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572 Why I am a naturalistIn Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. pp. 32. 2013.
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Davidson's unintended attack on psychologyIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Ernest LePore (eds.), Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Blackwell. 1985.
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101The Metaphysics of MicroeconomicsThe Monist 78 (3): 352-367. 1995.The study of economics has been a going concern among philosophers for the better part of twenty years without very many people even noticing that economics has a metaphysics. Indeed, among economists the term ‘metaphysical’ is probably an epithet of opprobrium, employed to suggest that a claim is untestable or otherwise without cognitive significance. Philosophers of economics will admit to the existence of an epistemology of economics—the study of the nature, extent and justification of econom…Read more
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53Selection and science: Critical notice of David Hull's science as a process (review)Biology and Philosophy 7 (2): 217-228. 1992.An examination of Hull's claims about the nature of interactors, replicators and selection, with special attention to how the genetic material realizes the first two types, and a critique of Hull's attempt to apply the theory of natural selection to the explanation of scientific change, and in particular the succession of theories. I conclude that difficulties attending the molecular instantiation of Hull's theory are vastly increased when it comes to be applied to memes.
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121How Darwinian reductionism refutes genetic determinismStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (1): 122-135. 2006.Genetic determinism labels the morally problematical claim that some socially significant traits, traits we care about, such as sexual orientation, gender roles, violence, alcoholism, mental illness, intelligence, are largely the results of the operation of genes and not much alterable by environment, learning or other human intervention. Genetic determinism does not require that genes literally fix these socially significant traits, but rather that they constrain them within narrow channels bey…Read more
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121On the original contract: Evolutionary game theory and human evolutionAnalyse & Kritik 27 (1): 136157. 2005.This paper considers whether the available evidence from archeology, biological anthropology, primatology, and comparative gene-sequencing, can test evolutionary game theory models of cooperation as historical hypotheses about the actual course of human prehistory. The examination proceeds on the assumption that cooperation is the product of cultural selection and is not a genetically encoded trait. Nevertheless, we conclude that gene sequence data may yet shed signi cant light on the evolution …Read more
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25Genie Selection, Molecular Biology and Biological InstrumentalismMidwest Studies in Philosophy 18 (1): 343-362. 1993.
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391. From developmental molecular biology to neurogenomics 2. More than you wanted to know about short term and long term implicit memory 3. How are explicit memories stored? 4. How the brain recalls memories 5. Each explicit memory is just a lot of implicit memories 6. Is ‘knowledge how’ computable? 7. Computationalism and neuroscience..
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191How is biological explanation possible?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (4): 735-760. 2001.That biology provides explanations is not open to doubt. But how it does so must be a vexed question for those who deny that biology embodies laws or other generalizations with the sort of explanatory force that the philosophy of science recognizes. The most common response to this problem has involved redefining law so that those grammatically general statements which biologists invoke in explanations can be counted as laws. But this terminological innovation cannot identify the source of biolo…Read more
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77Philosophical Darwinism is a species of naturalism. Among philosophers, naturalism is widely treated as the view that contemporary scientific theory is the source of solutions to philosophical problems. Thus, naturalists look to the theory of natural selection as the primary source in coming to solve philosophical problems raised by human affairs. For it combines more strongly than any other theory relevance to human affairs and scientific warrant. Other theories, especially in physics and chemi…Read more
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110The Genealogy of Content or the Future of an IllusionPhilosophia 43 (3): 537-547. 2015.Eliminativism about intentional content argues for its conclusion from the partial correctness of all three of the theses Hutto and Satne seek to combine: neo-Cartesianism is correct to this extent: if there is intentional content it must originally be mental. Neo-Behaviorism is correct to this extent: attribution of intentional content is basically a heuristic device for predicting the behavior of higher vertebrates. Neo-Pragmatism is right to this extent: the illusion of intentionality in lang…Read more
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424 Can naturalism save the humanities?In Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. pp. 39. 2013.
