Abstract
According to the no-miracle argument, scientific realism is the only view that does not render the predictive success of scientific theories miraculous. Against the no-miracle argument, selectionists argue that the predictive success of scientific theories is a product of them being subject to a selection process that weeds out predictively unsuccessful theories. Against selectionism, I argue that the selectionist explanation is not an alternative to the realist one. More precisely, I draw on a standard framework in behavioral biology, known as “Tinbergen’s four questions,” and argue that selectionism and realism are aimed at answering different questions and that they are complementary to each other, instead.
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Notes
A similar argument is proposed by Smart (1963, p. 39).
I want to thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for this interpretation.
These four questions have been named differently by different authors (cf. Dewsbury 1992, p. 92). While Tinbergen is justly credited for proposing this framework of questions, similar proposals had also been proposed by his predecessors and contemporaries (cf. Hogan and Bolhuis 2009, pp. 25–26). Some even argue that Tinbergen’s four questions are analogous to Aristotle’s four causes (Hladký and Havlíček 2013).
Over the years, many biologists have proposed additional questions to supplement Tinbergen’s lists (Bateson and Laland 2013, p. 716). But this does not have a direct bearing on the present discussion, for the points I want to make do not go beyond Tinbergen’s original framework.
Mayr distinguishes between proximate causes and ultimate causes. The former consist of “an immediate set of causes” of a phenomenon, while the latter are “causes that have a history and that have been incorporated into the system through many thousands of generations and natural selection” (Mayr 1961, p. 1503; also cf. Haig 2013). Notice that throughout this paper, ‘proximate explanation’ and ‘ultimate explanation’ are not synonymous with Mayr’s ‘proximate causes’ and ‘ultimate causes’ respectively, although the former pair is surely related to the later pair. For the differences between Mayr’s and Tinbergen’s frameworks, cf. Conley (2020)
I want to thank an anonymous reviewer of this journal for this reply.
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank Duen-Min Deng, Hsiang-Yun Chen, and Hsuan-Chih Lin for commenting on an earlier version of this paper. My special thanks go to Ruey-Lin Chen, Jonathon Hricko, and anonymous reviewers of this journal for their invaluable comments that greatly improve this paper. The present work is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan (R.O.C.) (MOST 110-2410-H-194-082-MY3).
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Lee, K. Tinbergen’s four questions and the debate between scientific realism and selectionism. Synthese 199, 12643–12661 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03347-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03347-6