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  1. (1 other version)Modus Darwin Reconsidered.Casey Helgeson - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (1):193-213.
    ABSTRACT ‘Modus Darwin’ is the name given by Elliott Sober to a form of argument that he attributes to Darwin in the Origin of Species, and to subsequent evolutionary biologists who have reasoned in the same way. In short, the argument form goes: similarity, ergo common ancestry. In this article, I review and critique Sober’s analysis of Darwin’s reasoning. I argue that modus Darwin has serious limitations that make the argument form unsuitable for supporting Darwin’s conclusions, and that Darwin did (...)
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  • Introduction: Points of Contact between Biology and History.Marie I. Kaiser & Daniel Plenge - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 1-23.
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  • The a priority of abduction.Stephen Biggs & Jessica Wilson - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (3):735-758.
    Here we challenge the orthodoxy according to which abduction is an a posteriori mode of inference. We start by providing a case study illustrating how abduction can justify a philosophical claim not justifiable by empirical evidence alone. While many grant abduction's epistemic value, nearly all assume that abductive justification is a posteriori, on grounds that our belief in abduction's epistemic value depends on empirical evidence about how the world contingently is. Contra this assumption, we argue, first, that our belief in (...)
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  • Cladistic Parsimony, Historical Linguistics and Cultural Phylogenetics.Frank Cabrera - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (1):65-100.
    Here, I consider the recent application of phylogenetic methods in historical linguistics. After a preliminary survey of one such method, i.e. cladistic parsimony, I respond to two common criticisms of cultural phylogenies: that cultural artifacts cannot be modeled as tree-like because of borrowing across lineages, and that the mechanism of cultural change differs radically from that of biological evolution. I argue that while perhaps remains true for certain cultural artifacts, the nature of language may be such as to side-step this (...)
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  • Skeptheism: Is Knowledge of God’s Existence Possible?Moti Mizrahi - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (1):41-64.
    In this paper, I sketch an argument for the view that we cannot know (or have good reasons to believe) that God exists. Some call this view “strong agnosticism” but I prefer the term “skeptheism” in order to clearly distinguish between two distinct epistemic attitudes with respect to the existence of God, namely, agnosticism and skepticism. For the skeptheist, we cannot know (or have good reasons to believe) that God exists, since there can be neither conceptual (a priori) nor empirical (...)
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  • X - Phi and Carnapian Explication.Joshua Shepherd & James Justus - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (2):381-402.
    The rise of experimental philosophy has placed metaphilosophical questions, particularly those concerning concepts, at the center of philosophical attention. X-phi offers empirically rigorous methods for identifying conceptual content, but what exactly it contributes towards evaluating conceptual content remains unclear. We show how x-phi complements Rudolf Carnap’s underappreciated methodology for concept determination, explication. This clarifies and extends x-phi’s positive philosophical import, and also exhibits explication’s broad appeal. But there is a potential problem: Carnap’s account of explication was limited to empirical and (...)
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  • Model Organisms are Not (Theoretical) Models.Arnon Levy & Adrian Currie - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (2):327-348.
    Many biological investigations are organized around a small group of species, often referred to as ‘model organisms’, such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The terms ‘model’ and ‘modelling’ also occur in biology in association with mathematical and mechanistic theorizing, as in the Lotka–Volterra model of predator-prey dynamics. What is the relation between theoretical models and model organisms? Are these models in the same sense? We offer an account on which the two practices are shown to have different epistemic characters. (...)
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  • Parsimony and the Fisher–Wright debate.Anya Plutynski - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (4):697-713.
    In the past five years, there have been a series of papers in the journal Evolution debating the relative significance of two theories of evolution, a neo-Fisherian and a neo-Wrightian theory, where the neo-Fisherians make explicit appeal to parsimony. My aim in this paper is to determine how we can make sense of such an appeal. One interpretation of parsimony takes it that a theory that contains fewer entities or processes, (however we demarcate these) is more parsimonious. On the account (...)
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  • 14. Real Traits, Real Functions?Colin Allen - 2002 - In André Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 373.
    Discussions of the functions of biological traits generally take the notion of a trait for granted. Defining this notion is a non-trivial problem. Different approaches to function place different constraints on adequate accounts of the notion of a trait. Accounts of function based on engineering-style analyses allow trait boundaries to be a matter of human interest. Accounts of function based on natural selection have typically been taken to require trait boundaries that are objectively real. After canvassing problems raised by each (...)
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  • Optimality and constraint.David A. Helweg & Herbert L. Roitblat - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):222-223.
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  • Types of optimality: Who is the steersman?Michael E. Hyland - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):223-224.
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  • Critical Notice of Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science by Elliott Sober, Cambridge University of Press, 2008.Ingo Brigandt - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (1):159-186.
