Peter Smith

The paper links discussions of two topics: biological individuality and the simplest forms of mentality. I discuss several attempts to locate the boundary between metabolic activity and ‘minimal cognition.’ I then look at differences between the kinds of individuality present in unicellular life, multicellular life in general, and animals of several kinds. Nervous systems, which are clearly relevant to cognition and subjectivity, also play an important role in the form of individuality seen in animals. The last part of the paper links these biological transitions to the evolutionary history of subjective experience.

Maynard Smith is right that one of the most striking features of contemporary biology is the ever-increasing prominence of the concept of information, along with related concepts like representation, programming, and coding. Maynard Smith is also right that this is surely a phenomenon which philosophers of science should examine closely. We should try to understand exactly what sorts of theoretical commitment are made when biological systems are described in these terms, and what connection there is between semantic descriptions in biology and in other domains.

One way to express the most persistent part of the mind-body problem is to say that there is an “explanatory gap” between the physical and the mental. The gap is not usually taken to apply to all of the mental, but to subjective experience, the mind’s “qualitative” features, or what is now referred to as “phenomenal consciousness.” The “gap” formulation is due to Joseph Levine. He acknowledged the appeal of intuitions of separability between physical facts, of any kind we can envisage, and this aspect of our mental lives. Subjective experience seems not to be the sort of thing that is just the physical under another guise. The immediate focus of Levine’s discussion was a family of arguments due to Saul Kripke. Kripke argued that some influential claims of mind-body identity could not be, as materialists claimed, contingent. If these identities are real then they are necessary. But we can clearly conceive that the mental and physical could come apart—an intuition that “identity theorists” conceded. Given that the identity is necessarily present if present at all, from the fact it is not necessary we can see it is absent. Kripke concluded that physicalism is false. Levine wanted to resist this

A wide range of ecological and evolutionary models predict variety in phenotype or behavior when a population is at equilibrium. This heterogeneity can be realized in different ways. For example, it can be realized through a complex population of individuals exhibiting different simple behaviors, or through a simple population of individuals exhibiting complex, varying behaviors. In some theoretical frameworks these different realizations are treated as equivalent, but natural selection distinguishes between these two alternatives in subtle ways. By investigating an increasingly complex series of models, from a simple fluctuating selection model up to a finite population hawk/dove game, we explore the selective pressures which discriminate between pure strategists, mixed at the population level, and individual mixed strategists. Our analysis reveals some important limitations to the ESS framework often employed to investigate the evolution of complex behavior.

It is well known that informational theories of representation have trouble accounting for error. Informational semantics is a family of theories attempting a naturalistic, unashamedly reductive explanation of the semantic and intentional properties of thought and language. Most simply, the informational approach explains truth-conditional content in terms of causal, nomic, or simply regular correlation between a representation and a state of affairs. The central work is Dretske, and the theory was largely developed at the University of Wisconsin by Fred Dretske, Dennis Stampe, and Berent Enc. Recently, informational semantics has roamed far beyond its Wisconsin home, and built a sizeable collection of followers. Converts include Jerry Fodor, Robert Stalnaker and, less faithfully, Paul and Patricia Churchland and Hartry Field. But for some years informational semantics has been hounded by a problem with error – the classic presentation is Fodor – and no other problem has hounded the theory so persistently.

An interpretation is given of John Dewey's views about “realism” in metaphysics, and of how these views relate to contemporary debates. Dewey rejected standard formulations of realism as a general metaphysical position, and interpreters have often been taken him to be sympathetic to some form of verificationism or constructivism. I argue that these interpretations are mistaken, as Dewey's unease with standard formulations of realism comes from his philosophical emphasis on intelligent control of events, by means of ordinary action. Because of his views about relations, Dewey's views in this area do risk collapsing into an overly holistic position. I discuss how these problems might be avoided, and consider also how Dewey's views about naturalism and realism might usefully inform ongoing work

Many vertebrate animals approximate, to various degrees, the “split‐brain” condition that results from surgery done in humans to treat severe epilepsy, with very limited connection between the left and right sides of the upper parts of the brain. The split‐brain condition has been the topic of extensive philosophical discussion, because it appears, in some circumstances, to give rise to two minds within one body. Is the same true of these animals? This article attempts to make progress on two difficult topics—animal experience, and the consequences of the human split‐brain condition—by considering both at once.

This book presents a collection of linked essays written by one of the leading philosophers of biology, Kim Sterelny, on the topic of biological evolution. The first half of the book explores most of the main theoretical controversies about evolution and selection. Sterelny argues that genes are not the only replicators: non-genetic inheritance is also extremely important, and is no mere epiphenomenon of gene selection. The second half of the book applies some of these ideas in considering cognitive evolution. Concentrating on the mental capacities of simpler animals rather than those of humans, Sterelny argues for a general distinction between detection and representation, and that the evolution of belief, like that of representation, can be decoupled from the evolution of preference. These essays, some never before published, form a coherent whole that defends not just an overall conception of evolution, but also a distinctive take on cognitive evolution.