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96It Just Looks the Same: An Evolutionary Psychological Account of Differences in Racial Cognition Among Infants and Older HumansReview of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (3): 631-647. 2019.Forms of racial cognition begin early: from about 3 months onwards, many human infants prefer to look at own-race faces over other-race faces. What is not yet fully clear is what the psychological mechanisms are that underlie racial thoughts at this early age, and why these mechanisms evolved. In this paper, we propose answers to these questions. Specifically, we use recent experimental data and evolutionary biological insights to argue that early racial cognition is simply the result of a “faci…Read more
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16Externalization of moral demands does not motivate exclusion of non-cooperators: A defense of a subjectivist moral psychologyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.
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13Metonymisches ErzählenDeutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft Und Geistesgeschichte 84 (1): 3-43. 2010.Der Aufsatz entfaltet anhand einer Theorieskizze sowie einer Analyse von Fallbeispielen aus mittelalterlichen Erzähldichtungen einen Begriff metonymischen Erzählens. Dabei schließen wir an Jakobson an und akzentuieren die Begriffspaare ›Metapher — Metonymie‹ und ›Syntagma — Paradigma‹ neu. Zugleich lassen wir uns von der Annahme leiten, dass metonymisches Erzählen eine besondere Bedeutung für vormodernes Erzählen besitzt.
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34By genes alone: a model selectionist argument for genetical explanations of cooperation in non-human organismsBiology and Philosophy 32 (6): 951-967. 2017.I distinguish two versions of kin selection theory—a purely genetic version and a version that also appeals to cultural forms of cooperation —and present an argument in favor of using the former when it comes to accounting for the evolution of cooperation in non-human organisms. Specifically, I first show that both GKST and WKST are equally mathematically coherent—they can both be derived from the Price equation—but not necessarily equally empirically plausible, as they are based on different as…Read more
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22Structural flaws: massive modularity and the argument from designBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (4): 733-743. 2008.The ‘argument from design’ plays a pivotal role in Carruthers’ recent defence of the massive modularity thesis. However, as this paper seeks to show, there are major flaws in its structure. If construed deductively, it is unsound: modular mental architecture is not necessarily the best architecture, and even if it were, this alone would not show that this architecture evolved. If construed inductively, it is not much more convincing, as it then appears to be too weak to support the kind of modul…Read more
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29Risky business: evolutionary theory and human attitudes towards risk – a reply to OkashaJournal of Philosophy 105 (3): 156-165. 2008.
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109Beyond the Hype: The Value of Evolutionary Theorizing in EconomicsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (1): 46-72. 2013.In this paper, I consider the recent resurgence of “evolutionary economics”—the idea that evolutionary theory can be very useful to push forward key debates in economics—and assess the extent to which it rests on a plausible foundation. To do this, I first distinguish two ways in which evolutionary theory can, in principle, be brought to bear on an economic problem—namely, evidentially and heuristically—and then apply this distinction to the three major hypotheses that evolutionary economists ha…Read more
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19P. Hammerstein and J. R. Stevens: ‘Evolution and the Mechanisms of Decision Making’Acta Biotheoretica 62 (4): 527-530. 2014.
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40Firms, agency, and evolutionJournal of Economic Methodology 23 (1): 57-76. 2016.A recent trend in economics has been to appeal to evolutionary theory when addressing various open questions in the subject. I here further investigate one particular such appeal to evolutionary biology: the argument that, since markets select firms as coherent units, firms should be seen to be genuine economic agents. To assess this argument, I present a model of firm/office selection in a competitive market, and show that there are cases where markets can select for firms/offices as collective…Read more
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106Structural flaws: Massive modularity and the argument from designBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (4): 733-743. 2008.recent defence of the massive modularity thesis. However, as this paper seeks to show, there are major flaws in its structure. If construed deductively, it is unsound: modular mental architecture is not necessarily the best architecture, and even if it were, this alone would not show that this architecture evolved. If construed inductively, it is not much more convincing, as it then appears to be too weak to support the kind of modularity Carruthers is concerned with. The upshot of this is that …Read more
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37Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott, and Ben Fraser (eds) cooperation and its evolutionBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (4): 893-897. 2014.
