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515Functional diversity: An epistemic roadmapBioScience 10 (69): 800-811. 2019.Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut …Read more
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52Ecological Historicity, Novelty and Functionality in the AnthropoceneEnvironmental Values 28 (3): 275-303. 2019.While many recognise that rigid historical and compositional goals are inadequate in a world where climate and other global systems are undergoing unprecedented changes, others contend that promoting ecosystem services and functions encourages practices that can ultimately lower the bar of ecological management. These worries are foregrounded in discussions about 'novel ecosystems' (NEs), where some researchers and conservationists claim that NEs provide a license to trash nature as long as cert…Read more
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17Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our Self‐Conception. New York: Cambridge University Press , 316 pp., $65.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 72 (3): 508-510. 2005.
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27From stability to norm transformation: lessons about resilience, for development, from ecologyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (4): 571-584. 2017.Phenomenologists recognize the insights to be gained from looking at cognitive development. But our understanding of development, in turn, can be illuminated by ideas from ecology. Developmental studies in psychology and biology share with ecosystem ecology a concern with stability—with how things stay the same despite changes in the surrounding conditions, and how processes of change lead reliably to similar outcomes despite environmental variability. Recently, both ecologists and psychologists…Read more
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3Abstraction, Analogy and Induction: Toward a General Account of Ampliative InferenceDissertation, University of California, San Diego. 1997.My central concern is with the epistemological status of ampliative inference. Three sorts of ampliative inference are initially distinguished: enumerative induction, analogical reasoning, and abstraction. Philosophers of science have generally treated these separately, and in particular have often divorced the familiar problem of induction from equally fundamental questions concerning the use of analogy and abstraction: What kinds of similarity can support inference? How can we pick out those f…Read more
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49Mary Wollstonecraft: Eighteenth-Century CommonwealthwomanJournal of the History of Ideas 50 (1): 95. 1989.
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60The Perils of Confusing Nesting with Chaining in Psychological ExplanationsBehavior and Philosophy 32 (2). 2004.Despite its diminished importance amongst philosophers, the deductive-nomological framework is still important to contemporary behavioral scientists. Behavioral theorists operating within this framework must be careful to distinguish between nesting and chaining. Explanations are chained when the explanandum sentence of one explanation is one of the antecedent conditions of another. They are nested when one of the antecedent conditions or the explanandum sentence of one explanation is one of the…Read more
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87Ecological Historicity, Functional Goals, and Novelty in the AnthropoceneEnvironmental Values. 2018.While many recognize that rigid historical and compositional goals are inadequate in a world where climate and other global systems are undergoing unprecedented changes, others contend that promoting ecosystem services and functions encourages practices that can ultimately lower the bar of ecological management. These worries are foregrounded in discussions about Novel Ecosystems (NEs); where some researchers and conservationists claim that NEs provide a license to trash nature as long as some e…Read more
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415Philosophy of Science: A New IntroductionOxford University Press. 2013.Offering an engaging and accessible portrait of the current state of the field, Philosophy of Science: A New Introduction shows students how to think philosophically about science and why it is both essential and fascinating to do so. Gillian Barker and Philip Kitcher reconsider the core questions in philosophy of science in light of the multitude of changes that have taken place in the decades since the publication of C.G. Hempel's classic work, Philosophy of Natural Science —both in the field …Read more
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110Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences (edited book)Springer. 2014.Despite the burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the organism-environment dyad by biologists and philosophers, little attention has been paid in the resulting discussions to the history of these ideas and to their deployment in disciplines outside biology—especially in the social sciences. Even in biology and philosophy, there is a lack of detailed conceptual models of the organism-environment relationship. This volume is designed to fill these lacunae by providing the first m…Read more
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136Biological levers and extended adaptationismBiology and Philosophy 23 (1): 1-25. 2008.Two critiques of simple adaptationism are distinguished: anti-adaptationism and extended adaptationism. Adaptationists and anti-adaptationists share the presumption that an evolutionary explanation should identify the dominant simple cause of the evolutionary outcome to be explained. A consideration of extended-adaptationist models such as coevolution, niche construction and extended phenotypes reveals the inappropriateness of this presumption in explaining the evolution of certain important kin…Read more
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2Integrating Ecology and Evolution: Niche Construction and Ecological EngineeringIn Gillian Barker, Eric Desjardins & Trevor Pearce (eds.), Entangled Life: Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences, Springer. pp. 187-211. 2014.
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