Elliott Sober

[Elliott Sober] In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', Quine attacks the analytic/synthetic distinction and defends a doctrine that I call epistemological holism. Now, almost fifty years after the article's appearance, what are we to make of these ideas? I suggest that the philosophical naturalism that Quine did so much to promote should lead us to reject Quine's brief against the analytic/synthetic distinction; I also argue that Quine misunderstood Carnap's views on analyticity. As for epistemological holism, I claim that this thesis does not follow from the logical point that Duhem and Quine made about the role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis testing, and that the thesis should be rejected. \\\ [Peter Hylton] Section I of this essay discusses Quine's views about reference, contrasting them with those of Russell. For the latter, our language and thought succeed in being about the world because of our acquaintance with objects; the relation of reference-roughly, the relation between a name and its bearer-is thus fundamental. For Quine, by contrast, the fundamental relation by which our language comes to be about the world, and to have empirical content, is that between a sentence and stimulations of our sensory surfaces; reference, while important, is a derivative notion. Section II shows how this view of reference as derivative makes possible the notorious Quinean doctrine of ontological relativity. Section III raises the issue of realism. It argues that somewhat different notions of realism are in play for Quine and for Russell-for Russell, objects, and our knowledge of objects, play the fundamental role, while for quine objectivity and truth are fundamental, with ontology being derivative.

Philosophers frequently extract two lessons from Moliere's joke about the doctor who tried to explain why opium puts people to sleep by claiming that it has a dormative virtue. First, the principle I will call the equivalence thesis: attributions of dispositional properties are equivalent to certain associated subjunctive conditionals. The second is what I will call the reducibility thesis: for a dispositional concept to be nonproblematic, its “physical basis” must be found. In what follows, I will briefly describe three theoretical positions that have been defended in different areas of psychology. Each claims that a certain disposition does not exist, even though the associated subjunctive conditional is not called into question. Besides showing that the equivalence thesis is mistaken, these examples also illustrate how that doctrine in fact conflicts with the requirement of reducibility. Not that that demand can withstand criticism either; both the equivalence claim and the reducibility claim are mistaken.

One possible interpretation of the species concept is that specifies are natural kinds. Another species concept is that species are individuals whose parts are organisms. Philip Kitcher takes seriously both these ideas; he sees a role for the genealogical/historical conception and also for the one that is “purely qualitative”. I criticize his ideas here. I see the genealogical conception at work in biological discussion of species and it is presupposed by an active and inventive research program, but the natural kind concept is not. I also criticize Kitcher’s criticisms against Hull’s position that species are individuals, including Kitcher’s idea that species are sets of organisms, his explanations of why “all swans are white” isn’t law-like, his discussion of the example of multiple origination. Finally, I argue that given the current evolutionary developments, pluralism is the "null hypothesis" that we should attempt to refute.

The debate over the relative importance of natural selection as compared to other forces affecting the evolution of organisms is a long-standing and central controversy in evolutionary biology. The theory of adaptationism argues that natural selection contains sufficient explanatory power in itself to account for all evolution. However, there are differing views about the efficiency of the adaptation model of explanation. If the adaptationism theory is applied, are energy and resources being used to their optimum? This book presents an up-to-date view of this controversy and reflects the dramatic changes in our understanding of evolution that have occurred in the last twenty years. The volume combines contributions from biologists and philosophers, and offers a systematic treatment of foundational, conceptual, and methodological issues surrounding the theory of adaptationism. The essays examine recent developments in topics such as phylogenetic analysis, the theory of optimality and ess models, and methods of testing models.

Perhaps because of it implications for our understanding of human nature, recent philosophy of biology has seen what might be the most dramatic work in the philosophies of the ”special” sciences. This drama has centered on evolutionary theory, and in the second edition of this textbook, Elliott Sober introduces the reader to the most important issues of these developments. With a rare combination of technical sophistication and clarity of expression, Sober engages both the higher level of theory and the direct implications for such controversial issues as creationism, teleology, nature versus nurture, and sociobiology. Above all, the reader will gain from this book a firm grasp of the structure of evolutionary theory, the evidence for it, and the scope of its explanatory significance.

In this paper I want to clarify what biologists are talking about when they talk about the evolution of altruism. I’ll begin by saying something about the common sense concept. This familiar idea I’ll call ‘vernacular altruism.’ One point of doing this is to make it devastatingly obvious that the common sense concept is very different from the concept as it’s used in evolutionary theory. After that preliminary, I’ll describe some features of the evolutionary concept. Then I’ll conclude by briefly considering what explanatory relation might obtain between vernacular altruism and evolutionary altruism. Although the points I’ll make are rather elementary ones, their interest is not restricted to those who have never heard of the evolutionary problem. The reason for this is that there is some amount of confusion about evolutionary altruism among evolutionary biologists themselves.

