This paper argues for a radically different approach to normative function than the dominant

The design argument is one of three main arguments for the existence of God; the others are the ontological argument and the cosmological argument. Unlike the ontological argument, the design argument and the cosmological argument are a posteriori. And whereas the cosmological argument could focus on any present event to get the ball rolling (arguing that it must trace back to a first cause, namely God), design theorists are usually more selective. Design arguments have typically been of two types – organismic and cosmic. Organismic design arguments start with the observation that organisms have features that adapt them to the environments in which they live and that exhibit a kind of delicacy. Consider, for example, the vertebrate eye. This organ helps organisms survive by permitting them to perceive objects in their environment. And were the parts of the eye even slightly different in their shape and assembly, the resulting organ would not allow us to see. Cosmic design arguments begin with an observation concerning features of the entire cosmos – the universe obeys simple laws, it has a kind of stability, its physical features permit life and intelligent life to exist. However, not all design arguments fit into these two neat compartments. Kepler, for example, thought that the face we see when we look at the moon requires explanation in terms of intelligent design. Still, the common thread is that design theorists

Evolutionary theory is awash with probabilities. For example, natural selection is said to occur when there is variation in fitness, and fitness is standardly decomposed into two components, viability and fertility, each of which is understood probabilistically. With respect to viability, a fertilized egg is said to have a certain chance of surviving to reproductive age; with respect to fertility, an adult is said to have an expected number of offspring. There is more to evolutionary theory than the theory of natural selection, and here too one finds probabilistic concepts aplenty. When there is no selection, the theory of neutral evolution says that a gene’s chance of eventually reaching fixation is 1/(2N), where N is the number of organisms in the generation of the diploid population to which the gene belongs. The evolutionary consequences of mutation are likewise conceptualized in terms of the probability per unit time a gene has of changing from one state to another. The examples just mentioned are all “forwarddirected” probabilities; they describe the probability of later events, conditional on earlier events. However, evolutionary theory also uses “backwards probabilities ” that describe the probability of a cause conditional on its effects; for example, coalescence theory allows one to calculate the expected number of generations in the past that the genes in the present generation find their most recent common

ABSTRACT—Many origin-of-life researchers now regard the origin of biological information as the central problem facing origin-of-life research. Yet, the term ‘information ’ can designate several theoretically distinct concepts. By distinguishing between specified and unspecified information, this essay seeks to eliminate definitional ambiguity associated with the term ‘information ’ as used in biology. It does this in order to evaluate competing explanations for the origin of biological information. In particular, this essay challenges the causal adequacy of naturalistic chemical evolutionary explanations for the origin of specified biological information, whether based upon “chance, ” “necessity, ” or the combination. Instead, it argues that our present knowledge of causal powers suggests intelligent design or agent causation as a better, more causally adequate, explanation for the origin of specified biological information. 1.

'probability ' is a multifarious notion, while Butler’s aphorism implies that there is exactly one such guide. What sort of probability, then, is this guide? We may think of probability theory at two levels: axiomatization and interpretation. At the level of axiomatization Kolmogorov's theory clearly reigns. He began by axiomatizing unconditional, or absolute, probability. He later defined conditional, or relative, probability as a ratio of unconditional probabilities according to the familiar formula: (RATIO) P(A|B) =

Does evolutionary theory have implications about the existence of supernatural entities? This question concerns the logical relationships that hold between the theory of evolution and different bits of metaphysics. There is a distinct question that I also want to address; it is epistemological in character. Does the evidence we have for evolutionary theory also provide evidence concerning the existence of supernatural entities? An affirmative answer to the logical question would entail an affirmative answer to the epistemological question if the principle in confirmation theory that Hempel (1965, p. 31) called the special consequence condition were true: The special consequence condition: If an observation report confirms a hypothesis H, then it also confirms every consequence of H. According to this principle, if evolutionary theory has metaphysical implications, then whatever confirms evolutionary theory also must confirm those metaphysical implications. But the special consequence is false. Here‟s a simple example that illustrates why. You are playing poker and would dearly like to know whether the card you are about to be dealt will be the Jack of Hearts. The dealer is a bit careless and so you catch a glimpse of the card on top of the deck before it is dealt to you. You see that it is red. The fact that it is red confirms the hypothesis that the card is the Jack of Hearts, and the hypothesis that it is the Jack of Hearts entails that the card will be a Jack. However, the fact that the card is red does not confirm the hypothesis that the card will be a Jack. 2 Bayesians gloss these facts by understanding confirmation in terms of probability raising: The Bayesian theory of confirmation: O confirms H if and only if Pr(H│O)> Pr(H). The general reason why Bayesianism is incompatible with the special consequence

