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559How to Tell When Simpler, More Unified, or Less A d Hoc Theories Will Provide More Accurate PredictionsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (1): 1-35. 1994.Traditional analyses of the curve fitting problem maintain that the data do not indicate what form the fitted curve should take. Rather, this issue is said to be settled by prior probabilities, by simplicity, or by a background theory. In this paper, we describe a result due to Akaike [1973], which shows how the data can underwrite an inference concerning the curve's form based on an estimate of how predictively accurate it will be. We argue that this approach throws light on the theoretical vir…Read more
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60The 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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104Parsimony and predictive equivalenceErkenntnis 44 (2). 1996.If a parsimony criterion may be used to choose between theories that make different predictions, may the same criterion be used to choose between theories that are predictively equivalent? The work of the statistician H. Akaike (1973) is discussed in connection with this question. The results are applied to two examples in which parsimony has been invoked to choose between philosophical theories-Shoemaker's (1969) discussion of the possibility of time without change and the discussion by Smart (…Read more
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236Conjunctive forks and temporally asymmetric inferenceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (1). 1992.We argue against some of Reichenbach's claims about causal forks are incorrect. We do not see why the Second Law of Thermodynamics rules out the existence of conjunctive forks open to the past. In addition, we argue that a common effect rarely forms a conjunctive fork with its joint causes, but it sometimes does. Nevertheless, we think there is something to be said for Reichenbach's idea that forks of various kinds are relevant to explaining why we know more about the past than about the future…Read more
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37Similarities as Evidence for Common Ancestry: A Likelihood EpistemologyBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2015.Darwin claims in the Origin that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are ‘almost valueless’ as evidence. This second claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we clarify and evaluate these and related matters by using the law of likelihood as an analytic tool and by considering mathematical models of three evolutionary processes: directional selection, stabilizing selection, and drift. Our results apply both to Darwin’s …Read more
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38Frequency-dependent causationJournal of Philosophy 79 (5): 247-253. 1982.In what follows, I propose to evaluate Giere's analysis by applying it to a causal process considered in evolutionary theory, namely, natural selection. To say that there is selection for a given trait is to say that possessing that trait causes differential reproductive success. If there is selection for a trait and if no other evolutionary forces impinge and there is no "sampling error" due to random drift, individuals with the trait will on average have more offspring than individuals without…Read more
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373Causal, A Priori True, and Explanatory: A Reply to Lange and RosenbergAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 167-171. 2015.Sober [2011] argues that some causal statements are a priori true and that a priori causal truths are central to explanations in the theory of natural selection. Lange and Rosenberg [2011] criticize Sober's argument. They concede that there are a priori causal truths, but maintain that those truths are only ‘minimally causal’. They also argue that explanations that are built around a priori causal truths are not causal explanations, properly speaking. Here we criticize both of Lange and Rosenber…Read more
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176The 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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139Natural selection and distributive explanation: A reply to NeanderBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (3): 384-397. 1995.The thesis that natural selection explains the frequencies of traits in populations, but not why individual organisms have the traits tehy do, is here defended and elaborated. A general concept of ‘distributive explanation’ is discussed.
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57Computability and cognitionSynthese 39 (3). 1978.According to information processing models of cognition, such as Chomsky's, the set of well-formed formulae of any natural language must be recursively enumerable (RE), otherwise, human learning language is impossible. I argue that there is nothing unlearnable about languages that are not RE. Insofar as natural languages turn out to be RE, this is to be accounted for on grounds of simplicity and not by appeal to the mistaken claim that nonRE languages are ruled out a priori. A consequence of thi…Read more
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45Précis 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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136Reconstructing the character states of ancestors - a likelihood perspective on cladistic parsimonyThe Monist 85 (1): 156-176. 2002.Although the justification for using cladistic parsimony to infer phylogenetic trees has been extensively discussed, much less attention has been paid to the use of cladistic parsimony to reconstruct the character states of the ancestral species postulated by an inferred phylogenetic tree. These two problems differ in terms of both their inputs and their outputs, as shown in the following table. In the former, one begins with data on the character states of extant species and tries to find the b…Read more
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443Evolution, population thinking, and essentialismPhilosophy of Science 47 (3): 350-383. 1980.Ernst Mayr has argued that Darwinian theory discredited essentialist modes of thought and replaced them with what he has called "population thinking". In this paper, I characterize essentialism as embodying a certain conception of how variation in nature is to be explained, and show how this conception was undermined by evolutionary theory. The Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary gradualism makes it impossible to say exactly where one species ends and another begins; such line-drawing problems ar…Read more
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59Time and Knowability in Evolutionary ProcessesPhilosophy of Science 81 (4): 558-579. 2014.Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. Markov chain theory entails that the passage of time reduces the amount of information that the present provides about the past. Here we use a Moran process framework to show that some evolutionary processes destroy information faster than others. Our results connect with Darwin’s principle that adaptive similarities provide scant evidence of common ancestry wher…Read more
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40Language and psychological reality: Some reflections on Chomsky's rules and representations (review)Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (3). 1979.
