The role of values in scientific research has become an important topic of discussion in both scholarly and popular debates. Pundits across the political spectrum worry that research on topics like climate change, evolutionary theory, vaccine safety, and genetically modified foods has become overly politicized. At the same time, it is clear that values play an important role in science by limiting unethical forms of research and by deciding what areas of research have the greatest relevance for society. Deciding how (...) to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in scientific research is a matter of vital importance.Recently, philosophers of science have written a great deal on this topic, but most of their work has been directed toward a scholarly audience. This book makes the contemporary philosophical literature on science and values accessible to a wide readership. It examines case studies from a variety of research areas, including climate science, anthropology, chemical risk assessment, ecology, neurobiology, biomedical research, and agriculture. These cases show that values have necessary roles to play in identifying research topics, choosing research questions, determining the aims of inquiry, responding to uncertainty, and deciding how to communicate information. Kevin Elliott focuses not just on describing roles for values but also on determining when their influences are actually appropriate. He emphasizes several conditions for incorporating values in a legitimate fashion, and highlights multiple strategies for fostering engagement between stakeholders so that value influences can be subjected to careful and critical scrutiny. (shrink)

This volume offers a critical appreciation of the work of 16 leading curriculum theorists through critical expositions of their writings. Written by a leading name in Curriculum Studies, the book includes a balance of established curriculum thinkers and contemporary curriculum analysts from education as well as philosophy, sociology and psychology. With theorists from the UK, the US and Europe, there is also a spread of political perspectives from radical conservatism through liberalism to socialism and libertarianism. Theorists included are: John Dewey, (...) Lev Vygotsky, Ralph Tyler, Joseph Schwab, Jerome Bruner, Maxine Greene, Basil Bernstein, Micheal Foucault, Paul Hirst, Donald Schon, Lawrence Stenhouse, Elliott Eisner, John White, Michael Apple, Henry Giroux and Robin Usher. This book is ideal for students looking for an introduction to some of the key educational thinkers of our time. It can also be used as a companion volume to the Routledge four-volume set on Curriculum Theory , 2003, which is also edited by David Scott. (shrink)

I explain the shutdown problem: the problem of designing artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don’t try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals competently. I prove three theorems that make the difficulty precise. These theorems show that agents satisfying some innocuous-seeming conditions will often try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, even in cases where it’s costly to do so. And (...) patience trades off against shutdownability: the more patient an agent, the greater the costs that agent is willing to incur to manipulate the shutdown button. I end by noting that these theorems can guide our search for solutions. (shrink)

Attempts to show that the simplicity of a hypothesis can be measured by attending to how well it answers certain kinds of questions.

The evolutionary problem of the units of selection has elicited a good deal of conceptual work from philosophers. We review this work to determine where the issues now stand.

That some propositions are testable, while others are not, was a fundamental idea in the philosophical program known as logical empiricism. That program is now widely thought to be defunct. Quine’s (1953) “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and Hempel’s (1950) “Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning” are among its most notable epitaphs. Yet, as we know from Mark Twain’s comment on an obituary that he once had the pleasure of reading about himself, the report of a death can (...) be an exaggeration. The research program that began in Vienna and Berlin continues, even though many of the specific formulations that came out of those circles are flawed and need to be replaced. (shrink)

In a recent article, Kim Sterelny and Philip Kitcher5 defend a version of genic selectionism and attempt to refute the criticisms I made of that doctrine. Their defense has two components. First, they find fault with the account I gave of the units-of-selection controversy-an account which uses the idea of probabilistic causality as a tool of explication. Second, they provide a positive account of their own of what that controversy concerns, one which they think allows genic selectionism to emerge as (...) a successful thesis. I believe that the position they sketch is mistaken, both in its general orientation and in its details. I believe that the Sterelny/ Kitcher position misunderstands what the biological question of the units of selection is about and that their criticisms of my own proposal are mistaken as well. (shrink)

