• Philosophy of the environmental sciences
    In P. D. Magnus & Jacob Busch (eds.), New waves in philosophy of science, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
  •  16
    An even better ape? Comments on a better ape
    Biology and Philosophy 38 (4): 1-5. 2023.
    Richmond Campbell and Victor Kumar’s _A Better Ape_ is very plausible accout of how the “moral mind” evolved. In my commentary, I raise questions and objections regarding their views on the units of selection, the emotions, the intrinsic motivation of moral norms, and the nature of moral progress.
  • Models
    In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains section titled: Itroduction The Received (Syntactic) View of Theories Models and Analogies The Semantic View of Theories Models as Mediators Material Models Conclusion References.
  •  157
    Buyer beware: robustness analyses in economics and biology
    Biology and Philosophy 26 (5): 757-771. 2011.
    Theoretical biology and economics are remarkably similar in their reliance on mathematical models, which attempt to represent real world systems using many idealized assumptions. They are also similar in placing a great emphasis on derivational robustness of modeling results. Recently philosophers of biology and economics have argued that robustness analysis can be a method for confirmation of claims about causal mechanisms, despite the significant reliance of these models on patently false assu…Read more
  •  1
    Book Review (review)
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 95 (C): 224-225. 2022.
  •  26
    Owl vs Owl: Examining an Environmental Moral Tragedy
    Philosophia 50 (5): 2303-2317. 2022.
    In the United States, the northern spotted owl has declined throughout the Pacific Northwest even though its habitat has been protected under the Endangered Species Act. The main culprit for this decline is the likely human-facilitated invasion of the barred owl. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service conducted an experiment in which they lethally removed the barred owls from selected areas in Washington, Oregon, and California. In those locations, the northern spotted owl populations have …Read more
  •  15
    Functions in Ecosystem Ecology
    Philosophical Topics 47 (1): 167-180. 2019.
    In this essay, I argue that the selected effects approach to ecosystem functions is inadequate and defend the adequacy of the systemic capacity account. I additionally argue that rival persistence enhancing and organizational approaches face serious problems when applied to ecosystem ecology. Lastly, I explore how the systemic capacity approach applies to recent experimental work on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.
  •  10
    Building Trust, Removing Doubt? Robustness Analysis and Climate Modeling
    In Elisabeth A. Lloyd & Eric Winsberg (eds.), Climate Modelling: Philosophical and Conceptual Issues, Springer Verlag. pp. 297-321. 2018.
    In this chapter, Odenbaugh first provides a conceptual framework for thinking about climate modeling, specifically focused on general circulation models. Second, he considers what makes models independent of one another. Third, he shows robustness analysis, which depends on models being independent of one another, can be used to remove doubts about idealizations in general climate models. Finally, he considers a dilemma for robustness analysis; namely, it leads to either an infinite regress of i…Read more
  •  26
    Biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and the environmentalist agenda
    Biology and Philosophy 35 (1): 1-11. 2020.
    Jonathan Newman, Gary Varner, and Stefan Linquist’s Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics is a critical examination of a panoply of arguments for conserving biodiversity. Their discussion is extremely impressive though I think one can push back on some of their criticisms. In this essay, I consider their criticisms of the argument for conserving biodiversity based on ecosystem services; specifically, ecosystem functioning. In the end, I try to clarify and defend this argument …Read more
  •  471
    Functional diversity: An epistemic roadmap
    with Christophe Malaterre, Antoine C. Dussault, Sophia Rousseau-Mermans, Gillian Barker, Beatrix E. Beisner, Frédéric Bouchard, Eric Desjardins, Tanya I. Handa, Steven W. Kembel, Geneviève Lajoie, Virginie Maris, Alison D. Munson, Timothée Poisot, B. Jesse Shapiro, and Curtis A. Suttle
    BioScience 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
  •  11
    Ecological Models
    Cambridge University Press. 2019.
    In this book, we consider three questions. What are ecological models? How are they tested? How do ecological models inform environmental policy and politics? Through several case studies, we see how these representations which idealize and abstract can be used to explain and predict complicated ecological systems. Additionally, we see how they bear on environmental policy and politics.
  •  27
    Rethinking Wilderness
    Environmental Ethics 39 (4): 459-460. 2017.
  •  30
    Engineering Model Independence
    with Zachary Pirtle, Andrew Hamilton, and Zoe Szajnfarber
    Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 22 (2): 191-229. 2018.
    According to population biologist Richard Levins, every discipline has a “strategy of model building,” which involves implicit assumptions about epistemic goals and the types of abstractions and modeling approaches used. We will offer suggestions about how to model complex systems based upon a strategy focusing on independence in modeling. While there are many possible and desirable modeling strategies, we will contrast a model-independence-focused strategy with the more common modeling strategy…Read more
  •  20
    Engineering Model Independence
    with Zachary Pirtle, Andrew Hamilton, and Zoe Szajnfarber
    Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 22 (2): 191-229. 2018.
