-
73Parsimony, likelihood, and the principle of the common causePhilosophy of Science 54 (3): 465-469. 1987.The likelihood justification of cladistic parsimony suggested in Sober (1984) is here shown to be incomplete. Even so, cladistic parsimony remains a counter-example to the principle of the common cause formulated by Reichenbach (1956) and Salmon (1975, 1979, 1984)
-
81Contrastive empiricismIn C. Wade Savage (ed.), Scientific Theories, University of Minnesota Press. pp. 392--410. 1990.Realism and empiricism have always been contradictory tendencies in the philosophy of science. The view I will sketch is a synthesis, which I call Contrastive Empiricism. Realism and empiricism are incompatible, so a synthesis that merely conjoined them would be a contradiction. Rather, I propose to isolate important elements in each and show that they combine harmoniously. I will leave behind what I regard as confusions and excesses. The result, I hope, will be neither contradiction nor mishmas…Read more
-
48Reply to Rosenberg on genic selectionismPhilosophy of Science 50 (4): 648-650. 1983.Rosenberg (1983), in his comments on our article (Sober and Lewontin 1982) concerning the units of selection controversy, has matters precisely backwards. We suggest Rosenberg alludes to a quite different view of the units of selection controversy, one that he never shows to have mattered to any biologists engaged in the dispute. We also reject Rosenberg's remark that the hypothesis of genic selection is currently predictively vacuous.
-
1Force and disposition in evolutionary theoryIn Christopher Hookway (ed.), Minds, Machines, and Evolution: Philosophical Studies, Cambridge University Press. 1984.
-
13Book reviews : Sociobiology and the preemption of social science. By Alexander Rosenberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university press, 1980; oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Pp. XI + 227. $20.00 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (1): 89-93. 1985.
-
871What is wrong with intelligent design?Quarterly Review of Biology 82 (1): 3-8. 2007.This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifiable, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.
-
325Parsimony and models of animal mindsIn Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds, Cambridge University Press. pp. 237. 2009.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 chapt…Read more
Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America