for contemplating the principle's promises …Read more
  •  183
    Confirmation and law-likeness
    Philosophical Review 97 (1): 93-98. 1988.
    Nelson Goodman suggests that a generalization of the form “all A’s are B” is confirmable by an observed instance only if the generalization is law-like. Jackson and Pargetter deny this and give examples of how accidental generalizations can be confirmed. A possible response from Goodman appears to make these accidental generalizations look law-like, but I show it’s defective. And Jackson and Pargetter's substitute nomological condition fares no better than Goodman’s. Because of the multiplicity …Read more
  •  97
    What is psychological egoism?
    Behaviorism 17 (2): 89-102. 1989.
    Egoism and altruism need not be characterized as single factor theories of motivation, according to which there is a single kind of preference that moves people to action. Rather, each asserts a claim of causal primacy—a claim as to which sort of preference is the more powerful influence on behavior. This paper shows that this idea of causal primacy can be clarified in a standard scientific way. This formulation explains why many observed behaviors fail to discriminate between the hypothesis tha…Read more
  •  117
    Explanation in Biology: Let's Razor Ockham's Razor
    Royal 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
  •  285
  •  162
    Mathematics and indispensability
    Philosophical Review 102 (1): 35-57. 1993.
    Realists persuaded by indispensability arguments af- firm the existence of numbers, genes, and quarks. Van Fraassen's empiricism remains agnostic with respect to all three. The point of agreement is that the posits of mathematics and the posits of biology and physics stand orfall together. The mathematical Platonist can take heart from this consensus; even if the existence of num- bers is still problematic, it seems no more problematic than the existence of genes or quarks. If the two positions …Read more
  •  13
  •  232
    The principle of parsimony
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (2): 145-156. 1981.
  •  105
    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
  •  17
    I_– _Elliott Sober
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 (1): 237-280. 2000.
  •  131
    I discuss two versions of the doomsday argument. According to ``Gott's Line'',the fact that the human race has existed for 200,000 years licences the predictionthat it will last between 5100 and 7.8 million more years. According to ``Leslie'sWedge'', the fact that I currently exist is evidence that increases the plausibilityof the hypothesis that the human race will come to an end sooner rather than later.Both arguments rest on substantive assumptions about the sampling process thatunderlies our…Read more
  •  485
    The multiple realizability argument against reductionism
    Philosophy of Science 66 (4): 542-564. 1999.
    Reductionism is often understood to include two theses: (1) every singular occurrence that the special sciences can explain also can be explained by physics; (2) every law in a higher-level science can be explained by physics. These claims are widely supposed to have been refuted by the multiple realizability argument, formulated by Putnam (1967, 1975) and Fodor (1968, 1975). The present paper criticizes the argument and identifies a reductionistic thesis that follows from one of the argument's …Read more
  •  38
    Quine
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 237-299. 2000.
    In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', Quine attacks the analytic/synthetic distinction and defends a doctrine that I call epistemological holism. Now, almost fifty years after the article's appearance, what are we to make of these ideas? I suggest that the philosophical naturalism that Quine did so much to promote should lead us to reject Quine's brief against the analytic/synthetic distinction; I also argue that Quine misunderstood Carnap's views on analyticity. As for epistemological holism, I claim …Read more
  •  60
    Evolutionary altruism, psychological egoism, and morality: disentangling the phenotypes
    In Matthew Nitecki & Doris Nitecki (eds.), Evolutionary Ethics, Suny Press. pp. 199--216. 1993.
    I want to explain some of the gaps I see between the concepts of morality and altruism. Indeed, there are three concepts here that need to be disentangled, not just two. Evolutionists use the terms “altruism” and “selfishness” in a way that differs from the usage found in ordinary parlance. So my goal is to separate evolutionary altruism, psychological altruism, and morality. Morality includes a variety of characteristics. There is more to morality than altruism. If we can avoid the mistake of t…Read more
  •  62
    Six sayings about adaptationism
    In David L. Hull & Michael Ruse (eds.), The philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press. pp. 72--86. 1973.
    Adaptationism is a doctrine that has meant different things to different people. In this essay, I want to isolate and discuss a reading of adaptationism that makes it a non-trivial empirical thesis about the history of life. I'll take adaptationism to be the following claim: natural selection has been the only important cause of most of the phenotypic traits found in most species. I won't try to determine whether adaptationism, so defined, is true. Rather, my task will be one of clarification. W…Read more