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116Coincidences and how to reason about themIn Henk W. De Regt, Stephan Hartmann & Samir Okasha (eds.), EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009, Springer. pp. 355-374. 2012.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 w…Read more
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94Is entropy relevant to the asymmetry between retrodiction and prediction?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (2): 141-160. 1992.The idea that the changing entropy of a system is relevant to explaining why we know more about the system's past than about its future has been criticized on several fronts. This paper assesses the criticisms and clarifies the epistemology of the inference problem. It deploys a Markov process model to investigate the relationship between entropy and temporally asymmetric inference
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53Likelihood, Model Selection, and the Duhem-Quine ProblemJournal of Philosophy 101 (5): 221-241. 2004.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 tes…Read more
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158A Plea for Pseudo‐Processes†Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 66 (3-4): 303-309. 2017.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 sh…Read more
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44Revisability, a priori truth, and evolutionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 59 (1). 1981.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 the…Read more
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82Explanation and causation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2): 243-257. 1987.
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359Instrumentalism RevisitedCritica 31 (91): 3-39. 1999.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 theorie…Read more
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416A critical review of philosophical work on the units of selection problemPhilosophy of Science 61 (4): 534-555. 1994.The evolutionary problem of the units of selection has elicited a good deal of conceptual work from philosophers. We review this work to determine where the issues now stand
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484The multiple realizability argument against reductionismPhilosophy of Science 66 (4): 542-564. 1999.Reductionism is often understood to include two theses: (1) every singular occurrence that the special sciences can explain also can be explained by physics; (2) every law in a higher-level science can be explained by physics. These claims are widely supposed to have been refuted by the multiple realizability argument, formulated by Putnam (1967, 1975) and Fodor (1968, 1975). The present paper criticizes the argument and identifies a reductionistic thesis that follows from one of the argument's …Read more
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58Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth-Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary BiologyIn Jessica Riskin (ed.), Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, University of Chicago Press. pp. 131--62. 2007.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 creationi…Read more
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19Précis 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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339Intelligent design and probability reasoningInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 52 (2): 65-80. 2002.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 , …Read more
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263Betting against Pascal's WagerNoûs 28 (3): 382-395. 1994.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,…Read more
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71Parsimony, 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)
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164Two 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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118Core Questions in Philosophy: A Text with ReadingsPrentice-Hall. 2001.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 o…Read more
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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.
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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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1Force and disposition in evolutionary theoryIn Christopher Hookway (ed.), Minds, Machines, and Evolution: Philosophical Studies, Cambridge University Press. 1984.
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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.
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322Parsimony 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
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80Contrastive 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
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15Review of E xplanation and Causation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2). 1987.
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96Venetian 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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40Explanatory presuppositionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (2). 1986.This Article does not have an abstract
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43Old problems for a new theory: Mayo on Giere's theory of causationPhilosophical Studies 52 (3). 1987.
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93Modus DarwinBiology and Philosophy 14 (2): 253-278. 1999.Modus Darwin is a principle of inference that licenses the conclusion that two species have a common ancestor, based on the observation that they are similar. The present paper investigates the principle's probabilistic foundations.
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