University of British Columbia
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2011
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America
  •  8
    Finding value-ladenness in evolutionary psychology: Examining Nelson’s arguments
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 45 (3): 1-14. 2023.
    Faced with the charge of value-ladenness in their theories, researchers in evolutionary psychology (EP) argue that their science is entirely free of values; their hypotheses only concern scientific facts, without any socio-cultural value judgments. Lynn Hankinson Nelson, a renowned feminist scholar of science, denies this. In her book and papers, Nelson finds that their hypotheses do contain evaluative components. One such example is the fear of snakes. While this fear was adaptive to the enviro…Read more
  •  89
    Do New Evolutionary Studies of Consciousness Face Similar Methodological Problems As Evolutionary Studies of Mind?
    Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 31 (n/a): 31-53. 2022.
    Recently several prominent biologists and philosophers, including Feinberg and Mallatt, and Godfrey-Smith, have proposed evolutionary accounts of consciousness. Despite disagreements regarding the specifics, they all focused on the “primitive” form of consciousness and argued that its origin is much more ancient than previously believed. In this study, we examine these accounts based on their methodological grounds. Specifically, we examine whether one methodological criticism leveled against ev…Read more
  •  17
    The Communication Puzzle of the Species Problem
    Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 21 1-20. 2013.
    The species problem is the longstanding puzzle regarding the nature of species. This paper aims to describe how biologists experience little communication breakdown when they have different conceptions of species. For this purpose, I analyze two debates on species and speciation between Guy Bush and Jerry Coyne & H. Allen Orr. Although they have radically different ideas on species, they experience little communication difficulty. I will argue that this is because they implicitly agreed on the r…Read more
  •  25
    A Tale of Two Minds: Past, Present and Future
    Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 24 21-43. 2016.
    The dual process theory is a view that there are two information-processing systems in our mind. It has been popular in cognitive and social psychology for the last few decades, but this simplified formulation of the theory has problems. In this paper I shall review the recent developments made by the dual process theorists to meet those challenges and indicate the directions the theory could take. In particular I shall discuss possible defining properties or mechanisms of the two systems. I arg…Read more
  •  40
    Natural Kinds, Species, and Races
    Kagaku Tetsugaku 48 (1): 35-48. 2015.
    In _Realism and Naturalizing Knowledge_ (Keisho Shobo, 2013), Ryo Uehara carefully formulates the homeostatic property cluster theory of natural kinds and expands it by applying this framework to artifacts and knowledge and thereby drawing them in the naturalistic picture of the world. This is a substantial addition to the development of naturalistic philosophy in Japan. In this essay I shall make general comments on his account of natural kinds in the following respects: Uehara's distinction be…Read more
  •  452
    Prototypical Reasoning About Species and the Species Problem
    Biological Theory 10 (4): 289-300. 2015.
    The species problem is often described as the abundance of conflicting definitions of _species_, such as the biological species concept and phylogenetic species concepts. But biologists understand the notion of species in a non-definitional as well as a definitional way. In this article I argue that when they understand _species_ without a definition in their mind, their understanding is often mediated by the notion of _good species_, or prototypical species, as the idea of ``prototype'' is expl…Read more
  •  40
    The natural frequency hypothesis and evolutionary arguments
    Mind and Society 15 (1): 1-19. 2015.
    In the rationality debate, Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues have argued that human’s apparent inability to follow probabilistic principles does not mean our irrationality, because we can do probabilistic reasoning successfully if probability information is given in frequencies, not percentages (the natural frequency hypothesis). They also offered an evolutionary argument to this hypothesis, according to which using frequencies was evolutionarily more advantageous to our hominin ancestors than …Read more
  •  100
    The Frequency Hypothesis and Evolutionary Arguments
    Kagaku Tetsugaku 41 (1): 79-94. 2008.
    Gerd Gigerenzer's views on probabilistic reasoning in humans have come under close scrutiny. Very little attention, however, has been paid to his evolutionary component of his argument. According to Gigerenzer, reasoning about probabilities as frequencies is so common today because it was favored by natural selection in the past. This paper presents a critical examination of this argument. It will show first, that, _pace_ Gigerenzer, there are some reasons to believe that using the frequency for…Read more