Online research in philosophy

In this paper, I propose that influential arguments of Jacques Derridas's and Judith Butler's rely on behaviorism and relativism, a reliance which has implications for, among other things, the issue of hate speech. I begin with a brief discussion of the philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, a thinker seldom discussed in relationship to continental poststructuralism. Quine is interesting because he explicitly defends an ontological relativism combined with linguistic behaviorism, the latter as influenced by B. F. Skinner and John Watson. (...) I then show that Butler's and Derrida's theories demonstrate a similar yet unacknowledged lineage. I devote the final section of the paper to a discussion of hate speech, and the problematization of behaviorism and relativism it entails. Key Words: behaviorism • Judith Butler • Jacques Derrida • hate speech • poststructuralism • W. V. O. Quine. (shrink)

One way to understand science is as a selection process. David Hull, one of the dominant figures in contemporary philosophy of science, sets out in this volume a general analysis of this selection process that applies equally to biological evolution, the reaction of the immune system to antigens, operant learning, and social and conceptual change in science. Hull aims to distinguish between those characteristics that are contingent features of selection and those that are essential. Science and Selection brings (...) together many of David Hull's most important essays on selection (some never before published) in one accessible volume. (shrink)

An invisible hand seems to play an important role in science. In this paper I set out the general structure of invisible-hand explanations, counter some objections that have been raised to them, and detail the role that they play in science. The most important issue is the character of the mechanisms that are supposed to bring about invisible-hand effects.

Karl Popper has been one of the few philosophers of sciences who has influenced scientists. I evaluate Popper's influence on our understanding of evolutionary theory from his earliest publications to the present. Popper concluded that three sorts of statements in evolutionary biology are not genuine laws of nature. I take him to be right on this score. Popper's later distinction between evolutionary theory as a metaphysical research program and as a scientific theory led more than one scientist to misunderstand his (...) position on evolutionary theory as a scientific theory. In his later work Popper also introduced what he took to be improvements of evolutionary theory. Thus far these improvements have had almost no influence on evolutionary biology. I conclude by examining the influence of Popper on the reception of cladistic analysis. (shrink)

Biological species have been treated traditionally as spatiotemporally unrestricted classes. If they are to perform the function which they do in the evolutionary process, they must be spatiotemporally localized individuals, historical entities. Reinterpreting biological species as historical entities solves several important anomalies in biology, in philosophy of biology, and within philosophy itself. It also has important implications for any attempt to present an "evolutionary" analysis of science and for sciences such as anthropology which are devoted to the study of single (...) species. (shrink)

If species are the things that evolve at least in large part through the action of natural selection, then both genetic and phenotypic variability are essential to biological species. If all species are variable, then Homo sapiens must be variable. Hence, it is very unlikely that the human species as a biological species can be characterized by a set of invariable traits. It might be the case that at this moment in evolutionary history, all human beings happen to possess a (...) particular set (or unimodal cluster) of traits, but if so, this will be in large part an evolutionary accident. As a result, anyone who proposes to base anything, including ethics, on human nature is basing it on historical happenstance. (shrink)

The claim that conceptual systems change is a platitude. That our conceptual systems are theory-laden is no less platitudinous. Given evolutionary theory, biologists are led to divide up the living world into genes, organisms, species, etc. in a particular way. No theory-neutral individuation of individuals or partitioning of these individuals into natural kinds is possible. Parallel observations should hold for philosophical theories about scientific theories. In this paper I summarize a theory of scientific change which I set out in considerable (...) detail in a book that I shall publish in the near future. Just as few scientists were willing to entertain the view that species evolve in the absence of a mechanism capable of explaining this change, so philosophers should be just as reticent about accepting a parallel view of conceptual systems in science evolving in the absence of a mechanism to explain this evolution. In this paper I set out such a mechanism. One reason that this task has seemed so formidable in the past is that we have all construed conceptual systems inappropriately. If we are to understand the evolution of conceptual systems in science, we must interpret them as forming lineages related by descent. In my theory, the notion of a family resemblance is taken literally, not metaphorically. In my book, I set out data to show that the mechanism which I propose is actually operative. In this paper, such data is assumed. (shrink)

