•  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
  •  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
  •  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
  •  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
  •  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
  •  13
  •  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
  •  17
    I_– _Elliott Sober
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 (1): 237-280. 2000.
  •  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
  •  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
  •  12
    Is it accurate to label Darwin's theory "the theory of evolution by natural selection," given that the concept of common ancestry is at least as central to Darwin's theory? Did Darwin reject the idea that group selection causes characteristics to evolve that are good for the group though bad for the individual? How does Darwin's discussion of God in The Origin of Species square with the common view that he is the champion of methodological naturalism? These are just some of the intriguing questi…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
  •  7
    The argument from design is best understood as a likelihood inference. Its Achilles heel is our lack of knowledge concerning the aims and abilities that the putative designer would have; in consequence, it is impossible to determine whether the observations are more probable under the design hypothesis than they are under the hypothesis of chance. Hypotheses about the role played by natural selection in the history of life also can be evaluated within a likelihood framework, and here too there a…Read more
  •  232
    The principle of parsimony
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (2): 145-156. 1981.
  •  476
    Explanatoriness and Evidence: A Reply to McCain and Poston
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (3): 193-199. 2014.
    We argue elsewhere that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant . Let H be some hypothesis, O some observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then O screens-off E from H: Pr = Pr. This thesis, hereafter “SOT” , is defended by appeal to a representative case. The case concerns smoking and lung cancer. McCain and Poston grant that SOT holds in cases, like our case concerning smoking and lung cancer, that involve frequency data. However, McCain and Poston con…Read more
  •  32
    This book consists of four essays on Darwin’s theory of evolution and three postscripts on contemporary evolutionary theory. The main questions that the chapters address are: How are common ancestry and natural selection related to each other in Darwin’s theory? What were Darwin’s views about group selection and the evolution of altruism? Why did Darwin change his mind about sex ratio, and how are his ideas related to the creationism that preceded him and the evolutionary biology that followed? …Read more
  •  250
    Conjunctive forks and temporally asymmetric inference
    with Martin Barrett
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (1). 1992.
    We argue against some of Reichenbach's claims about causal forks are incorrect. We do not see why the Second Law of Thermodynamics rules out the existence of conjunctive forks open to the past. In addition, we argue that a common effect rarely forms a conjunctive fork with its joint causes, but it sometimes does. Nevertheless, we think there is something to be said for Reichenbach's idea that forks of various kinds are relevant to explaining why we know more about the past than about the future…Read more
  •  40
    Similarities as Evidence for Common Ancestry: A Likelihood Epistemology
    with Mike Steel
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2015.
    Darwin claims in the Origin that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are ‘almost valueless’ as evidence. This second claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we clarify and evaluate these and related matters by using the law of likelihood as an analytic tool and by considering mathematical models of three evolutionary processes: directional selection, stabilizing selection, and drift. Our results apply both to Darwin’s …Read more
  •  38
    Frequency-dependent causation
    Journal of Philosophy 79 (5): 247-253. 1982.
    In what follows, I propose to evaluate Giere's analysis by applying it to a causal process considered in evolutionary theory, namely, natural selection. To say that there is selection for a given trait is to say that possessing that trait causes differential reproductive success. If there is selection for a trait and if no other evolutionary forces impinge and there is no "sampling error" due to random drift, individuals with the trait will on average have more offspring than individuals without…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
  •  566
    Traditional analyses of the curve fitting problem maintain that the data do not indicate what form the fitted curve should take. Rather, this issue is said to be settled by prior probabilities, by simplicity, or by a background theory. In this paper, we describe a result due to Akaike [1973], which shows how the data can underwrite an inference concerning the curve's form based on an estimate of how predictively accurate it will be. We argue that this approach throws light on the theoretical vir…Read more
  •  104
    Parsimony and predictive equivalence
    Erkenntnis 44 (2). 1996.
    If a parsimony criterion may be used to choose between theories that make different predictions, may the same criterion be used to choose between theories that are predictively equivalent? The work of the statistician H. Akaike (1973) is discussed in connection with this question. The results are applied to two examples in which parsimony has been invoked to choose between philosophical theories-Shoemaker's (1969) discussion of the possibility of time without change and the discussion by Smart (…Read more
  •  136
    Although the justification for using cladistic parsimony to infer phylogenetic trees has been extensively discussed, much less attention has been paid to the use of cladistic parsimony to reconstruct the character states of the ancestral species postulated by an inferred phylogenetic tree. These two problems differ in terms of both their inputs and their outputs, as shown in the following table. In the former, one begins with data on the character states of extant species and tries to find the b…Read more
  •  444
    Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism
    Philosophy of Science 47 (3): 350-383. 1980.
    Ernst Mayr has argued that Darwinian theory discredited essentialist modes of thought and replaced them with what he has called "population thinking". In this paper, I characterize essentialism as embodying a certain conception of how variation in nature is to be explained, and show how this conception was undermined by evolutionary theory. The Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary gradualism makes it impossible to say exactly where one species ends and another begins; such line-drawing problems ar…Read more
  •  166
    Two Cornell realisms: moral and scientific
    Philosophical 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
  •  405
    Causal, A Priori True, and Explanatory: A Reply to Lange and Rosenberg
    with Mehmet Elgin
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 167-171. 2015.
    Sober [2011] argues that some causal statements are a priori true and that a priori causal truths are central to explanations in the theory of natural selection. Lange and Rosenberg [2011] criticize Sober's argument. They concede that there are a priori causal truths, but maintain that those truths are only ‘minimally causal’. They also argue that explanations that are built around a priori causal truths are not causal explanations, properly speaking. Here we criticize both of Lange and Rosenber…Read more
  •  150
    Natural selection and distributive explanation: A reply to Neander
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (3): 384-397. 1995.
    The thesis that natural selection explains the frequencies of traits in populations, but not why individual organisms have the traits tehy do, is here defended and elaborated. A general concept of ‘distributive explanation’ is discussed.