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15The Authority of Avowals and the Concept of BeliefEuropean 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
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Mill, phenomenalism, and the selfIn John Skorupski (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mill, Cambridge University Press. pp. 139--75. 1998.
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3Toward a mechanistic Evo DevoIn Manfred Laubichler & Jane Maienschein (eds.), Form and Function in Developmental Evolution, Cambridge University Press. pp. 213. 2009.
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32Ernst Mayr: What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline (review)Philosophy of Science 73 (2): 255-257. 2006.
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146Coherence, Consistency, and Cohesion: Clade Selection in Okasha and BeyondPhilosophy of Science 72 (5): 1026-1040. 2005.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
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12The authority of avowals and the concept of beliefEuropean 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
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8False memory syndrome and the authority of personal memory-claims: A philosophical perspectivePhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 5 (4): 283-297. 1998.
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9Taxonomy and Why History of Science Matters for ScienceIsis 99 331-340. 2008.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
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8Clades Are ReproducersBiological 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
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3261. 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
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14Laws of biology, laws of nature: Problems and (dis)solutionsPhilosophy Compass 2 (3). 2007.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
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34Stoichiometry and the New Biology: The Future Is NowPLoS 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
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23Clade Selection and Levels of Lineage: A Reply to RieppelBiological Theory 4 (2): 214-218. 2009.