In Chapter 12 of Warrant and Proper Function, Alvin Plantinga constructs two arguments against evolutionary naturalism, which he construes as a conjunction E&N .The hypothesis E says that “human cognitive faculties arose by way of the mechanisms to which contemporary evolutionary thought directs our attention (p.220).”1 With respect to proposition N , Plantinga (p. 270) says “it isn’t easy to say precisely what naturalism is,” but then adds that “crucial to metaphysical naturalism, of course, is the view that there is no such person as the God of traditional theism.” Plantinga tries to cast doubt on the conjunction E&N in two ways.His “preliminary argument” aims to show that the conjunction is probably false, given the fact (R) that our psychological mechanisms for forming beliefs about the world are generally reliable.His “main argument” aims to show that the conjunction E&N is self-defeating — if you believe E&N , then you should stop believing that conjunction.Plantinga further develops the main argument in his unpublished paper “Naturalism Defeated” (Plantinga 1994).We will try to show that both arguments contain serious errors

We have two main objections to Kerr and Godfrey-Smith's (2002) meticulous analysis. First, they misunderstand the position we took in Unto Others – we do not claim that individual-level statements about the evolution of altruism are always unexplanatory and always fail to capture causal relationships. Second, Kerr and Godfrey-Smith characterize the individual and the multi-level perspectives in terms of different sets of parameters. In particular, they do not allow the multi-level perspective to use the individual fitness parameters i and i. We don't see why the multi-level perspective prevents one from thinking in these terms. Kerr and Godfrey-Smith's argument that Uyenoyama and Feldman's (1980, 1992) definition of altruism belongs more to the individualist perspective than it does to the multi-level perspective is an artifact of their choice of parameters; the same point applies to their argument about the individualism inherent in the idea of Class I and Class II fitness structures.

Philosophy of mind is, and for a long while has been, 99% metaphysics and 1% epistemology. Attention is lavished on the question of the nature of mind, but questions concerning how we know about minds are discussed much less thoroughly. University courses in philosophy of mind routinely devote a lot of time to dualism, logical behaviourism, the mind/brain identity theory, and functionalism. But what gets said about the kinds of evidence that help one determine what mental states, if any, an individual occupies? Well, Skinner's puritanical disdain for postulating mental states gets raked over the coals, the problem of other minds gets solved by a perfunctory invocation of the principle of inference to the best explanation, and the Turing test gets discussed, mainly in order to emphasize that it can lead to mistaken answers.

constructive empiricism asserts that it is not for science to reach a verdict on whether a theory is true or false, if the theory is about unobservable entities; science's only interest here, says Van Fraassen, is to discover whether the theory is ‘empirically adequate’. However, if a theory is soley about observables, empirical adequacy and truth are said to ‘coincide’, here discovering the theory's truth value is an appropriate scientific goal. Constructive empiricism thus rests an epistemological thesis on a semantical distinction. This paper critically examines the notion of aboutness and its epistemological significance. * I am grateful to members of my philosophy of science seminar during Spring, 1983 for useful discussion and to the two anonymous referees of this journal for providing helpful suggestions. I also thank the University of Wisconsin, Madison Graduate School for support in the form of a Romnes Faculty Fellowship.

The substance of the commentaries, however, reveals considerable disagreement about how UO conceptualizes the idea of group selection. Dennett describes the issues as “mind-twistingly elusive and slippery” and hints that it is mere hype to say that group selection has been revived. Barrett and Godfrey-Smith discuss the problem of multiple perspectives at length and claim that we are too liberal in our definition of groups. We believe that these criticisms obscure the simplicity of the basic question that group selection theory is designed to answer and the historical continuity of that theory, from Darwin to the present.

Los filósofos han tendido a discutir el esencialismo como si fuera una doctrina global, una filosofía que, por alguna razón uniforme, debiera ser adoptada por todas las ciencias o por ninguna. Popper (1972) ha adoptado una postura global negativa, porque ve al esencialismo como un obstáculo fundamental para la racionalidad científica. También Quine (1953b, 1960), por una combinación de motivos semánticos y epistemológicos, quiere desterrar el esencialismo de la totalidad del discurso científico. Sin embargo, en fechas más recientes, Putnam (1975) y Kripke (1972) han propugnado doctrinas esencialistas y han afirmado que es tarea de cada ciencia investigar las propiedades esenciales de sus clases naturales constitutivas.