Authors frequently refer to gene-based selection in biological evolution, the reaction of the immune system to antigens, and operant learning as exemplifying selection processes in the same sense of this term. However, as obvious as this claim may seem on the surface, setting out an account of “selection” that is general enough to incorporate all three of these processes without becoming so general as to be vacuous is far from easy. In this target article, we set out such a general (...) account of selection to see how well it accommodates these very different sorts of selection. The three fundamental elements of this account are replication, variation, and environmental interaction. For selection to occur, these three processes must be related in a very specific way. In particular, replication must alternate with environmental interaction so that any changes that occur in replication are passed on differentially because of environmental interaction. One of the main differences among the three sorts of selection that we investigate concerns the role of organisms. In traditional biological evolution, organisms play a central role with respect to environmental interaction. Although environmental interaction can occur at other levels of the organizational hierarchy, organisms are the primary focus of environmental interaction. In the functioning of the immune system, organisms function as containers. The interactions that result in selection of antibodies during a lifetime are between entities (antibodies and antigens) contained within the organism. Resulting changes in the immune system of one organism are not passed on to later organisms. Nor are changes in operant behavior resulting from behavioral selection passed on to later organisms. But operant behavior is not contained in the organism because most of the interactions that lead to differential replication include parts of the world outside the organism. Changes in the organism's nervous system are the effects of those interactions. The role of genes also varies in these three systems. Biological evolution is gene-based (i.e., genes are the primary replicators). Genes play very different roles in operant behavior and the immune system. However, in all three systems, iteration is central. All three selection processes are also incredibly wasteful and inefficient. They can generate complexity and novelty primarily because they are so wasteful and inefficient. Key Words: evolution; immunology; interaction; operant behavior; operant learning; replication; selection; variation. (shrink)

Academia is subdivided into separate disciplines, most of which are quite discrete. In this review I trace the interactions between two of these disciplines: biology and philosophy of biology. I concentrate on those topics that have the most extensive biological content: function, species, systematics, selection, reduction and development. In the final section of this paper I touch briefly on those issues that biologists and philosophers have addressed that do not have much in the way of biological content.

A belief common among philosophers and biologists alike is that Mendelian genetics has been or is in the process of being reduced to molecular genetics, in the sense of formal theory reduction current in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to show that there are numerous empirical and conceptual difficulties which stand in the way of establishing a systematic inferential relation between Mendelian and molecular genetics. These difficulties, however, have little to do with the traditional objections which have (...) been raised to reduction. (shrink)

The philosophy of biology is one of the most exciting new areas in the field of philosophy and one that is attracting much attention from working scientists. This Companion, edited by two of the founders of the field, includes newly commissioned essays by senior scholars and up-and-coming younger scholars who collectively examine the main areas of the subject - the nature of evolutionary theory, classification, teleology and function, ecology, and the problematic relationship between biology and religion, among other topics. Up-to-date (...) and comprehensive in its coverage, this unique volume will be of interest not only to professional philosophers but also to students in the humanities and researchers in the life sciences and related areas of inquiry. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is external versus internal explanations, first, of the genesis of evolutionary theory and, second, its reception. Victorian England was highly competitive and individualistic. So was the view of society promulgated by Malthus and the theory of evolution set out by Charles Darwin and A.R. Wallace. The fact that Darwin and Wallace independently produced a theory of evolution that was just as competitive and individualistic as the society in which they lived is taken as evidence for (...) the impact that society has on science. The same conclusion is reached with respect to the reception of evolutionary theory. Because Darwin's contemporaries lived in such a competitive and individualistic society, they were prone to accept a theory that exhibited these same characteristics. The trouble is that Darwin and Wallace did not live in anything like the same society and did not formulate the same theory. Although the character of Victorian society may have influenced the acceptance of evolutionary theory, it was not the competitive, individualistic theory that Darwin and Wallace set out but a warmer, more comforting theory. (shrink)

Mayr has made both conceptual and professional contributions to the establishment of the history and philosophy of biology. His conceptual contributions include, among many others, the notion of population thinking. He has also played an important role in the establishment of history and philosophy of biology as viable professional disciplines.

If selection is interpreted as involving repeated cycles of replication, variation, and environmental interaction so structured that environmental interaction causes replication to be differential, then selection in gene-based biological evolution and the reaction of the immune system to antigens are relatively unproblematic examples of selection processes. Operant learning and cultural evolution pose more serious problems. In this response we deal with operant learning as a selection process. Footnotes1 The authors regretfully inform readers that since the publication of our target article (...) in 2001, one of our coauthors, Rod Langman, has died. (shrink)

In his critical notice, Rosenberg (1991) raises three objections to my evolutionary account of science: whether it is more than a week metaphor, the compatibility of my past objections to reduction and my current advocacy of viewing selection in terms of replication and interaction, and finally, the feasibility of identifying appropriate replicators and interactors in biological evolution, let alone conceptual evolution. I discuss each of these objections in turn.

