An essential introduction to the philosophy of biology This is a concise, comprehensive, and accessible introduction to the philosophy of biology written by a leading authority on the subject. Geared to philosophers, biologists, and students of both, the book provides sophisticated and innovative coverage of the central topics and many of the latest developments in the field. Emphasizing connections between biological theories and other areas of philosophy, and carefully explaining both philosophical and biological terms, Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses (...) the relation between philosophy and science; examines the role of laws, mechanistic explanation, and idealized models in biological theories; describes evolution by natural selection; and assesses attempts to extend Darwin's mechanism to explain changes in ideas, culture, and other phenomena. Further topics include functions and teleology, individuality and organisms, species, the tree of life, and human nature. The book closes with detailed, cutting-edge treatments of the evolution of cooperation, of information in biology, and of the role of communication in living systems at all scales. Authoritative and up-to-date, this is an essential guide for anyone interested in the important philosophical issues raised by the biological sciences. (shrink)

Metaphysics is once again a thriving subdiscipline within philosophy, despite a long tradition of challenges to the very viability of the metaphysical enterprise. The criticisms have not so much been satisfactorily answered, as shouldered aside by the vigorous development of the field. Some focused meta-theoretic discussion has recently arisen within mainstream metaphysics.1 The present paper is written more from an outsider's vantage point. I attempt to give a new meta-theory for some parts of metaphysics. The central claim is that much (...) metaphysical work, especially of the contemporary systematic kind, might best be understood as model-building, in a specific sense of this term that draws on recent philosophy of science. (shrink)

John Dewey’s Experience and Nature has the potential to transform several areas of philosophy. The book is lengthy and difficult, but it has great importance for a knot of issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. It bears also on metaphilosophy, devoting many pages to the discipline’s characteristic pathologies, and advancing a view of what sort of guidance “naturalism” provides. Later chapters move on to discuss art, morality, and value. So this is a major statement by Dewey. It may (...) one day transform moral philosophy as he hopes, but this review will focus on the central ideas of the first two-thirds of the book. Here Dewey does succeed, I think, in motivating us to look at his core topics—experience and nature—in a new way. And though Dewey’s language is often obscure and unhelpful, some of the main ideas are simpler than they look.Earlier “pragmatist” philosophical work was novel in its focus on the relation between thought and action. This work had a broadly emp. (shrink)

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s introduction to the philosophy of biology is excellent. This review questions one implication of his book, namely that Darwin’s case for the efficacy of natural selection was hampered by his ignorance of the particulate nature of inheritance. I suggest, instead, that Darwin was handicapped by an inability to effectively engage in quantitative population thinking. I also question Godfrey-Smith’s understanding of the role that Malthusian struggle plays in linking natural selection to the origination (...) of new adaptive traits, and I raise problems for his defence of apparently unproblematic conceptions of human nature. Finally, I highlight the welcome conception of a ‘philosophy of nature’ developed by Godfrey-Smith. (shrink)

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is "really" like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality , Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of one hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science. Intended for undergraduates and general readers with no prior background in (...) philosophy, Theory and Reality covers logical positivism the problems of induction and confirmation Karl Popper's theory of science Thomas Kuhn and "scientific revolutions" the views of Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, and Paul Feyerabend and challenges to the field from sociology of science, feminism, and science studies. The book then looks in more detail at some specific problems and theories, including scientific realism, the theory-ladeness of observation, scientific explanation, and Bayesianism. Finally, Godfrey-Smith defends a form of philosophical naturalism as the best way to solve the main problems in the field. Throughout the text he points out connections between philosophical debates and wider discussions about science in recent decades, such as the infamous "science wars." Examples and asides engage the beginning student a glossary of terms explains key concepts and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. However, this is a textbook that doesn't feel like a textbook because it captures the historical drama of changes in how science has been conceived over the last one hundred years. Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates in language that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow. (shrink)

A number of recent discussions have argued that George Price's equationfor representing evolutionary change is a powerful and illuminatingtool, especially in the context of debates about multiple levels ofselection. Our paper dissects Price's equation in detail, and comparesit to another statistical tool: the calculation and comparison ofaverage fitnesses. The relations between Price's equation and equationsfor evolutionary change using average fitness are closer than issometimes supposed. The two approaches achieve a similar kind ofstatistical summary of one generation of change, and they (...) achieve thisvia a similar loss of information about the underlying fitnessstructure. (shrink)

