•  24
    Précis of Evidence and Evolution: The Logic behind the Science
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3): 661-665. 2011.
    Evidence and Evolution has four chapters: (1) Evidence, (2) Intelligent Design, (3) Natural Selection, and (4) Common Ancestry. The first chapter develops tools that are used in the rest of the book, though more ideas about evidence are added. In Chapter 1, I endorse a pluralistic outlook—Bayesianism is fine in some inference problems, likelihoodism in others, and AIC in still others. In Chapter Two, on intelligent design, I try to develop the strongest possible formulation of the design argumen…Read more
  •  7
    Does "Fitness" Fit the Facts?
    Journal of Philosophy 84 (4): 220-223. 1987.
    My critical remarks' on Alexander Rosenberg’s article on fitness have elicited a rejoinder from Mary Williams and Rosenberg himself. They charge that my criticisms are a “tissue of misunderstandings” (738); since they misunderstand my own position in fundamental ways, it may help to try to clarify the points that divide us. In the interest of brevity, I will ignore technical issues concerning the internal correctness of Williams’s axiomatization and will focus on questions of broader philosophic…Read more
  •  18
    Fact, Fiction, and Fitness
    Journal of Philosophy 81 (7): 372-383. 1984.
    Alexander Rosenberg began 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 need to be overcome. But Rosenberg repeats some of the old mistakes and invents epicycles on others. In this comment I will not be able to circumscribe fully the range of the topics that an adequate treatment of this cluster of problems demands. A few critical comments …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
  •  219
    What's historical about historical materialism?
    with Andrew Levine
    Journal of Philosophy 82 (6): 304-326. 1985.
  •  167
    Panglossian functionalism and the philosophy of mind
    Synthese 64 (August): 165-93. 1985.
    I want to explore what happens to two philosophical issues when we assume that the mind, a functional device, is to be understood by the same sort of functional analysis that guides biological investigation of other organismic systems and characteristics. The first problem area concerns the concept of rationality, its connection with reliability and reproductive success, and the status of rationality hypotheses in attribution of beliefs. It has been argued that ascribing beliefs to someone requi…Read more
  •  10
    These essays by leading scientists and philosophers address conceptual issues that arise in the theory and practice of evolutionary biology. The third edition of this widely used anthology has been substantially revised and updated. Four new sections have been added: on women in the evolutionary process, evolutionary psychology, laws in evolutionary theory, and race as social construction or biological reality. Other sections treat fitness, units of selection, adaptationism, reductionism, essent…Read more
  •  102
    Responses to Fitelson, Sansom, and Sarkar (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3): 692-704. 2011.
  •  140
    Evolutionary theory and the reality of macro probabilities
    In Ellery Eells & James H. Fetzer (eds.), The Place of Probability in Science, Springer. pp. 133--60. 2010.
    Evolutionary theory is awash with probabilities. For example, natural selection is said to occur when there is variation in fitness, and fitness is standardly decomposed into two components, viability and fertility, each of which is understood probabilistically. With respect to viability, a fertilized egg is said to have a certain chance of surviving to reproductive age; with respect to fertility, an adult is said to have an expected number of offspring.1 There is more to evolutionary theory tha…Read more
  •  232
    The principle of parsimony
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (2): 145-156. 1981.
  •  49
    Epistemology for Empiricists
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 18 (1): 39-61. 1993.
  •  21
    Optimist/pessimist
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (1): 87-88. 1987.
    The reception so far of Kitcher's Vaulting Ambition reminds me of the old saw about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. Looking at the same glass of water, the former sees it as half full while the latter sees it as half empty. Some have seen Kitcher's book as a vindication of the possibility of an evolutionary science of human behavior; others have seen it as a devastating critique of the most influential efforts to date to construct such a science. As in the joke about the wate…Read more
  •  24
    Coincidences and How to Reason about Them
    In Henk W. de Regt (ed.), Epsa Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009, Springer. pp. 355--374. 2012.
    Suppose that several observations “coincide,” meaning that they are similar in some interesting respect. Is this coinciding a mere coincidence, or does it derive from a common cause? Those who reason about this kind of question—whether they embrace the first answer or the second—often deploy a mode of inference that I call probabilistic modus tollens. In this chapter I criticize probabilistic modus tollens and consider likelihood and Bayesian frameworks for reasoning about coincidences. I also c…Read more
  •  94
    Entropy increase and information loss in Markov models of evolution
    with Mike Steel
    Biology and Philosophy 26 (2): 223-250. 2011.
