• Psychological Egoism
    In Hugh LaFollette & Ingmar Persson (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, Blackwell. pp. 148-168. 2013.
    Psychological egoism is a theory about motivation. It claims that all of our ultimate desires are self‐directed. Whenever we want others to do well (or ill), we have these other‐directed desires only instrumentally; we care about others only because we think that the welfare of others will have ramifications for our own welfare. As stated, egoism is a descriptive, not a normative, claim. It aims to characterize what motivates human beings in fact; the theory does not say whether it is good or ba…Read more
  • Quine's Two Dogmas
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 237-280. 2000.
  •  3
    Philosophy of Biology
    In Nicholas Bunnin & E. P. Tsui‐James (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Blackwell. 2002.
    This chapter contains sections titled: The Subject Matter of Biology The Structure of Evolutionary Theory The Philosophical Significance of Evolutionary Theory.
  •  5
    Simplicity
    In W. H. Newton‐Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell. 2017.
    Scientists often appeal to a criterion of simplicity as a consideration that helps them decide which hypotheses are most plausible. Some such principle seems to be essential; the data, all by themselves, apparently cannot single out as best one hypothesis among the set of competitors.
  •  10
    Methods of Science
    In Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Wiley. 2019.
    Do the methods of science lead to atheism? This is different from asking whether the results of science (e.g., well‐confirmed theories in evolutionary biology or cosmology) have that consequence. In this chapter, I consider several philosophical theories about scientific reasoning and trace out their implications for atheism, theism, and agnosticism. These theories include different versions of empiricism, logical positivism, inference to the best explanation, Bayesianism, hypothetico‐deductivis…Read more
  • Unto Others
    In Michael Ruse (ed.), Philosophy After Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Princeton University Press. pp. 433-451. 2009.
  •  15
    Evolutionary gradualism, the randomness of mutations, and the hypothesis that natural selection exerts a pervasive and substantial influence on evolutionary outcomes are pair-wise logically independent. Can the claims about selection and mutation be used to formulate an argument for gradualism? In his Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, R.A. Fisher made an important start at this project in his famous “geometric argument” by showing that a random mutation that has a smaller effect on two or m…Read more
  •  12
    Simplicity
    Oxford University Press. 1975.
    Attempts to show that the simplicity of a hypothesis can be measured by attending to how well it answers certain kinds of questions.
  •  6
    Core questions in philosophy
    Routledge. 2020.
    Writing in an engaging lecture-style format, Elliott Sober shows students how philosophy is best used to evaluate many different kinds of arguments and to construct sound theories. Well-known arguments and problems from the history of philosophy are discussed and analyzed, not as a means to honor the dead or merely to discuss what various philosophers have thought, but to engage with, criticize, and even improve ideas from the past. In addition--because philosophy cannot function apart from its …Read more
  •  35
    Conference on evolution and the human sciences
    with Leda Cosmides, Martin Daly, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, W. D. Hamilton, Philip Kitcher, John Maynard Smith, Steven Pinker, and Dan Sperber
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 23 (4): 699-700. 1991.
  •  157
    Philosophy in Science: Some Personal Reflections
    Philosophy of Science 89 (5): 899-907. 2022.
    The task of Philosophy in Science (PinS) is to use philosophical tools to help solve scientific problems. This article describes how I stumbled into this line of work and then addressed several topics in philosophy of biology—units of selection, cladistic parsimony, robustness and trade-offs in model building, adaptationism, and evidence for common ancestry—often in collaboration with scientists. I conclude by offering advice for would-be PinS practitioners.
  •  7
    Philosophy of Biology
    Routledge. 1993.
    Perhaps because of it implications for our understanding of human nature, recent philosophy of biology has seen what might be the most dramatic work in the philosophies of the ?special? sciences. This drama has centered on evolutionary theory, and in the second edition of this textbook, Elliott Sober introduces the reader to the most important issues of these developments. With a rare combination of technical sophistication and clarity of expression, Sober engages both the higher level of theory…Read more
  •  32
    Remembering Richard Lewontin
    with Stuart A. Newman, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Daniel L. Hartl, Philip Kitcher, Diane B. Paul, John Beatty, Sahotra Sarkar, and William C. Wimsatt
    Biological Theory 16 (4): 257-267. 2021.
  •  284
    Purely Probabilistic Measures of Explanatory Power: A Critique
    Philosophy of Science 90 (1): 129-149. 2023.
    All extant purely probabilistic measures of explanatory power satisfy the following technical condition: if Pr(E | H1) > Pr(E | H2) and Pr(E | ∼H1) < Pr(E | ∼H2), then H1’s explanatory power with respect to E is greater than H2’s explanatory power with respect to E. We argue that any measure satisfying this condition faces three serious problems—the Problem of Temporal Shallowness, the Problem of Negative Causal Interactions, and the Problem of Nonexplanations. We further argue that many such me…Read more
  •  237
    Interpolating Decisions
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2): 327-339. 2023.
    Decision theory requires agents to assign probabilities to states of the world and utilities to the possible outcomes of different actions. When agents commit to having the probabilities and/or utilities in a decision problem defined by objective features of the world, they may find themselves unable to decide which actions maximize expected utility. Decision theory has long recognized that work-around strategies are available in special cases; this is where dominance reasoning, minimax, and max…Read more
  •  265
    Screening-Off and Causal Incompleteness: A No-Go Theorem
    with Mike Steel
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (3): 513-550. 2013.
