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Pluralism without Genic Causes?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Elisabeth A. Lloyd ,
Matthew Dunn ,
Jennifer Cianciollo  and
Costas Mannouris
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Abstract

Since the fundamental challenge that I laid at the doorstep of the pluralists was to defend, with nonderivative models, a strong notion of genic cause, it is fatal that Waters has failed to meet that challenge. Waters agrees with me that there is only a single cause operating in these models, but he argues for a notion of causal ‘parsing’ to sustain the viability of some form of pluralism. Waters and his colleagues have some very interesting and important ideas about the sciences, involving pluralism and parsing or partitioning causes, but they are ideas in search of an example. He thinks he has found an example in the case of hierarchical and genic selection. I think he has not.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 72 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 334 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

We would like to thank Jason Baker, Stephen Crowley, Melinda Fagan, Patrick Forber, and Michael Weisberg for their extensive comments and discussion. We are indebted to Ken Waters for his generous assistance and friendship throughout the production of these papers.

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