Orthodox Bayesianism is a highly idealized theory of how we ought to live our epistemic lives. One of the most widely discussed idealizations is that of logical omniscience: the assumption that an agent’s degrees of belief must be probabilistically coherent to be rational. It is widely agreed that this assumption is problematic if we want to reason about bounded rationality, logical learning, or other aspects of non-ideal epistemic agency. Yet, we still lack a satisfying way to avoid logical omniscience within (...) a Bayesian framework. Some proposals merely replace logical omniscience with a different logical idealization; others sacrifice all traits of logical competence on the altar of logical non-omniscience. We think a better strategy is available: by enriching the Bayesian framework with tools that allow us to capture what agents can and cannot infer given their limited cognitive resources, we can avoid logical omniscience while retaining the idea that rational degrees of belief are in an important way constrained by the laws of probability. In this paper, we offer a formal implementation of this strategy, show how the resulting framework solves the problem of logical omniscience, and compare it to orthodox Bayesianism as we know it. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a new semantic framework designed to capture a distinctly cognitive or epistemic notion of meaning akin to Fregean senses. Traditional Carnapian intensions are too coarse-grained for this purpose: they fail to draw semantic distinctions between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, differ in meaning. This has led some philosophers to introduce more fine-grained hyperintensions that allow us to draw semantic distinctions among co-intensional sentences. But the hyperintensional strategy has a flip-side: it risks drawing semantic distinctions (...) between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, do not differ in meaning. This is what we call the ‘new problem’ of hyperintensionality to distinguish it from the ‘old problem’ that faced the intensional theory. We show that our semantic framework offers a joint solution to both these problems by virtue of satisfying a version of Frege’s so-called ‘equipollence principle’ for sense individuation. Frege’s principle, we argue, not only captures the semantic intuitions that give rise to the old and the new problem of hyperintensionality, but also points the way to an independently motivated solution to both problems. (shrink)

The traditional possible-worlds model of belief describes agents as ‘logically omniscient’ in the sense that they believe all logical consequences of what they believe, including all logical truths. This is widely considered a problem if we want to reason about the epistemic lives of non-ideal agents who—much like ordinary human beings—are logically competent, but not logically omniscient. A popular strategy for avoiding logical omniscience centers around the use of impossible worlds: worlds that, in one way or another, violate the laws (...) of logic. In this paper, we argue that existing impossible-worlds models of belief fail to describe agents who are both logically non-omniscient and logically competent. To model such agents, we argue, we need to ‘dynamize’ the impossible-worlds framework in a way that allows us to capture not only what agents believe, but also what they are able to infer from what they believe. In light of this diagnosis, we go on to develop the formal details of a dynamic impossible-worlds framework, and show that it successfully models agents who are both logically non-omniscient and logically competent. (shrink)

When a belief has been influenced, in part or whole, by factors that, by the believer's own lights, do not bear on the truth of the believed proposition, we can say that the belief has been, in a sense, arbitrarily formed. Can such beliefs ever be rational? It might seem obvious that they can't. After all, belief, supposedly, “aims at the truth.” But many epistemologists have come to think that certain kinds of arbitrary beliefs can, indeed, be rational. In this (...) paper, I want to do two things. First, I want to show that the claim that arbitrary beliefs can be rational is inconsistent with the conjunction of two other attractive claims: one saying that rationality requires a certain kind of epistemic immodesty, and one saying that rationality forbids certain kinds of self-ascriptions of epistemic luck. Second, I want to evaluate different ways one might respond to this inconsistent triad. I won't defend any response in particular, but I'll draw out some notable costs and benefits of each response, which may help shed light on the question of whether arbitrary beliefs can be rational. (shrink)

