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40Explanatory presuppositionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (2). 1986.This Article does not have an abstract
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101Temporally oriented lawsSynthese 94 (2). 1993.A system whose expected state changes with time cannot have both a forward-directed translationally invariant probabilistic law and a backward-directed translationally invariant law. When faced with this choice, science seems to favor the former. An asymmetry between cause and effect may help to explain why temporally oriented laws are usually forward-directed.
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1Kindness and Cruelty in EvolutionIn Richard J. Davidson & Anne Harrington (eds.), Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature, Oxford University Press. pp. 46-65. 2002.Human nature is intriguing in such that it can express both negative and positive emotions, as in kindness and cruelty. The question is whether both are a natural part of our nature as human beings, or is one produced to serve as the alternate of the other. Another question that is brought to the table in this chapter is how does one determine what is natural and what is not, being its true definition? The chapter attempts to answer these questions based on evolution theory, whether events earli…Read more
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628Absence of evidence and evidence of absence: evidential transitivity in connection with fossils, fishing, fine-tuning, and firing squadsPhilosophical Studies 143 (1): 63-90. 2009.“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” is a slogan that is popular among scientists and nonscientists alike. This article assesses its truth by using a probabilistic tool, the Law of Likelihood. Qualitative questions (“Is E evidence about H ?”) and quantitative questions (“How much evidence does E provide about H ?”) are both considered. The article discusses the example of fossil intermediates. If finding a fossil that is phenotypically intermediate between two extant species provides …Read more
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34I_– _Elliott SoberAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 (1): 237-280. 2000.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 …Read more
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1Three differences between deliberation and evolutionIn Peter Danielson (ed.), Modeling rationality, morality, and evolution, Oxford University Press. 1998.In this paper, I'll explore three contexts in which the heuristic of personification yields the wrong answer. They all come from game theoretic discussion of altruism and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Whether it is applied to evolution or to rational deliberation, game theory models situations that involve frequency dependence. In the evolutionary case, how fit a trait is, and whether it is more or less fit than the alternatives, depends on the composition of the population (Maynard Smith 1982). In th…Read more
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41Independent evidence about a common causePhilosophy of Science 56 (2): 275-287. 1989.To infer the state of a cause from the states of its effects, independent lines of evidence are preferable to dependent ones. This familiar idea is here investigated, the goal being to identify its presuppositions. Connections are drawn with Reichenbach's (1956) and Salmon's (1984) discussions of the principle of the common cause
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151The causal efficacy of contentPhilosophical Studies 63 (July): 1-30. 1991.Several philosophers have argued recently that semantic properties do play a causal role. 1 It is our view that none of these arguments are satisfactory. Our aim is to reveal some of the deficiencies of these arguments, and to reassess the question in our own way. In section 1, we shall explain in more detail what is involved in the pretheoretical idea of a causally efficacious property and so provide a fuller sense of the issue. In section 2 we shall discuss Fodor's and Kim's arguments that the…Read more
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21Précis of Unto OthersPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 681-684. 2002.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 ques…Read more
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24Précis of Evidence and Evolution: The Logic behind the SciencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3): 661-665. 2011.Evidence and Evolution has four chapters: (1) Evidence, (2) Intelligent Design, (3) Natural Selection, and (4) Common Ancestry. The first chapter develops tools that are used in the rest of the book, though more ideas about evidence are added. In Chapter 1, I endorse a pluralistic outlook—Bayesianism is fine in some inference problems, likelihoodism in others, and AIC in still others. In Chapter Two, on intelligent design, I try to develop the strongest possible formulation of the design argumen…Read more
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7Does "Fitness" Fit the Facts?Journal of Philosophy 84 (4): 220-223. 1987.My critical remarks' on Alexander Rosenberg’s article on fitness have elicited a rejoinder from Mary Williams and Rosenberg himself. They charge that my criticisms are a “tissue of misunderstandings” (738); since they misunderstand my own position in fundamental ways, it may help to try to clarify the points that divide us. In the interest of brevity, I will ignore technical issues concerning the internal correctness of Williams’s axiomatization and will focus on questions of broader philosophic…Read more
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234Temporally asymmetric inference in a Markov processPhilosophy of Science 58 (3): 398-410. 1991.A model of a Markov process is presented in which observing the present state of a system is asymmetrically related to inferring the system's future and inferring its past. A likelihood inference about the system's past state, based on observing its present state, is justified no matter what the parameter values in the model happen to be. In contrast, a probability inference of the system's future state, based on observing its present state, requires further information about the parameter value…Read more
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18Fact, Fiction, and FitnessJournal of Philosophy 81 (7): 372-383. 1984.Alexander Rosenberg began 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 need to be overcome. But Rosenberg repeats some of the old mistakes and invents epicycles on others. In this comment I will not be able to circumscribe fully the range of the topics that an adequate treatment of this cluster of problems demands. A few critical comments …Read more