This book evaluates the widespread preference in philosophy of mind for varieties of property dualism over other alternatives to physicalism. It takes the standard motivations for property dualism as a starting point and argues that these lead directly to nonphysical substances resembling the soul of traditional metaphysics. In the first half of the book, the author clarifies what is at issue in the choice between theories that posit nonphysical properties only and those that posit nonphysical substances. The crucial question, he (...) argues, is whether one posits nonphysical things that satisfy an Aristotelian-Cartesian independence definition of substance: nonphysical things that could exist in the absence of anything else. In the second half, the author argues that standard and Russellian monist forms of property dualism are far less plausible than we usually suppose. Most significantly, the presuppositions of one of the leading arguments for property dualism, the conceivability argument, lead by parity of reasoning to the view that conscious subjects are nonphysical substances. He concludes that if you posit nonphysical properties in response to the mind-body problem then you should be prepared to posit nonphysical substances as well. Mainstream philosophy of mind must take nonphysical substances far more seriously than it has done for the best part of a century. The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

John Beatty (1995) and Alexander Rosenberg (1994) have argued against the claim that there are laws in biology. Beatty's main reason is that evolution is a process full of contingency, but he also takes the existence of relative significance controversies in biology and the popularity of pluralistic approaches to a variety of evolutionary questions to be evidence for biology's lawlessness. Rosenberg's main argument appeals to the idea that biological properties supervene on large numbers of physical properties, but he also develops (...) case studies of biological controversies to defend his thesis that biology is best understood as an instrumental discipline. The present paper assesses their arguments. (shrink)

I want to explain some of the gaps I see between the concepts of morality and altruism. Indeed, there are three concepts here that need to be disentangled, not just two. Evolutionists use the terms “altruism” and “selfishness” in a way that differs from the usage found in ordinary parlance. So my goal is to separate evolutionary altruism, psychological altruism, and morality. Morality includes a variety of characteristics. There is more to morality than altruism. If we can avoid the mistake (...) of thinking we have explained the whole when we have explained only the part, we may yet be able to advance our understanding of what morality is and where it came from. (shrink)

Is it accurate to label Darwin's theory "the theory of evolution by natural selection," given that the concept of common ancestry is at least as central to Darwin's theory? Did Darwin reject the idea that group selection causes characteristics to evolve that are good for the group though bad for the individual? How does Darwin's discussion of God in The Origin of Species square with the common view that he is the champion of methodological naturalism? These are just some of (...) the intriguing questions raised in this volume of interconnected philosophical essays on Darwin. The author's approach is informed by modern issues in evolutionary biology, but is sensitive to the ways in which Darwin's outlook differed from that of many biologists today. The main topics that are the focus of the book--common ancestry, group selection, sex ratio, and naturalism--have rarely been discussed in their connection with Darwin in such penetrating detail. (shrink)

I want to explore what happens to two philosophical issues when we assume that the mind, a functional device, is to be understood by the same sort of functional analysis that guides biological investigation of other organismic systems and characteristics. The first problem area concerns the concept of rationality, its connection with reliability and reproductive success, and the status of rationality hypotheses in attribution of beliefs. It has been argued that ascribing beliefs to someone requires the assumption that that person (...) is rational. It also has been argued that evolutionary theory can account for the capacity we have for rational thought by appealing to the idea that rational methods for constructing beliefs are reliable and therefore represented a selected advantage. Both of these claims about rationality are critically examined. In the second part of the paper, I turn to some criticisms that have been advanced against "functionalist" solutions to the mind/body problem. These criticisms are defused when that doctrine is understood in terms of a Teleological (rather than a Turing Machine) notion of function. However, functionalism does not emerge totally unscathed. Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss saw everything in terms of its function and its perfect performance of its function. In the philosophy of mind, his influence lives on in the form of two ideas: (i) that we must possess rational methods for constructing beliefs, since our minds are the product of natural selection, and (ii) that psychological states and properties are individuated by their psychological functions. Contemporary biology provides the resources for avoiding Pangloss's wideeyed teleology in the study of adaptation. It is to be hoped that progress in psychology will loosen the grip of Panglossian assumptions in the study of mind. (shrink)

Russell (1948), Reichenbach (1956), and Salmon (1975, 1979) have argued that a fundamental principle of science and common sense is that "matching" events should not be chalked up to coincidence, but should be explained by postulating a common cause. Reichenbach and Salmon provided this intuitive idea with a probabilistic formulation, which Salmon used to argue for a version of scientific realism. Van Fraassen (1980, 1982) showed that the principle, so construed, runs afoul of certain results in quantum mechanics. In this (...) paper a new formulation of the principle is offered that emerges from its use in evolutionary theory. This characterization identifies fairly general conditions in which postulating common causes will be more explanatory than postulating separate causes. (shrink)

To infer the state of a cause from the states of its effects, independent lines of evidence are preferable to dependent ones. This familiar idea is here investigated, the goal being to identify its presuppositions. Connections are drawn with Reichenbach's (1956) and Salmon's (1984) discussions of the principle of the common cause.

Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. Markov chain theory entails that the passage of time reduces the amount of information that the present provides about the past. Here we use a Moran process framework to show that some evolutionary processes destroy information faster than others. Our results connect with Darwin’s principle that adaptive similarities provide scant evidence of common ancestry whereas neutral and deleterious similarities do better. (...) We also describe how the branching in phylogenetic trees affects the information that the present supplies about the past. (shrink)

We explore the evidential relationships that connect two standard claims of modern evolutionary biology. The hypothesis of common ancestry (which says that all organisms now on earth trace back to a single progenitor) and the hypothesis of natural selection (which says that natural selection has been an important influence on the traits exhibited by organisms) are logically independent; however, this leaves open whether testing one requires assumptions about the status of the other. Darwin noted that an extreme version of adaptationism (...) would undercut the possibility of making inferences about common ancestry. Here we develop a converse claim—hypotheses that assert that natural selection has been an important influence on trait values are untestable unless supplemented by suitable background assumptions. The fact of common ancestry and a claim about quantitative genetics together suffice to render such hypotheses testable. Furthermore, we see no plausible alternative to these assumptions; we hypothesize that they are necessary as well as sufficient for adaptive hypotheses to be tested. This point has important implications for biological practice, since biologists standardly assume that adaptive hypotheses predict trait associations among tip species. Another consequence is that adaptive hypotheses cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by a trait value that is universal within a single species, if that trait value deviates even slightly from the optimum. 1 Two Darwinian hypotheses 2 Logical independence 3 How adaptive hypotheses bear on the tree of life hypothesis 4 How the tree of life hypothesis bears on adaptive hypotheses 5 What do adaptive hypotheses predict? 6 Common ancestry and quantitative genetics to the rescue 7 Conclusion. (shrink)

The hypothesis of group selection fell victim to a seemingly devastating critique in 1960s evolutionary biology. In Unto Others (1998), we argue to the contrary, that group selection is a conceptually coherent and empirically well documented cause of evolution. We suggest, in addition, that it has been especially important in human evolution. In the second part of Unto Others, we consider the issue of psychological egoism and altruism -- do human beings have ultimate motives concerning the well-being of others? We (...) argue that previous psychological and philosophical work on this question has been inconclusive. We propose an evolutionary argument for the claim that human beings have altruistic ultimate motives. (shrink)

In her 1997 OSSA paper, Trudy Govier discusses in detail my thesis that arguers have dialectical obligations. In a 1998 paper she further examines this thesis to see whether it is viable and concludes that it faces serious problems. In this paper, I assess the state of the thesis in light of Govier's discussion of it. I urge that we have something to gain from the empirical turn--from investigating best practices. At the end, I take a step back to ask (...) what is really at issue here and how it connect s to other issues in the theory of argument. (shrink)

Quine has developed two reasons for thinking that our ontology should not include the ontological category of properties. His first point is that the criterion for individuating properties is unclear, and the second is that postulating the existence of properties would not explain anything. In what follows I critically examine these two themes, which I will call the clarity argument and the parsimony argument. Although I will suggest that these two arguments are defective, I also will try to show that (...) certain related arguments on behalf of the existence of properties are likewise flawed. This will set the stage for the discussion in the fourth section of the perspective provided by evolutionary theory on the question of the ontological status of properties. It will emerge that evolutionary theory provides reason for thinking that properties exist, and, additionally, gives an interesting point of view on the epistemological and metaphysical issues that Quine has addressed. (shrink)

This paper is a sympathetic critique of the argument that Reichenbach develops in Chap. 2 of Experience and Prediction for the thesis that sense experience justifies belief in the existence of an external world. After discussing his attack on the positivist theory of meaning, I describe the probability ideas that Reichenbach presents. I argue that Reichenbach begins with an argument grounded in the Law of Likelihood but that he then endorses a different argument that involves prior probabilities. I try to (...) show how this second step in Reichenbach’s approach can be strengthened by using ideas that have been developed recently for understanding causation in terms of the idea of intervention. (shrink)