Many theories of rational action are predicated on the idea that what it is rational to do in a given situation depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe in that situation. In short: they treat epistemic rationality as explanatorily prior to practical rationality. If they are right in doing so, it follows, on pain of explanatory circularity, that epistemic rationality cannot itself be a form of practical rationality. Yet, many epistemologists have defended just such a view of (...) epistemic rationality. According to them, there is no such thing as a distinctively epistemic form of rationality which could be explanatorily prior to practical rationality. Rather, they maintain, there is just one form of rationality—practical rationality—of which epistemic rationality is a species. What to make of this conflict? The aim of this paper is to motivate a view about the relationship between epistemic and practical rationality which resolves the conflict in a way that should be attractive to both sides. The central idea is to ground both epistemic and practical rationality in an independently motivated notion of evidential probability which is itself to be understood in non-normative terms. Doing so, I argue, allows us to unify epistemic and practical rationality in a way that does justice to the idea that what it is rational to do depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe; and to do so in a way that avoids explanatory circularity. (shrink)

This paper explores whether natural selection, a putative evolutionary mechanism, and a main one at that, can be characterized on either of the two dominant conceptions of mechanism, due to Glennan and the team of Machamer, Darden, and Craver, that constitute the “new mechanistic philosophy.” The results of the analysis are that neither of the dominant conceptions of mechanism adequately captures natural selection. Nevertheless, the new mechanistic philosophy possesses the resources for an understanding of natural selection under the rubric.

Should you always be certain about what you should believe? In other words, does rationality demand higher-order certainty? First answer: Yes! Higher-order uncertainty can’t be rational, since it breeds at least a mild form of epistemic akrasia. Second answer: No! Higher-order certainty can’t be rational, since it licenses a dogmatic kind of insensitivity to higher-order evidence. Which answer wins out? The first, I argue. Once we get clearer about what higher-order certainty is, a view emerges on which higher-order certainty does (...) not, in fact, license any kind of insensitivity to higher-order evidence. The view as I will describe it has plenty of intuitive appeal. But it is not without substantive commitments: it implies a strong form of internalism about epistemic rationality, and forces us to reconsider standard ways of thinking about the nature of evidential support. Yet, the view put forth promises a simple and elegant solution to a surprisingly difficult problem in our understanding of rational belief. (shrink)

When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. Here we (...) bring good news: if we accept an independently motivated version of epistemic instrumentalism—the view that epistemic reasons are a species of instrumental reasons—we can reduce The Combinatorial Problem to the relatively benign problem of how to weigh different instrumental reasons against each other. As an added benefit, the instrumentalist account can explain the apparent intractability of The Combinatorial Problem in terms of a common tendency to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an elliptical manner. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the thesis, roughly, that one’s beliefs should fit one’s evidence. The enkratic principle is the thesis, roughly, that one’s beliefs should "line up" with one’s beliefs about which beliefs one ought to have. While both theses have seemed attractive to many, they jointly entail the controversial thesis that self-misleading evidence is impossible. That is to say, if evidentialism and the enkratic principle are both true, one’s evidence cannot support certain false beliefs about which beliefs one’s evidence supports. Recently, (...) a number of epistemologists have challenged the thesis that self-misleading evidence is impossible on the grounds that misleading higher-order evidence does not have the kind of strong and systematic defeating force that would be needed to rule out the possibility of such self-misleading evidence. Here I respond to this challenge by proposing an account of higher-order defeat that does, indeed, render self-misleading evidence impossible. Central to the proposal is the idea that higher-order evidence acquires its normative force by influencing which conditional beliefs it is rational to have. What emerges, I argue, is an independently plausible view of higher-order evidence, which has the additional benefit of allowing us to reconcile evidentialism with the enkratic principle. (shrink)

We often have reason to doubt our own ability to form rational beliefs, or to doubt that some particular belief of ours is rational. Perhaps we learn that a trusted friend disagrees with us about what our shared evidence supports. Or perhaps we learn that our beliefs have been afflicted by motivated reasoning or other cognitive biases. These are examples of higher-order evidence. While it may seem plausible that higher-order evidence should impact our beliefs, it is less clear how and (...) why. Normally, when evidence impacts our beliefs, it does so by virtue of speaking for or against the truth of theirs contents. But higher-order evidence does not directly concern the contents of the beliefs that they impact. In recent years, philosophers have become increasingly aware of the need to understand the nature and normative role of higher-order evidence. This is partly due to the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence in human life. But it has also become clear that higher-order evidence plays a central role in many epistemological debates, spanning from traditional discussions of internalism/externalism about epistemic justification to more recent discussions of peer disagreement and epistemic akrasia. This volume brings together, for the first time, a distinguished group of leading and up-and-coming epistemologists to explore a range of issues about higher-order evidence. (shrink)

