Elliott Sober

Alexander Rosenberg begins 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 needs to be overcome. But Rosenberg repeats some of the old mis- takes and invents epicycles on others. In this comment I will not be able to circumscribe fully the range of topics that an adequate treatment of this cluster of problems demands. A few critical re marks will indicate what I find wanting in Rosenberg's treatment

In a recent article, Kim Sterelny and Philip Kitcher5 defend a version of genic selectionism and attempt to refute the criticisms I made of that doctrine. Their defense has two components. First, they find fault with the account I gave of the units-of-selection controversy-an account which uses the idea of probabilistic causality as a tool of explication. Second, they provide a positive account of their own of what that controversy concerns, one which they think allows genic selectionism to emerge as a successful thesis. I believe that the position they sketch is mistaken, both in its general orientation and in its details. I believe that the Sterelny/ Kitcher position misunderstands what the biological question of the units of selection is about and that their criticisms of my own proposal are mistaken as well.

In their book What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini construct an a priori philosophical argument and an empirical biological argument. The biological argument aims to show that natural selection is much less important in the evolutionary process than many biologists maintain. The a priori argument begins with the claim that there cannot be selection for one but not the other of two traits that are perfectly correlated in a population; it concludes that there cannot be an evolutionary theory of adaptation. This article focuses mainly on the a priori argument.

The naïve see causal connections everywhere. Consider the fact that Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice. The naïve find it irresistible to think that this cannot be a coincidence. Maybe the lottery was rigged or perhaps some uncanny higher power placed its hand upon her brow. Sophisticates respond with an indulgent smile and ask the naïve to view Adams’ double win within a larger perspective. Given all the lotteries there have been, it isn’t at all surprising that someone would win one of them twice. No need to invent conspiracy theories or invoke the paranormal – the double win was a mere coincidence.

Quine has developed two reasons for thinking that our ontology should not include the ontological category of properties. His first point is that the criterion for individuating properties is unclear, and the second is that postulating the existence of properties would not explain anything. In what follows I critically examine these two themes, which I will call the clarity argument and the parsimony argument. Although I will suggest that these two arguments are defective, I also will try to show that certain related arguments on behalf of the existence of properties are likewise flawed. This will set the stage for the discussion in the fourth section of the perspective provided by evolutionary theory on the question of the ontological status of properties. It will emerge that evolutionary theory provides reason for thinking that properties exist, and, additionally, gives an interesting point of view on the epistemological and metaphysical issues that Quine has addressed.

Nancy Cartwright (1983, 1999) argues that (1) the fundamental laws of physics are true when and only when appropriate ceteris paribus modifiers are attached and that (2) ceteris paribus modifiers describe conditions that are almost never satisfied. She concludes that when the fundamental laws of physics are true, they don't apply in the real world, but only in highly idealized counterfactual situations. In this paper, we argue that (1) and (2) together with an assumption about contraposition entail the opposite conclusion — that the fundamental laws of physics do apply in the real world. Cartwright extracts from her thesis about the inapplicability of fundamental laws the conclusion that they cannot figure in covering-law explanations. We construct a different argument for a related conclusion — that forward-directed idealized dynamical laws cannot provide covering-law explanations that are causal. This argument is neutral on whether the assumption about contraposition is true. We then discuss Cartwright's simulacrum account of explanation, which seeks to describe how idealized laws can be explanatory.

This paper proposes a game-theoretic solution of the surprise examination problem. It is argued that the game of “matching pennies” provides a useful model for the interaction of a teacher who wants her exam to be surprising and students who want to avoid being surprised. A distinction is drawn between prudential and evidential versions of the problem. In both, the teacher should not assign a probability of zero to giving the exam on the last day. This representation of the problem provides a diagnosis of where the backwards induction argument, which “proves” that no surprise exam is possible, is mistaken.