    This essay discusses Elliott Sober’s Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science. Valuable to both philosophers and biologists, Sober analyzes the testing of different kinds of evolutionary hypotheses about natural selection or phylogenetic history, including a thorough critique of intelligent design. Not at least because of a discussion of different schools of hypothesis testing (Bayesianism, likelihoodism, and frequentism), with Sober favoring a pluralism where different inference methods are appropriate in different empirical contexts, the book has lessons for philosophy of (...)
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  • Formal rationality and its pernicious effects on the social sciences.Harold Kincaid - 2000 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (1):67-88.
    This article argues that a particular notion of rationality, more exactly a specific notion of legitimate inference, is presupposed by much work in the social sciences to their detriment. The author describes the notion of rationality he has in mind, explains why it is misguided, identifies where and how it affects social research, and illustrates why that research is weaker as a result. The notion of legitimate inference the author has in mind is one that believes inferences are guided by (...)
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  • (1 other version)Instrumentalism, parsimony, and the akaike framework.Elliott Sober - 2002 - Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002 (3):S112-S123.
    Akaike’s framework for thinking about model selection in terms of the goal of predictive accuracy and his criterion for model selection have important philosophical implications. Scientists often test models whose truth values they already know, and they often decline to reject models that they know full well are false. Instrumentalism helps explain this pervasive feature of scientific practice, and Akaike’s framework helps provide instrumentalism with the epistemology it needs. Akaike’s criterion for model selection also throws light on the role of (...)
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  • Confirmation, heuristics, and explanatory reasoning.Timothy McGrew - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (4):553-567.
    Recent work on inference to the best explanation has come to an impasse regarding the proper way to coordinate the theoretical virtues in explanatory inference with probabilistic confirmation theory, and in particular with aspects of Bayes's Theorem. I argue that the theoretical virtues are best conceived heuristically and that such a conception gives us the resources to explicate the virtues in terms of ceteris paribus theorems. Contrary to some Bayesians, this is not equivalent to identifying the virtues with likelihoods or (...)
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  • Outline of an explanatory account of cladistic practice.Nico M. Franz - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3):489-515.
    A naturalistic account of the strengths and limitations of cladistic practice is offered. The success of cladistics is claimed to be largely rooted in the parsimony-implementing congruence test. Cladists may use the congruence test to iteratively refine assessments of homology, and thereby increase the odds of reliable phylogenetic inference under parsimony. This explanation challenges alternative views which tend to ignore the effects of parsimony on the process of character individuation in systematics. In a related theme, the concept of homeostatic property (...)
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  • How to Tell When Simpler, More Unified, or Less A d Hoc Theories Will Provide More Accurate Predictions.Malcolm R. Forster & Elliott Sober - 1994 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (1):1-35.
    Traditional analyses of the curve fitting problem maintain that the data do not indicate what form the fitted curve should take. Rather, this issue is said to be settled by prior probabilities, by simplicity, or by a background theory. In this paper, we describe a result due to Akaike [1973], which shows how the data can underwrite an inference concerning the curve's form based on an estimate of how predictively accurate it will be. We argue that this approach throws light (...)
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  • Population-genetic trees, maps, and narratives of the great human diasporas.Marianne Sommer - 2015 - History of the Human Sciences 28 (5):108-145.
    From the 1960s, mathematical and computational tools have been developed to arrive at human population trees from various kinds of serological and molecular data. Focusing on the work of the Italian-born population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, I follow the practices of tree-building and mapping from the early blood-group studies to the current genetic admixture research. I argue that the visual language of the tree is paralleled in the narrative of the human diasporas, and I show how the tree was actually (...)
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  • On Arrow’s Theorem and Scientific Rationality: Reply to Morreau and Stegenga.Samir Okasha - 2015 - Mind 124 (493):279-294.
    In a recent article I compared the problem of theory choice, in which scientists must choose between competing theories, with the problem of social choice, in which society must choose between competing social alternatives. I argued that the formal machinery of social choice theory can be used to shed light on the problem of theory choice in science, an argument that has been criticized by Michael Morreau and Jacob Stegenga. This article replies to Morreau’s and Stegenga’s criticisms.
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  • Why optimality is not worth arguing about.Stephen E. G. Lea - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):225-225.
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  • Straining the word “optimal”.James E. Mazur - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):227-227.
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  • The infinite regress of optimization.Philippe Mongin - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):229-230.
    A comment on Paul Schoemaker's target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14 (1991), p. 205-215, "The Quest for Optimality: A Positive Heuristic of Science?" (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00066140). This comment argues that the optimizing model of decision leads to an infinite regress, once internal costs of decision (i.e., information and computation costs) are duly taken into account.