This book explains the relationship between intelligence and environmental complexity, and in so doing links philosophy of mind to more general issues about the relations between organisms and environments, and to the general pattern of 'externalist' explanations. The author provides a biological approach to the investigation of mind and cognition in nature. In particular he explores the idea that the function of cognition is to enable agents to deal with environmental complexity. The history of the idea in the work of (...) Dewey and Spencer is considered, as is the impact of recent evolutionary theory on our understanding of the place of mind in nature. (shrink)

Godfrey-Smith begins with the particular, with the peculiarities of some creatures in a small corner of the animal kingdom, and builds up his reasoning and evidence through a series of detailed comparisons with other creatures. He often finds that similar effects have different causes, and appears to rely on the inverse of the Newtonian principle, namely, that similar causes will have similar effects. But the similarities and differences that occupy Godfrey-Smith are not only or mainly by (...) comparison with humans or mammals. His story is as much about how octopuses and cuttlefish differ from other mollusks and from their common ancestors as about how they behave in ways commonly associated with vertebrates. (shrink)

This is a review of Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith's book, The Scientific Imagination.

Both biologists and philosophers often make use of simple verbal formulations of necessary and sufficient conditions for evolution by natural selection (ENS). Such summaries go back to Darwin's Origin of Species (especially the "Recapitulation"), but recent ones are more compact.1 Perhaps the most commonly cited formulation is due to Lewontin.2 These summaries tend to have three or four conditions, where the core requirement is a combination of variation, heredity, and fitness differences. The summaries are employed in several ways. First, they (...) are often used in pedagogical contexts, and in showing the coherence of evolutionary theory in response to attacks from outside biology. Second, they are important in discussions of extensions of evolutionary principles to new domains, such as cultural change. The summaries also have intrinsic scientific and philosophical interest as attempts to capture some core principles of evolutionary theory in a highly concise way. Despite their prominence, both the proper formulation and status of these summaries are unclear. Standard formulations are subject to counterexamples, and their relations to formal models of evolutionary change are not straightforward. Here I look closely at these verbal summaries, and at how they relate to formal models. Are the summaries merely rough approximations that have no theoretical role of their own? Perhaps they could operate as theoretical statements in Darwin's time, but have now been superseded by more exact treatments. (shrink)

One way to express the most persistent part of the mind-body problem is to say that there is an “explanatory gap” between the physical and the mental. The gap is not usually taken to apply to all of the mental, but to subjective experience, the mind’s “qualitative” features, or what is now referred to as “phenomenal consciousness.” The “gap” formulation is due to Joseph Levine. He acknowledged the appeal of intuitions of separability between physical facts, of any kind we can (...) envisage, and this aspect of our mental lives. Subjective experience seems not to be the sort of thing that is just the physical under another guise. The immediate focus of Levine’s discussion was a family of arguments due to Saul Kripke. Kripke argued that some influential claims of mind-body identity could not be, as materialists claimed, contingent. If these identities are real then they are necessary. But we can clearly conceive that the mental and physical could come apart—an intuition that “identity theorists” conceded. Given that the identity is necessarily present if present at all, from the fact it is not necessary we can see it is absent. Kripke concluded that physicalism is false. Levine wanted to resist this. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between a family of concepts involving reliable correlation, and a family of concepts involving adaptation and biological function, as these concepts are used in the naturalistic semantic theory of Dretske's "Explaining Behavior." I argue that Dretske's attempt to marry correlation and function to produce representation fails, though aspects of his failure point the way forward to a better theory.

The history and theoretical role of the concept of a ``replicator''is discussed, starting with Dawkins' and Hull's classic treatmentsand working forward. I argue that the replicator concept is still auseful one for evolutionary theory, but it should be revised insome ways. The most important revision is the recognition that notall processes of evolution by natural selection require thatsomething play the role of a replicator.

Group-structured populations, of the kind prominent in discussions of multilevel selection, are contrasted with ‘neighbor-structured’ populations. I argue that it is a necessary condition on multilevel description of a selection process that there should be a nonarbitrary division of the population into equivalence classes (or an approximation to this situation). The discussion is focused via comparisons between two famous problem cases involving group structure (altruism and heterozygote advantage) and two neighbor-structured cases that resemble them. Conclusions are also drawn about the (...) role of correlated interaction in the evolution of altruism. 1 Introduction 2 Two Kinds of Population Structure 3 Objections and Replies 4 Particles on a Line 5 Conclusion Appendix: Neighborhoods and Selection CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Biologists and philosophers differ on whether selection should be analyzed at the level of the gene or of the individual. In Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, he argues that individuals can be good members of Darwinian populations, whereas genes rarely can. I take issue with parts of this view, and suggest that Godfrey-Smith’s scheme for thinking about Darwinian populations is also applicable to populations of genes.