    Markov models of evolution describe changes in the probability distribution of the trait values a population might exhibit. In consequence, they also describe how entropy and conditional entropy values evolve, and how the mutual information that characterizes the relation between an earlier and a later moment in a lineage’s history depends on how much time separates them. These models therefore provide an interesting perspective on questions that usually are considered in the foundations of phys…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
  •  899
    In their 2010 book, Biology’s First Law, D. McShea and R. Brandon present a principle that they call ‘‘ZFEL,’’ the zero force evolutionary law. ZFEL says (roughly) that when there are no evolutionary forces acting on a population, the population’s complexity (i.e., how diverse its member organisms are) will increase. Here we develop criticisms of ZFEL and describe a different law of evolution; it says that diversity and complexity do not change when there are no evolutionary causes.
  •  13
    11 Metaphysical and epistemological issues in modern Darwinian theory
    In J. Hodges & Gregory Radick (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge University Press. pp. 267. 2003.
  •  30
    Authors' response
    Metascience 10 (2): 202-208. 2001.
    We thank Karen Canfell, Hamish Spencer and Ben Oldroyd for their commentaries. Below are some comments on the points they raise: 1. Is the Group Selection Debate Merely a Matter of Semantics? 2. Multi-Level Selection Theory versus Genic Selectionism 3. Heritability and Group Selection in Human Beings 4. Adaptationism.
  •  20
    Representation and psychological reality
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1): 38-39. 1980.
    In this brief space I want to describe how Chomsky's analysis of "psychological reality" departs from what I think is a fairly standard construal of the idea. This familiar formulation arises from distinguishing between someone's following a rule and someone's acting in conformity with a rule. The former idea, but not the latter, involves the idea that the person has some mental representation of the rule that plays a certain causal role in determining behavior. Although there may be many gramma…Read more
  •  125
    Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science
    Cambridge University Press. 2008.
    How should the concept of evidence be understood? And how does the concept of evidence apply to the controversy about creationism as well as to work in evolutionary biology about natural selection and common ancestry? In this rich and wide-ranging book, Elliott Sober investigates general questions about probability and evidence and shows how the answers he develops to those questions apply to the specifics of evolutionary biology. Drawing on a set of fascinating examples, he analyzes whether cla…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
  •  127
    Instrumentalism Revisited
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 10 (91): 59-68. 2001.
    Instrumentalism is usually understood as a semantic thesis: scientific theories are neither true nor false, but are merely instruments for making predictions. Scientific realists are on firm ground when they reject this semantic claim. This paper focuses on epistemological rather than semantic instrumentalism. This form of instrumentalism claims that theories are to be judged by their ability to make accurate predictions, and that predictive accuracy is the only consideration that matters in the…Read more
  •  19
    Précis of Unto Others
    Philosophy 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
  •  160
    Apportioning Causal Responsibility
    Journal of Philosophy 85 (6): 303. 1988.
    (Journal of Philosophy, 1988, 85:303-318)
  •  32
    Quine
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 237-299. 2000.
    [Elliott Sober] 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 …Read more
  •  151
    Sets, species, and evolution: Comments on Philip Kitcher's "species"
    Philosophy of Science 51 (2): 334-341. 1984.
    One possible interpretation of the species concept is that specifies are natural kinds. Another species concept is that species are individuals whose parts are organisms. Philip Kitcher takes seriously both these ideas; he sees a role for the genealogical/historical conception and also for the one that is “purely qualitative”. I criticize his ideas here. I see the genealogical conception at work in biological discussion of species and it is presupposed by an active and inventive research program…Read more
  •  88
    ‘There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’ —Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, on the subject of the U.S. government’s failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
  •  283
    Why 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
  •  11
    Adaptationism and Optimality (edited book)
    with Steven Hecht Orzack
    Cambridge University Press. 2001.
    The debate over the relative importance of natural selection as compared to other forces affecting the evolution of organisms is a long-standing and central controversy in evolutionary biology. The theory of adaptationism argues that natural selection contains sufficient explanatory power in itself to account for all evolution. However, there are differing views about the efficiency of the adaptation model of explanation. If the adaptationism theory is applied, are energy and resources being use…Read more