In what follows I will discuss an example of the Duhem-Quine problem in which Pr(H A), Pr(A H), and Pr(OI +H& ?A) (where H is the hypothesis, A the auxiliary assumptions, and O the observational prediction) can be construed objectively; however, only some of those quantities are relevant to the analysis that I provide. The example involves medical diagnosis. The goal is to test the hypothesis that someone has tuberculosis; the auxiliary assumptions describe the er- ror characteristics of the test procedure. Although it can make sense to talk about the objective probability that someone (randomly drawn from a given population) has tuberculosis and it also can make sense to talk about the objective probability that a test procedure has a certain set of error characteristics, neither of these quantities will enter into the analysis. The analysis proceeds entirely via likelihoods, what one needs to consider is just the probability of the observations conditional on four conjunctions of the form (?H & +A).' It is a special feature of the example that all four of these conjunctions are simple statistical hypotheses in the technical sense that each unambigu-ously confers a probability on the observations.'o After describing how the likelihood concept applies to the example concerning medical diagnosis, I will show how similar patterns can arise in the context of a second inferential framework-that of H. Akaike's criterion of model selection;" this time the example will involve phylogenetic inference.

Is all explanations causal explanation? Puzzles about barometer readings "explain" storms and shadow lengths "explaining" flagpole heights make it attractive to think so. Wesley Salmon (1984) has endorsed this causal thesis. One way to test this thesis is to assess the explanatory import of pseudo-processes. I do so by discussing the concept of heritability, which measures a pseudo-process, and one role it played in the theory of natural selection: explaining response to selection. This will show, not just that heritability has heuristic or predictive utility, but that it can be explanatory. Possible responses to this case are also discussed.

The positivists suggest that some truths may be immune from empirical refutation and yet lacking in rational justification. Quine holds that every proposition is in principle empirically refutable so there are no a priori truths. I’ll provide a working characterization of the idea of “rational revisability” and argue it’s impossible for us to take a chain of rational revision and end up revising everything which we now believe. Quine's position on revisability is also in tension with certain theses about epistemic holism. Finally, I discuss a more general context in which rational argument is viewed as one mechanism among many for reliably modifying beliefs. This more biological perspective allows us to formulate Quine's claims about revisability in a new way and to raise some interesting questions about the potential impact of natural selection on our cognitive capacities.

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 units of selection controversy and the use of parsimony as an inference rule in phylogenetic reconstruction.

The logical empiricists said some good things about epistemology and scientific method. However, they associated those epistemological ideas with some rather less good ideas about philosophy of language. There is something epistemologically suspect about statements that cannot be tested. But to say that those statements are meaningless is to go too far. And there is something impossible about trying to figure out which of two empirically equivalent theories is true. But to say that those theories are synonymous is also to go too far. My goal in this paper is not to resuscitate all these positivist ideas, but to revisit just one of them. Instrumentalism is the idea that theories are instruments for making predictions. Of course, no one would disagree that this is one of the things we use theories to do. In just the same way, no one could disagree with the emotivist claim that one of the things we do with ethical terms like "good" and "right" is to express our feelings of approval and disapproval. Instrumentalism and emotivism become contentious, and therefore interesting, when these claims are supplemented.

Only one traditional objection to Pascal's wager is telling: Pascal assumes a particular theology, but without justification. We produce two new objections that go deeper. We show that even if Pascal's theology is assumed to be probable, Pascal's argument does not go through. In addition, we describe a wager that Pascal never considered, which leads away from Pascal's conclusion. We then consider the impact of these considerations on other prudential arguments concerning what one should believe, and on the more general question of when and why belief formation ought to be based solely on the evidence.

Writers like Attneave [I960], Fodor [I968], and Dennett [1978] have argued that explanations of a mental capacity can only avoid the emptiness of Moliere's dormative virtue by decomposing the capacity into a set of components which are more rudimentary. But What is wrong with smart homunculi? I argue that smart homunculi may explain token events, such as why I now see the page in front of me, but they do not explain what seeing is. It is the importance of the latter explanatory problem which explains why homunculi must be so stupid.

