Biologists have proposed a variety of explanations for extravagant sexual displays, and controversies over explanations define the history of sexual selection research. Recently, Richard Prum has defended Darwin’s idea that the evolution of sexual displays is driven by arbitrary and nonadaptive preferences of potential mates. Prum argues that this explanation should be the null model for sexual selection research. I show that if we adopted Prum’s proposal, the inferences we could be justified in making are more modest than he claims. I also discuss problems with estimating model parameters that at present prevent his proposal from being useful in practice.

Many cases of gene-environment interaction, or $\mathrm{G}\,\times \mathrm{E}\,$, are misconstrued as evincing a genetic predisposition. I diagnose this misconstrual and then introduce a new concept—interactive predisposition—to correct for the mistake. I conclude by examining how recent debates over screening for individual predispositions are related to older debates about group differences between populations, drawing on the lessons of the latter to inform the former.

A system as complex as man can be viewed from many sides, and the one or the other axis can be selected to form a theoretical image. Partial truths will emerge, and their mutual intermeshing will gradually raise truth to higher levels. … It has always proven prejudicial to attribute general validity to a partial truth. Yet, a partial truth could not have been reached without overstating its value. Thus the history of truth is intimately interconnected with the history of emotion, but the latter has remained in the dark.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Recent years have witnessed an effort to explicate the concept of explanatory power in a Bayesian framework by constructing explanatory measures. It has been argued that those measures should not violate the principle of explanatory justice, which states that explanatory power cannot be extended “for free.” I argue, by formal means, that one recent measure claiming to be immune from explanatory injustice fails to be so. I end by concluding that the explanatory justice criticism can be dissolved, given a natural interpretation of the concept of negative explanatory power.

In the causal modeling literature, it is well known that ill-defined variables may give rise to ambiguous manipulations. Here, we illustrate how ill-defined variables may also induce mistakes in causal inference when standard causal search methods are applied. To address the problem, we introduce a representation framework, which exploits an independent component representation of the data, and demonstrate its potential for detecting ill-defined variables and avoiding mistaken causal inferences.

Starting with the view that methodological constraints depend upon the nature of the system investigated, a tripartite division between theoretical, semitheoretical, and empirical discoveries is made. Many nanosystems can only be investigated semitheoretically or empirically, and this aspect leads to some nanophenomena being weakly emergent. Self-assembling systems are used as an example, their existence suggesting that the class of systems that is not Kim-reducible may be quite large.

The Relevance Criterion of confirmation gained prominence as the underlying principle of the class-size approach (CSA) to Hempel's paradoxes of confirmation. The CSA, however, yields counter-intuitive results for (c) instances, and this failing cast serious doubt on the acceptability of the Relevance Criterion. In this paper an attempt is made to rescue the Relevance Criterion from this embarrassment. This is done by incorporating that criterion into a new resolution of the paradoxes, a resolution based on a theory of selective confirmation and a distinction between mere confirmation in principle and evaluative confirmation (E-confirmation).

Is tense real and objective? Can the fact that something is past, say, be wholly objective, consistent with modern physics? I believe that it can. But some hold that for tense to be real, then a certain ontological doctrine must also hold. There must be a fact of the matter as to what really, truly, exists at each time. For example, it is held that only what is now really exists. This is the doctrine of presentism. Alternatively, that only what is now or past really exists; following Savitt, I shall call this possibilism. But on either view there is a problem with special relativity.

Some issues raised by parapsychological phenomena (psi) are examined in the light of their implications for a philosophy of science. It is shown that the kinds of problems psi poses for science vary with the way one conceives of science as well as one's conception of psi. It is suggested that psi may be a product of the fact that all of our scientific concepts are abstractions and therefore oversimplifications. This raises the possibility that our best conceptual technique for dealing with psi is a non-discursive symbolism, since this would not demand “classes” (oversimplification). Implications of this approach are considered.

In his The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984) Grünbaum compliments Freud on the development of the Tally Argument as an answer to a number of serious methodological criticisms, “The epistemological considerations that prompted Freud to enunciate (this argument) make him a sophisticated methodologist” (p. 128). In contrast to this position I argue that the Tally Argument and the considerations for it are hardly sophisticated: They would equally well go to demonstrate the methodological sophistication of modern-day evangelists. Furthermore, I argue that the Tally Argument does not play the crucial role that Grünbaum assigns to it. It is one of many arguments Freud used to counter criticism, but not one to which Freud gave pride of place.