Examples of reduction outside of physics typically concern in principle possibilities; e.g., if we had a decent psychological theory of human behavior, we could reduce it to neurophysiology once we know more. However, in one instance, a reduction is actually well underway – the reduction of Mendelian genetics to molecular biology. Empirical and conceptual difficulties in setting out this reduction have led certain philosophers to modify the traditional logical empiricist analysis of theory reduction, first, to allow for necessary corrections and, (...) second, to introduce a temporal dimension [reduction, genetics, theory, logical empiricism]. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper I trace Michael Ruse's Booknotes from the first volumeof Biology and Philosophy in 1986 to the present. I deal withboth the style and the content of these booknotes. Ruse paid specialattention to authors outside of the traditional English axis as wellas to feminist writers. He complained that too much attention wasbeing paid to certain topics (e.g., evolutionary ethics, evolutionaryepistemology, the species problem and reduction) while other, moreimportant topics were all but ignored (e.g., natural selection,population genetics, levels of (...) selection and extraterrestrial life).He also dealt with the Darwin Industry. Creationism, his love-haterelationships with several authors and his undiluted love of CharlesDickens. (shrink)

: Testing the claims that scientists make is extremely difficult. Testing the claims that philosophers of science make about science is even more difficult, difficult but not impossible. I discuss three efforts at testing the sorts of claims that philosophers of science make about science: the influence of scientists' age on the alacrity with which they accept new views, the effect of birth order on the sorts of contributions that scientists make, and the role of novel predictions in the acceptance (...) of new scientific views. Without attempting to test philosophical claims, it is difficult to know what they mean. (shrink)

For a long time, several natural phenomena have been considered unproblematically selection processes in the same sense of “selection.” In our target article we dealt with three of these phenomena: gene-based selection in biological evolution, the reaction of the immune system to antigens, and operant learning. We characterize selection in terms of three processes (variation, replication, and environmental interaction) resulting in the evolution of lineages via differential replication. Our commentators were largely supportive with respect to variation and environmental interaction but (...) critical with respect to replication, in particular its appeal to information. With some reservations, our commentators think that our general analysis of selection may fit gene-based selection in biological evolution and the reaction of the immune system but not operant learning. If nothing else, this article shows that the notion of selection is not as straightforward as it may seem. (shrink)

During the past hundred years or so, those scholars studying science have isolated themselves as much as possible from scientists as well as from workers in other disciplines who study science. The result of this effort is history of science, philosophy of science and sociology of science as separate disciplines. I argue in this paper that now is the time for these disciplinary boundaries to be lowered or at least made more permeable so that a unified discipline of Science Studies (...) might emerge. I discuss representative problems that stand in the way of such an integration. These problems may seem so formidable in the abstract that no one in their right mind would waste their time trying to bring about a unified field of Science Studies. However, those of us who limit ourselves to the study of the biological sciences have already formed a society in which workers from all disciplines can share their expertise -- the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. (shrink)

n 1982, Steven Jay Gould and I were in England at a conference, held at Darwin College, marking the 100th anniversary of Charles Darwin's death (academics can always find some reason for a conference). Gould looked terrible, and after an ample apology for my doing to him what I hate when it is done to me, I told him so. He agreed that he did not feel very good, and said that when he got back to the States, he was (...) going to see a doctor. He did and w a s diagnosed with an especially virulent form of cancer—abdominal mesothelioma. That Gould immediately went to the library to look up the latest research on his special sort of cancer reminds us that he was first and foremost a biologist, and biologists are peculiar creatures. They care about what goes on inside their bodies more than most people. If something is eating them alive, they want to know what it is and what they can do about it. When Gould went to read up on his illness, he discovered that his prognosis was not good, but it wasn't necessarily a death s entence. Gould survived his first war with cancer and, needless to say, wrote a paper on the topic. (shrink)

ust-jackets are frequently adorned by quotations from famous people praising the book. At first glance, Andrew Brown's The Darwin Wars is no exception. Pithy quotations from Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, Stephen Jay Gould and Daniel Dennett. Who could ask for more? However, on closer inspection these quotations turn out not to be about Brown's book at all, but quotations that Brown uses in his book. Only Dennett's blurb refers to one of Brown's own publications: "What a (...) sleazy bit of trash journalism.". (shrink)

Stephen Rose's formulation of evolutionary theory is too scattered and impressionistic to serve as a genuine alternative to ultra- Darwinism. In addition, he has muddied a distinction that is crucial to our understanding of evolutionary phenomenona – the distinction between homologies and homoplasies.

