•  102
    What’s wrong with dogwhistles
    Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (3): 387-403. 2022.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 3, Page 387-403, Fall 2022.
  •  23
    The Irrationality of Stand Your Ground: Game Theory on Self-Defense
    Moral Philosophy and Politics 10 (2): 387-404. 2023.
    US law continues its historical trend of growing more permissive towards actors who engage in violent action in purported self-defense. We draw on some informal game theory to show why this is strategically irrational and suggest rolling back self-defense doctrines like stand your ground to earlier historical precedents like duty to retreat.
  •  87
    Supposedly, stubbornness on the part of scientists—an unwillingness to change one’s position on a scientific issue even in the face of countervailing evidence—helps efficiently divide scientific labor. Maintaining disagreement is important because it keeps scientists pursuing a diversity of leads rather than all working on the most promising, and stubbornness helps preserve this disagreement. Planck’s observation that “Science progresses one funeral at a time” might therefore be an insight into …Read more
  •  16
  •  27
    The value of and in novel ecosystem
    Biology and Philosophy 37 (2): 1-18. 2022.
    The very idea of novel ecosystems has been controversial in ecology. Critics have complained about its imprecision, and that it illicitly smuggles problematic ethical and political values into the science. By labelling a human-modified system a ‘novel ecosystem,‘ they worry, we give policymakers a “license to trash nature.“ The critics are right to be suspicious. I show that proponents of the novel ecosystem concept have been unable to make it both value-free and precise enough to allow for appl…Read more
  •  14
    COVID-19, other zoonotic diseases and wildlife conservation
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (4): 1-3. 2020.
    Many experts have warned that environmental degradation is increasing the likelihood of future pandemics like COVID-19, as habitat loss and poaching increase close contact between wildlife and people. This fact has been framed as a reason to increase wildlife conservation efforts. We have many good reasons to step up conservation efforts, but arguments for doing so on the basis of pandemic prevention are rhetorically, ethically, and empricially flawed.
  •  27
    The reproduction of cultural systems in cases where cultural group selection may occur is typically incomplete, with only certain cultural traits being adopted by less successful cultural groups. Why a particular trait and not another is transmitted might not be explained by cultural group selection. We explore this issue through the case of religious syncretism.
  •  49
    Mineral misbehavior: why mineralogists don’t deal in natural kinds
    Foundations of Chemistry 21 (3): 333-343. 2019.
    Mineral species are, at first glance, an excellent candidate for an ideal set of natural kinds somewhere beyond the periodic table. Mineralogists have a detailed set of rules and formal procedure for ratifying new species, and minerals are a less messy subject matter than biological species, psychological disorders, or even chemicals more broadly—all areas of taxonomy where the status of species as natural kinds has been disputed. After explaining how philosophers have tended to get mineralogy w…Read more
  •  128
    Waiting for the Anthropocene
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4): 1073-1096. 2019.
    The idea that we are living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by human activity, has gained substantial currency across the academy and with the broader public. Within the earth sciences, however, the question of the Anthropocene is hotly debated, recognized as a question that gets at both the foundations of geological science and issues of broad philosophical importance. For example, official recognition of the Anthropocene requires us to find a way to use the methods of histo…Read more
  •  55
    Biodiversity is a chimera, and chimeras aren’t real
    Biology and Philosophy 33 (1-2): 15. 2018.
    A recent article by Burch-Brown and Archer provides compelling arguments that biodiversity is either a natural kind or a pragmatically-valid scientific entity. I call into question three of these arguments. The first argument contends that biodiversity is a Homeostatic Property Cluster. I respond that there is no plausible homeostatic mechanism that would make biodiversity an HPC natural kind. The second argument proposes that biodiversity is a multiply-realizable functional kind. I respond that…Read more
  •  56
    Seventeenth-century philosopher Margaret Cavendish wrote not only several philosophical treatises, but also many fictional works. I argue for taking the latter as serious objects of study for historians of philosophy, and sketch a method for doing so. Cavendish's fiction is full of conflicting viewpoints, and many authors have argued that this demonstrates that she did not intend her literary works to serve serious philosophical purpose. But if we consider philosophers more central to the canon,…Read more
  •  49
    Ambiguity in Cooperative Signaling
    Philosophy of Science 81 (3): 398-422. 2014.
    In game-theoretic signaling models, evolution tends to favor perfectly precise signaling systems, but in the natural world communication is almost always imprecise. I argue that standard explanations for this discrepancy are only partially sufficient, and I show that communication is often ambiguous because signal senders take advantage of context sensitivity. As evidence, I make two additions to the signaling model: a cost for more complex signaling strategies and the ability to combine informa…Read more
  •  101
    What Is Language?
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3. 2016.
    Linguists (and philosophers of language) have long disagreed about the ontology of language, and thus about the proper subject matter of their disciplines. A close examination of the leading arguments in the debates shows that while positive arguments that language is x tend to be sound, negative arguments that language is not x generally fail. This implies that we should be pluralists about the metaphysical status of language and the subject matter of linguistics and the philosophy of language.…Read more
  •  50
    Group-level traits are not units of selection
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3): 271-272. 2014.
  •  59
    Why not all evidence is scientific evidence
    Episteme 15 (2): 209-227. 2018.
    Data which constitute satisfactory evidence in other contexts are sometimes not treated as valid evidence in the context of scientic conrmation. I give a justicatory explanation of this fact, appealing to the incentives, biases, and social situatedness of scientists
  •  185
    Save the planet: eliminate biodiversity
    Biology and Philosophy 29 (6): 761-780. 2014.
    Recent work in the philosophy of biology has attempted to clarify and defend the use of the biodiversity concept in conservation science. I argue against these views, and give reasons to think that the biodiversity concept is a poor fit for the role we want it to play in conservation biology on both empirical and conceptual grounds. Against pluralists, who hold that biodiversity consists of distinct but correlated properties of natural systems, I argue that the supposed correlations between thes…Read more
  •  23
    Agriculture increases individual fitness
    with Karen Kovaka, Raj Patel, Erol Akçay, and Michael Weisberg
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39. 2016.