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177A Priori Causal Models of Natural SelectionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4). 2011.To evaluate Hume's thesis that causal claims are always empirical, I consider three kinds of causal statement: ?e1 caused e2 ?, ?e1 promoted e2 ?, and ?e1 would promote e2 ?. Restricting my attention to cases in which ?e1 occurred? and ?e2 occurred? are both empirical, I argue that Hume was right about the first two, but wrong about the third. Standard causal models of natural selection that have this third form are a priori mathematical truths. Some are obvious, others less so. Empirical work o…Read more
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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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41A Modest Proposal – a Review of John Earman’s Hume’s Abject Failure – the Miracles Argument (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2). 2004.What thesis is Hume trying to establish in his essay “On Miracles” and does he succeed? John Earman’s answer to the latter question is clearly conveyed by the title of his new book. Earman uses a Bayesian representation of the problem to make his case. For Earman, this mode of analysis is both perspicuous and nonanachronistic, in that probability reasoning was central to the 18th century debate about miracles in particular and testimony in general. Indeed, one of Hume’s most interesting antagoni…Read more
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34Extremum descriptions, process laws and minimality heuristicsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2): 232-233. 1991.The examples and concepts that Shoemaker cites are rather heterogeneous. Some distinctions need to be drawn. An optimality thesis involves not just an ordering of options, but a value judgment about them. So let us begin by distinguishing minimality from optimality. And the concept of minimality can play a variety of roles, among which I distinguish between extremum descriptions, statements hypothesizing an optimizing process, and methodological recommendations. Finally, I consider how the three…Read more
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58A Reply to Paul Nolan's 'What's Darwinian About Historical Materialism? A Critique of Levine and Sober'Historical Materialism 11 (3): 177-181. 2003.In our essay ‘What’s Historical About Historical Materialism?’, we drew two contrasts between the Darwinian theory of evolution (ET) and the Marxist theory of historical materialism (HM).1 We described the former as a ‘micro-theory’ and the latter as a ‘macro-theory’. We also argued that, in Darwinian theory, evolution is driven by exogenous forces, specifically, by natural selection induced by environmental factors; whereas historical materialism sees the transformation of a society from feudal…Read more
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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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167Artifact, cause and genic selectionPhilosophy of Science 49 (2): 157-180. 1982.Several evolutionary biologists have used a parsimony argument to argue that the single gene is the unit of selection. Since all evolution by natural selection can be represented in terms of selection coefficients attaching to single genes, it is, they say, "more parsimonious" to think that all selection is selection for or against single genes. We examine the limitations of this genic point of view, and then relate our criticisms to a broader view of the role of causal concepts and the dangers …Read more
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401What is the problem of simplicity?In Arnold Zellner, Hugo A. Keuzenkamp & Michael McAleer (eds.), Simplicity, Inference and Modelling: Keeping It Sophisticatedly Simple, Cambridge University Press. pp. 13-32. 2001.The problem of simplicity involves three questions: How is the simplicity of a hypothesis to be measured? How is the use of simplicity as a guide to hypothesis choice to be justified? And how is simplicity related to other desirable features of hypotheses -- that is, how is simplicity to be traded-off? The present paper explores these three questions, from a variety of viewpoints, including Bayesianism, likelihoodism, and the framework of predictive accuracy formulated by Akaike (1973). It may t…Read more
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297Putting the function back into functionalismIn William G. Lycan (ed.), Mind and Cognition, Blackwell. 1990.This paper describes how functionalism as a view of the mind/body problem changes, if the concept of Turing machine functionalism is replaced by teleological functionalism. The latter is evaluated in light of the on0going debate about adaptationism in evolutoinary biology.
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111In S. Psillos and M. Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming.
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417Holism, 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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35Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of HistoryPhilosophical Review 103 (1): 199. 1994.
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82The concept of fitness began its career in biology long before evolutionary theory was mathematized. Fitness was used to describe an organism’s vigor, or the degree to which organisms “fit” into their environments. An organism’s success in avoiding predators and in building a nest obviously contribute to its fitness and to the fitness of its offspring, but the peacock’s gaudy tail seemed to be in an entirely different line of work. Fitness, as a term in ordinary language (as in “physical fitness…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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