Abstract: When proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) theory deny that their theory is religious, the minimalistic theory they have in mind (the mini-ID theory) is the claim that the irreducibly complex adaptations found in nature were made by one or more intelligent designers. The denial that this theory is religious rests on the fact that it does not specify the identity of the designer-- a supernatural God or a team of extra-terrestrials could have done the work. The present paper attempts to show that this reply underestimates the commitments of the mini-ID Theory. The mini-ID theory, when supplemented with four independently plausible further assumptions, entails the existence of a supernatural intelligent designer. It is further argued that scientific theories, such as the Darwinian theory of evolution, are neutral on the question of whether supernatural designers exist. 1. Will the Real ID Theory Please Stand Up? What is Intelligent Design (ID) theory? Answering this question is complicated by the fact that one version of the theory is minimalistic, while others are more contentful. The minimalistic version, which I’ll call the mini-ID theory, says only that

Recently, philosophers of science have argued that the epistemological requirements of different scientific fields lead necessarily to differences in scientific method. In this paper, we examine possible variation in how language is used in peer-reviewed journal articles from various fields to see if features of such variation may help to elucidate and support claims of methodological variation among the sciences. We hypothesize that significant methodological differences will be reflected in related differences in scientists ’ language style. This paper reports a corpus-based study of peer-reviewed articles from twelve separate journals in six fields of experimental and historical sciences. Machine learning methods were applied to compare the discourse styles of articles in different fields, based on easily-extracted linguistic features of the text. Features included function word frequencies, as used often in computational stylistics, as well as lexical features based on systemic functional linguistics, which affords rich resources for comparative textual analysis. We found that indeed the style of writing in the historical sciences is readily distinguishable from that of the experimental sciences. Furthermore, the most significant linguistic features of these distinctive styles are directly related to the methodological differences posited by philosophers of science between historical and experimental sciences, lending empirical weight to their contentions.

Abstract. Functional explanation, for long the mainstay of psychology’s autonomy, has recently come under attack. It is sometimes argued that higher-level generalizations are causally impotent, and do not really explain anything. Presumably only the reduction of higher-level patterns to underlying causal physical properties, and the specifying of lower-level, local causal mechanisms, provides genuine explanations. Two lines of argument are critically discussed: causal exclusion and multiple realization. These bear upon the credibility of functional explanation, and upon the presumed explanatory superiority of causal mechanisms over functional higher-level generalizations. It is argued that the causal exclusion argument conflates metaphysics with explanation, and that, rather than pointing towards reductionism, multiple realization indicates the indispensability of higher (functional) generalizations, alongside lower (causal) explanations; the choice for higher or lower level depends on context and explanatory interest. The notion of screening-off suggests a criterion for the legitimacy of higher-level characterizations. A brief example from the history of genetics is discussed to illustrate these ideas. This leads to a plea for pluralism in explanation.

Normic laws have the form "if A, then normally B". This paper attempts to show that if a philosophical analysis of normic laws (§ § 1, 4) is combined with certain developments in nonmono-tonic logic (§§2, 3), the following problems in philosophy of science can be seen in a new pers-pective which, at least in many cases, allows to improve their received analysis: explanation and individual case understanding in the humanities (§§1, 2), an evolution-theoretic foundation of normic laws which explains their omnipresence and establishes a the connection between prototypi-cal and statstical normality, (§4), ceteris paribus laws (§5), differences between physical versus non-physical sciences (§6) and finally, theory-protection through auxiliary hypotheses (§7).