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762Deception: a functional accountPhilosophical Studies 175 (3): 579-600. 2018.Deception has recently received a significant amount of attention. One of main reasons is that it lies at the intersection of various areas of research, such as the evolution of cooperation, animal communication, ethics or epistemology. This essay focuses on the biological approach to deception and argues that standard definitions put forward by most biologists and philosophers are inadequate. We provide a functional account of deception which solves the problems of extant accounts in virtue of …Read more
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348Social norms and game theory: harmony or discord?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (3): 551-587. 2013.Recent years have witnessed an increased number of game-theoretic approaches to social norms, which apparently share some common vocabulary and methods. We describe three major approaches of this kind (due to Binmore, Bicchieri and Gintis), before comparing them systematically on five crucial themes: generality of the solution, preference transformation, punishment, epistemic conditions and type of explanation. This allows us to show that these theories are, by and large, less compatible than th…Read more
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243Virtues and vices in scientific practiceSynthese 194 (5). 2017.The role intellectual virtues play in scientific inquiry has raised significant discussions in the recent literature. A number of authors have recently explored the link between virtue epistemology and philosophy of science with the aim to show whether epistemic virtues can contribute to the resolution of the problem of theory choice. This paper analyses how intellectual virtues can be beneficial for successful resolution of theory choice. We explore the role of virtues as well as vices in scien…Read more
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222Being realistic about common knowledge: a Lewisian approachSynthese 183 (2): 249-276. 2011.Defined and formalized several decades ago, widely used in philosophy and game theory, the concept of common knowledge is still considered as problematic, although not always for the right reasons. I suggest that the epistemic status of a group of human agents in a state of common knowledge has not been thoroughly analyzed. In particular, every existing account of common knowledge, whether formal or not, is either too strong to fit cognitively limited individuals, or too weak to adequately descr…Read more
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208Theory Choice, Good Sense and Social ConsensusErkenntnis 78 (5): 1109-1132. 2013.There has been a significant interest in the recent literature in developing a solution to the problem of theory choice which is both normative and descriptive, but agent-based rather than rule-based, originating from Pierre Duhem’s notion of ‘good sense’. In this paper we present the properties Duhem attributes to good sense in different contexts, before examining its current reconstructions advanced in the literature and their limitations. We propose an alternative account of good sense, seen …Read more
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113Cooperation, conflict, sex and bargaining: Joan Roughgarden’s: The genial gene. University of California Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-520-25826-6Biology and Philosophy 25 (2): 257-267. 2010.
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100Minimal CooperationPhilosophy of the Social Sciences (1): 0048393112457428. 2012.Most definitions of cooperation provide sufficient but not necessary conditions. This paper describes a form of minimal cooperation, corresponding to mass actions implying many agents, such as demonstrations. It characterizes its intentional, epistemic, strategic, and teleological aspects, mostly obtained from weakening classical concepts. The rationality of minimal cooperation turns out to be part of its definition, whereas it is usually considered as an optional though desirable feature. Game-…Read more
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92Review of Brian Skyrms, Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (11). 2010.
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86The epistemic core of weak joint actionPhilosophical Psychology (1): 1-24. 2013.Over the last three decades, joint action has received various definitions, which for all their differences share many features. However, they cannot fit some perplexing cases of weak joint action, such as demonstrations, where agents rely on distinct epistemic sources, and as a result, have no first-hand knowledge about each other. I argue that one major reason why the definition of such collective actions is akin to the classical ones is that it crucially relies on the concept of common knowle…Read more
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70Group adaptation, formal darwinism and contextual analysisJournal of Evolutionary Biology 25 (6). 2012.We consider the question: under what circumstances can the concept of adaptation be applied to groups, rather than individuals? Gardner and Grafen (2009, J. Evol. Biol.22: 659–671) develop a novel approach to this question, building on Grafen's ‘formal Darwinism’ project, which defines adaptation in terms of links between evolutionary dynamics and optimization. They conclude that only clonal groups, and to a lesser extent groups in which reproductive competition is repressed, can be considered a…Read more
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65The Fragility of Common KnowledgeErkenntnis 82 (3): 451-472. 2017.Ordinary common knowledge is formally expressed by strong probabilistic common belief. How strong exactly? The question can be answered by drawing from the similar equivalence, recently explored, between plain and probabilistic individual beliefs. I argue that such a move entails that common knowledge displays a double fragility: as a description of a collective state and as a phenomenon, because it can respectively disappear as group size increases, or more worryingly as the epistemic context c…Read more
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46Shared adaptiveness is not group adaptationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (5): 499-500. 2013.Climate stresses and monetary resources seem to lead to different collective adaptations. However, the reference to adaptation and to ambiguous collective dimensions appears premature; populations may entertain nothing more than shared adaptiveness. At this point, the intricacy of the underlying evolutionary processes (cultural selection, fitness-utility decoupling) very much obscures any diagnosis based on correlations
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46Rational Choice TheoryIn I. Jarvie & J. Zamorra-Bonilla (eds.), Chapter 14 of The Sage Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Sage Publications. pp. 307. 2011.
