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165Two Cornell realisms: moral and scientificPhilosophical 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
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866Puzzles for ZFEL, McShea and Brandon’s zero force evolutionary lawBiology and Philosophy 27 (5): 723-735. 2012.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.
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283Why 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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1311 Metaphysical and epistemological issues in modern Darwinian theoryIn J. Hodges & Gregory Radick (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge University Press. pp. 267. 2003.
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30Authors' responseMetascience 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.
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20Representation and psychological realityBehavioral 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
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93Entropy increase and information loss in Markov models of evolutionBiology 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
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100Venetian sea levels, british bread prices, and the principle of the common causeBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (2): 331-346. 2001.When two causally independent processes each have a quantity that increases monotonically (either deterministically or in probabilistic expectation), the two quantities will be correlated, thus providing a counterexample to Reichenbach's principle of the common cause. Several philosophers have denied this, but I argue that their efforts to save the principle are unsuccessful. Still, one salvage attempt does suggest a weaker principle that avoids the initial counterexample. However, even this wea…Read more
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126Instrumentalism RevisitedThe 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
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159Apportioning Causal ResponsibilityJournal of Philosophy 85 (6): 303. 1988.(Journal of Philosophy, 1988, 85:303-318)
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31QuineAristotelian 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
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124Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the ScienceCambridge 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
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61The principle of conservatism in cognitive ethologyIn D. Walsh (ed.), Evolution, Naturalism and Mind, Cambridge University Press. pp. 225-238. 2001.Philosophy of mind is, and for a long while has been, 99% metaphysics and 1% epistemology. But the fundamental question cognitive ethologists face is epistemological: what count as evidence that a creature has a mind, and if the creature does have a mind, what evidence is relevant to deciding which mental state should be attributed to it? The usual answer that cognitive ethologists give is that one’s explanation should be “conservative”. It recommends a two-part plausibility ordering: mindless i…Read more
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88Is Drift a Serious Alternative to Natural Selection as an Explanation of Complex Adaptive Traits?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 56 10-11. 2005.‘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.
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9Adaptationism and Optimality (edited book)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
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347Philosophy of BiologyWestview Press. 1993.Perhaps because of it implications for our understanding of human nature, recent philosophy of biology has seen what might be the most dramatic work in the philosophies of the ”special” sciences. This drama has centered on evolutionary theory, and in the second edition of this textbook, Elliott Sober introduces the reader to the most important issues of these developments. With a rare combination of technical sophistication and clarity of expression, Sober engages both the higher level of theory…Read more
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69Dispositions and subjunctive conditionals, or, dormative virtues are no laughing matterPhilosophical Review 91 (4): 591-596. 1982.Philosophers frequently extract two lessons from Moliere's joke about the doctor who tried to explain why opium puts people to sleep by claiming that it has a dormative virtue. First, the principle I will call the equivalence thesis: attributions of dispositional properties are equivalent to certain associated subjunctive conditionals. The second is what I will call the reducibility thesis: for a dispositional concept to be nonproblematic, its “physical basis” must be found. In what follows, I w…Read more
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149Sets, 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
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177The evolution of altruism: Correlation, cost, and benefit (review)Biology and Philosophy 7 (2): 177-187. 1992.A simple and general criterion is derived for the evolution of altruism when individuals interact in pairs. It is argued that the treatment of this problem in kin selection theory and in game theory are special cases of this general criterion.
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594Plantinga’s Probability Arguments Against Evolutionary NaturalismPacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (2). 1998.In Chapter 12 of Warrant and Proper Function, Alvin Plantinga constructs two arguments against evolutionary naturalism, which he construes as a conjunction E&N .The hypothesis E says that “human cognitive faculties arose by way of the mechanisms to which contemporary evolutionary thought directs our attention (p.220).”1 With respect to proposition N , Plantinga (p. 270) says “it isn’t easy to say precisely what naturalism is,” but then adds that “crucial to metaphysical naturalism, of course, is…Read more
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50Précis of Unto OthersPhilosophy 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
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41Perspectives and parameterizations commentary on Benjamin Kerr and Peter Godfrey-Smith's ``individualist and multi-level perspectives on selection in structured populations''Biology and Philosophy 17 (4): 529-537. 2002.We have two main objections to Kerr and Godfrey-Smith's (2002) meticulous analysis. First, they misunderstand the position we took in Unto Others – we do not claim that individual-level statements about the evolution of altruism are always unexplanatory and always fail to capture causal relationships. Second, Kerr and Godfrey-Smith characterize the individual and the multi-level perspectives in terms of different sets of parameters. In particular, they do not allow the multi-level perspective to…Read more
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94Constructive empiricism and the problem of aboutnessBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36 (1): 11-18. 1985.constructive empiricism asserts that it is not for science to reach a verdict on whether a theory is true or false, if the theory is about unobservable entities; science's only interest here, says Van Fraassen, is to discover whether the theory is ‘empirically adequate’. However, if a theory is soley about observables, empirical adequacy and truth are said to ‘coincide’, here discovering the theory's truth value is an appropriate scientific goal. Constructive empiricism thus rests an epistemolog…Read more
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203SimplicityClarendon Press. 1975.Attempts to show that the simplicity of a hypothesis can be measured by attending to how well it answers certain kinds of questions
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140Probabilistic causality and the question of transitivityPhilosophy of Science 50 (1): 35-57. 1983.After clarifying the probabilistic conception of causality suggested by Good (1961-2), Suppes (1970), Cartwright (1979), and Skyrms (1980), we prove a sufficient condition for transitivity of causal chains. The bearing of these considerations on the units of selection problem in evolutionary theory and on the Newcomb paradox in decision theory is then discussed
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155Testing for treeness: lateral gene transfer, phylogenetic inference, and model selectionBiology and Philosophy 25 (4): 675-687. 2010.A phylogeny that allows for lateral gene transfer (LGT) can be thought of as a strictly branching tree (all of whose branches are vertical) to which lateral branches have been added. Given that the goal of phylogenetics is to depict evolutionary history, we should look for the best supported phylogenetic network and not restrict ourselves to considering trees. However, the obvious extensions of popular tree-based methods such as maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood face a serious problem—if …Read more
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81Common ancestry and natural selectionBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (3): 423-437. 2003.We explore the evidential relationships that connect two standard claims of modern evolutionary biology. The hypothesis of common ancestry (which says that all organisms now on earth trace back to a single progenitor) and the hypothesis of natural selection (which says that natural selection has been an important influence on the traits exhibited by organisms) are logically independent; however, this leaves open whether testing one requires assumptions about the status of the other. Darwin noted…Read more
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20Reply to CommentariesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 711-727. 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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