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74Origins Are Not Essences in Evolutionary SystematicsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (2). 2002.Sound like a philosopher’s controversy? I think so. In ‘Evolution,’ I argued that Anti-Individualism was committed to a ‘highly metaphysical’ proposition at odds with the methodology of population genetics. This infelicity gave me reason for rejecting it. In his recent article, Pust takes issue with Neander and me. Until Pust wrote, Sober felt some small pressure from Individualism, and had shifted, albeit microscopically, toward it—he thought that on a very broad conception of causation, there …Read more
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104The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2015.Perception has been for philosophers in the last few decades an area of compelling interest and intense investigation. Developments in contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience has thrown up new information about the brain and new conceptions of how sensory information is processed and used. These new conceptions offer philosophers opportunities for reconceptualising the senses--what they tell us, how we use them, and the nature of the knowledge they give us. Today, the philosophy of perce…Read more
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121The Categories and Aristotle's OntologyDialogue 17 (2): 228-243. 1978.Much recent work on Aristotle's Categories assumes that there is an ontological theory presented in that work and tries to reconstruct it on the basis of the slender evidence in the book. I claim that this is misguided. Using a distinction made by G.E.L. Owen between theory and the "phaenomena", I argue that the Categories is mainly concerned with setting out the phenomena -- the intuitions that any ontology must explain. This thesis has consequences for the interpretation of Aristotle's ontolog…Read more
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14Aristotle's Semantics and a Puzzle Concerning ChangeCanadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (sup1): 21-40. 1984.In this paper I shall examine Aristotle's treatment of a certain puzzle concerning change. In section I, I shall show that within a certain standard framework for the semantics of subject-predicate sentences a number of things that Aristotle wants to maintain do not make sense. Then, I shall outline a somewhat non-standard account of the semantics for such sentences — arguably Aristotle's — and show how the proposals concerning change fit quite naturally into this framework. The results of this …Read more
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38How (and why) Darwinian selection restricts environmental feedbackBehavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (3): 545-545. 2001.Selectionist models date back to Empedocles in Ancient Greece. The novelty of Darwinian selection is that it is able to produce adaptively valuable things without being sensitive to adaptive value. Darwin achieved this result by a restriction of environmental feedback to the replicative process. Immune system selection definitely does not respect this restriction, and it is doubtful whether operant learning does.
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1027The Pleasure of ArtAustralasian Philosophical Review 1 (1): 6-28. 2017.This paper presents a new account of aesthetic pleasure, according to which it is a distinct psychological structure marked by a characteristic self-reinforcing motivation. Pleasure figures in the appreciation of an object in two ways: In the short run, when we are in contact with particular artefacts on particular occasions, aesthetic pleasure motivates engagement and keeps it running smoothly—it may do this despite the fact that the object we engagement is aversive in some ways. Over longer pe…Read more
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249Perception, Relativism, and Truth: Reflections on Plato's Theaetetus 152–160Dialogue 24 (1): 33-. 1985.The standard interpretation of "Theaetetus" 152-160 has Plato attribute to Protagoras a relativistic theory of truth and existence. It is argued here that in fact the individuals of Protagorean worlds are inter-Personal. (thus the Protagorean theory has public objects, but private truth). Also, a new interpretation is offered of Plato's use of heraclitean flux to model relativism. The philosophical and semantic consequences of the interpretation are explored.
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205What is Drift? A Response to Millstein, Skipper, and DietrichPhilosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 2 (20130604). 2010.The statistical interpretation of the Theory of Natural Selection claims that natural selection and drift are statistical features of mathematical aggregates of individual-level events. Natural selection and drift are not themselves causes. The statistical interpretation is motivated by a metaphysical conception of individual priority. Recently, Millstein, Skipper, and Dietrich (2009) have argued (a) that natural selection and drift are physical processes, and (b) that the statistical interpreta…Read more
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187Chicken, eggs, and speciationNoûs 43 (1): 94-115. 2009.Standard biological and philosophical treatments assume that dramatic genotypic or phenotypic change constitutes instantaneous speciation, and that barring such saltation, speciation is gradual evolutionary change in individual properties. Both propositions appear to be incongruent with standard theoretical perspectives on species themselves, since these perspectives are (a) non-pheneticist, and (b) tend to disregard intermediate cases. After reviewing certain key elements of such perspectives, …Read more
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„Introduction: The Structure of Aristotelian Science."In Aristotle Today: Essays on Aristotle's Ideal of Science, Academic Printing & Pub.. pp. 1--23. 1987.
