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6Of Nulls and NormsPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994. 1994.Neyman-Pearson methods in statistics distinguish between Type I and Type II errors. Through rigid control of Type I error, the "null" hypothesis typically receives the benefit of the doubt. I compare philosophers' interpretations of this feature of Neyman-Pearson tests with interpretations given in statistics textbooks. The pragmatic view of the tests advocated by Neyman, largely rejected by philosophers, lives on in many textbooks. Birnbaum thought the pragmatic view has a useful "heuristic" ro…Read more
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71I will sketch, but not argue for here, a hypothesis about its origins and structure. What philosophers think of as folk psychology has dual origins. One is a genuine "intuitive psychology." This is an evolved predictive tool seen also in some nonhuman animals and very young children. It is "peripheral" in what it recognizes and describes. Primarily, it recognizes seeing and acting (including trying) as activities of others. This is common element in how human and non-human animals deal with each…Read more
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27The idea that innateness can be understood in terms of genetic coding or genetic programming is discussed. I argue that biology does not provide any support for the view that the whole-organism features of interest to nativists in psychology and linguistics are genetically coded for. This provides some support for recent critical and deflationary treatments of the concept of innateness.
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8We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us... are ... constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey...
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34Dewey and the Subject-Matter of ScienceIn John R. Shook & Paul Kurtz (eds.), Dewey's enduring impact: essays on America's philosopher, Prometheus Books. pp. 73--86. 2011.
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105Did Darwin really do what Kant said was impossible, and serve as a Newton for the biological world? In assessing this question we need to look at both the structure of evolutionary theory and the structure of our explanation-seeking minds. The short answer to the question is yes. Both underestimates and overestimates of the significance of Darwinian explanations derive from psychological habits which may stem from our own evolutionary history.
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7Information in biologyIn David L. Hull & Michael Ruse (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge University Press. pp. 103--119. 2007.The concept of information has acquired a strikingly prominent role in contemporary biology. This trend is especially marked within genetics, but it has also become important in other areas, such as evolutionary theory and developmental biology, particularly where these fields border on genetics. The most distinctive biological role for informational concepts, and the one that has generated the most discussion, is in the description of the relations between genes and the various structures and p…Read more
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5Published as "Useful Lessons from California" in Quadrant Magazine, Volume 50, October 2006. An edited version appears in the Australian newspaper's Higher Education Supplement, as "The Model of Achievement," November 1, 2006.
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10William Dembski holds that "the origin of information is best sought in intelligent causes" ("Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information", 1997). In particular, Dembski argues that Darwinism is not able to explain the existence of biological structures that contain a certain kind of information – "complex specified information" (CSI). To explain these informational features of living systems, we must instead appeal to the choices made by an intelligent designer.
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21My title is intended to echo Hans Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), and the phrase "scientific epistemology" is intended in two Reichenbachian senses. One involves the epistemology of science; the other involves epistemology undertaken with a scientific orientation. Talk of "progress and procedures" is intended in a similar dual sense. I start by looking back over the last century, at how a family of problems was tackled by scientifically oriented philosophers. These are pr…Read more
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One of the most striking developments in recent biology has been the proliferation of concepts such as coding, information, representation and programming, especially applied to genes. The idea that genes can be described as having semantic properties, as well as ordinary causal properties, has become so uncontroversial in many quarters that it now appears prominently in biology textbooks. Scott Gilbert's widely used developmental biology text, to pick just one example, tell us that "the inherit…Read more
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19Debate about adaptationism in biology continues, in part because within “the” problem of assessing adaptationism, three distinct problems are mixed together. The three problems concern the assessment of three distinct adaptationist positions, each of which asserts the central importance of adaptation and natural selection to the study of evolution, but conceives this importance in a different way. As there are three kinds of adaptationism, there are three distinct "anti-adaptationist" positions …Read more
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16Folk psychology as a modelPhilosophers' Imprint 5 1-16. 2005.I argue that everyday folk-psychological skill might best be explained in terms of the deployment of something like a model, in a specific sense drawn from recent philosophy of science. Theoretical models in this sense do not make definite commitments about the systems they are used to understand; they are employed with a particular kind of flexibility. This analysis is used to dissolve the eliminativism debate of the 1980s, and to transform a number of other questions about the status and role …Read more
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6Untangling the evolution of mental representationIn António Zilhão (ed.), Evolution, rationality, and cognition: a cognitive science for the twenty-first century, Routledge. 2005.The "tangle" referred to in my title is a special set of problems that arise in understanding the evolution of mental representation. These are problems over and above those involved in reconstructing evolutionary histories in general, over and above those involved in dealing with human evolution, and even over and above those involved in tackling the evolution of other human psychological traits. I am talking about a peculiar and troublesome set of interactions and possibilities, linked to long…Read more
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5On folk psychology and mental representationIn Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation, Elsevier. pp. 147--162. 2004.into the old view of the mind as a kind of “ghost inside the machine.”
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3Over the past 30 years, one topic much discussed in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology has been the status of "the representational theory of mind," or "RTM." As usually conceived, the representational theory holds that the mind operates (in part) by creating, storing, and using internal representations of objects and events in the world
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51Mental representation, naturalism, and teleosemanticsIn Graham Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics: New Philo-sophical Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2006.The "teleosemantic" program is part of the attempt to give a naturalistic explanation of the semantic properties of mental representations. The aim is to show how the internal states of a wholly physical agent could, as a matter of objective fact, represent the world beyond them. The most popular approach to solving this problem has been to use concepts of physical correlation with some kinship to those employed in information theory (Dretske 1981, 1988; Fodor 1987, 1990). Teleosemantics, which …Read more
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212 Induction, Samples, and KindsIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science, Mit Press. pp. 33. 2011.
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5A Continuum of Semantic OptimismIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Mental Representation: A Reader, Blackwell. 1994.
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2Dewey, continuity, and McDowellIn Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity, Cambridge University Press. 2010.
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67Dewey and the Subject-Matter of ScienceIn John R. Shook & Paul Kurtz (eds.), Dewey's enduring impact: essays on America's philosopher, Prometheus Books. pp. 73--86. 2011.
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1Darwinian individualsIn Frédéric Bouchard & Philippe Huneman (eds.), From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality, Mit Press. 2013.
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3Representationalism reconsideredIn Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 30--45. 2009.
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226Petition to Include Cephalopods as “Animals” Deserving of Humane Treatment under the Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory AnimalsHarvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic. forthcoming.
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43The Scientific Imagination (edited book)Oup Usa. 2019.This book looks at the role of the imagination in science, from both philosophical and psychological perspectives. These contributions combine to provide a comprehensive and exciting picture of this under-explored subject.
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Untangling the evolution of mental representationIn António Zilhão (ed.), Evolution, Rationality and Cognition: A Cognitive Science for the Twenty-First Century, Routledge. 2005.
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26Theory and reality: an introduction to the philosophy of scienceUniversity of Chicago Press. 2003.How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality , Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science. Intended for undergraduates and general readers with no prior background in philosophy, Theory and Reali…Read more
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190Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1996.This book explains the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of 'externalist' explanations. The author provides a biological approach to the investigation of mind and cognition in nature. In particular he explores the idea that the function of cognition is to enable agents to deal with environmental complexity. The history of…Read more
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226Theories of Theories of Mind (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1996.Theories of Theories of Mind brings together contributions by a distinguished international team of philosophers, psychologists, and primatologists, who between them address such questions as: what is it to understand the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of other people? How does such an understanding develop in the normal child? Why, unusually, does it fail to develop? And is any such mentalistic understanding shared by members of other species? The volume's four parts together offer a state …Read more