    We begin by considering two principles, each having the form causal completeness ergo screening-off. The first concerns a common cause of two or more effects; the second describes an intermediate link in a causal chain. They are logically independent of each other, each is independent of Reichenbach's principle of the common cause, and each is a consequence of the causal Markov condition. Simple examples show that causal incompleteness means that screening-off may fail to obtain. We derive a str…Read more
  •  100
    Why Logically Equivalent Predicates May Pick out Different Properties
    American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (2): 183-189. 1982.
    The properties, theoretical magnitudes, and natural kinds which science seeks to characterize, and not the sense or meanings which parts of speech may possess, are the subject of this paper. Many philosophers (e.g., Putnam [1971] and Achinstein [1974]) have agreed that two predicates of different meaning may pick out the same property, but they usually hold that that logically equivalent predicates must pick out the same properties. I propose to deny this thesis. My argument is by way of an exam…Read more
  •  1
    Psychological Egoism
    In Hugh LaFollette & Ingmar Persson (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, 2nd edition, Wiley Blackwell. pp. 148-168. 2013.
  •  47
    Contrastive causal explanation and the explanatoriness of deterministic and probabilistic hypotheses
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (3): 1-15. 2020.
    Carl Hempel argued that probabilistic hypotheses are limited in what they can explain. He contended that a hypothesis cannot explain why E is true if the hypothesis says that E has a probability less than 0.5. Wesley Salmon and Richard Jeffrey argued to the contrary, contending that P can explain why E is true even when P says that E’s probability is very low. This debate concerned noncontrastive explananda. Here, a view of contrastive causal explanation is described and defended. It provides a …Read more
  •  292
    Carl Hempel (1965) argued that probabilistic hypotheses are limited in what they can explain. He contended that a hypothesis cannot explain why E is true if the hypothesis says that E has a probability less than 0.5. Wesley Salmon (1971, 1984, 1990, 1998) and Richard Jeffrey (1969) argued to the contrary, contending that P can explain why E is true even when P says that E’s probability is very low. This debate concerned noncontrastive explananda. Here, a view of contrastive causal explanation …Read more
  •  157
    Fitness and the Twins
    Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 12 (1): 1-13. 2020.
    Michael Scriven’s (1959) example of identical twins (who are said to be equal in fitness but unequal in their reproductive success) has been used by many philosophers of biology to discuss how fitness should be defined, how selection should be distinguished from drift, and how the environment in which a selection process occurs should be conceptualized. Here it is argued that evolutionary theory has no commitment, one way or the other, as to whether the twins are equally fit. This is because the…Read more
  •  42
    The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle the distality pro…Read more
  •  306
    Is there some general reason to expect organisms that have beliefs to have false beliefs? And after you observe that an organism occasionally occupies a given neural state that you think encodes a perceptual belief, how do you evaluate hypotheses about the semantic content that that state has, where some of those hypotheses attribute beliefs that are sometimes false while others attribute beliefs that are always true? To address the first of these questions, we discuss evolution by natural selec…Read more
  •  9
    Comments on Rosenberg's Review
    Behavior and Philosophy 14 (1): 89. 1986.
    Long ago, my undergraduate advisor counseled me against “replying to reviews.” Alexander Rosenberg cannot be blamed for tempting me to disregard this advice, since his review of my book, The Nature of Selection, is a generous one. However, the editors of this journal invited me to comment and this proved to be more temptation than I could withstand. In what follows, I take up some of the main themes that Rosenberg discusses and try to clarify those issues that divide us.
  •  37
    We conceptualize observation selection effects by considering how a shift from one process of observation to another affects discrimination-conduciveness, by which we mean the degree to which possible observations discriminate between hypotheses, given the observation process at work. OSEs in this sense come in degrees and are causal, where the cause is the shift in process, and the effect is a change in degree of discrimination-conduciveness. We contrast our understanding of OSEs with others th…Read more
  •  99
    The Requirement of Total Evidence: A Reply to Epstein’s Critique
    with Martin Barrett
    Philosophy of Science 87 (1): 191-203. 2020.
    The requirement of total evidence is a mainstay of Bayesian epistemology. Peter Fisher Epstein argues that the requirement generates mistaken conclusions about several examples that he devises. Here we examine the example of Epstein’s that we find most interesting and argue that Epstein’s analysis of it is flawed.
  •  362
    We conceptualize observation selection effects (OSEs) by considering how a shift from one process of observation to another affects discrimination-conduciveness, by which we mean the degree to which possible observations discriminate between hypotheses, given the observation process at work. OSEs in this sense come in degrees and are causal, where the cause is the shift in process, and the effect is a change in degree of discrimination-conduciveness. We contrast our understanding of OSEs with ot…Read more
  •  283
    Inference to the Best Explanation and the Screening-Off Challenge
    Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 38 121-142. 2019.
    We argue in Roche and Sober (2013) that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in that Pr(H | O&EXPL) = Pr(H | O), where H is a hypothesis, O is an observation, and EXPL is the proposition that if H and O were true, then H would explain O. This is a “screening-off” thesis. Here we clarify that thesis, reply to criticisms advanced by Lange (2017), consider alternative formulations of Inference to the Best Explanation, discuss a strengthened screening-off thesis, and consider how it bears on t…Read more
  •  110
    Selection never dominates drift
    with Hayley Clatterbuck and Richard Lewontin
    Biology and Philosophy 28 (4): 577-592. 2013.
    The probability that the fitter of two alleles will increase in frequency in a population goes up as the product of N (the effective population size) and s (the selection coefficient) increases. Discovering the distribution of values for this product across different alleles in different populations is a very important biological task. However, biologists often use the product Ns to define a different concept; they say that drift “dominates” selection or that drift is “stronger than” selection w…Read more