This note aims to make more familiar to philosophers yet another bizarre quantum mechanical effect with disturbing metaphysical implications. It is possible to modify the classic double-slit experiment so that one can register the path of a particle to determine which slit it passes through, and then erase this registered information so that the interference effects which would normally disappear upon registration of the “which path” information are reconstituted. Thus the “trajectory” of particles can be effected by temporally and spatially distant operations on the slit detectors. Nonetheless, no untoward effects (such as superluminal signalling) can result from the operation of the eraser.

The relation that holds between two singular sentences just if one of them can figure in an acceptable deductive nomological (DN) explanation of the other is not symmetric. As Sylvain Bromberger ([1]) pointed out some years ago, a sentence giving the height of a flagpole can figure in a DN explanation of a sentence specifying the length of the flagpole's shadow, but interchanging the explanans and the explanandum does not result in an explanation even though it may result in a valid argument. Recently Evan Jobe ([2]) has offered an ingenious account of such asymmetries, one which if successful would permit their characterization entirely within the framework of the DN model. The purpose of this note is to show that despite its attractiveness Jobe's idea will not work.

At the present time there is a tremendous discussion of the scientific method. But there is almost no discussion of the scientific aim. This is a paradoxical state of affairs. Is it possible to discuss method intelligently unless the question of aim is first given thorough and serious consideration? Is not a method, by virtue of the very fact that it is a method, something which is subordinate to an aim and determined by that aim ? Is not a method something which is to be understood, evaluated, attacked and defended only in relation to the particular aim which it serves? Surely to deal with method in any other way is to mishandle the situation. Yet at the present day we witness this tremendous volume of discussion of method, with almost no discussion of aim.

Influential classical and recent approaches to explicate confirmation, explanation, or explanatory power define these relations or degrees between hypotheses and evidence. This holds for both deductive and Bayesian approaches. However, this neglects the role of data, which for many everyday and scientific examples cannot simply be classified as evidence. I present arguments to sharply distinguish data from evidence in Bayesian approaches. Taking into account this distinction, we can rewrite Schupbach and Sprenger’s measure of explanatory power and show the strengths of this adaptation by applying it to the example of the detection of gravitational waves in physics.

This article characterizes various species concepts in terms of set-theoretic models that license biological inferences and illustrates the logical connections among different species concepts. Species in this construal are abstract models, rather than biological or even tangible entities, and relate to individual organisms via representation, rather than the membership or mereological whole/part relationship. The proposal sheds new light on vexed issues of species and situates them within broader philosophical contexts of model selection, scientific representation, and scientific realism.

This is one of a pair of discussion notes comparing some features of the account of causation in Wolfgang Spohn’s Laws of Belief with the “interventionist” account in James Woodward’s Making Things Happen. Despite striking similarities there are also important differences. These include (i) the “epistemic” orientation of Spohn’s account as opposed to the worldly or “ontic” orientation of the interventionist account, (ii) Spohn’s focus on token-level causal claims in contrast to the primary interventionist focus on type-level claims, (iii) the role of temporal information in accounting for causal asymmetry, and (iv) the extent to which causal claims are “frame relative.”

This paper examines constraints and their role in scientific explanation. Common views in the philosophical literature suggest that constraints are non-causal and that they provide non-causal explanations. While much of this work focuses on examples from physics, this paper explores constraints from other fields, including neuroscience, physiology, and the social sciences. I argue that these cases involve constraints that are causal and that provide a unique type of causal explanation. This paper clarifies what it means for a factor to be a constraint, when such constraints are causal, and how they figure in scientific explanation.

Fitness has taken center stage in debates concerning how best to identify evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs). An influential framework proposes that an ETI occurs only when fitness is exported from constituent particles to a collective. We reformulate the conceptual structure of this framework as involving three steps. The culminating step compares “counterfactual” fitnesses against a long-run measure of fitness. This comparison assumes that collective-level fitness mereologically supervenes on particle fitness. However, if this assumption is rigorously enforced, the proposed conditions for identifying ETIs prove to be too weak. We here suggest an alternative model of ETIs centered around traits.