Philosophers have distinguished a metaphysical category which they term "historical entities" or "continuants". Such particulars are spatiotemporally localized and develop continuously through time while retaining internal cohesiveness. Species, social groups and conceptual systems can be profitably treated as historical entities. No damage is done to preanalytic intuitions in treating social groups as historical entities; both biological species and conceptual systems can be construed as historical entities only by modifying the ordinary way of viewing both. However, if species and conceptual systems (...) are to "evolve", then they must be treated as historical entities. The type specimen method, which is used by systematists to individuate and name biological taxa, is set out and then extended to apply to scientific communities as social groups and conceptual systems. (shrink)

Fourteen philosophers share their experience teaching Peirce to undergraduates in a variety of settings and a variety of courses. The latter include introductory philosophy courses as well as upper-level courses in American philosophy, philosophy of religion, logic, philosophy of science, medieval philosophy, semiotics, metaphysics, etc., and even an upper-level course devoted entirely to Peirce. The project originates in a session devoted to teaching Peirce held at the 2007 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. The session, (...) organized by <span class='Hi'>James</span> Campbell and Richard Hart, was co-sponsored by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers. (shrink)

Each of the commentators on my Science as a Process has emphasized a different part of my book. Mishler concentrates on the relevant biology, Koertge expands upon the sociological mechanism I propose, while Bradie discusses biological and conceptual lineages as historical entities. I respond to these comments and criticisms, emphasizing the roles played by sequences of ancestor-descendant tokens in replication and ecological types in interaction. Hence, selection results from the alternation of genealogical tokens with ecological types in both biological and (...) conceptual evolution. (shrink)

Many of the objections to the sociobiological research program arise from putative peculiarities of human beings and human societies when many of them actually arise from the nature of hierarchically organized systems. The levels of selection problem is no easier to handle at the gene-organism interface than at the organism-society interface. The unity of the genotype is just as problematic as the cohesiveness of the gene pool. One distinction which helps to reduce confusion is between replicators and interactors. Implications of (...) various versions of evolutionary theory for human beings are set out. (shrink)

Drawing on work of the past decade, this volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, and many other branches of the biological sciences. The volume delves into the latest theoretical controversies as well as burning questions of contemporary social importance. The issues considered include the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today (in particular the Human Genome Project).

In this age of interdisciplinary interaction, we probably owe one another disclosures of our qualifications for commenting on each other’s profession. And you might well wonder why a philosopher would be asked to address this distinguished society of professiona l geologists. So, let me give what information I can about my qualifications to talk this evening about, of all things, the ethics of water geology.

The neobehaviorist Clark L. Hull and his disciple Kenneth Spence shared in common many views on the nature of science and the role of theories in psychology. However, a telling exchange in their correspondence of the early 1940s reveals a disagreement over the nature of intervening variables in behavior theory. Spence urged Hull to abandon his interpretations of intervening variables in terms of physiological models in favor of positivistic, purely mathematical interpretations that conflicted with Hull's mechanistic (...) explanatory aims and ontological commitment to materialism. This dispute is set against the background of similar disputes in physics, and the origins of Hull's and Spence's divergent views on theoretical explanation are described. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Hobbes’s understanding of signification, the process whereby words come to have meaning. Most generally, Hobbes develops and extends the nominalist critique of universals as it is found in Ockham and subsequently carried forward by early moderns such as Descartes. Hobbes’s radicality emerges in comparison with Ockham and Descartes, as, unlike them, Hobbes also reduces the intellectual faculty entirely to imagination. According to Hobbes, we have nothing in which a stabilizing, pre-discursive mental language could inhere. Hobbes thus concludes (...) that all thinking is affective and semiotic, and depends on the regulation of conventionally established regimes of signs. Establishing this regulation is one of the central functions of the Hobbesian commonwealth. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century psychology became the study of "behavior." This article reviews developments within animal psychology, functional psychology, and American society and culture that help explain how a term rarely used in the first years of the century became not only an accepted scientific concept but even, for many, an all-encompassing label for the entire subject matter of the discipline. The subsequent conceptual and linguistic activity of John B. Watson, Edward C. Tolman, Clark L. Hull, and B.F. (...) Skinner, as they attempted to explain "behavior" throughout the course of the twentieth century, is then discussed. Finally, the article suggests the need for greater conceptual and linguistic diversity in psychology. In this last regard, reference is made to cognition and consciousness, to William James and John Dewey, and to the fact that prediction and control might not be the most relevant aims of contemporary psychology. (shrink)

In: Hull, D. L. and M. Ruse, editors. Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. Cambridge University Press. New York, NY. Pp. 372-387.