In what follows I will discuss an example of the Duhem-Quine problem in which Pr(H A), Pr(A H), and Pr(OI +H& ?A) (where H is the hypothesis, A the auxiliary assumptions, and O the observational prediction) can be construed objectively; however, only some of those quantities are relevant to the analysis that I provide. The example involves medical diagnosis. The goal is to test the hypothesis that someone has tuberculosis; the auxiliary assumptions describe the er- ror characteristics of the test (...) procedure. Although it can make sense to talk about the objective probability that someone (randomly drawn from a given population) has tuberculosis and it also can make sense to talk about the objective probability that a test procedure has a certain set of error characteristics, neither of these quantities will enter into the analysis. The analysis proceeds entirely via likelihoods, what one needs to consider is just the probability of the observations conditional on four conjunctions of the form (?H & +A).' It is a special feature of the example that all four of these conjunctions are simple statistical hypotheses in the technical sense that each unambigu-ously confers a probability on the observations.'o After describing how the likelihood concept applies to the example concerning medical diagnosis, I will show how similar patterns can arise in the context of a second inferential framework-that of H. Akaike's criterion of model selection;" this time the example will involve phylogenetic inference. (shrink)

In this paper, I'll explore three contexts in which the heuristic of personification yields the wrong answer. They all come from game theoretic discussion of altruism and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Whether it is applied to evolution or to rational deliberation, game theory models situations that involve frequency dependence. In the evolutionary case, how fit a trait is, and whether it is more or less fit than the alternatives, depends on the composition of the population (Maynard Smith 1982). In the case (...) of rational deliberation, which act is best for the agent depends on what other actors are likely to do. As we now will see, frequency dependence can throw a monkey wrench into the convenient relationship between deliberation and evolution posited by the heuristic of personification. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman suggests that a generalization of the form “all A’s are B” is confirmable by an observed instance only if the generalization is law-like. Jackson and Pargetter deny this and give examples of how accidental generalizations can be confirmed. A possible response from Goodman appears to make these accidental generalizations look law-like, but I show it’s defective. And Jackson and Pargetter's substitute nomological condition fares no better than Goodman’s. Because of the multiplicity of possible background assumptions, I doubt that (...) there is a single “nomological condition” that each and every act of confirmation must obey. (shrink)

Presented in an engaging lecture-style format, this anthology leads readers through a series of discussions on the basic issues and ideas in philosophy, with lectures supported by related readings from historically important sources. The discussions emphasize the logic of philosophical arguments—and in particular, how they relate to the content of scientific theories such as evolution. This five-part book, made up of “lectures” and readings, covers an introduction to philosophy; the philosophy of religion; theory of knowledge; philosophy of mind; and ethics. (...) For anyone looking for adequate answers to enduring questions. (shrink)

Spirituality emerges in the function of culture to reinforce and yet redirect our genetic heritage. Our genes urge us to be concerned only for our own welfare, which can turn us to evil behaviors. Our religious traditions urge us to engage in behaviors of transkin altruism. These religious traditions have been selected for in the processes of natural selection. The challenge to spirituality is to discern the fundamental dynamics of the evolutionary processes, both genetic and cultural, that have created us (...) and to direct our behaviors in ways that can be beneficial to the entire natural system. Reason is not enough; we must also cultivate spiritual discernment in order to perceive the true nature of our situation and the best responses that are called for. The religious communities have the major responsibility for cultivating the spirituality that can achieve the most adequate discernment. (shrink)

As a species of egoism, Hedonism holds that our only ultimate pleasure is the self-directed desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Bishop Butler is widely regarded as having refuted hedonism. I argue that Butler's argument failed to undermine Hedonism, because his premises concern what people want, while Hedonism concerns why people have the wants they do. Even if the desires for external things were a prerequisite for obtaining pleasure, nothing would follow about why people desire external things.

