•  100
    Reply to Sober and Waters (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (1): 241-248. 2010.
    Elliott Sober and Ken Waters both raise interesting and difficult challenges for various aspects of the position I set out in Evolution and the Levels of the Selection. I am grateful to them for their penetrating criticisms of my work, and find myself in agreement with many of their points
  •  67
    My comments will focus on the second and third chapters of Sober’s book , which explore Darwin’s ideas about altruism, group selection and kin selection , and sex-ratio evolution . Sober makes a persuasive argument for his main claim: that Darwin was a subtler thinker on these topics than he is often taken to be. While there is much that I admire in Sober’s lucid discussion, I will focus on points of disagreement. Readers should note that this is not the first time that Sober and I have disagree…Read more
  •  25
    Bayes, Levi, and the taxicabs
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5): 693-693. 2000.
    Stanovich & West (S&W) are wrong to think that all “reject-the-norm” theorists simply wish to reduce the normative/descriptive gap. They have misunderstood Issac Levi's reasons for rejecting Tversky and Kahneman's normative assumptions in the “base-rate” experiments. In their discussion of the taxicab experiment, (S&W) erroneously claim that subjects' responses indicate whether they have reasoned in accordance with Bayesian principles or not.
  •  106
    On niche construction and extended evolutionary theory
    Biology and Philosophy 20 (1): 1-10. 2005.
  •  24
    Living Philosophers: Hilary Putnam
    Philosophy Now 33 51-51. 2001.
  •  124
    The Relation between Kin and Multilevel Selection: An Approach Using Causal Graphs
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (2): 435-470. 2016.
    Kin selection and multilevel selection are alternative approaches for studying the evolution of social behaviour, the relation between which has long been a source of controversy. Many recent theorists regard the two approaches as ultimately equivalent, on the grounds that gene frequency change can be correctly expressed using either. However, this shows only that the two are formally equivalent, not that they offer equally good causal representations of the evolutionary process. This article ar…Read more
  •  119
    Genetic relatedness and the evolution of altruism
    Philosophy of Science 69 (1): 138-149. 2002.
    In their recent book, Elliott Sober and David Wilson (1998) argue that evolutionary biologists have wrongly regarded kinship as the exclusive means by which altruistic behavior can evolve, at the expense of other mechanisms. I argue that Sober and Wilson overlook certain genetical considerations which suggest that kinship is likely to be a more powerful means for generating complex altruistic adaptations than the alternative mechanisms they propose.
  •  133
    John Harsanyi and John Rawls both used the veil of ignorance thought experiment to study the problem of choosing between alternative social arrangements. With his ‘impartial observer theorem’, Harsanyi tried to show that the veil of ignorance argument leads inevitably to utilitarianism, an argument criticized by Sen, Weymark and others. A quite different use of the veil-of-ignorance concept is found in evolutionary biology. In the cell-division process called meiosis, in which sexually reproduci…Read more
  •  12
    Could religion be a group-level adaptation of Homo sapiens?
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34 (4): 699-705. 2003.
  •  92
    Précis of Evolution and the Levels of Selection (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (1): 212-220. 2010.
    The ‘levels of selection’ question is one of the most fundamental in evolutionary biology, for it arises directly from the logic of Darwinism. As is well-known, the principle of natural selection is entirely abstract; it says that any entities satisfying certain conditions will evolve by natural selection, whatever those entities are. (These conditions are: variability, associated fitness differences, and heritability (cf. Lewontin 1970).) This fact, when combined with the fact that the biologic…Read more
  •  42
    The idea that natural selection can operate on cultural as well as genetic variation is central to recent theories of cultural evolution. This raises an overarching question: how much of traditional evolutionary theory, which was formulated in population-genetic terms, can survive intact once the possibility of cultural inheritance is taken into account? This question is addressed in relation to R. A. Fisher’s “fundamental theorem” of natural selection. Though Fisher’s theorem may appear to be a…Read more
  •  472
    On a flawed argument against the KK principle
    Analysis 73 (1): 80-86. 2013.
    Externalists in epistemology often reject the KK principle – which says that if a person knows that p, then they know that they know that p. This paper argues that one standard argument against the KK principle that many externalists make is fallacious, as it involves illicit substitution into an intensional context. The fallacy is exposed and discussed
  •  65
    Verificationism, realism and scepticism
    Erkenntnis 55 (3): 371-385. 2001.
    Verificationism has often seemed attractive to philosophers because of its apparent abilityto deliver us from scepticism. However, I argue that purely epistemological considerationsprovide insufficient reason for embracing verificationism over realism. I distinguish twotypes of sceptical problem: those that stem from underdetermination by the actual data,and those that stem from underdetermination by all possible data. Verificationismevades problems of the second sort, but is powerless in the fa…Read more
  • A Selective Bibliography of the Philosophy of Science
    with Ward Eaton Jones and W. Newton-Smith
    Oxford University Press. 1988.