Lockdowns and related policies of behavioral and economic restriction introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are criticized, drawing on three sets of ideas and arguments that are organized in accordance with the likely degree of controversy associated with their guiding assumptions. The first set of arguments makes use of cost–benefit reasoning within a broadly utilitarian framework, emphasizing uncertainty, the role of worst-case scenarios, and the need to consider at least the medium term as well as immediate effects. The second (...) draws on assumptions about the political value of basic liberties. The third draws on ideas about the roles of different stages within human life. (shrink)

An interpretation of John Dewey’s views about realism, science, and naturalistic philosophy is presented. Dewey should be seen as an unorthodox realist, with respect to both general metaphysical debates about realism and with respect to debates about the aims and achievements of science.

Methods and goals in philosophy are discussed by first describing an ideal, and then looking at how the ideal might be approached. David Lewis’s work in metaphysics is critically examined and compared to analogous work by Mackie and Carnap. Some large-scale philosophical systematic work, especially in metaphysics, is best treated as model-building, in a sense of that term that draws on the philosophy of science. Models are constructed in a way that involves deliberate simplification, or other imaginative modification of reality, (...) in order to make relationships visible or problems tractable. (shrink)

The commentaries by Dennett, Sterelny, and Queller on Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (DPNS) are so constructive that they make it possible to extend and improve the book’s framework in several ways. My replies will focus on points of disagreement, and I will pick a small number of themes and develop them in detail. The three replies below are mostly self-contained, except that all my comments about genes, discussed by all three critics, are in the reply to Queller. Agential views (...) of evolution, discussed by Queller and Dennett, are addressed in my reply to Dennett. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-SmithMichael BrownMetazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind BY PETER GODFREY-SMITH New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020Carrying forward the project he began in Other Minds (2016), Peter Godfrey-Smith aims in Metazoa (2020) to cast light on the problem of consciousness by inviting meditation on the minds (...) of our distant deep-sea cousins. To elaborate on the Nagelian question of what it’s like to be a bat, he asks what it is like to be a crab, a shrimp, or a cephalopod. One will not find here the dense and fine-grain argumentation that is characteristic of academic monographs, but instead a freer exploration of ideas ranging from marine biology, to philosophy of mind, to animal psychology. Godfrey-Smith’s more modest goal is not to argue definitively for a single viewpoint, but to acclimate the reader to the challenging conceptual-shift he calls gradualism—namely, “the idea that in evolution, minds and experience come slowly into view, rather than appearing in a single move” (262).In the place of a barrage of observational data or dense philosophical argumentation, Godfrey-Smith paints a rich picture of the underwater environment, describes his personal interactions with the creatures that live there, and invites the reader to reflect on their activities and the cognition behind them. In this capacity, he walks a fine line—not anthropomorphizing the creatures, but presenting their actions as mentally agnostic as possible—to let the reader consider how much mental unity there might be, or how much self-or other-awareness may or may [End Page 130] not be present behind the beady mollusk eyes. Nevertheless, he strives to acquaint us with creatures we otherwise might not engage with. The several drawings of the animals and settings Godfrey-Smith discusses throughout the book aid this goal, as well as eight pages of vibrant photographs featuring several of the book’s “characters.”Because minds are things formed over time, Godfrey-Smith takes us through the first fossil evidence of animals in the Ediacaran, the appearance of shrimp-like ancestors in the Cambrian, the vast increase in size of the Ordovician, and the appearance of the octopus and dinosaurs of the Mesozoic. Yet, minds also develop under pressure and conditions of their environment, so Godfrey-Smith takes us on his dives to consider what environmental conditions led to the development of these submarine minds. As such, the text inventively winds its way across dimensions of space, time, and a variety of academic disciplines.In advancing the gradualist thesis, Godfrey-Smith entertains the Aristotelian notion of continuity between life and mind, as opposed to Descartes’ firm dualism. In this way, as noted in chapter 2, when a cell establishes its boundaries and controls the traffic of ions in and out, it becomes a kind of self. This leads him to a discussion of the glass sponge, multicellular but structurally simple, and yet a “collector and curator of biological light,” referring to its ability to channel light like a fiber optic cable (47). Chapter 3 considers the cnidarians—corals, in particular—in which the first signs of animal action appear. This action, like grasping, requires the appearance of a nervous system, and this increased complexity seems to give rise to agency, and more particularly, subjecthood. Chapter 4 invites us to consider the crab to guide reflections on early animal sensation. Of particular interest to this investigation are signs of feeling pain, such as the release of painkillers and the tending of wounds. Surprisingly, scientists find such behavior in shrimp. Chapter 5 returns to more philosophical considerations, attempting to stitch up false dichotomies of self-awareness and other-awareness, and activity and passivity, to name a couple. This sets the stage for chapter 6’s examination of the mysterious mix of mental unity and disunity in the octopus. With a decentralized nervous system, each arm seems to have a mind of its own, yet the creature nevertheless acts to unified purposes. Godfrey-Smith considers the resemblance to split-brain cases in humans, and the copresence of unified and disunified experience in... (shrink)