Don’t form beliefs on the basis of coin flips or random guesses. More generally, don’t take belief gambles: if a proposition is no more likely to be true than false given your total body of evidence, don’t go ahead and believe that proposition. Few would deny this seemingly innocuous piece of epistemic advice. But what, exactly, is wrong with taking belief gambles? Philosophers have debated versions of this question at least since the classic dispute between William Clifford and William James (...) near the end of the nineteenth century. Here I reassess the normative standing of belief gambles from the perspective of epistemic decision theory. The main lesson of the paper is a negative one: it turns out that we need to make some surprisingly strong and hard-to-motivate assumptions to establish a general norm against belief gambles within a decision-theoretic framework. I take this to pose a dilemma for epistemic decision theory: it forces us to either make seemingly unmotivated assumptions to secure a norm against belief gambles, or concede that belief gambles can be rational after all. (shrink)

Guessing is a familiar activity, one we engage in when we are uncertain of the answer to a question under discussion. It is also an activity that lends itself to normative evaluation: some guesses are better than others. The question that interests me here is what makes for a good guess. In recent work, Dorst and Mandelkern have argued that good guesses are distinguished from bad ones by how well they optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and specificity. Here I argue (...) that Dorst and Mandelkern’s implementation of this idea fails to satisfy some plausible constraints on good guesses, and I develop an alternative implementation that satisfies the relevant constraints. The result is a new account of good guesses which retains the positive aspects of Dorst and Mandelkern’s proposal, but without the drawbacks. (shrink)

Many theories of rational belief give a special place to logic. They say that an ideally rational agent would never be uncertain about logical facts. In short: they say that ideal rationality requires "logical omniscience." Here I argue against the view that ideal rationality requires logical omniscience on the grounds that the requirement of logical omniscience can come into conflict with the requirement to proportion one’s beliefs to the evidence. I proceed in two steps. First, I rehearse an influential line (...) of argument from the "higher-order evidence" debate, which purports to show that it would be dogmatic, even for a cognitively infallible agent, to refuse to revise her beliefs about logical matters in response to evidence indicating that those beliefs are irrational. Second, I defend this "anti-dogmatism" argument against two responses put forth by Declan Smithies and David Christensen. Against Smithies’ response, I argue that it leads to irrational self-ascriptions of epistemic luck, and that it obscures the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification. Against Christensen’s response, I argue that it clashes with one of two attractive deontic principles, and that it is extensionally inadequate. Taken together, these criticisms will suggest that the connection between logic and rationality cannot be what it is standardly taken to be—ideal rationality does not require logical omniscience. (shrink)

Titelbaum Oxford studies in epistemology, 2015) has recently argued that the Enkratic Principle is incompatible with the view that rational belief is sensitive to higher-order defeat. That is to say, if it cannot be rational to have akratic beliefs of the form “p, but I shouldn’t believe that p,” then rational beliefs cannot be defeated by higher-order evidence, which indicates that they are irrational. In this paper, I distinguish two ways of understanding Titelbaum’s argument, and argue that neither version is (...) sound. The first version can be shown to rest on a subtle, but crucial, misconstrual of the Enkratic Principle. The second version can be resisted through careful consideration of cases of higher-order defeat. The upshot is that proponents of the Enkratic Principle are free to maintain that rational belief is sensitive to higher-order defeat. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers of biology have endorsed views about random drift that, we will argue, rest on an implicit assumption that the meaning of concepts such as drift can be understood through an examination of the mathematical models in which drift appears. They also seem to implicitly assume that ontological questions about the causality of terms appearing in the models can be gleaned from the models alone. We will question these general assumptions by showing how the same equation (...) — the simple 2 = p2 + 2pq + q2 — can be given radically different interpretations, one of which is a physical, causal process and one of which is not. This shows that mathematical models on their own yield neither interpretations nor ontological conclusions. Instead, we argue that these issues can only be resolved by considering the phenomena that the models were originally designed to represent and the phenomena to which the models are currently applied. When one does take those factors into account, starting with the motivation for Sewall Wright’s and R.A. Fisher’s early drift models and ending with contemporary applications, a very different picture of the concept of drift emerges. On this view, drift is a term for a set of physical processes, namely, indiscriminate sampling processes. (shrink)

