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214Theory Choice, Good Sense and Social ConsensusErkenntnis 78 (5): 1109-1132. 2013.There has been a significant interest in the recent literature in developing a solution to the problem of theory choice which is both normative and descriptive, but agent-based rather than rule-based, originating from Pierre Duhem’s notion of ‘good sense’. In this paper we present the properties Duhem attributes to good sense in different contexts, before examining its current reconstructions advanced in the literature and their limitations. We propose an alternative account of good sense, seen …Read more
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234Being realistic about common knowledge: a Lewisian approachSynthese 183 (2): 249-276. 2011.Defined and formalized several decades ago, widely used in philosophy and game theory, the concept of common knowledge is still considered as problematic, although not always for the right reasons. I suggest that the epistemic status of a group of human agents in a state of common knowledge has not been thoroughly analyzed. In particular, every existing account of common knowledge, whether formal or not, is either too strong to fit cognitively limited individuals, or too weak to adequately descr…Read more
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57Rational Choice TheoryIn I. Jarvie & J. Zamorra-Bonilla (eds.), Chapter 14 of The Sage Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Sage Publications. pp. 307. 2011.
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107Minimal CooperationPhilosophy of the Social Sciences (1): 0048393112457428. 2012.Most definitions of cooperation provide sufficient but not necessary conditions. This paper describes a form of minimal cooperation, corresponding to mass actions implying many agents, such as demonstrations. It characterizes its intentional, epistemic, strategic, and teleological aspects, mostly obtained from weakening classical concepts. The rationality of minimal cooperation turns out to be part of its definition, whereas it is usually considered as an optional though desirable feature. Game-…Read more
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45Adaptation, fitness and the selection-optimality linksBiology and Philosophy 29 (2): 225-232. 2014.We critically examine a number of aspects of Grafen’s ‘formal Darwinism’ project. We argue that Grafen’s ‘selection-optimality’ links do not quite succeed in vindicating the working assumption made by behavioural ecologists and others—that selection will lead organisms to exhibit adaptive behaviour—since these links hold true even in the presence of strong genetic and developmental constraints. However we suggest that the selection-optimality links can profitably be viewed as constituting an axi…Read more
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114Cooperation, conflict, sex and bargaining: Joan Roughgarden’s: The genial gene. University of California Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-520-25826-6Biology and Philosophy 25 (2): 257-267. 2010.
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29Seven principles to rule them all: E. Coen: Cells to Civilizations. Princeton University Press, 2012, 360 pp, $29.95, ISBN: 9780691149677 (review)Biology and Philosophy 28 (4): 683-692. 2013.Coen offers a unified explanation of natural selection, development, learning and cultural change, based on seven fundamental principles: population variation, persistence, reinforcement, competition, cooperation, combinatorial richness and recurrence. I discuss whether all seven principles are justified, successfully fit the four processes, encompass life processes only, and have any strong explanatory import. I find each of these claims doubtful
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17Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott and Ben Fraser (eds): Cooperation and Its Evolution (review)Acta Biotheoretica 62 (1): 109-114. 2014.
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364Social norms and game theory: harmony or discord?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (3): 551-587. 2013.Recent years have witnessed an increased number of game-theoretic approaches to social norms, which apparently share some common vocabulary and methods. We describe three major approaches of this kind (due to Binmore, Bicchieri and Gintis), before comparing them systematically on five crucial themes: generality of the solution, preference transformation, punishment, epistemic conditions and type of explanation. This allows us to show that these theories are, by and large, less compatible than th…Read more
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36Robustness in evolutionary explanations: a positive accountBiology and Philosophy 32 (1): 73-96. 2017.Robustness analysis is widespread in science, but philosophers have struggled to justify its confirmatory power. We provide a positive account of robustness by analysing some explicit and implicit uses of within and across-model robustness in evolutionary theory. We argue that appeals to robustness are usually difficult to justify because they aim to increase the likeliness that a phenomenon obtains. However, we show that robust results are necessary for explanations of phenomena with specific p…Read more
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