Online research in philosophy

Baldwin Effect, in which there has been a revival of interest in recent years, is disentangled from certain other ideas which, while resembling it in some ways, also differ importantly from it. Baldwin's original idea was that a 'voluntarily' adopted practice which is adaptive can foster, in some non-Lamarckian way, 'coincident variations' that render the practice instinctive and heritable. It is argued that this idea involves a surreptitious slide back to Lamarckism.

I argue that the account of the epistemic modalities developed by Kripke and Putnam is incomplete since it does not make use of the possible worlds machinery that is indispensable to their analysis of the metaphysical modalities. It would have been simpler and more elegant if they had used the concept of 'possible world' to explain both modalities. Instead, they provide an explication of the epistemic modalities in terms of the vague concepts of conceivability and revisability. I show that logical omniscience as a consequence of a possible worlds analysis of the epistemic modalities can be made palatable.

Recent work on the philosophy of modality has tended to pass over questions about iterated modalities in favour of constructing ambitious metaphysical theories of possibility and necessity, despite the central importance of iterated modalities to modal logic. Yet there are numerous unresolved but fundamental issues involving iterated modalities: Chandler and Salmon have provided forceful arguments against the widespread assumption that all necessary truths are necessarily necessary, for example. The current paper examines a range of ways in which one might seek to identify limited regions within which some of the most well-known principles featuring iterated modalities may safely be assumed.

Griffiths (2001) make a number of comments about James Mark Baldwin's motivations and character at the time that he was developing what later became known as the "Baldwin effect." Some of these comments I found to be misleading. I attempt to correct the historical record concerning the origins of the "Baldwin effect.".

I argue that too much attention has been paid to the Baldwin effect. George Gaylord Simpson was probably right when he said that the effect is theoretically possible and may have actually occurred but that this has no major implications for evolutionary theory. The Baldwin effect is not even central to Baldwin’s own account of ‘social heredity’ and biology-culture co-evolution, an account that in important respects resembles the modern ideas of epigenetic inheritance and niche-construction.

In recent years, many scholars have suggested that the Baldwin effect may play an important role in the evolution of language. However, the Baldwin effect is a multifaceted and controversial process and the assessment of its connection with language is difficult without a formal model. This paper provides a first step in this direction. We examine a game-theoretic model of the interaction between plasticity (represented by Herrnstein reinforcement learning) and evolution in the context of a simple language game. Additionally, we describe three distinct aspects of the Baldwin effect: the Simpson–Baldwin effect, the Baldwin expediting effect and the Baldwin optimizing effect. We find that a simple model of the evolution of language lends theoretical plausibility to the existence of the Simpson–Baldwin and the Baldwin optimizing effects in this arena, but not the Baldwin expediting effect.

God’s relationship to modalities poses a serious problem for the theist. If God determines modalities, then it seems that he can do anything. If, on the other hand, modalities determine God’s actions, then it seems that he is not genuinely free. Conceptualism offers a solution to this problem by maintaining that modalities are determined by what is conceivable for the intellects of the universe that God has chosen to create. Prior to the creation of intellects, there are no modalities restricting God’s choice. Consequently, God is genuinely free. What is more, prior to creation there are no modalities, thus it is not the case that anything is possible. However, there are several problems with conceptualism. In particular, because the necessary features of the modal concepts themselves are independent of the shape of any intellect, no form of conceptualism will succeed as a solution to the problem of modalities.