This paper considers recent heated debates led by Jerry A. Coyne andMichael J. Wade on issues stemming from the 1929–1962 R.A. Fisher-Sewall Wrightcontroversy in population genetics. William B. Provine once remarked that theFisher-Wright controversy is central, fundamental, and very influential.Indeed,it is also persistent. The argumentative structure of therecent (1997–2000) debates is analyzed with the aim of eliminating a logicalconflict in them, viz., that the two sides in the debates havedifferent aims and that, as such, they are talking past each other. (...) Given aphilosophical analysis of the argumentative structure of the debates,suggestions supportive of Wade's work on the debate are made that areaimed, modestly, at putting the persistent Fisher-Wright controversy on thecourse to resolution. (shrink)

According to Philip Kitcher, scientific unification is achieved via the derivation of numerous scientific statements from economies of argument schemata. I demonstrate that the unification of selection phenomena across domains in which it is claimed to occur--evolutionary biology, immunology and, speculatively, neurobiology--is unattainable on Kitcher's view. I then introduce an alternative method for rendering the desired unification based on the concept of a mechanism schema. I conclude that the gain in unification provided by the alternative account suggests that Kitcher's view (...) is defective. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists think that epistemic normativity is just a special kind of instrumental normativity. According to them, you have epistemic reason to believe a proposition insofar as doing so is conducive to certain epistemic goals or aims—say, to believe what is true and avoid believing what is false. Perhaps the most prominent challenge for instrumentalists in recent years has been to explain, or explain away, why one’s epistemic reasons often do not seem to depend on one’s aims. This challenge can (...) arguably be met. But a different challenge looms: instrumental reasons in the practical domain have various properties that epistemic reasons do not seem to share. In this chapter, we offer a way for epistemic instrumentalists to overcome this challenge. Our main thesis takes the form of a conditional: if we accept an independently plausible transmission principle of instrumental normativity, we can maintain that epistemic reasons in fact do share the relevant properties of practical instrumental reasons. In addition, we can explain why epistemic reasons seem to lack these properties in the first place: some properties of epistemic reasons are elusive, or easy to overlook, because we tend to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an ‘elliptical’ manner. (shrink)

People don't always speak the truth. When they don't, we do better not to trust them. Unfortunately, that's often easier said than done. People don't usually wear a ‘Not to be trusted!’ badge on their sleeves, which lights up every time they depart from the truth. Given this, what can we do to figure out whom to trust, and whom not? My aim in this paper is to offer a partial answer to this question. I propose a heuristic—the “Humility Heuristic”—which (...) is meant to help guide our search for trustworthy advisors. In slogan form, the heuristic says: people worth trusting admit to what they don't know. I give this heuristic a precise probabilistic interpretation, offer a simple argument for it, defend it against some potential worries, and demonstrate its practical worth by showing how it can help address some difficult challenges in the relationship between experts and laypeople. (shrink)

: Where there are cases of underdetermination in scientific controversies, such as the case of the molecular clock, scientists may direct the course and terms of dispute by playing off the multidimensional framework of theory evaluation. This is because assessment strategies themselves are underdetermined. Within the framework of assessment, there are a variety of trade-offs between different strategies as well as shifting emphases as specific strategies are given more or less weight in assessment situations. When a strategy is underdetermined, scientists (...) can change the dynamics of a controversy by making assessments using different combinations of evaluation strategies and/or weighting whatever strategies are in play in different ways. Following an underdetermination strategy does not end or resolve a scientific dispute. Consequently, manipulating underdetermination is a feature of controversy dynamics and not controversy closure. (shrink)