In the early eighties, answering a question of A. Macintyre, J. H. Schmerl ([13]) proved that every countable recursively saturated structure, equipped with a function β encoding the finite functions, is the β-closure of an infinite indiscernible sequence. This result implies that every countably saturated structure, in a countable but not necessarily recursive language, is an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model, by which we mean that the structure expands, in a countable language, to the Skolem hull of an infinite indiscernible sequence (in (...) the new language). More recently, D. Lascar ([5]) showed that the saturated model of cardinality ℵ 1 of an ω-stable theory is also an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model. These results naturally raise the following problem: which (countable) complete theories have an uncountably saturated Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model. We study a generalization of this question. Namely, we call ACI-model a structure which can be expanded, in a countable language L', to the algebraic closure (in L') of an infinite indiscernible sequence (in L'). And we try to characterize the λ-saturated structures which are ACI-models. The main results are the following. First it is enough to restrict ourselves to ℵ 1 -saturated structures: if T has an ℵ 1 -saturated ACI-model then, for every infinite λ, T has a λ-saturated ACI-model. We obtain a complete answer in the case of stable theories: if T is stable then the three following properties are equivalent: (a) T is ω-stable, (b) T has a ℵ 1 saturated ACI-model, (c) every saturated model of T is an Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski model. The unstable case is more complicated, however we show that if T has an ℵ 1 -saturated ACI-model then T doesn't have the independence property. (shrink)

Introduction, by R. Peters and M. Cranston.--Hobbes: the problem of interpretation, by W. H. Greenleaf.--Warrender and his critics, by B. Barry.--Hobbes and the just man, by K. R. Minogue.--Hobbes on the knowledge of God, by R. W. Hepburn.--The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation, by Q. Skinner.--The economic foundations of Hobbes' politics, by W. Letwin.--Hobbes & Hull: metaphysicians of behaviour, by R. Peters and H. Tajfel.--Hobbes on power, by S. I. Benn.--Liberty, by J. W. N. Watkins.--Man and society (...) in Hobbes and Rousseau, by P. Winch.--On the intention of Rousseau, by L. Strauss.--The social contract and Rousseau's revolt against society, by J. McManners.--On le forcera d'être libre, by J. Plamenatz.--Rousseau's images of authority, by J. N, Shklar.--The notion of time in Rousseau's political thought, by W. Pickles.--The structure of Rousseau's political thought, by R. D. Masters.--Rousseau and the problem of happiness, by R. Grimsley.--Individual identity and social consciousness in Rousseau's philosophy, by J. Charvet.--Rousseau's theory of the forms of government, by B. de Jouvenel.--Bibliography (p. [498]-505). (shrink)

Biologists studying ecology and evolution use the term “population” in many different ways. Yet little philosophical analysis of the concept has been done, either by biologists or philosophers, in contrast to the voluminous literature on the concept of “species.” This is in spite of the fact that “population” is arguably a far more central concept in ecological and evolutionary studies than “species” is. The fact that such a central concept has been employed in so many different ways is potentially problematic (...) for the reason that inconsistent usages (especially when the usage has not been made explicit) might lead to false controversies in which disputants are simply talking past one another. However, the inconsistent usages are not the only, or even the most important reason to examine the concept. If any set of organisms is legitimately called a “population,” selection and drift processes become purely arbitrary, too. Moreover, key ecological variables, such as abundance and distribution, depend on a nonarbitrary way of identifying populations. I sketch the beginnings of a population concept, drawing inspiration from the Ghiselin-Hull individuality thesis, and show why some alternative approaches are nonstarters. (shrink)

The encounter occurred aboard the presidential yacht USS Potomac, the same steel-hulled craft that, half a century ago, carried Roosevelt to his meeting with Churchill wherein they secretly plotted World War II. It cruised on the San Francisco Bay as helicopters hovered above, dropping smoke flares to mark a jumper from the Golden Gate Bridge.