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68The benefits of rule following: a new account of the evolution of desiresStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4 A): 595-603. 2013.A key component of much current research in behavioral ecology, cognitive science, and economics is a model of the mind at least partly based on beliefs and desires. However, despite this prevalence, there are still many open questions concerning both the structure and the applicability of this model. This is especially so when it comes to its ‘desire’ part: in particular, it is not yet entirely clear when and why we should expect organisms to be desire-based—understood so as to imply that they …Read more
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114Preferences Vs. Desires: Debating the Fundamental Structure of Conative StatesEconomics and Philosophy 31 (2): 239-257. 2015.Abstract:I address an overlooked question about the structure of the cognitive/conative model of the mind that underlies much of the work in economics, psychology and philosophy: namely, whether conative states are fundamentally monistic (desire-like) or comparative (preference-like). I argue that two seemingly promising sets of theoretical considerations – namely, the structure of Rational Choice Theory, and considerations of computational efficiency – are unable to resolve this debate. Given t…Read more
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51Gigerenzer’s Evolutionary Arguments against Rational Choice Theory: An AssessmentPhilosophy of Science 78 (5): 1272-1282. 2011.I critically discuss a recent innovation in the debate surrounding the plausibility of rational choice theory : the appeal to evolutionary theory. Specifically, I assess Gigerenzer and colleagues’ claim that considerations based on natural selection show that, instead of making decisions in a RCT-like way, we rely on ‘simple heuristics’. As I try to make clearer here, though, Gigerenzer and colleagues’ arguments are unconvincing: we lack the needed information about our past to determine whether…Read more
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101Simulation, simplicity, and selection: an evolutionary perspective on high-level mindreading (review)Philosophical Studies 152 (2). 2011.In this paper, I argue that a natural selection-based perspective gives reasons for thinking that the core of the ability to mindread cognitively complex mental states is subserved by a simulationist process—that is, that it relies on nonspecialised mechanisms in the attributer's cognitive architecture whose primary function is the generation of her own decisions and inferences. In more detail, I try to establish three conclusions. First, I try to make clearer what the dispute between simulation…Read more
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56Niche construction, adaptive preferences, and the differences between fitness and utilityBiology and Philosophy 29 (3): 315-335. 2014.A number of scholars have recently defended the claim that there is a close connection between the evolutionary biological notion of fitness and the economic notion of utility: both are said to refer to an organism’s success in dealing with its environment, and both are said to play the same theoretical roles in their respective sciences. However, an analysis of two seemingly disparate but in fact structurally related phenomena—‘niche construction’ (the case where organisms change their environm…Read more
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44Altruism, egoism, or neither: A cognitive-efficiency-based evolutionary biological perspective on helping behaviorStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56 15-23. 2016.
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28The benefits of rule following: A new account of the evolution of desiresStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4): 595-603. 2013.A key component of much current research in behavioral ecology, cognitive science, and economics is a model of the mind at least partly based on beliefs and desires. However, despite this prevalence, there are still many open questions concerning both the structure and the applicability of this model. This is especially so when it comes to its ‘desire’ part: in particular, it is not yet entirely clear when and why we should expect organisms to be desire-based—understood so as to imply that they …Read more
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55Interdisciplinary thinking about mechanisms and causes (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 50 94-97. 2015.
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236Sober & Wilson’s evolutionary arguments for psychological altruism: a reassessmentBiology and Philosophy 26 (2): 251-260. 2011.In their book Unto Others, Sober and Wilson argue that various evolutionary considerations (based on the logic of natural selection) lend support to the truth of psychological altruism. However, recently, Stephen Stich has raised a number of challenges to their reasoning: in particular, he claims that three out of the four evolutionary arguments they give are internally unconvincing, and that the one that is initially plausible fails to take into account recent findings from cognitive science an…Read more
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110Overextension: the extended mind and arguments from evolutionary biology (review)European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (2): 241-255. 2013.I critically assess two widely cited evolutionary biological arguments for two versions of the ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT): namely, an argument appealing to Dawkins’s ‘Extended Phenotype Thesis’ (EPT) and an argument appealing to ‘Developmental Systems Theory’ (DST). Specifically, I argue that, firstly, appealing to the EPT is not useful for supporting the EMT (in either version), as it is structured and motivated too differently from the latter to be able to corroborate or elucidate it. Second…Read more
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129Condorcet and communitarianism: Boghossian’s fallacious inferenceSynthese 166 (1). 2009.This paper defends the communitarian account of meaning against Boghossian’s (Wittgensteinian) arguments. Boghossian argues that whilst such an account might be able to accommodate the infinitary characteristic of meaning, it cannot account for its normativity: he claims that, since the dispositions of a group must mirror those of its members, the former cannot be used to evaluate the latter. However, as this paper aims to make clear, this reasoning is fallacious. Modelling the issue with four (…Read more
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40The Heuristic Defense of Scientific Models: An Incentive-Based AssessmentPerspectives on Science 23 (4): 424-442. 2015.It is undeniable that much scientific work is model-based. Despite this, the justification for this reliance on models is still controversial. A particular difficulty here is the fact that many scientific models are based on assumptions that do not describe the exact details of many or even any empirical situations very well. This raises the question of why it is that, despite their frequent lack of descriptive accuracy, employing models is scientifically useful.One..
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122Selection, Drift, and Independent Contrasts: Defending the Methodological Foundations of the FIC (review)Biological Theory 7 (1): 38-47. 2013.Felsenstein’s method of independent contrasts (FIC) is one of the most widely used approaches to the study of correlated evolution. However, it is also quite controversial: numerous researchers have called various aspects of the method into question. Among these objections, there is one that, for two reasons, stands out from the rest: first, it is rather philosophical in nature; and second, it has received very little attention in the literature thus far. This objection concerns Sober’s charge t…Read more
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70It takes two: sexual strategies and game theoryStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (1): 41-49. 2010.David Buss’s Sexual Strategies Theory is one of the major evolutionary psychological research programmes, but, as I try to show in this paper, its theoretical and empirical foundations cannot yet be seen to be fully compelling. This lack of cogency comes about due to Buss’s failure to attend to the interactive nature of his subject matter, which leads him to overlook two classic and well known issues of game theoretic and evolutionary biological analysis. Firstly, Buss pays insufficient attentio…Read more
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51The adaptive importance of cognitive efficiency: an alternative theory of why we have beliefs and desiresBiology and Philosophy 26 (1): 31-50. 2011.Finding out why we have beliefs and desires is important for a thorough understanding of the nature of our minds (and those of other animals). It is therefore unsurprising that several accounts have been presented that are meant to answer this question. At least in the philosophical literature, the most widely accepted of these are due to Kim Sterelny and Peter Godfrey-Smith, who argue that beliefs and desires evolved due to their enabling us to be behaviourally flexible in a way that reflexes d…Read more