Our aim in this chapter is to draw attention to what we see as a disturbing feature of conciliationist views of disagreement. Roughly put, the trouble is that conciliatory responses to in-group disagreement can lead to the frustration of a group's epistemic priorities: that is, the group's favoured trade-off between the "Jamesian goals" of truth-seeking and error-avoidance. We show how this problem can arise within a simple belief aggregation framework, and draw some general lessons about when the problem is most (...) pronounced. We close with a tentative proposal for how to solve the problem raised without rejecting conciliationism. (shrink)

This article draws on scientific explanations of obesity to motivate the creation of a system of paternalistic public health interventions into the obesity epidemic. Libertarian paternalists argue that paternalism is warranted in light of the cognitive limits of human decision-making abilities. There are further, specific biological limits on our capacity to choose and maintain a healthy diet. These biological facts strengthen the general motivation for libertarian paternalism. As a consequence, the creation of a system of paternalistic public health interventions into (...) the obesity epidemic is warranted. (shrink)

Population genetics attempts to measure the influence of the causes of evolution, viz., mutation, migration, natural selection, and random genetic drift, by understanding the way those causes change the genetics of populations. But how does it accomplish this goal? After a short introduction, we begin in section (2) with a brief historical outline of the origins of population genetics. In section (3), we sketch the model theoretic structure of population genetics, providing the flavor of the ways in which population genetics (...) theory might be understood as incorporating causes. In sections (4) and (5) we discuss two specific problems concerning the relationship between population genetics and evolutionary causes, viz., the problem of conceptually distinguishing natural selection from random genetic drift, and the problem of interpreting fitness. In section (6), we briefly discuss the methodology and key epistemological problems faced by population geneticists in uncovering the causes of evolution. Section (7) of the essay contains concluding remarks. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have endorsed a version of the view that rational belief is sensitive to higher-order defeat. That is to say, even a fully rational belief state can be defeated by misleading higher-order evidence, which indicates that the belief state is irrational. In a recent paper, however, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio calls this view into doubt. Her argument proceeds in two stages. First, she argues that higher-order defeat calls for a two-tiered theory of epistemic rationality. Secondly, she argues that there seems to (...) be no satisfactory way of avoiding epistemic dilemmas within a two-tiered framework. Hence, she concludes that the prospects look dim for making sense of higher-order defeat within a broader theoretical picture of epistemic rationality. Here I aim to resist both parts of Lasonen-Aarnio’s challenge. First, I outline a way of accommodating higher-order defeat within a single-tiered framework, by amending epistemic rules with appropriate provisos for different kinds of higher-order defeat. Secondly, I argue that those who nevertheless prefer to accommodate higher-order defeat within a two-tiered framework can do so without admitting to the possibility of epistemic dilemmas, since epistemic rules are not always accompanied by ‘oughts’ in a two-tiered framework. The considerations put forth thus indirectly vindicate the view that rational belief is sensitive to higher-order defeat. (shrink)

The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons. Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, companies, and the like. However, this raises a number of fundamental questions concerning what it (...) means for groups to be epistemic peers and to disagree with each other. In this paper, we explore what group peer disagreement amounts to given that we think of group belief in terms of List and Pettit’s ‘belief aggregation model’. We then discuss how the so-called ‘equal weight view’ of peer disagreement is best accommodated within this framework. The account that seems most promising to us says, roughly, that the parties to a group peer disagreement should adopt the belief that results from applying the most suitable belief aggregation function for the combined group on all members of the combined group. To motivate this view, we test it against various intuitive cases, derive some of its notable implications, and discuss how it relates to the equal weight view of individual peer disagreement. (shrink)

Sewall Wright's adaptive landscape is the most influential heuristic in evolutionary biology. Wright's biographer, Provine, criticized Wright's adaptive landscape, claiming that its heuristic value is dubious because of deep flaws. Ruse has defended Wright against Provine. Ruse claims Provine has not shown Wright's use of the landscape is flawed, and that, even if it were, it is heuristically valuable. I argue that both Provine's and Ruse's analyses of the adaptive landscape are defective and suggest a more adequate understanding of it.