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42Is color perception really categorical?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4): 504-505. 2005.Are color categories the evolutionary product of their usefulness in communication, or is this an accidental benefit they give us? It is argued here that embodiment constraints on color categorization suggest that communication is an add-on at best. Thus, the Steels & Belpaeme (S&B) model may be important in explaining coordination, but only at the margin. Furthermore, the concentration on discrimination is questionable: coclassification is at least as important.
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2934An untutored reaction of incredulity: A Review of Thomas Nagel's Mind and CosmosPhilosophers' Magazine 60 (-1). 2013.
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84Teleology and the product analogyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1). 1997.This article presents an analogical account of the meaning of function attributions in biology. To say that something has a function analogizes it with an artifact, but since the analogy rests on a necessary (but possibly insufficient) basis, function statements can still be assessed as true or false in an objective sense.
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192Taxonomy, Polymorphism, and History: An Introduction to Population Structure TheoryPhilosophy of Science 72 (1): 1-21. 2005.Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) theory suggests that species and other biological taxa consist of organisms that share certain similarities. HPC theory acknowledges the existence of Darwinian variation within biological taxa. The claim is that “homeostatic mechanisms” acting on the members of such taxa nonetheless ensure a significant cluster of similarities. The HPC theorist’s focus on individual similarities is inadequate to account for stable polymorphism within taxa, and fails properly to…Read more
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58Review of Daniel W. McShea and Robert N. Brandon, Biology's First Law (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (1). 2011.McShea and Brandon propose that in the absence of constraint, biological diversity increases spontaneously. While heuristically useful, the thesis is unclear and of dubious empirical validity. The authors have no natural way to distinguish entropic decrease of diversity from the kind of increase that they are interested in. They make unsupported claims about how to explain dramatic increases of diversity and increases of functional complexity.
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515Eye CandyAeon 5. 2014.This is a short popular version of my views on aesthetic pleasure published in the online magazine, Aeon.
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960Drift and “Statistically Abstractive Explanation”Philosophy of Science 76 (4): 464-487. 2009.A hitherto neglected form of explanation is explored, especially its role in population genetics. “Statistically abstractive explanation” (SA explanation) mandates the suppression of factors probabilistically relevant to an explanandum when these factors are extraneous to the theoretical project being pursued. When these factors are suppressed, the explanandum is rendered uncertain. But this uncertainty traces to the theoretically constrained character of SA explanation, not to any real indeterm…Read more
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72Our Knowledge of ColourCanadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (Supplement): 215-246. 2001.Scientists are often bemused by the efforts of philosophers essaying a theory of colour: colour science sports a huge array of facts and theories, and it is unclear to its practitioners what philosophy can or is trying to contribute. Equally, philosophers tend to be puzzled about how they can fit colour science into their investigations without compromising their own disciplinary identity: philosophy is supposed to be an _a priori_ investigation; philosophers do not work in psychophysics labs – …Read more
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689Visual DemonstrativesIn Athanassios Raftopoulos & Peter Machamer (eds.), Perception, Realism, and the Problem of Reference, Cambridge University Press. 2012.When I act on something, three kinds of idea (or representation) come into play. First, I have a non-visual representation of my goals. Second, I have a visual description of the kind of thing that I must act upon in order to satisfy my goals. Finally, I have an egocentric position locator that enables my body to interact with the object. It is argued here that these ideas are distinct. It is also argued that the egocentric position locator functions in the same way as a demonstrative, and that …Read more
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Perception |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Biology |
Aesthetic Pleasure |
Aesthetic Subjectivism |
The Value of Art |