Different Office Hours

For a various reasons, I need to change my office hours for the next few weeks. Rather than the usual Friday office hours, I'll hold them on Thursday April 2nd, Monday April 6th, Monday April 13th, and Thursday April 23rd, all from 1-3PM. I'll have other times available by appointment. Sorry about this: just turns out that Fridays are getting quite complicated for me for the foreseeable future.

Comments about First Essay

I have distributed the graded first essays. Many of you would have benefited greatly from submitting something early and revising. Hopefully you will take into account my comments and seek help if you need it before tackling your final essay. If you weren't in class today, you can pick up your essay from me in my office during regular office hours or find me at another time.

Some of you seem rather at sea with regard to how to handle citations/references. For the final essay, please follow this formatting guide that describes a standard way of handling in-text citations. It's but one way, yes, but good practice to master it. I will include your successfully following it in the first row of the rubric on the final essay. Please ask if anything is unclear.

Here's how I see the scores on the rubric translating into rough grades: The A range runs from 22-28, B: 16-22, C: 10-16, D: 4-6, F: <4. But don't focus on the grade: focus on what you need to do to improve. Almost all of you needed to drastically increase the focus and specificity of your thesis. This, as I've been saying, sets the terms of a successful essay. It's much easier to argue well for a specific thesis. Please come visit with me sometime if you're not sure how to improve your work for the final essay. I'll be happy to read a draft or outline, talk about your thesis and argument, and help you structure your essay and tighten up your writing.

Assignment 10 (due 4/1)

Formalize Kitcher's argument against reductionism, describing the premises, general principles, and important background assumptions he draws upon as clearly as you can.

Meeting 11: The Reduction/Anti-Reduction Debate (4/1)

Reading:

• S&D Chapters 6–7: “Mendel and Molecules”, “Reduction: For and Against” **
• Sarkar, “Reduction: A Philosophical Analysis” [PDF]
• Kitcher, “1953 and All That: A Tale of Two-Sciences” [CIEB §13]
• Waters, “Why the Antireductionist Consensus Won’t Survive the Case of Mendelian Genetics” [CIEB §14]
• Sober, “The Multiple Realizability Argument Against Reductionism” [CIEB §15] *

Presentation:
Troy | Zoe commenting

Sterelny and Griffiths provide an excellent introduction to the main issues surrounding the reductionist anti-reductionist debate. We can get into this debate by noting the obvious fact that there are a number of different scientific theories (some coming under the heading of an umbrella theory, like biology, perhaps). How do all these different theories relate? Sometimes this relation seems quite unproblematic. Newtonian mechanics simply replaced Galilean mechanics; their relation is that one is closer to the truth than the other and that’s it. But there are also many theories which have a more questionable relationship. We'll focus on the test case of Mendelian genetics and it's relationship to modern molecular biology. Is the latter reducible to the former? What precisely does (or might) that mean? For that matter, is biology an autonomous science or can it all be reduced to physics? Is all science, as Ernest Rutherford put it, “either physics or stamp collecting”?

A terminological note for the Kitcher paper: it uses an older symbolic logic notation that you might not be familiar with. On p. 265, principle (*) reads: ‘(x)(x is a gene <—> Mx)’. This is to be read (in “quasi-English”) as ‘For all x, x is a gene if and only if Mx’. In other words: ‘All genes are Ms, and vice versa’, where ‘Mx’ is an “open sentence”, which basically means a complex predicate — something that can be said of something.

What is going on on page 266? All that’s happening is one direction of (*) — confusingly listed there as (2) — is being used to replace every mention of genes (Gx, Gy) with their molecular equivalents (Mx, My). Don’t worry about it if it’s still obscure. . . . The basic idea is just that (*) and (2) are being used as “bridge principles” for replacing the predicates of classical genetics with those of molecular.

Upcoming Meetings

I'm moving this post to the front: now with actual links (sorry about that delay) for you to use to start planning your presentation. Your final research essay will involve more sources than just these. I'm happy to help you with your search.

10. Organism and Environment — 3/25

• Lewontin, The Triple Helix (entire book)
  
• S&D Chapter 9: “Adaptation, Ecology, and the Environment” **

11. Reductionism versus Anti-Reductionism — 4/1

• Sarkar, “Reduction: A Philosophical Analysis” [PDF]
• Kitcher, “1953 and All That: A Tale of Two-Sciences” [CIEB §13]
• Waters, “Why the Antireductionist Consensus Won’t Survive the Case of Mendelian Genetics” [CIEB §14]
• Sober, “The Multiple Realizability Argument Against Reductionism” [CIEB §15] *
• S&D Chapters 6–7: “Mendel and Molecules”, “Reduction: For and Against” **

No class on 4/8 (Slater at Pacific APA).

12. Biological Laws & Contingency — 4/15

• Beatty, "The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis" [CIEB §11]
• Sober, “Two Outbreaks of Lawlessness in the Philosophy of Biology” [CIEB §12] *
• Lange, "Are There Natural Laws Concerning Particular Biological Species?" [PDF]

13. Biological Laws and Special Science Autonomy — 4/22

• Rosenberg, “How is Biological Explanation Possible?” [PDF]
• Lange, “The Autonomy of Functional Biology: a Reply to Rosenberg” [PDF]

14. Ecological Diversity, Biodiversity — 4/29

• Mikkelson, “Ecological Kinds and Ecological Laws” [PDF]
• Sarkar, “Defining ‘Biodiversity’; Assessing Biodiversity” [PDF]

Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference on "The Environment" — 5/1–3

15. Final Presentations: Topics TBA — 5/6

• If you are presenting in Meeting 15, final essays are due by Friday 5/15 at 3PM
• They are due Monday 5/11 by 3PM otherwise.