: This paper explores the calibration of laboratory models in population genetics as an experimental strategy for justifying experimental results and claims based upon them following Franklin (1986, 1990) and Rudge (1996, 1998). The analysis provided undermines Coyne et al.'s (1997) critique of Wade and Goodnight's (1991) experimental study of Wright's (1931, 1932) Shifting Balance Theory. The essay concludes by further demonstrating how this analysis bears on Diamond's (1986) claims regarding the weakness of laboratory experiments as evidence, and further how (...) the calibration strategy fits within Lloyd's (1987, 1988) account of the confirmation of ecological and evolutionary models. (shrink)

In a small handful of papers in theoretical population genetics, John Gillespie (2000a, 2000b, 2001) argues that a new stochastic process he calls "genetic draft" is evolutionarily more significant than genetic drift. This case study of chance in evolution explores Gillespie's proposed stochastic evolutionary force and sketches the implications of Gillespie's argument for philosophers' explorations of genetic drift.

This paper is about a problem that can arise when we try to harness the “wisdom of the crowd” from groups comprised of individuals who exhibit a certain kind of epistemic humility in the way they respond to testimonial evidence. I begin by setting out the problem and then make some initial steps toward solving it. The solution I develop is tentative and may not apply in all circumstances, but it promises to alleviate what seems to me to be a (...) problem of both theoretical interest and practical importance. (shrink)

We critique a series of recent papers in which Reidenbach and Robin developed a multidimensional ethics scale. Our critique raises four problems for the scale. First, it is not clear what the scale measures. Second, the semantic differential items used in the scale seem problematic. Third, the scale omits several important ethical rationales. Finally, no caveats accompany the scale to alert managers about its proper and improper use.

People tend to think that they know others better than others know them. This phenomenon is known as the “illusion of asymmetric insight.” While the illusion has been well documented by a series of recent experiments, less has been done to explain it. In this paper, we argue that extant explanations are inadequate because they either get the explanatory direction wrong or fail to accommodate the experimental results in a sufficiently nuanced way. Instead, we propose a new explanation that does (...) not face these problems. The explanation is based on two other well-documented psychological phenomena: the tendency to accommodate ambiguous evidence in a biased way, and the tendency to overestimate how much better we know ourselves than we know others. (shrink)

I argue that bureaucracies, as described by Max Weber, have essential characteristics that clash with basic educational values. On the one hand, bureaucracies, because of their divisions of labor, inevitably narrow all those who participate. Bureaucracies also, because of the need for impartiality, inevitably dehumanize all who participate. On the other hand, education aims to broaden and humanize those who participate in it. This tension between bureaucracy and education makes bureaucracy an unsuitable mechanism for delivering an education. Bureaucracies are often (...) the best ways to accomplish large tasks involving many people; however, the task of educating all humanity is not one of those tasks. Problems in education can only be exacerbated by “fixing” the bureaucracy, because efficiency, the greatest bureaucratic virtue, is harmful to education. While I offer no solution, I share some thoughts about how a humanizing, broadening, and suitably inefficient education might look. (shrink)

Hull et al. make a direct connection between selection and replication. My view is that selection, at its causal crux, is not inherently connected to replication. I make plain the causal crux of selection, distinguishing it from replication. I discuss implications of my results for Hull et al.'s critique of Darden and Cain (1989).

Some people believe that there is an “explanatory gap” between the facts of physics and certain other facts about the world—for example, facts about consciousness. The gap is presented as a challenge to any thoroughgoing naturalism or physicalism. We believe that advocates of the explanatory gap have some reasonable expectations that cannot be merely dismissed. We also believe that naturalistic thinkers have the resources to close the explanatory gap, but that they have not adequately explained how and why these resources (...) work. In this paper we isolate the legitimate explanatory demands in the gap reasoning, as it is defended by Chalmers and Jackson . We then argue that these demands can be met. Our solution involves a novel proposal for understanding the relationship between theories, explanations, and scientific identities. (shrink)

