"Who Got What Wrong? Sober and F&PP on Darwin: Guiding Principles and Explanatory Models in Natural Selection"

DÍEZ, JOSÉ A.; LORENZANO, PABLO

ERKENNTNIS

Springer

Año: 2013 vol. 78 p. 1143 - 1175

0165-0106

The goal of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of Natural Selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim that there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an "adaptive" character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared to Classical Mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are a priori (a trait shared with few other theories). We argue that NS provides perfectly bona fide adaptive explanations of phenotype evolution, unified by a common natural-selection guiding principle. First, we introduce the debate and reply to F&PP´s main argument against NS. Then, by reviewing different paradigmatic examples and analyzing Fisher´s model in detail, we show that NS-explanations of phenotypic evolution share a General Natural Selection Principle. Third, by elaborating an analogy with CM, we argue against F&PP´s claim that such a principle would be a mere truism and thus explanatorily useless, and against Sober´s thesis that NS models/explanations have a priori components that are not present in CM and other common empirical theories. Regardless of differences in other respects, the NS guiding principle has the same epistemic status as other guiding principles in other highly unified theories such as CM. We defend that only pointing to its guiding principle driven nature that it shares with CM and other highly unified theories, something that no-one has done yet in this debate, one can definitively show that NS is not defective in F&PP´s sense: in the respects relevant for the debate, Natural Selection is as defective and as epistemically peculiar as Classical Mechanics and other never questioned theories.