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42Une forme minimale de coopérationDialogue 48 (2): 235-267. 2009.La plupart des nombreuses définitions existantes d’une action coopérative en fournissent des conditions suffisantes plutôt que nécessaires. Nous définissons ici une forme minimale de coopération, correspondant aux actions de masse, telles des manifestations. Nous en détaillons les aspects intentionnel, épistémique, stratégique et téléologique, généralement obtenus par affaiblissement spécifique de concepts classiques. Parallèlement, nous soulignons le rôle crucial de concepts issus de la théorie…Read more
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40Adaptation, fitness and the selection-optimality linksBiology and Philosophy 29 (2): 225-232. 2014.We critically examine a number of aspects of Grafen’s ‘formal Darwinism’ project. We argue that Grafen’s ‘selection-optimality’ links do not quite succeed in vindicating the working assumption made by behavioural ecologists and others—that selection will lead organisms to exhibit adaptive behaviour—since these links hold true even in the presence of strong genetic and developmental constraints. However we suggest that the selection-optimality links can profitably be viewed as constituting an axi…Read more
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34Robustness in evolutionary explanations: a positive accountBiology and Philosophy 32 (1): 73-96. 2017.Robustness analysis is widespread in science, but philosophers have struggled to justify its confirmatory power. We provide a positive account of robustness by analysing some explicit and implicit uses of within and across-model robustness in evolutionary theory. We argue that appeals to robustness are usually difficult to justify because they aim to increase the likeliness that a phenomenon obtains. However, we show that robust results are necessary for explanations of phenomena with specific p…Read more
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30Joint Improvisation, Minimalism and Pluralism about Joint actionJournal of Social Ontology 7 (1): 97-118. 2021.This paper introduces freely improvised joint actions, a class of joint actions characterized by highly unspecific goals and the unavailability of shared plans. For example, walking together just for the sake of walking together with no specific destination or path in mind provides an ordinary example of FIJAs, along with examples in the arts, e.g., collective free improvisation in music, improv theater, or contact improvisation in dance. We argue that classic philosophical accounts of joint act…Read more
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27Seven principles to rule them all: E. Coen: Cells to Civilizations. Princeton University Press, 2012, 360 pp, $29.95, ISBN: 9780691149677 (review)Biology and Philosophy 28 (4): 683-692. 2013.Coen offers a unified explanation of natural selection, development, learning and cultural change, based on seven fundamental principles: population variation, persistence, reinforcement, competition, cooperation, combinatorial richness and recurrence. I discuss whether all seven principles are justified, successfully fit the four processes, encompass life processes only, and have any strong explanatory import. I find each of these claims doubtful
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27Knowledge transfer without knowledge? The case of agentive metaphors in biologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 72 49-58. 2018.
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23Unexplained cooperationEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3): 1-21. 2021.Social evolution theory provides a wide array of successful evolutionary explanations for cooperative traits. However and surprisingly, a number of cases of unexplained cooperative behaviour remain. Shouldn’t they cast doubt on the relevance of the theory, or even disconfirm it? This depends on whether the theory is akin to a research programme such as adaptationism, or closer to a theory – a set of compatible, confirmable hypotheses. In order to find out, we focus on the two main tenets of soci…Read more
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19Comment on Raimo Tuomela. Joint Action: How Rational? How Irreducible?Analyse & Kritik 33 (1): 87-92. 2011.In his 'Cooperation as joint action', Tuomela presents a we-mode account of cooperation, which he argues has several advantages over an individual account. This commentary examines to what extent this is true. In particular, I assess three related characteristics of we-mode joint action: its possible rationality, its greater efficiency, and its alleged irreducibility to purely individual properties, which are recurring points of the article.
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16The formal Darwinism project: editors' introductionBiology and Philosophy 29 (2): 153-154. 2014.
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15Joint Improvisation, Minimalism and Pluralism about Joint actionJournal of Social Ontology 7 (1): 97-118. 2021.This paper introduces freely improvised joint actions, a class of joint actions characterized by highly unspecific goals and the unavailability of shared plans. For example, walking together just for the sake of walking together with no specific destination or path in mind provides an ordinary example of FIJAs, along with examples in the arts, e.g., collective free improvisation in music, improv theater, or contact improvisation in dance. We argue that classic philosophical accounts of joint act…Read more
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14Trolls, bans and reverts: simulating WikipediaSynthese 198 (1): 451-470. 2018.The surprisingly high reliability of Wikipedia has often been seen as a beneficial effect of the aggregation of diverse contributors, or as an instance of the wisdom of crowds phenomenon; additional factors such as elite contributors, Wikipedia’s policy or its administration have also been mentioned. We adjudicate between such explanations by modelling and simulating the evolution of a Wikipedia entry. The main threat to Wikipedia’s reliability, namely the presence of epistemically disruptive ag…Read more
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13Zeynep P amuk, Politics and expertise : how to use science in a democratic society, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2021Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 117 (1): 142-144. 2023.
Areas of Interest
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