My commentary on Hurley is concerned with foundational issues. Hurley's investigation of animal cognition is cast within a particular framework—basically, a philosophically refined version of folk psychology. Her discussion has a complicated relationship to unresolved debates about the nature and status of folk psychology, especially debates about the extent to which folk psychological categories are aimed at picking out features of the causal organization of the mind.

An interpretation is given of John Dewey's views about “realism” in metaphysics, and of how these views relate to contemporary debates. Dewey rejected standard formulations of realism as a general metaphysical position, and interpreters have often been taken him to be sympathetic to some form of verificationism or constructivism. I argue that these interpretations are mistaken, as Dewey's unease with standard formulations of realism comes from his philosophical emphasis on intelligent control of events, by means of ordinary action. Because of (...) his views about relations, Dewey's views in this area do risk collapsing into an overly holistic position. I discuss how these problems might be avoided, and consider also how Dewey's views about naturalism and realism might usefully inform ongoing work. (shrink)

Jablonka and Lamb's claim that evolutionary biology is undergoing a ‘revolution’ is queried. But the very concept of revolutionary change has uncertain application to a field organized in the manner of contemporary biology. The explanatory primacy of sequence properties is also discussed.

I distinguish different versions of the “niche construction” idea. Some are primarily scientific, while others are more philosophical. Laland, Odling-Smee & Feldman's is mostly scientific, but given that fact, there are some changes they could make to their account. I also compare the target article to Lewontin's classic 1983 paper.

Mercier and Sperber (M&S) claim that the main function of reasoning is to generate support for conclusions derived unconsciously. An alternative account holds that reasoning has a deliberative function even though it is an internalized analogue of public discourse. We sketch this alternative and compare it with M&S's in the light of the empirical phenomena they discuss.

Is Popper's philosophy alive or dead? If we make a judgment based on recent discussion in academic philosophy of science, he definitely seems to be fading. Popper is still seen as an important historical figure, a key part of the grand drama of 20th century thinking about science. He is associated with an outlook, a mindset, and a general picture of scientific work. His name has bequeathed us an adjective, "Popperian," that is well established. But the adjective is used for (...) very general ideas that, according to most current philosophers, Popper did not develop convincingly. His detailed account is often seen as attractive on first impression, but full of holes that become bigger rather than smaller as discussion continues. The picture and the name remain, which is more than 1 most philosophers can hope for. But the name attaches more and more to a set of instincts and intuitions, less and less to views that are seeing ongoing philosophical development. Inside science itself, Popper's standing is quite different. He continues to be just about the only philosopher who can seize the imagination and command the loyalty of successful professional scientists. And he is popular within science not only for purposes of general commentary and public relations. Popper's philosophy is a resource drawn on by scientists in their internal debates about scientific matters. This has been especially marked in some parts of biology (Hull 1999). From the point of view of philosophers, this affection on the part of scientists may have an unflattering explanation. Popper offers a rather heroic view of the scientific character, featuring an appealing combination of creativity and hard-headedness. It is no surprise that scientists like to be described this way. It is no surprise that they prefer this picture to the one often (though inaccurately) associated with Hempel and Carnap – the scientist as a sort of logic-driven pattern-recognition machine. The same applies to the picture associated with Kuhn, who presents the normal scientist as a narrow-minded, indoctrinated member of a peculiar collective enterprise, an enterprise devoted to solving tiny puzzles most of the time but prone to occasional fits of crisis and chaos.. (shrink)

One of the most striking developments in recent biology has been the proliferation of concepts such as coding, information, representation and programming, especially applied to genes. The idea that genes can be described as having semantic properties, as well as ordinary causal properties, has become so uncontroversial in many quarters that it now appears prominently in biology textbooks. Scott Gilbert's widely used developmental biology text, to pick just one example, tell us that "the inherited information needed for development and metabolism (...) is encoded in the DNA sequences of the chromosomes" (Gilbert 1997 p. 5). (shrink)