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  • Natural selection doesn't have goals, but it's the reason organisms do.Martin Daly - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):219-220.
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  • Simplicity in the Best Systems Account of Laws of Nature.James Woodward - 2014 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (1):91-123.
    This article discusses the role of simplicity and the notion of a best balance of simplicity and strength within the best systems account (BSA) of laws of nature. The article explores whether there is anything in scientific practice that corresponds to the notion of simplicity or to the trade-off between simplicity and strength to which the BSA appeals. Various theoretical rationales for simplicity preferences and their bearing on the identification of laws are also explored. It is concluded that there are (...)
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  • Doing away with morgan’s canon.Simon Fitzpatrick - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (2):224–246.
    Morgan’s Canon is a very widely endorsed methodological principle in animal psychology, believed to be vital for a rigorous, scientific approach to the study of animal cognition. In contrast I argue that Morgan’s Canon is unjustified, pernicious and unnecessary. I identify two main versions of the Canon and show that they both suffer from very serious problems. I then suggest an alternative methodological principle that captures all of the genuine methodological benefits that Morgan’s Canon can bring but suffers from none (...)
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  • Black box inference: When should intervening variables be postulated?Elliott Sober - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (3):469-498.
    An empirical procedure is suggested for testing a model that postulates variables that intervene between observed causes and abserved effects against a model that includes no such postulate. The procedure is applied to two experiments in psychology. One involves a conditioning regimen that leads to response generalization; the other concerns the question of whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind.
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  • The quest for plausibility: A negative heuristic for science?R. W. Byrne - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):217-218.
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  • (2 other versions)A Verisimilitude Framework for Inductive Inference, with an Application to Phylogenetics.Olav B. Vassend - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (4):1359-1383.
    Bayesianism and likelihoodism are two of the most important frameworks philosophers of science use to analyse scientific methodology. However, both frameworks face a serious objection: much scientific inquiry takes place in highly idealized frameworks where all the hypotheses are known to be false. Yet, both Bayesianism and likelihoodism seem to be based on the assumption that the goal of scientific inquiry is always truth rather than closeness to the truth. Here, I argue in favour of a verisimilitude framework for inductive (...)
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  • Causes of cultural disparity: Switches, tuners, and the cognitive science of religion.Andrew Buskell - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (8):1239-1264.
    Cultural disparity—the variation across cultural traits such as knowledge, skill, and belief—is a complex phenomenon, studied by a number of researchers with an expanding empirical toolkit. While there is a growing consensus as to the processes that generate cultural variation and change, general explanatory frameworks require additional tools for identifying, organising, and relating the complex causes that underpin the production of cultural disparity. Here I develop a case study in the cognitive science of religion, and demonstrate how concepts and distinctions (...)
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  • Rational agents, real people and the quest for optimality.Eldar Shafir - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):232-232.
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  • Complexity and optimality.Dauglas A. Miller & Steven W. Zucker - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):227-228.
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  • (1 other version)A material dissolution of the problem of induction.John D. Norton - 2014 - Synthese 191 (4):1-20.
    In a formal theory of induction, inductive inferences are licensed by universal schemas. In a material theory of induction, inductive inferences are licensed by facts. With this change in the conception of the nature of induction, I argue that the celebrated “problem of induction” can no longer be set up and is thereby dissolved. Attempts to recreate the problem in the material theory of induction fail. They require relations of inductive support to conform to an unsustainable, hierarchical empiricism.
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  • Hot-Blooded Gluttons: Dependency, Coherence, and Method in the Historical Sciences.Adrian Currie - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (4):929-952.
    Our epistemic access to the past is infamously patchy: historical information degrades and disappears and bygone eras are often beyond the reach of repeatable experiments. However, historical scientists have been remarkably successful at uncovering and explaining the past. I argue that part of this success is explained by the exploitation of dependencies between historical events, entities, and processes. For instance, if sauropod dinosaurs were hot blooded, they must have been gluttons; the high-energy demands of endothermy restrict sauropod grazing strategies. Understanding (...)
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  • Representing the past.Ludovica Lorusso - unknown
    In my dissertation I define historical disciplines as disciplines that aim to give a historical interpretation of the evidence. Phylogenetic systematics is a historical discipline and therefore in my definition phylogenies should be thought of as historical interpretations of relationships between taxa.
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  • Is economics still immersed in the old concepts of the Enlightenment era?Andrzej P. Wierzbicki - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):236-237.
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  • (1 other version)The Disorder of Things. [REVIEW]Marc Ereshefsky - 1995 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 25 (1):143-158.
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  • Why the ultimate argument for scientific realism ultimately fails.Moti Mizrahi - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (1):132-138.