The dissertation is a critical examination of theory evaluation in population genetics. There are three main philosophical approaches to theory evaluation in philosophy of science: confirmation and hypothesis testing, scientific change, and experimentation. Accounts that champion each of the main philosophical approaches to scientific theory evaluation are represented in philosophy of biology: confirmation and hypothesis testing by Elisabeth A. Lloyd, scientific change by Lindley Darden, and experimentation by David W. Rudge. I argue that each of the main approaches is insufficient (...) for evaluating population genetics theories. However, the accounts I critique are not fundamentally incompatible. I modify, unify, and extend them into a comprehensive account of theory evaluation for population genetics. ;My philosophical analysis is driven by a complex, important, and ongoing controversy in population genetics, viz., the R. A. Fisher-Sewall Wright controversy in population genetics. I use my historical case study to assess the adequacy of both the extant philosophical analyses of theory evaluation and my own account. Between 1929 and 1962 Fisher and Wright debated the main differences emanating from their alternative approaches to evolutionary theorizing. The debates between Fisher and Wright functionally ended with Fisher's death. However, Wright continued to clarify his position in the controversy until his death in 1988, and other biologists have continued work on the core debates. ;Recently, four scientific papers led by biologists Jerry A. Coyne and Michael J. Wade have been key in revisiting and rekindling the Fisher-Wright controversy with analyses of old theoretical and empirical issues as well as new developments that have spun off the older work. Four decades after the debates between Fisher and Wright, these papers have staked out, with substantial disagreement, claims about the evaluative status of the two predominant population genetics approaches to evolution in the field. A further task of this dissertation is to provide a non-partisan evaluation of the last 40 years of work on the controversy, i.e., the controversy since Fisher's death in 1962. It is hoped that such a critical analysis of the controversy will advance it to some extent. (shrink)

’For each case against advertising, there is a stronger offsetting argument.’Dr Hyman is Visiting Professor of Marketing at Limburg University, Holland, and guest editor of a forth coming special issue of The Journal of Advertising on advertising ethics. Dr Skipper is Instructor of Philosophy at Southwest Texas State University.

Whenever we make a claim about a fictional entity, we seem to embroil ourselves in familiar problems of reference. This appearance is misleading, because what a sentence is about bears a greater resemblance to a Fregean sense than to a reference. All previous attempts to define 'about' consist of two approaches: "metalinguistic" theories of 'about', proposed by Ryle and Carnap, which fail to counterexamples wherein transparent contexts generate paradoxical consequences; and "semantic" theories of 'about' proposed by Putnam and by Goodman, (...) which fail to counterexamples wherein no term refers to that which the sentence is about. ;An untried alternative is to replace 'S is about k ' with 'S is about k for person p '. Clearly, such a definition need not confine itself to sentences, but may apply to works of art as well. A detailed examination of how one actually goes about arguing to an audience that some work of art W is about some topic, yields a definition that approximates normal usage, yet avoids many problematic notions, such as 'beliefs', 'ideas', and 'intentional states'. Necessary and sufficient truth conditions for 'W is about k for p at time T' turn out to include as major elements a causal chain leading from W to a set of "explicit thoughts" and dispositions, and the lack of an "aesthetic environment" which excludes W. (shrink)

For whatever reasons, students seem more resistant than ever before to reading. Educators have catered to this trend, introducing learning activities other than reading. I argue that, in philosophy at least, nothing can substitute for reading and discussion. I further argue that the best readings are famous, intellectually challenging, and substantial enough to reward the student with a memorable philosophical experience. I have noticed that students appreciate meaty, classical, philosophical works that challenge them, but are bored by dumbed-down textbooks or (...) summaries. After considering some obvious objections, I relate two successful techniques I have used to raise the level of student engagement in class. (shrink)

Despite the apparent aptness of the spatial model for Internet concepts, I will try to show that the paradigm is in fact very misleading and unnatural First, I argue that Cyberspace lacks the central features that constitute a space. Then I show that the metaphor creates a poor conceptual model that yields false or misleading conclusions about how Cyberspace functions.