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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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38Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of HistoryPhilosophical Review 103 (1): 199. 1994.
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47Two Concepts of CausePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1984. 1984.A distinction is drawn between property causation and token causation. According to the former, a positive causal factor in a population raises the probability of its effects within "background contexts". The latter, which concerns "actual physical connections" between token events, is not explicated here although its distinctness from the first concept and its importance are discussed. The applicability of both is illustrated by two currently controversial issues in evolutionary theory -- the u…Read more
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10Problems for environmentalismIn Mohan Matthen & Christopher Stephens (eds.), Philosophy of Biology, Elsevier. pp. 144--365. 2007.
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"Comments on Maynard Smith's" How to model evolutionIn John Dupre (ed.), The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality, Mit Press. pp. 133--145. 1987.
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55Multilevel selection and the return of group-level functionalismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (2): 305-306. 1998.We reinforce Thompson's points by providing a second example of the paradox that makes group selection appear counterintuitive and by discussing the wider implications of multilevel selection theory.
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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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436Holism, 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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