This is the paper I presented in the Phil. of Sci. seminar where we had no time for discussion. Would love to hear comments from you guys, both people in the seminar and those who are not. (This is a part of the practice for the seminar, and the paper is rather too long for a post. For those who are not in the seminar, if you could just read Part II, III, and VI, and offer some comments, that would be great.) (more…)
Archive for the ‘Philosophy of Science’ Category
The Mirror Argument (for Phil. of Sci. seminar)
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008Evolution and Proper Function
Thursday, February 7th, 2008When my heart pumps blood, it is properly functioning. If it were to suddenly stop, it would not be properly functioning. Our immune system is properly functioning when it fights off diseases, but HIV can cause it to dysfunction. For something to properly function is for it to function as it is supposed to. My heart is supposed to pump blood. It’s not supposed to explode.
An evolutionary analysis of biological proper functions might proceed as follows:
E) x’s functioning in way W is proper iff x’s ancestors functioning in way W contributed to its survival.
This is a crude analysis, but it gets most of the results right. My heart’s functioning so that it pumps blood contributed to the survival of my ancestors.
Plantinga provides the following counterexample (in Warrant and Proper Function, c.11). (He doesn’t specifically aim it at E, but at other accounts like it.) Suppose Hitler won the war so that he had full power. Furthermore, there were certain nonAryans who had a mutation such that everything they saw was tinted green and caused an incessant pain. Hitler enjoyed this suffering, so he allowed these nonAryans to survive. After a few generations, nonAryans with eyes like ours died out, and the nonAryans with these mutated eyes continued to survive.
According to E, the nonAryans’ eyes are properly functioning, i.e., functioning as they are supposed to. But intuitively, no, eyes aren’t supposed to function that way. This is dysfunctional, even if it helped the ancestors survive.
Is this case convincing?
Can Naturalistic Evolution Give Us Reliable Faculties?
Friday, February 1st, 2008(I posted a similar version of this post at Prosblogion.)Â
Consider the following proposition:
1) P(R/N&E&C) is low or inscrutable.
where ‘R’ = Human cognitive faculties are reliable, ‘N’ = Naturalism is true (i.e., there are no supernatural entities such as God or angels), ‘E’ = Humans have evolved according to the suggestions of contemporary evolutionary theory, and ‘C’ = beliefs are causally efficacious with respect to our behavior in virtue of their content.
C is plausible. For example, it is in virtue of my believing that the paper is due tomorrow that I scramble to get it finish. That belief plays a causal role in my behavior in virtue of its content. (more…)
Recent Plantinga Lectures on Science and Religion
Sunday, November 11th, 2007Species Demarcation, Reproduction, and Sterility
Monday, October 15th, 2007There has been a few times when I’ve come across the impossibility of reproduction being used as a method of distinguishing one species from another. Whether this is a necessary or sufficient condition is never clear to me, so I will put it aside. What the claim does seem to entail is that X is a member of species S if X can successfully reproduce with another member of S. There are a few problems with this formulation. (more…)
Scientific Explanations and Knowing Why
Friday, September 15th, 2006I’ve been rereading the introduction of the Salmon book (Four Decades of Scientific Explanation) and I have some ground level questions.
Salmon begins (on p. 3) by distinguishing between knowing that and knowing why. He takes his target concept to be knowledge why. Now I’m familiar with knowledge that from mainstream epistemology. We are trying to find out what fills the blank in the following sentence:
Is Intelligent Design Falsifiable?
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006Some of us think that Intelligent Design Theory is just creationism tricked out in a cheap powder blue tuxedo. Others of us like cheap powder blue tuxedos. Now that some of the nationwide hoopla over IDT has abated, I want to comment on one particular criticism of IDT, namely, that it isn’t falsifiable and hence isn’t science. Philosophers, scientists, and opinion writers frequently repeated this criticism, and indeed IDT’S putative unfalsifiability is one of the key reasons that IDT loses its legal battles.
The problem is this: IDT is patently falsifiable. (more…)
Nunley v. Sober on Design
Friday, March 10th, 2006I was reading a paper for our own Troy Nunley responding to Eliot Sober on design arguments. I hate likelihoodism and I casually remarked that you couldn’t know whether Pr(E/H1) > Pr(E/H2) without knowing the individual values or at least knowing one of them and knowing some function connecting them. After some wrangling we came up with this counterexample.
I know that at t the ratio of black to white balls is the same in Urn 1 and Urn 2. Then I discover that at t’ an undisclosed number of white balls have been added to Urn 1. It seems that the drawing of a white ball favors the hypothesis that it was drawn from Urn 1. For this we did not have to have any information allowing H1 or H2 to generate predictions.
Troy thinks this model allows us to see how observational data favor guided evolution over unguided evolution. Here’s the argument as I understand it. Let H1 be that evolution occurred unguided. Let H2 be that evolution was guided by some sufficiently powerful agent whose goals would be furthered by evolution occurring. I think the idea is that H2 is just H1 + H3 where H3 is the part about there being such an agent. Since H3 adds some probability of E to H2 (whose likelihood w.r.t E = that of H1), E favors H2 over H1.
I find this a pretty interesting argument and as far as I know it’s novel, though I don’t know the literature very well.