    In this paper, I argue that the ultimate argument for Scientific Realism, also known as the No-Miracles Argument (NMA), ultimately fails as an abductive defence of Epistemic Scientific Realism (ESR), where (ESR) is the thesis that successful theories of mature sciences are approximately true. The NMA is supposed to be an Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) that purports to explain the success of science. However, the explanation offered as the best explanation for success, namely (ESR), fails to yield independently (...)
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  • Historical Reconstruction: Gaining Epistemic Access to the Deep Past.Patrick Forber - 2011 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 3 (20130604).
    We discuss the scientific task of historical reconstruction and the problem of epistemic access. We argue that strong epistemic support for historical claims consists in the consilience of multiple independent lines of evidence, and analyze the impact hypothesis for the End-Cretaceous mass extinction to illustrate the accrual of epistemic support. Although there are elements of the impact hypothesis that enjoy strong epistemic support, the general conditions for this are strict, and help to clarify the difficulties associated with reconstructing the deep (...)
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  • Venetian sea levels, british bread prices, and the principle of the common cause.Elliott Sober - 2001 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (2):331-346.
    When two causally independent processes each have a quantity that increases monotonically (either deterministically or in probabilistic expectation), the two quantities will be correlated, thus providing a counterexample to Reichenbach's principle of the common cause. Several philosophers have denied this, but I argue that their efforts to save the principle are unsuccessful. Still, one salvage attempt does suggest a weaker principle that avoids the initial counterexample. However, even this weakened principle is mistaken, as can be seen by exploring the concepts (...)
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  • Homology and the origin of correspondence.Ingo Brigandt - 2002 - Biology and Philosophy 17 (3):389-407.
    Homology is a natural kind term and a precise account of what homology is has to come out of theories about the role of homologues in evolution and development. Definitions of homology are discussed with respect to the question as to whether they are able to give a non-circular account of the correspondence or sameness referred to by homology. It is argued that standard accounts tie homology to operational criteria or specific research projects, but are not yet able to offer (...)
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  • The prior probabilities of phylogenetic trees.Joel D. Velasco - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (4):455-473.
    Bayesian methods have become among the most popular methods in phylogenetics, but theoretical opposition to this methodology remains. After providing an introduction to Bayesian theory in this context, I attempt to tackle the problem mentioned most often in the literature: the “problem of the priors”—how to assign prior probabilities to tree hypotheses. I first argue that a recent objection—that an appropriate assignment of priors is impossible—is based on a misunderstanding of what ignorance and bias are. I then consider different methods (...)
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  • (1 other version)Quantitative Parsimony and Explanatory Power.Baker Alan - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2):245-259.
    The desire to minimize the number of individual new entities postulated is often referred to as quantitative parsimony. Its influence on the default hypotheses formulated by scientists seems undeniable. I argue that there is a wide class of cases for which the preference for quantitatively parsimonious hypotheses is demonstrably rational. The justification, in a nutshell, is that such hypotheses have greater explanatory power than less parsimonious alternatives. My analysis is restricted to a class of cases I shall refer to as (...)
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  • The strategy of optimality revisited.Paul J. H. Schoemaker - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):237-245.
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  • The human being as a bumbling optimalist: A psychologist's viewpoint.Masanao Toda - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):235-235.
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  • Optimality as a prescriptive tool.Alexander H. G. Rinnooy Kan - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):230-231.
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  • The example of psychology: Optimism, not optimality.Daniel S. Levine - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):225-226.
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  • Vaulting optimality.Peter Dayan & Jon Oberlander - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):221-222.
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  • The phenomena of homology.Paul Edmund Griffiths - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (5):643-658.
    Philosophical discussions of biological classification have failed to recognise the central role of homology in the classification of biological parts and processes. One reason for this is a misunderstanding of the relationship between judgments of homology and the core explanatory theories of biology. The textbook characterisation of homology as identity by descent is commonly regarded as a definition. I suggest instead that it is one of several attempts to explain the phenomena of homology. Twenty years ago the ‘new experimentalist’ movement (...)
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  • The domain relativity of evolutionary contingency.Cory Travers Lewis - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (3-4):25.
    A key issue in the philosophy of biology is evolutionary contingency, the degree to which evolutionary outcomes could have been different. Contingency is typically contrasted with evolutionary convergence, where different evolutionary pathways result in the same or similar outcomes. Convergences are given as evidence against the hypothesis that evolutionary outcomes are highly contingent. But the best available treatments of contingency do not, when read closely, produce the desired contrast with convergence. Rather, they produce a picture in which any degree of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Defending Non‐Epiphenomenal Event Dualism 1.Brian Jonathan Garrett - 2000 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (3):393-412.
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