University of California, San Diego
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2005
Tempe, Arizona, United States of America
  •  2
    Book Reviews (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 39 (3): 316-318. 1999.
  •  5
    Book-reviews (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 39 (4): 429-432. 1999.
  •  15
    The Authority of Avowals and the Concept of Belief
    European Journal of Philosophy 8 (1): 20-39. 2000.
    The pervasive dispositional model of belief is misguided. It fails to acknowledge the authority of first‐person ascriptions or avowals of belief, and the “decision principle”– that having decided the question whether p, there is, for me, no further question whether I believe that p. The dilemma is how one can have immediate knowledge of a state extended in time; its resolution lies in the expressive character of avowals – which does not imply a non‐assertoric thesis – and their non‐cognitive sta…Read more
  • Mill, phenomenalism, and the self
    In John Skorupski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mill, Cambridge University Press. pp. 139--75. 1998.
  •  4
    Book reviews (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (3): 429-432. 1998.
  •  3
    Toward a mechanistic Evo Devo
    In Manfred Laubichler & Jane Maienschein (eds.), Form and Function in Developmental Evolution, Cambridge University Press. pp. 213. 2009.
  •  146
    Samir Okasha argues that clade selection is an incoherent concept, because the relation that constitutes clades is such that it renders parent-offspring (reproduction) relations between clades impossible. He reasons that since clades cannot reproduce, it is not coherent to speak of natural selection operating at the clade level. We argue, however, that when species-level lineages and clade-level lineages are treated consistently according to standard cladist commitments, clade reproduction is in…Read more
  •  12
    The authority of avowals and the concept of belief
    European Journal of Philosophy 8 (1): 20-39. 2000.
    The pervasive dispositional model of belief is misguided. It fails to acknowledge the authority of first‐person ascriptions or avowals of belief, and the “decision principle”– that having decided the question whether p, there is, for me, no further question whether I believe that p. The dilemma is how one can have immediate knowledge of a state extended in time; its resolution lies in the expressive character of avowals – which does not imply a non‐assertoric thesis – and their non‐cognitive sta…Read more
  •  9
    The history of science often has difficulty connecting with science at the lab-bench level, raising questions about the value of history of science for science. This essay offers a case study from taxonomy in which lessons learned about particular failings of numerical taxonomy in the second half of the twentieth century bear on the new movement toward DNA barcoding. In particular, it argues that an unwillingness to deal with messy theoretical questions in both cases leads to important problems …Read more
  •  8
    Clades Are Reproducers
    Biological Theory 1 (4): 381-391. 2006.
    Exploring whether clades can reproduce leads to new perspectives on general accounts of biological development and individuation. Here we apply James Griesemer's general account of reproduction to clades. Griesemer's account of reproduction includes a requirement for development, raising the question of whether clades may bemeaningfully said to develop. We offer two illustrative examples of what clade development might look like, though evaluating these examples proves difficult due to the pauci…Read more
  •  326
    1. A Historical Look at Unity 2. Field Guide to Modern Concepts of Reduction and Unity 3. Kitcher's Revisionist Account of Unification 4. Critics of Unity 5. Integration Instead of Unity 6. Reduction via Mechanisms 7. Case Studies in Reduction and Unification across the Disciplines
  •  14
    This article serves as an introduction to the laws-of-biology debate. After introducing the main issues in an introductory section, arguments for and against laws of biology are canvassed in Section 2. In Section 3, the debate is placed in wider epistemological context by engaging a group of scholars who have shifted the focus away from the question of whether there are laws of biology and toward offering good accounts of explanation(s) in the biological sciences. Section 4 introduces two relati…Read more
  •  34
    Stoichiometry and the New Biology: The Future Is Now
    with James Elser
    PLoS Biology 5 181-183. 2007.
    The world is an untidy place, and the sciences—all of them—reflect this. One source of this untidiness is the relationship between levels of organization. Reducing macrolevels to microlevels—explaining the former in terms of the latter—has met with successes but has never been the whole story. In the biological sciences, there has been much attention lately to the shortcomings of reductionism on the grounds that (i) it changes the subject rather than explaining, (ii) it leads to a myopically mol…Read more