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162Reductionism in a historical sciencePhilosophy of Science 68 (2): 135-163. 2001.Reductionism is a metaphysical thesis, a claim about explanations, and a research program. The metaphysical thesis reductionists advance (and antireductionists accept) is that all facts, including all biological facts, are fixed by the physical and chemical facts; there are no non-physical events, states, or processes, and so biological events, states and processes are “nothing but” physical ones. The research program can be framed as a methodological prescription which follows from the claim ab…Read more
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182Is indeterminism the source of the statistical character of evolutionary theory?Philosophy of Science 66 (1): 140-157. 1999.We argue that Brandon and Carson's (1996) "The Indeterministic Character of Evolutionary Theory" fails to identify any indeterminism that would require evolutionary theory to be a statistical or probabilistic theory. Specifically, we argue that (1) their demonstration of a mechanism by which quantum indeterminism might "percolate up" to the biological level is irrelevant; (2) their argument that natural selection is indeterministic because it is inextricably connected with drift fails to join th…Read more
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51On multiple realization: Comments and criticism and the special sciencesJournal of Philosophy XCVIII ( 7. 2001.In
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41Is Epigenetic Inheritance a Counterexample to the Central Dogma?History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28 (4). 2006.This paper argues that nothing that has been discovered in the increasingly complex delails of gene regulation has provided any grounds to retract or qualify Crick's version of the central dogma. In particular it defends the role of the genes as the sole bearers of information, and argues that the mechanism of epigenetic modification of the DNA is but another vindication of Crick's version of the central dogma. The paper shows that arguments of C.K. Waters for the distinctive causual role of the…Read more
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399Darwin's nihilistic idea: Evolution and the meaninglessness of life (review)Biology and Philosophy 18 (5): 653-668. 2003.No one has expressed the destructive power of Darwinian theory more effectively than Daniel Dennett. Others have recognized that the theory of evolution offers us a universal acid, but Dennett, bless his heart, coined the term. Many have appreciated that the mechanism of random variation and natural selection is a substrate-neutral algorithm that operates at every level of organization from the macromolecular to the mental, at every time scale from the geological epoch to the nanosecond. But it …Read more
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114The Return of the "Tabula Rasa" (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2). 2007.Thought in a Hostile World1 has four ostensible aims: …[1] to develop and vindicate a set of analytical tools for thinking about cognition and its evolution… [2] to develop a substantive theory of the evolution of human uniqueness… [3] to explore, from this evolutionary perspective, the relationship between folk psychology and an integrated scientific conception of human cognition… [4] to develop a critique of, and an alternative to, nativist, modular versions of evolutionary psychology (p. viii)…Read more
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23Critical review: Sober's Philosophy of biology and his philosophy of biologyPhilosophy of Science 63 (3): 452-464. 1996.An examination of the foundations of Elliot Sober's philosophy of biology as reflected in his introductory textbook of that title reveals substantial and controversial philosophical commitments. Among these are the claim that all understanding is historical, the assertion that there are biological laws but they are necessary truths, the view that the fundamental theory in biology is a narrative, and the suggestion that biology adverts to ungrounded probabilistic propensities of the sort to be me…Read more
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85Scientific innovation and the limits of social scientific predictionSynthese 97 (2). 1993.Philosophers and historians of philosophy have come to recognize that at the core of logical positivism was an attachment to prediction as the necessary condition for scientific knowledge.1 The inheritors of their tradition, especially the Bayesians among us, continue to seek a theory of confirmation that reflects this epistemic commitment. The importance of prediction in the growth of scientific knowledge is a commitment I share with the positivists, so I do not blanch at that designation, much…Read more
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83On the priority of intellectual property rights, especially in biotechnologyPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 3 (1): 77-95. 2004.This article argues that considerations about the role and predictability of intellectual innovation make the protection of intellectual property morally obligatory even when it greatly reduces short-term welfare. Since the provision of good new ideas is the only productive input not subject to decreasing marginal productivity, welfarist considerations require that no impediment to its maximal provision be erected and the potentially substantial welfare losses imposed by a patent system be mitig…Read more
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201Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings (edited book)Routledge. 2001.This comprehensive anthology draws together writings by leading philosophers on the philosophy of science. Each section is prefaced by an introductory essay from the editors, guiding students gently into the topic. Accessible and wide-ranging, the text draws on both contemporary and twentieth century sources. The readings are designed to complement Alex Rosenberg's textbook, _Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction_, but can also serve as a stand-alone volume in any philosophy of scie…Read more
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169How Jerry Fodor slid down the slippery slope to Anti-Darwinism, and how we can avoid the same fateEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (1): 1-17. 2013.There is only one physically possible process that builds and operates purposive systems in nature: natural selection. What it does is build and operate systems that look to us purposive, goal directed, teleological. There really are not any purposes in nature and no purposive processes ether. It is just one vast network of linked causal chains. Darwinian natural selection is the only process that could produce the appearance of purpose. That is why natural selection must have built and must con…Read more
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81Why do Spatiotemporally Restricted Regularities Explain in the Social Sciences?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (1): 1-26. 2012.Employing a well-known local regularity from macroeconomics, the Phillips curve, I examine Woodward’s ([2000], [2003]) account of the explanatory power of such historically restricted generalizations and the mathematical models with which they are sometimes associated. The article seeks to show that, pace Woodward, to be explanatory such generalizations need to be underwritten by more fundamental ones, and that rational choice theory would not avail in this case to provide the required underwrit…Read more
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20Defending Information-Free GenocentrismHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 27 (3/4). 2005.Genocentrism, the thesis that the genes play a special role in the causation of development is often rejected in favor of a 'causal democracy thesis' to the effect that all causally necessary conditions for development are equal. Genocentrists argue that genes play a distinct causal role owing to their informational content and that this content enables them to program the embryo. I show that the special causal role of the genome hinges not on its informational status — it has none, or at least …Read more
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Arizona State UniversityPhilosophy - School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious StudiesProfessor (Part-time)
Durham, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Social Science |