Any physical explanation of consciousness seems to leave unresolved the ‘explanatory gap': Isn't it conceivable that all the elements in that explanation could occur, with the same information processing outcomes as in a conscious process, but in the absence of consciousness? E.g. any digital computational process could occur in the absence of consciousness. To resolve this dilemma, we propose a biological-process-oriented physiological- phenomenological characterization of consciousness that addresses three ‘paradoxical’ qualities seemingly incompatible with the empirical realm: The dual location of (...) phenomenal properties ‘out there’ yet ‘in here’ in consciousness; the mysterious ‘thickness’ of the specious present; the feeling of ‘free agency', that we can voluntarily direct our actions, including the act of conscious attention, while at the same time attention and the emotions that direct it seem responsive to physiological substrates with physical causes. These paradoxes are then resolved by relating three elements of consciousness: organismically interested anticipation; sensory and proprioceptive imagery generated by the interested anticipation rather than by sensory input; resonating of these activities with activity stimulated by sensory data, where the interested anticipation precedes the processing of the input. Each of these elements is bridged to physiological processes such that, if they occur in a certain relation to each other, we can understand why they would inevitably be accompanied by the corresponding elements of conscious experience. (shrink)

Philosophy of mind is, and for a long while has been, 99% metaphysics and 1% epistemology. Attention is lavished on the question of the nature of mind, but questions concerning how we know about minds are discussed much less thoroughly. University courses in philosophy of mind routinely devote a lot of time to dualism, logical behaviourism, the mind/brain identity theory, and functionalism. But what gets said about the kinds of evidence that help one determine what mental states, if any, an (...) individual occupies? Well, Skinner's puritanical disdain for postulating mental states gets raked over the coals, the problem of other minds gets solved by a perfunctory invocation of the principle of inference to the best explanation, and the Turing test gets discussed, mainly in order to emphasize that it can lead to mistaken answers. (shrink)

The contemporary debate on the metaphysical side of metaethics is dominated by two paradigms—reductive naturalism and primitivist non- naturalism. It is argued here that these are both extreme views. In principle, it should be possible for there to be a host of intermediate views between these two extremes. In fact, most of the views that were taken on these metaphysical questions by philosophers of ancient and medieval times differed from both reductive naturalism and primitivist non-naturalism. However, the metaphysical views of (...) these past philosophers cannot easily be endorsed today. This is because our conception of the natural world has changed from that of these premodern thinkers, because of the development of modern natural science. Nonetheless, it is still possible to make sense of intermediate positions, lying between the two extremes of reductive naturalism and primitivist non- naturalism. These intermediate positions are prima facie promising, and deserve careful consideration from contemporary metaethicists. (shrink)

The positivists suggest that some truths may be immune from empirical refutation and yet lacking in rational justification. Quine holds that every proposition is in principle empirically refutable so there are no a priori truths. I’ll provide a working characterization of the idea of “rational revisability” and argue it’s impossible for us to take a chain of rational revision and end up revising everything which we now believe. Quine's position on revisability is also in tension with certain theses about epistemic (...) holism. Finally, I discuss a more general context in which rational argument is viewed as one mechanism among many for reliably modifying beliefs. This more biological perspective allows us to formulate Quine's claims about revisability in a new way and to raise some interesting questions about the potential impact of natural selection on our cognitive capacities. (shrink)

Markov models of evolution describe changes in the probability distribution of the trait values a population might exhibit. In consequence, they also describe how entropy and conditional entropy values evolve, and how the mutual information that characterizes the relation between an earlier and a later moment in a lineage’s history depends on how much time separates them. These models therefore provide an interesting perspective on questions that usually are considered in the foundations of physics—when and why does entropy increase and (...) at what rates do changes in entropy take place? They also throw light on an important epistemological question: are there limits on what your observations of the present can tell you about the evolutionary past? (shrink)

One of the traditional ways in which we manage dissensus is by argumentation, which may be construed as the attempt of the proponent to persuade rationally the other party of the truth of some thesis. To achieve this, the arguer will often anticipate a possible objection. In this paper, I attempt to shed light on the normative aspect of the task of anticipating objections. I deal with such questions as: How is the arguer to anticipate objections? Which of the anticipated (...) objections are to be dealt with? What is required to deal successfully with an objection? (shrink)

One of the distinctive features of rhetorical approaches to the study of argumentation is the emphasis placed on the role of the audience. Here one thinks immediately of the influence of Chaïm Perelman and of his and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric. There is something importantly right about an audience-centered approach to argumentation. Clearly if you wish to persuade an audience of your position (or gain the acceptance of your thesis), you must engage that audience and in some sense carry (...) them with you from your starting points to your conclusion. Still, when I read theorists who place strong emphasis on the role of audience (for example, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca in The New Rhetoric .. (shrink)