Presented in an engaging lecture-style format, this anthology leads readers through a series of discussions on the basic issues and ideas in philosophy, with lectures supported by related readings from historically important sources. The discussions emphasize the logic of philosophical arguments—and in particular, how they relate to the content of scientific theories such as evolution. This five-part book, made up of “lectures” and readings, covers an introduction to philosophy; the philosophy of religion; theory of knowledge; philosophy of mind; and ethics. For anyone looking for adequate answers to enduring questions.

The design argument for the existence of God took a probabilistic turn in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. Earlier versions, such as Thomas Aquinas' 5 th way, usually embraced the premise that goal-directed systems (things that "act for an end" or have a function) must have been created by an intelligent designer. This idea – which we might express by the slogan "no design without a designer" – survived into the 17 th and 18 th centuries, 1 and it is with us still in the writings of many creationists. The new version of the argument, inspired by the emerging mathematical theory of probability, removed the premise of necessity. It begins with the thought that goal-directed systems might have arisen by intelligent design or by chance; the problem is to discern which hypothesis is more plausible. With the epistemic concept of plausibility characterized in terms of the mathematical concept of probability, the design argument was given a new direction. The new probabilistic perspective did not extinguish the older idea of "no design without a designer." The two conflicting approaches coexisted, often with less than perfect clarity about their fundamental difference. At the same time, the details of how the probabilistic perspective ought to be articulated were slow in emerging. These characteristics of uneven development are exemplified in a debate that took place in the 18 th century among three probabilists – John Arbuthnot, Nicholas Bernoulli, and Abraham DeMoivre – on the proper explanation of human sex ratio. Arbuthnot proposed a probabilistic version of the design argument, claiming that it is intelligent design, not chance, that provides the better explanation of why slightly more boys than girls are born each year. Bernoulli rejected Arbuthnot's argument. DeMoivre defended Arbuthnot against Bernoulli's criticisms. The problem of explaining sex ratio, both in human populations and in the rest of nature, experienced another transformation after 1859 --it became a problem for the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin (1871) addressed the question in the first edition of The Descent of Man but withdrew his suggestion in the second (Darwin 1874). Carl Düsing (1884) provided a mathematical model that moved beyond the explanation Darwin offered. Fisher (1930) added the new idea of parental expenditure. Williams (1966) argued that the sex ratios found in nature provide the opportunity to test hypotheses of group selection against hypotheses of individual selection. Hamilton (1967) constructed a model that generalizes Fisher's approach and represents the effects of both group and individual selection. The theory of natural selection gradually developed the ability to predict sex ratios, not just explain them post hoc.

This paper defends two theses about probabilistic reasoning. First, although modus ponens has a probabilistic analog, modus tollens does not – the fact that a hypothesis says that an observation is very improbable does not entail that the hypothesis is improbable. Second, the evidence relation is essentially comparative; with respect to hypotheses that confer probabilities on observation statements but do not entail them, an observation O may favor one hypothesis H1 over another hypothesis H2 , but O cannot be said to confirm or disconfirm H1 without such relativization. These points have serious consequences for the Intelligent Design movement. Even if evolutionary theory entailed that various complex adaptations are very improbable, that would neither disconfirm the theory nor support the hypothesis of intelligent design. For either of these conclusions to follow, an additional question must be answered: With respect to the adaptive features that evolutionary theory allegedly says are very improbable, what is their probability of arising if they were produced by intelligent design? This crucial question has not been addressed by the ID movement.

The chapter discusses the principle of conservatism and traces how the general principle is related to the specific one. This tracing suggests that the principle of conservatism needs to be refined. Connecting the principle in cognitive science to more general questions about scientific inference also allows us to revisit the question of realism versus instrumentalism. The framework deployed in model selection theory is very general; it is not specific to the subject matter of science. The chapter outlines some non-Bayesian ideas that have been developed in model selection theory. The principle of conservatism, like C. Lloyd Morgan's canon, describes a preference concerning kinds of parameters. It says that a model that postulates only lower-level intentionality is preferable to one that postulates higher-level intentionality if both fit the data equally well. The model selection approach to parsimony helps explain why unification is a theoretical virtue.