Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY): Complex Life Cycles and Natural Selection
Other
Familiar summaries of evolution by natural selection hold that one requirement for evolutionary change of this kind is heredity. Parents must resemble their offspring; like must beget like. In many organisms, however, that is not how things seem to work. Many life cycles feature long and complex…
Kim Sterelny (ANU): Cumulative Culture and the Evolution of Language
Other
Debates about the evolution of language are notorious for their fractious nature, and the utter lack of consensus generated; so much so, that there is a reasonably suspicion that the whole problem is empirically intractable. In this paper, I present a substantive proposal about the timing and…
Rachael Briggs (ANU): Accuracy Dominance Arguments for Conditionalization
Other
Probabilism is the theory that rational degrees of belief have the structure of probabilities; conditionalization is the view that rational individuals update their rational degrees of belief by setting their new degree of belief in a given proposition A to the conditional probability P(A|E) = P(A…
Alexander Sandgren (ANU): Intentional Identity and Characterisation
Other
Intentional identity puzzles relate to two difficult questions. The first is how we should characterise the content of empty intentional states (intentional states that are, prima facie, about things that don’t exist). The second is the question of when intentional states are about the same thing.…