The propensity interpretation of fitness draws on the propensity interpretation of probability, but advocates of the former have not attended sufficiently to problems with the latter. The causal power of C to bring about E is not well-represented by the conditional probability Pr. Since the viability fitness of trait T is the conditional probability Pr, the viability fitness of the trait does not represent the degree to which having the trait causally promotes surviving. The same point holds for fertility fitness. This failure of trait fitness to capture causal role can also be seen in the fact that coextensive traits must have the same fitness values even if one of them promotes survival and the other is neutral or deleterious. Although the fitness of a trait does not represent the trait’s causal power to promote survival and reproduction, variation in fitness in a population causally promotes change in trait frequencies; in this sense, fitness variation is a population-level propensity

We explore the evidential relationships that connect two standard claims of modern evolutionary biology. The hypothesis of common ancestry (which says that all organisms now on earth trace back to a single progenitor) and the hypothesis of natural selection (which says that natural selection has been an important influence on the traits exhibited by organisms) are logically independent; however, this leaves open whether testing one requires assumptions about the status of the other. Darwin noted that an extreme version of adaptationism would undercut the possibility of making inferences about common ancestry. Here we develop a converse claim—hypotheses that assert that natural selection has been an important influence on trait values are untestable unless supplemented by suitable background assumptions. The fact of common ancestry and a claim about quantitative genetics together suffice to render such hypotheses testable. Furthermore, we see no plausible alternative to these assumptions; we hypothesize that they are necessary as well as sufficient for adaptive hypotheses to be tested. This point has important implications for biological practice, since biologists standardly assume that adaptive hypotheses predict trait associations among tip species. Another consequence is that adaptive hypotheses cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by a trait value that is universal within a single species, if that trait value deviates even slightly from the optimum. 1 Two Darwinian hypotheses 2 Logical independence 3 How adaptive hypotheses bear on the tree of life hypothesis 4 How the tree of life hypothesis bears on adaptive hypotheses 5 What do adaptive hypotheses predict? 6 Common ancestry and quantitative genetics to the rescue 7 Conclusion.

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as "replicators" which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be "vehicles" of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units. The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to "organs" of group-level "organisms." Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals.

After clarifying how Darwin understood natural selection and common ancestry, I consider how the two concepts are related in his theory. I argue that common ancestry has an evidential priority. For Darwin, arguments about natural selection often make use of the assumption of common ancestry, whereas defending common ancestry does not require the assumption that natural selection has been at work. In fact, Darwin held that the key evidence for common ancestry comes from characters whose evolution is not caused by natural selection. This raises the question of why Darwin puts natural selection first and foremost in the Origin.

Maximum Parsimony (MP) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) are two methods for evaluating which phlogenetic tree is best supported by data on the characteristics of leaf objects (which may be species, populations, or individual organisms). MP has been criticized for assuming that evolution proceeds parsimoniously -- that if a lineage begins in state i and ends in state j, the way it got from i to j is by the smallest number of changes. MP has been criticized for needing to assume some model or other of the evolutionary process even though biologists often do not know what that process really is. This paper critically evaluates both criticisms.

I consider three theses that are friendly to anthropomorphism. Each makes a claim about what can be inferred about the mental life of chimpanzees from the fact that humans and chimpanzees both have behavioral trait B and humans produce this behavior by having mental trait M. The first thesis asserts that this fact makes it probable that chimpanzees have M. The second says that this fact provides strong evidence that chimpanzees have M. The third claims that the fact is evidence that chimpanzees have M. The third thesis follows from a plausible Reichenbachian model of how a common ancestor is probabilistically related to its descendants. The first two theses do not, and they have no general evolutionary justification

Do traits evolve because they are good for the group, or do they evolve because they are good for the individual organisms that have them? The question is whether groups, rather than individual organisms, are ever “units of selection.” My exposition begins with the 1960’s, when the idea that traits evolve because they are good for the group was criticized, not just for being factually mistaken, but for embodying a kind of confused thinking that is fundamentally at odds with the logic that Darwin’s theory requires. A counter-movement has arisen since the 1960’s, called multi-level selection theory, according to which selection acts at multiple levels, including the level of the group. After discussing the 1960’s attack on group selection and the concept’s subsequent revival, I examine Darwin’s views on the subject. I discuss what Darwin says about four examples: human morality, the barbed stinger of the honeybee, neuter workers in species of social insect, and the sterility of many interspecies hybrids. I argue that Darwin defended hypotheses of group selection in the first three problems, but rejected it in the fourth. I also discuss Darwin’s general views about the role of group selection in evolution.

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 criterion for model selection also throws light on the role of parsimony considerations in hypothesis evaluation. I explain the basic ideas behind Akaike’s framework and criterion; several biological examples, including the use of maximum likelihood methods in phylogenetic inference, are considered.

When philosophers defend epiphenomenalist doctrines, they often do so by way of a priori arguments. Here we suggest an empirical approach that is modeled on August Weismann’s experimental arguments against the inheritance of acquired characters. This conception of how epiphenomenalism ought to be developed helps clarify some mistakes in two recent epiphenomenalist positions – Jaegwon Kim’s (1993) arguments against mental causation, and the arguments developed by Walsh (2000), Walsh, Lewens, and Ariew (2002), and Matthen and Ariew (2002) that natural selection and drift are not causes of evolution. A manipulationist account of causation (Woodward 2003) leads naturally to an account of how macro- and micro-causation are related and to an understanding of how epiphenomenalism at different levels of organization should be understood.