My title is intended to echo Hans Reichenbach's The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), and the phrase "scientific epistemology" is intended in two Reichenbachian senses. One involves the epistemology of science; the other involves epistemology undertaken with a scientific orientation. Talk of "progress and procedures" is intended in a similar dual sense. I start by looking back over the last century, at how a family of problems was tackled by scientifically oriented philosophers. These are problems with the nature of evidence (...) and testing – with how, given our limited access to the world and the ambitious reach of our theories, we can have good reason to believe one such theory over another. These discussions were informed especially by skeptical treatments of the problem in Hume. We see in this period a number of different theoretical strands. These are characterized by different raw materials, and by different organizing or paradigm cases – different bets regarding the parts of scientific practice that should function as exemplars. (shrink)

Why do octopuses matter to philosophy? They matter to the part of philosophy concerned with the mind. To see why, we step back and think about the evolutionary connections between all living things. Biologists think of these relationships in terms of a tree of life. This is a huge tree-like pattern, marking which species are close relatives and which are distantly connected. The vertebrates form one branch of the tree, and that is where we find nearly all the animals with (...) large and complex brains. These include ourselves, other mammals, and birds. In evolutionary terms, these are all cousins. In the huge area of the tree containing other animals, invertebrates, there is only one small branch where we also find large brains. This branch contains the cephalopods – octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. Large nervous systems evolved separately on these two branches, and nowhere else. Octopuses are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind. Meeting an octopus is like meeting an intelligent alien. So what did this experiment produce? Here is one thing. The nervous system of an octopus is less centralized than ours. In fact, more than half of the octopus' neurons are not in the animal's central "brain" at all, but in the eight arms. It is as if each arm has a mind of its own. Or perhaps in an octopus we see intelligence without a unified self. (shrink)

Kyle Stanford’s arguments against scientific realism are assessed, with a focus on the underdetermination of theory by evidence. I argue that discussions of underdetermination have neglected a possible symmetry which may ameliorate the situation.

Published as "Useful Lessons from California" in Quadrant Magazine, Volume 50, October 2006. An edited version appears in the Australian newspaper's Higher Education Supplement, as "The Model of Achievement," November 1, 2006.

I respond to two of the main arguments in Rosenberg’s commentary on “Mind, Matter, and Metabolism.” Rosenberg’s claim that metabolic activities are “modularized” in a way that sets them apart from cognitive processes is not true given the broad sense of the “metabolic” employed in my paper, and contemporary neuroscience, including the work on navigation cited by Rosenberg, has begun to yield an understanding of subjectivity and “point of view.”.

A philosopher's examination of how animal and plant life has shaped the history of our planet.

Modeling work by Brian Skyrms and others in recent years has transformed the theoretical role of David Lewis's 1969 model of signaling. The latter can now be understood as a minimal model of communication in all its forms. In this article, we explain how the Lewis model has been generalized, and consider how it and its variants contribute to ongoing debates in several areas. Specifically, we consider connections between the models and four topics: The role of common interest in communication, (...) signaling within the organism, meaning, and the evolution of human communication and language. (shrink)

Altruism is generally understood to be behavior that benefits others at a personal cost to the behaving individual. However, within evolutionary biology, different authors have interpreted the concept of altruism differently, leading to dissimilar predictions about the evolution of altruistic behavior. Generally, different interpretations diverge on which party receives the benefit from altruism and on how the cost of altruism is assessed. Using a simple trait-group framework, we delineate the assumptions underlying different interpretations and show how they relate to one (...) another. We feel that a thorough examination of the connections between interpretations not only reveals why different authors have arrived at disparate conclusions about altruism, but also illuminates the conditions that are likely to favor the evolution of altruism. (shrink)

Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itsel...

One version of pluralism was defended in a well-known paper by Sterelny and Kitcher. In this sense, pluralism is the view that any given selective process can be described at a variety of different levels in the biological hierarchy. On Sterelny and Kitcher’s view, one can explain giraffe necks in terms of competition among longer-necked and shorter-necked giraffes, and one can also explain them in terms of competition among the genes that lead to these differences in neck size. Although these (...) descriptions might have different heuristic virtues, neither description has a special explanatory status that the other lacks. (shrink)

Two of the most potent challenges faced by scientific realism are the underdetermination of theories by data, and the pessimistic induction based on theories previously held to be true, but subsequently acknowledged as false. Recently, Stanford (2006, Exceeding our grasp: Science, history, and the problem of unconceived alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press) has formulated what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives: a version of the underdetermination thesis combined with a historical argument of the same form as the pessimistic induction. (...) In this paper, I contend that while Stanford does present a novel antirealist argument, a successful response to the pessimistic induction would likewise defuse the problem of unconceived alternatives, and that a more selective and sophisticated realism than that which he allows is arguably immune to both concerns. (shrink)