Assignment 9 (due 3/25)

What conception of the environment does Lewontin appear to be targeting in his discussion. Describe it in some detail and explain what he believes is wrong with this conception. What view of the environment does Lewontin advocate?

Meeting 10: Organism and Environment (3/25)

Reading:

• S&D Chapter 11: “Adaptation, Ecology, and the Environment” **
• Lewontin, The Triple Helix

Presentation:
Brian | Graham commenting

We switch gears next time to tackle the interconnections between gene, environment, and organism. Richard Lewontin has been an influential critic of genetic determinism and traditional views about the relationship between organisms and the environment. This book weaves together several of his criticisms into a fascinating, holistic (but not obscurely so) view of biology.

Rather than attempt to summarize the structure of the discussion, I shall leave you to enjoy Lewontin, who is a wonderfully clear writer. My goal for the our discussion, however, will be to try to clarify and evaluate the specifics of Lewontin's proposals, particularly about the relationship between organisms and their environments, but also between genes and organisms. As you'll see, much of the book will also be relevant to our discussion in meeting 11 about reductionism.

Study Questions

• Lewontin contends that discussion of development is fraught with bad metaphors. What specifically are his main concerns?
• What does the Clausen, Keck, and Heisey experiment show?
• Why would Lewontin dispute the claim that knowing an organism’s genome would allow us to specify all of its physical properties?
• According to Lewontin, how should we understand locutions like 'Gene X is for green eyes'?
• What is the difference between "forward" and "backward" modes of adaptive explanations?
• How does Lewontin understand the environment?
• What is the Red Queen hypothesis?
• Why does Lewontin think that "'The environment' does not exist to be saved" (68)?

the plan

Rather than mess up the whole schedule by going back to the HPC/SPC account of natural kinds, as my previous posts indicate, I think we ought to press ahead. We'll spend a little time talking about SPC kinds next time, since I think they're relevant to questions about the reality of race.

Here's what I want to do for your assignments. If you did them: great. Why don't you email me a copy. If you did not: no worries, I'll give you a free pass.

If I'm not mistaken, David was planning on presenting in our next meeting (correct, David?). Would someone like to volunteer to comment on his paper? If all goes as expected, it should be ready by the weekend. Feel free to use the comments: one bonus of using blogger, I guess.

Race Resources

There is a quite a wealth of information on the science of race online. Here's an excellent place to start: http://www.racesci.org/. Richard Lewontin also lectured on the topic a bit ago (video).

See also the reading list for Sally Haslanger and Koffi Maglo's course at MIT on Race.

Assignment 8 (due 3/11)

Respond to two to three study questions for Meeting 9.

Meeting 9: Are Races Real (3/11)

Readings:

• Appiah, "Why There Are No Human Races" [CIEB §22]
• Andreasen, "A New Perspective on the Race Debate" [CIEB §23]

We turn this week to the question of the reality of race. Do our racial concepts correspond to anything genuine in reality or are they merely social constructs? From this simple starting point, lots of interesting methodological issues arise: does the question of the reality of race automatically engage our concepts? Andreasen suggests that it might not. Perhaps there are (real) races and our ordinary understanding of what they are is flawed. In Sober’s introduction to the section on race, he offers an apt analogy to the one time presumption that whales are fish. We can revise this view on the influence of new information without rejecting that fish are a taxonomically-respectable group. Andreasen’s essay attempts to make biological sense of races as subspecies on a cladist model of taxonomy.

Appiah’s approach is different: he is a skeptic of race, placing a great deal of emphasis on the question of whether there is anything in biology that might vindicate our ordinary concept. His approach bears some resemblance to skepticism about the reality of species from the apparent lack of essential properties characterizing them.

As you might expect, my take on this issue is somewhat different: I’m not convinced that what we ought to be looking for is biological reality. Here the HPC/SPC kind view might help some, as it is not a specifically-biological account. I’m not yet sure how the details might go — what the clustered properties would be, whether presumptive clusters would feature the sort of stability (or homeostasis) required, and so on. My suspicion is that there might be something in the neighborhood of stable clusters of biologically/culturally-interesting properties/dispositions that might feature a kind of dwindling stability (think back to the discussion of metastability).

Study Questions

• Describe the difference between the “ideational” and the “referential” views of meaning.
• How does the analogy to acids work for Appiah?
• In what sense does Appiah see Jefferson as interested in a BIOLOGICAL conception of race?
• Compare Appiah’s take on Jefferson and Arnold on the race question.
• Describe the relevance of evolution to the race question. Do Appiah and Andreasen see its relevance in the same way?
• What, in brief, is Appiah’s argument that there are no human races?
• Describe the “no subspecies” argument against the reality of race (both varieties). How does it differ from the “no human subspecies” argument?
• How does Andreasen propose to use cladism to understand human races?

Lewontin at Book People

I'm told that Book People has a bunch of copies of Lewontin's The Triple Helix. Please pick yours up soon --- I don't know that they're saving them for us or something.

New Course Blog for PHIL 417/517

Oy veh: the program I've been using to take care of my personal blog and Phil Bio course blog has managed to corrupt all of those posts. So I've reconstructed the blog on Blogger, which I take it will be a bit more reliable [knocking on wood].