Derek D. Turner

Explanations in the natural historical sciences often take the form of stories. This paper examines two accounts of the sources of narrative’s explanatory power: Beatty’s suggestion that narrative explanation is closely connected to historical contingency, and that narratives explain by contrasting what happened with what might have happened; and Ereshefsky and Turner’s view that narratives explain by organizing events around a central subject with a distinctive direction of historical development. In both accounts, it turns out that non-epistemic values typically play a role in the construction of narrative, and hence contribute to narrative’s explanatory force. Two case studies from historical science – the plate tectonic story of the Avalonian terrane, and the story of the evolution of trichromatic vision in (some) mammals – help to motivate and illustrate this argument.

Common philosophical accounts of creativity align creative products and processes with a particular kind of agency: namely, that deserving of praise or blame. Considering evolutionary examples, we explore two ways of denying that creativity requires forms of agency. First, we argue that decoupling creativity from praiseworthiness comes at little cost: accepting that evolutionary processes are non-agential, they nonetheless exhibit many of the same characteristics and value associated with creativity. Second, we develop a ‘product-first’ account of creativity by which a process is creative just in case it gives rise to products deserving of certain forms of aesthetic engagement.

A number of people, from William James to Dave Foreman and Vandana Shiva, have suggested that humans are at war with nature. Moreover, the analogy with warfare figures in at least one important argument for strategic monkeywrenching. In general, an analogy can be used for purposes of (1) justification; (2) persuasion; or (3) as a tool for generating novel hypotheses and recommendations. This paper argues that the analogy with warfare should not be used for justificatory or rhetorical purposes, but that it may nevertheless have a legitimate heuristic role to play in environmental philosophy

Starting with Ben-Menahem’s definition of historical contingency as sensitivity to variations in initial conditions, we suggest that historical events and processes can be thought of as forming a complex landscape of contingency and necessity. We suggest three different ways of extending and elaborating Ben-Menahem’s concepts: By supplementing them with a notion of historical disturbance; by pointing out that contingency and necessity are subject to scaling effects; by showing how degrees of contingency/necessity can change over time. We also argue that further development of Sterelny’s notion of conditional inevitability leads to our conclusion that the topography of historical contingency is something that can change over time.

Eric Katz’s insight about the relationship between causal history and value only generates a principled critique of de-extinction when conjoined with the diminishment claim, or the claim that human involvement in something’s causal history diminishes its value. The diminishment claim is a form of negative anthropocentrism. In addition to thinking about de-extinction as a form of ecological restoration, we could think of it as a form of environmental artwork. This reframing highlights the implausibility of the diminishment claim.

Part One of this dissertation explores an analogy between Darwinian evolution by natural selection and the process of inquiry. Beliefs are memes, or replicators, much like biological replicators . As beliefs replicate, their numbers can increase at a geometrical rate. Important checks to the replication of beliefs include limited human memory and attention, as well as the law of non-contradiction. When someone detects an inconsistency, the contradictory beliefs enter into an intellectual struggle for existence. Which beliefs die out and which go on replicating is sometimes, though not always, determined by arguments, evidence, and reasons. Arguments are among the interactors of intellectual evolution: their interactions with each other and with us can cause the differential replication of beliefs. Inquiry is thus a Darwinian evolutionary process---it is the evolution of beliefs and arguments over time. ;Three lines of objection to this analogical evolutionary epistemology are addressed in Part One: the weak analogy criticism; the explanatory emptiness objection; and a set of worries concerning normativity. ;The conclusion of Part One is that the analogy between evolution and inquiry, while not perfect, still deserves to be taken seriously. One significant consequence of the analogy is that the process of inquiry has no over-arching, as-yet-to-be-realized future goal or telos, as some philosophers have thought. Instead, the process of inquiry, like biological evolution, is open-ended and driven from behind by the sub-processes of replication, interaction, and selection. ;Part Two of the dissertation tests the fruitfulness of the analogy by showing how it can be combined with related theories in philosophy of mind and normative epistemology. Chapter III shows how Ruth Garrett Millikan's Darwinian approach to philosophy of mind can shed light on the nature of beliefs. Chapter IV combines the analogy between evolution and inquiry with John Post's minimal epistemology, or the epistemology of creativity and consistency