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32What would happen if everyone did it? A reply to Collier and Giere on frequency dependent causationPhilosophy of Science 52 (1): 141-150. 1985.In a recent article (Sober 1982), I criticized an account of causation proposed by Giere (1979, 1980) by describing a series of examples concerning natural selection. Collier (1983) has criticized my criticisms, saying that I misapplied Giere's proposal and misconstrued the biology. More recently, Giere (1984) has defended his theory against my criticisms. Here I argue that my criticisms still stand
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166Panglossian functionalism and the philosophy of mindSynthese 64 (August): 165-93. 1985.I want to explore what happens to two philosophical issues when we assume that the mind, a functional device, is to be understood by the same sort of functional analysis that guides biological investigation of other organismic systems and characteristics. The first problem area concerns the concept of rationality, its connection with reliability and reproductive success, and the status of rationality hypotheses in attribution of beliefs. It has been argued that ascribing beliefs to someone requi…Read more
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10Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, 3rd ed. (edited book)MIT Press. 2006.These essays by leading scientists and philosophers address conceptual issues that arise in the theory and practice of evolutionary biology. The third edition of this widely used anthology has been substantially revised and updated. Four new sections have been added: on women in the evolutionary process, evolutionary psychology, laws in evolutionary theory, and race as social construction or biological reality. Other sections treat fitness, units of selection, adaptationism, reductionism, essent…Read more
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6Book 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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28What Is Evolutionary Altruism?Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 14 (n/a): 75-99. 1988.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 brief…Read more
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21Optimist/pessimistBehavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (1): 87-88. 1987.The reception so far of Kitcher's Vaulting Ambition reminds me of the old saw about the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. Looking at the same glass of water, the former sees it as half full while the latter sees it as half empty. Some have seen Kitcher's book as a vindication of the possibility of an evolutionary science of human behavior; others have seen it as a devastating critique of the most influential efforts to date to construct such a science. As in the joke about the wate…Read more
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24Coincidences and How to Reason about ThemIn Henk W. de Regt (ed.), Epsa Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009, Springer. pp. 355--374. 2012.Suppose that several observations “coincide,” meaning that they are similar in some interesting respect. Is this coinciding a mere coincidence, or does it derive from a common cause? Those who reason about this kind of question—whether they embrace the first answer or the second—often deploy a mode of inference that I call probabilistic modus tollens. In this chapter I criticize probabilistic modus tollens and consider likelihood and Bayesian frameworks for reasoning about coincidences. I also c…Read more
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100Responses to Fitelson, Sansom, and Sarkar (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3): 692-704. 2011.
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137Evolutionary theory and the reality of macro probabilitiesIn Ellery Eells & James H. Fetzer (eds.), The Place of Probability in Science, Springer. pp. 133--60. 2010.Evolutionary theory is awash with probabilities. For example, natural selection is said to occur when there is variation in fitness, and fitness is standardly decomposed into two components, viability and fertility, each of which is understood probabilistically. With respect to viability, a fertilized egg is said to have a certain chance of surviving to reproductive age; with respect to fertility, an adult is said to have an expected number of offspring.1 There is more to evolutionary theory tha…Read more
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846Puzzles for ZFEL, McShea and Brandon’s zero force evolutionary lawBiology and Philosophy 27 (5): 723-735. 2012.In their 2010 book, Biology’s First Law, D. McShea and R. Brandon present a principle that they call ‘‘ZFEL,’’ the zero force evolutionary law. ZFEL says (roughly) that when there are no evolutionary forces acting on a population, the population’s complexity (i.e., how diverse its member organisms are) will increase. Here we develop criticisms of ZFEL and describe a different law of evolution; it says that diversity and complexity do not change when there are no evolutionary causes.
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77The Illusory Riches of Sober's MonismJournal of Philosophy 87 (3): 158-161. 1990.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 emer…Read more
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1311 Metaphysical and epistemological issues in modern Darwinian theoryIn J. Hodges & Gregory Radick (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge University Press. pp. 267. 2003.
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30Authors' responseMetascience 10 (2): 202-208. 2001.We thank Karen Canfell, Hamish Spencer and Ben Oldroyd for their commentaries. Below are some comments on the points they raise: 1. Is the Group Selection Debate Merely a Matter of Semantics? 2. Multi-Level Selection Theory versus Genic Selectionism 3. Heritability and Group Selection in Human Beings 4. Adaptationism.
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20Representation and psychological realityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1): 38-39. 1980.In this brief space I want to describe how Chomsky's analysis of "psychological reality" departs from what I think is a fairly standard construal of the idea. This familiar formulation arises from distinguishing between someone's following a rule and someone's acting in conformity with a rule. The former idea, but not the latter, involves the idea that the person has some mental representation of the rule that plays a certain causal role in determining behavior. Although there may be many gramma…Read more
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