    According to population biologist Richard Levins, every discipline has a “strategy of model building,” which involves implicit assumptions about epistemic goals and the types of abstractions and modeling approaches used. We will offer suggestions about how to model complex systems based upon a strategy focusing on independence in modeling. While there are many possible and desirable modeling strategies, we will contrast a model-independence-focused strategy with the more common modeling strategy…Read more
  •  37
    Models, models, models: a deflationary view
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 21): 1-16. 2018.
    In this essay, I first consider a popular view of models and modeling, the similarity view. Second, I contend that arguments for it fail and it suffers from what I call “Hughes’ worry.” Third, I offer a deflationary approach to models and modeling that avoids Hughes’ worry and shows how scientific representations are of apiece with other types of representations. Finally, I consider an objection that the similarity view can deal with approximations better than the deflationary view and show that…Read more
  •  39
    Dr. Jay Odenbaugh discusses different types of climate skepticism and the evidence for anthropogenic climate change along with some common arguments against it. He considers the role of consensus and dissent in science and recent discussion of the book Merchants of Doubt and Climategate.
  •  15
    Dr. Jay Odenbaugh discusses psychological issues concerning American opinion on the topic of climate control, the relevance or irrelevance of scientific literacy to climate skepticism, and the role of affect and cognitive biases in environmental decision-making. He considers climate communication and how we might most effectively motivate pro-environmental behavior and beliefs. The discussion ends with a case study for persuading individuals on both sides of the political aisle for taking global…Read more
  •  79
    Becoming Human by Jennifer Greenwood is one of the most thought-provoking books on emotion and its expression I have read. At its core, it attempts to provide an account of the development of full human emotionality and in so doing argues the emotions are “transcranial.” Emotions are radically realized outside our nervous systems and beyond our skin. As children, we are functionally integrated affectively with our mothers; so much so that in a sense our emotions are not ours alone. Regardless of…Read more
  • Ecological populations and communities are highly complex systems and our ability to understand these systems are limited. Thus, the mathematical models used to represent these systems are often highly idealized. In this dissertation. I examine in the context of theoretical ecology what mathematical models are, how these models are evaluated, and how models can explain the dynamics of these systems given their complexity and the idealizations introduced. ;In the first section, I argue that the s…Read more
  •  1356
    Message in the Bottle: The Constraints of Experimentation on Model Building
    Philosophy of Science 73 (5): 720-729. 2006.
    Some ecologists have argued that theoretical model building in population and community ecology has gone evidentially unconstrained. In the essay, I argue that "bottle experiments" offer ecological model building evidential constraints and illustrate this by considering work on chaotic models tested by the dynamics of flour beetles. Critics reply that these experiments are importantly unlike nonmanipulated natural systems and thus do not constitute genuine tests of the models. I conclude by cons…Read more
  •  1411
    In 1974, John Maynard Smith wrote in his little book Models in Ecology, A theory of ecology must make statements about ecosystems as a whole, as well as about particular species at particular times, and it must make statements that are true for many species and not just for one… For the discovery of general ideas in ecology, therefore, different kinds of mathematical description, which may be called models, are called for. Whereas a good simulation should include as much detail as possible, a go…Read more
  •  123
    Seeing the forest and the trees: Realism about communities and ecosystems
    Philosophy of Science 74 (5): 628-641. 2007.
    In this essay I first provide an analysis of various community concepts. Second, I evaluate two of the most serious challenges to the existence of communities—gradient and paleoecological analysis respectively—arguing that, properly understood, neither threatens the existence of communities construed interactively. Finally, I apply the same interactive approach to ecosystem ecology, arguing that ecosystems may exist robustly as well. ‡I would like to thank to the participants at the Ecology and …Read more
  •  349
    Philosophy of biology
    with Matt Haber, Andrew Hamilton, and and Samir Okasha
    Philosophy of the Special Sciences, edited by Fritz Allhof, Blackwell Press.
  •  987
    Ecologists attempt to understand the diversity of life with mathematical models. Often, mathematical models contain simplifying idealizations designed to cope with the blooming, buzzing confusion of the natural world. This strategy frequently issues in models whose predictions are inaccurate. Critics of theoretical ecology argue that only predictively accurate models are successful and contribute to the applied work of conservation biologists. Hence, they think that much of the mathematical work…Read more
  •  171
    Foot , Hursthouse , and Thompson , along with other philosophers, have argued for a metaethical position, the natural goodness approach, that claims moral judgments are, or are on a par with, teleological claims made in the biological sciences. Specifically, an organism’s flourishing is characterized by how well they function as specified by the species to which they belong. In this essay, I first sketch the Neo-Aristotelian natural goodness approach. Second, I argue that critics who claim that …Read more