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16The formal Darwinism project: editors' introductionBiology and Philosophy 29 (2): 153-154. 2014.
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70Group adaptation, formal darwinism and contextual analysisJournal of Evolutionary Biology 25 (6). 2012.We consider the question: under what circumstances can the concept of adaptation be applied to groups, rather than individuals? Gardner and Grafen (2009, J. Evol. Biol.22: 659–671) develop a novel approach to this question, building on Grafen's ‘formal Darwinism’ project, which defines adaptation in terms of links between evolutionary dynamics and optimization. They conclude that only clonal groups, and to a lesser extent groups in which reproductive competition is repressed, can be considered a…Read more
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70The Fragility of Common KnowledgeErkenntnis 82 (3): 451-472. 2017.Ordinary common knowledge is formally expressed by strong probabilistic common belief. How strong exactly? The question can be answered by drawing from the similar equivalence, recently explored, between plain and probabilistic individual beliefs. I argue that such a move entails that common knowledge displays a double fragility: as a description of a collective state and as a phenomenon, because it can respectively disappear as group size increases, or more worryingly as the epistemic context c…Read more
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21Comment on Raimo Tuomela. Joint Action: How Rational? How Irreducible?Analyse & Kritik 33 (1): 87-92. 2011.In his 'Cooperation as joint action', Tuomela presents a we-mode account of cooperation, which he argues has several advantages over an individual account. This commentary examines to what extent this is true. In particular, I assess three related characteristics of we-mode joint action: its possible rationality, its greater efficiency, and its alleged irreducibility to purely individual properties, which are recurring points of the article.
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91The epistemic core of weak joint actionPhilosophical Psychology (1): 1-24. 2013.Over the last three decades, joint action has received various definitions, which for all their differences share many features. However, they cannot fit some perplexing cases of weak joint action, such as demonstrations, where agents rely on distinct epistemic sources, and as a result, have no first-hand knowledge about each other. I argue that one major reason why the definition of such collective actions is akin to the classical ones is that it crucially relies on the concept of common knowle…Read more
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48Shared adaptiveness is not group adaptationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (5): 499-500. 2013.Climate stresses and monetary resources seem to lead to different collective adaptations. However, the reference to adaptation and to ambiguous collective dimensions appears premature; populations may entertain nothing more than shared adaptiveness. At this point, the intricacy of the underlying evolutionary processes (cultural selection, fitness-utility decoupling) very much obscures any diagnosis based on correlations
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94Review of Brian Skyrms, Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (11). 2010.
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Parallels between joint action and biological individualityIn Thomas Pradeu & Alexandre Guay (eds.), Individuals Across The Sciences, Oxford University Press. 2015.There exist many definitions of human joint action, or of what makes a group similar to an individual. However, they do not agree and are not directly reducible to each other. This multiplicity is due to a lack of constraints on them. I argue that they should at least meet an efficiency constraint: any account of joint action has to justify how it reliably leads agents to cooperation. One avenue consists in exploring the analogy between definitions of joint action and of biological individuality…Read more
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45Une forme minimale de coopérationDialogue 48 (2): 235-267. 2009.La plupart des nombreuses définitions existantes d’une action coopérative en fournissent des conditions suffisantes plutôt que nécessaires. Nous définissons ici une forme minimale de coopération, correspondant aux actions de masse, telles des manifestations. Nous en détaillons les aspects intentionnel, épistémique, stratégique et téléologique, généralement obtenus par affaiblissement spécifique de concepts classiques. Parallèlement, nous soulignons le rôle crucial de concepts issus de la théorie…Read more
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17Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott and Ben Fraser (eds): Cooperation and Its EvolutionActa Biotheoretica 62 (1): 109-114. 2014.
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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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